birds – Quanta Magazine

How Is Flocking Like Computing?

Steven Strogatz — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. Within assemblies of organisms that seem as though they could get chaotic, order somehow emerges. The collective behaviors of animals differ in their details from one species to another, but they largely adhere to principles of collective motion that physicists have worked out over centuries. Now, using technologies that only recently became available...

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Dinosaur Bone Study Reveals That Not All Giants Grew Alike

Anna Gibbs — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 13:55:36 +0000

When the paleontologist Michael D’Emic cut into the bones of Majungasaurus, a relative of Tyrannosaurus rex that roamed Madagascar 70 million years ago, he suspected that surprises might be hiding in them. But what he found defied all expectations. Majungasaurus adults measured up to 7 meters from snout to tail and could weigh 1,000 kilograms. Paleontologists had thought that big dinosaurs like...

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Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 13:26:27 +0000

In a rectangular room draped in camouflage netting, four Harris’ hawks took turns flying back and forth between grass-covered perches while scientists recorded their every biomechanical flutter. The researchers were partaking of the time-honored pursuit of watching birds fly — although in this experiment, their real interest was in watching them land. In more than 1,500 flights between the perches...

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Embryo Cells Set Patterns for Growth by Pushing and Pulling

Monique Brouillette — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 14:08:12 +0000

One of the longest-standing questions in biology is how a living thing that starts as an embryonic blob of uniform cells morphs over time into an organism with diverse tissues, each with its own unique pattern and characteristics. The answer would explain how a leopard gets its spots, a zebra gets its stripes, trees get their branches and many more mysteries of pattern development in biology.

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Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?

Jordana Cepelewicz — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 16:11:10 +0000

An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty — a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Honeybees count landmarks when navigating toward sources of nectar. Lionesses tally the number of roars they hear from an intruding pride before deciding whether to attack or retreat.

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