Chimpanzees lay down mad beats to communicate

Apart from their rich vocal palette, chimpanzees drum on trees to communicate over long distances. A new interdisciplinary study, led in part by PhD student Vesta Eleuteri and primatologist Cat Hobaiter from the University of St. Andrews, has explored the details of the rhythms they used, and found that different populations drum with rhythms which are similar to the beats in human music. The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

An exciting new fossil of an early ancestor of modern birds gives insight into evolution

Archaeopteryx, a 150 million year-old bird-like dinosaur, is known from about a dozen fossils found in Germany. A new one that has been studied at Chicago’s Field Museum may be the best preserved yet, and is giving researchers like paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor new insights into how the ancient animal moved around the Jurassic landscape. The research was published in the journal Nature.

A house with good bones — in more ways than one

Inspired by the structure of bone, researchers have created limestone-like biomineralized construction materials using a fungal-scaffold that they seeded with bacteria. Montana State University’s Chelsea Heveran said they demonstrated they could mold it into specific shapes that had internal properties similar to bone, and that it remained alive for a month. It’s early days yet, but she envisions a day when they can grow living structural material on site that may even be able heal themselves. The study is in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

A different kind of emotional band-aid

Scientists have created a clever combination of physical sensors and computer technology to produce a flexible band-aid like device that can accurately read emotions when it is stuck to the face. It’s not quite mind reading, but could give physicians better insight into the emotional state of their patients. Huanyu Cheng of Penn State led the work, which was published in the journal Nano Letters.

A scientist explores what it takes to live a longer, better life

Do you want to live forever? As he noticed himself showing signs of age, immunologist John Tregoning decided to find out what he could do to make that possible. So he explored the investigations that scientists are doing into why we age and die — and tried a few experiments on himself. Bob speaks with him about his new book Live Forever? A Curious Scientists’ Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death.

Tregoning dutifully documents everything he discovers as he undergoes testing for his heart, gets his genes sequenced, has a bronchoscopy, and follows an extreme diet, among other experiments. But he comes to the conclusion that “when it comes to improving life outcomes, exercise considerably trumps nearly everything I am planning to do whilst writing this book.”

Chimpanzees use medicinal plants for first aid and hygiene

Researchers have observed wild chimpanzees seeking out particular plants, including ones known to have medicinal value, and using them to treat wounds on themselves and others. They also used plants to clean themselves after sex and defecation. Elodie Freymann from Oxford University lived with the chimpanzees in Uganda over eight months and published this research in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Why this evolutionary dead end makes understanding extinction even more difficult

540 million years ago, there was an explosion of animal diversity called the Cambrian explosion, when nature experimented with, and winnowed many animal forms into just a few. A new discovery of one of the unlucky ones that didn’t make it has deepened the mystery of why some went extinct, because despite its strangeness, it shows adaptations common to many of the survivors. Joseph Moysiuk, curator of paleontology and geology at the Manitoba Museum helped identify the fossil, and published on it in Royal Society Open Science

A quantum computer demonstrates its worth by solving an impossible puzzle

Imagine taking a sudoku puzzle, handing bits of it to several people, putting them in separate rooms, and asking them to solve the puzzle. A quantum computer using the weird phenomenon of “entanglement” was able to do something analogous to this, which serves as evidence that it really is exploiting quantum strangeness, and could be used for more practical purposes. David Stephen, a physicist at the quantum computing company Quantinuum, and colleagues from the University of Boulder published on this finding in Physical Review Letters.

Roadkill shows that most mammals have fluorescent fur

A researcher who used a range of mammal and marsupial animals killed by vehicles, has demonstrated that the fur of many of these animals exhibit biofluorescence – the ability to absorb light and re-emit it in different wavelengths. They were able to identify some of the fluorescent chemicals, but don’t know why these animals would glow like this. Zoologist Linda Reinhold observed bright colours such as yellow, blue, green and pink on Australian animals like the bandicoot, wallaby, tree-kangaroo, possums and quolls. Their research was published in the journal PLOS One.

Science suggests humans are not built for the information age

We are living in the age of information. In fact, we’re drowning in it. Modern technology has put vast amounts of information at our fingertips, and it turns out that science is showing that humans just aren’t that good at processing all that data, making us vulnerable to bias, misinformation and manipulation.

Producer Amanda Buckiewicz spoke to:

Friedrich Götz, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.

Vasileia Karasavva, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia.

Timothy Caulfield, professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, and was the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy from 2002 - 2023.

Eugina Leung, an assistant professor of marketing at the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.

Jonathan Kimmelman, a medical ethicist based at McGill University.

The beginnings of our end — where the anus came from

Our distant evolutionary ancestors had no anuses. Their waste was excreted from the same orifice they used to ingest food, much like jellyfish do today. Now a new study on bioRxiv that has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists think they’ve found the evolutionary link in a worm with only a single digestive hole. Andreas Hejnol, from Friedrich Schiller University Jena, said he found genes we now associate with the anus being expressed in the worms in the opening where its sperm comes out, suggesting that in our evolutionary history a similar orifice was co-opted as a butt hole.

Deepfake videos are becoming so real, spotting them is becoming increasingly dicey

Detecting deepfake videos generated by artificial intelligence is a problem that’s getting progressively worse as the technology continues to improve. One way we used to be able to tell the difference between a fake and real video is that subtle signals revealing a person’s heart rate don’t exist in artificially generated videos. But that is no longer the case, according to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Imaging. Peter Eisert, from Humboldt University and the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute HHI in Germany, said detecting manipulated content visually is only going to become a lot more difficult going forward.

Crows can use tools, do math — and now apparently understand geometry

Crows are known to be among the most intelligent of animals, and a new study has explored their geometrical sophistication. Researchers including Andreas Nieder from the University of Tübingen found that crows can recognize and distinguish different kinds of quadrilateral shapes, an ability we had thought was unique to humans. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

There’s gold in them thar magnetically charged neutron stars!

Astronomers have discovered a new source of the universe’s heavy elements — things like gold, platinum and uranium. A study led by astrophysicist Anirudh Patel found that magnetars — exotic neutron stars with ultra-powerful magnetic fields — may produce these elements in a process analogous to the way solar flares are produced by our Sun. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that a single flare from a magnetar could produce the mass equivalent of 27 moons’ worth of these heavy elements in one burst.

It may not be big, but it’s small — and stroppy

You might not expect an insect so tiny you need a magnifying glass to see it properly to be an aggressive defender of its territory, but that’s because you haven’t met the warty birch caterpillar. Its territory is just the tip of a birch leaf, but it defends it by threatening intruders with vigorous, if not precisely powerful, vibrations. Jayne Yack at Carleton University has been studying this caterpillar since 2008. This research was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Criminals beware — the microbiome leaves fingerprints

Scientists have developed a new tool that can track location based on traces of the bacteria characteristic to different places. Eran Elhaik, from Lund University in Sweden, trained the AI tool using nearly 4,500 microbiome samples collected around the world from subway systems, soil and the oceans. He said they could identify the city source in 92 per cent of their urban samples, and in Hong Kong, where a lot of their data came from, they could identify the specific subway station samples were taken from with 82 per cent accuracy. The study was published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.