Biology

African gray parrots (Psittacus erithacus) voluntarily and spontaneously help familiar parrots to achieve a goal, without obvious immediate benefit to themselves, says a duo of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the Max Planck Comparative Cognition Research Station. African gray parrots (Psittacus erithacus). Image credit: Andrew Bernard …

Life is pretty easy to recognize. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym ‘MRS-GREN’ to describe it. It stands for movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. But Helen Sharman, Britain’s first astronaut and a chemist at Imperial …

A species of many-plumed moth believed to be new to science has been discovered in South Africa. Alucita udovichenkoi, an adult male. Image credit: Kovtunovich et al. Many-plumed moths, or the Alucitidae, are a small family with currently over 200 described species in nine genera. These moths are found in …

In a series of experiments, a duo of researchers from the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University has observed eight-week-old wolf puppies spontaneously responding to social-communicative behaviors from an unfamiliar person by retrieving a ball. These observations come as a surprise because it had been hypothesized that the cognitive abilities …

A team of scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WSC), the CADIC-CONICET and Argentina’s National Parks Administration has discovered a new colony of Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus) on a remote island in Argentina. A Magellanic penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) on a bluff on Isla de los Estados, Argentina. Image credit: Ulises …

In a series of experiments, a team of biologists at the University of California, San Diego studied the structure of growing colonies comprised of two species of rod-shaped bacteria, Escherichia coli and Acinetobacter baylyi; the researchers were surprised to see that the highly-motile Acinetobacter baylyi accelerated the spread of the …

A team of German researchers has discovered several hundreds of new negative strand RNA viruses and at least 20 viral genera in insects. Phylogeny of negative strand RNA viruses: red dots identify virus orders according to current taxonomy; blue clouds show virus families; selected viral species are identified for orientation. …

An international team of ornithologists has discovered five new species and five new subspecies of songbirds on little-explored islands off the northeastern coast of Sulawesi. The Taliabu grasshopper-warbler (Locustella portenta). Image credit: James Eaton / Birdtour Asia. “From November 2013 through January 2014, we conducted a bird-collecting expedition to three …

Common mealworms, the larvae of the darkling beetle (Tenebrio molitor), can consume toxic additives in polystyrene with no ill effects; the worms can then be used as a safe, protein-rich feed supplement, according to new research from Stanford University. Brandon et al investigated the fate of the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane …

The early Earth could have hosted many carbonate-rich lakes, which would have had high enough phosphorus concentrations to get life started, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lake Magadi. Image credit: Stig Nygaard, Flickr / CC BY 2.0. “For 50 years, …