The concerned calls began in mid-August. Sea lions – mostly adult females – were turning up along the southern California coast with signs of poisoning: disoriented and agitated, with their heads bobbing and their mouths foaming.Marine animal organizations say they were inundated with inquiries from alarmed beachgoers. “We are responding to 50-100 calls a day,”…
by Fabienne Salfner, Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V. (GWZ) Human gesture–speech biomechanics, and locomotor–respiratory–vocal coupling in a flying bat Credit: Pouw, W. & Fuchs, S. Researchers from Radboud University and ZAS Berlin have developed a new perspective on why humans often move their hands rhythmically during speaking. The perspective published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, suggests…
The last Tasmanian tiger, an individual named Benjamin, died a lonely death of exposure in an empty, cold cage in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1936. The coyote-size animal—the last marsupial apex predator on earth—had disappeared from the Australian mainland some two thousand years earlier and was then hunted off Tasmania in the nineteenth…
The natural world is a reservoir of plagues. At any moment, untold numbers of viruses circulate among animals. Inevitably, some will cross the species barrier, infecting people and making them sick. Scientists call such an event a “zoonotic spillover.” No one knows how often such spillovers happen—presumably, animal viruses are always establishing footholds that our…
California-based Zipline is known for pioneering the delivery of blood and essential health products in Africa using automated drones in Rwanda, Ghana, and Nigeria just this year. Recently, the company began extending its assets to the distribution of items used in agriculture, such as semen for farm animals. In what could one day reshape the…
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AnimalsExplainerBiologists have a definition for teaching that very few animals actually meet, such as orcas and meerkats. Here are a few more from the head of the class.ByBrian HandwerkPublished August 31, 2022• 7 min readAnimals do all kinds of amazing things—and how they learn do to them has long intrigued scientists.Some knowledge is inherited: Monarch…
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Between 1-10 August 2022, a team of Portuguese and Spanish paleontologists has been working at the paleontological site in Pombal, Portugal. (Credit: Instituto Dom Luiz, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon)Fossil find after fossil find has shown that dinosaurs were a wide variety of shapes and sizes, with some of the most substantial…
The more the climate warms, the more we’re destined to sweat. But while drenched t-shirts might be uncomfortable, not all animals are lucky enough to perspire.Mammals are the only type of animals with eccrine sweat glands, though these glands are sometimes used to help animals grip rather than cool down in the heat. For humans,…
