A woman walking to a bus stop realizes that she forgot her keys; she suddenly turns around and runs home. Such spontaneous activities are hallmarks of animal behavior. Eager to capture the essence of the human brain, roboticists have tried … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
New technique builds animal brain–like spontaneity into AI
Categories: Computer sciences | Journal Club
Tagged artificial intelligence, behavior switching, chaotic itinerancy, machine learning, robotics
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Insights into heat shock protein machinery could point to interventions for neurodegenerative disease
Heat shock proteins perform a range of functions related to protein quality control. Among them: breaking down dangerous protein aggregates called amyloid fibers. The buildup of certain amyloids has been linked to neurodegenerative disease. But the exact mechanism by which … Continue reading
Smaller salamander species associated with smaller genomes
The world’s tiniest salamanders are so small that some body parts appear to get short shrift. Those in the genus Thorius, for example, have heads that are “mind bogglingly small, maybe half the size of a pencil eraser,” says herpetologist … Continue reading
Categories: Developmental Biology | Evolution | Genetics | Journal Club | Physiology
Tagged cells, dinosaur, evolution, frog, genome, phylogenetic tree, retrotransposon, salamander
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Interdisciplinary study brings a humanist perspective to research on land use change
Decades ago, Brazil’s northeastern State of Bahia produced much of the world’s cocoa for chocolate. Most farms grew their cacao trees interspersed with other native trees, in dense agricultural forests. Children played at the forest edges. Today those children are … Continue reading
Categories: Agriculture | Journal Club | Social Sciences
Tagged agriculture, agro-forestry, cacao, cocoa, conservation, deforestation, farming, forests, land use change, monoculture, remote sensing
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Model suggests how evolution shapes ecological networks among species
The natural world is filled with networks. Predator and prey, flower and pollinator—each interacting pair forms a link in a networked community of organisms. Now, a French research team has developed a model that explores how evolution may help shape … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Ecology | Evolution | Journal Club | Mathematics
Tagged community, ecological networks, model, mutualism, predator, prey
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Plants sense temperature with help of elegant protein
How plants sense temperature is a longstanding and little-understood question. Researchers have discovered some of the mechanisms involved. A recent study in Nature adds a new mechanism—among the first in which the biophysical behavior of a single protein regulates the … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged amino acids, Arabidopsis, ELF3, flowering, meristem, NTL8, protein, temperature, thermosensing
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Inner Workings: Researchers race to develop in-home COVID-19 testing, a potential game-changer
For most people, a COVID-19 test entails a swab up the nose in a doctor’s office or drive-in site. The sample then goes out to a lab. Results come back within a few days to a week—a waiting period that’s … Continue reading
Categories: Infectious disease | Inner workings
Tagged antigen, COVID-19, COVID-19 testing, CRISPR, EUA, FDA, LAMP, nucleic acid, PCR, SARS-Cov-2
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The hippocampus has brief but critical role in early task learning
How the brain learns new tasks is among the biggest and oldest questions in neuroscience. A recent study in Nature Neuroscience offers a new, potentially key part of the answer: the dorsal hippocampus is involved in the earliest stages of … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience
Tagged Alzheimer's disease, chemogenetics, decision-making, dorsal hippocampus, hippocampus, learning, memory, neuron
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Insects, not just wind, offer an ancient mechanism of orchid seed dispersal
On Yakushima Island, at the southern tip of Japan, an orchid employs a very unusual strategy to disperse its seeds. Crickets visit the orchid at night, eat its fruits, and defecate the seeds in the vicinity. The discovery, reported recently … Continue reading
Satellite monitoring may help preserve the Chesapeake Bay by improving farming practices
Restoring the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, has for decades proven to be a fraught enterprise, beset by the interests of researchers, farmers, anglers, multiple governments, and a host of others. A new approach, recently reported in Remote … Continue reading
Categories: Agriculture | Ecology | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club | Sustainability Science
Tagged adaptive management, Chesapeake Bay, cover crops, estuary, farming, pollution, satellite, watershed
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Deep-sea mussels still show biological rhythms tracking sunlight, tides
Like many land animals, marine organisms follow daily and seasonal clocks—in the water, those clocks are set by the cadence of the sun and the moon. But researchers hadn’t known if deep-sea creatures also exhibit biological rhythms, tucked away in … Continue reading
Categories: Ecology | Genetics | Journal Club
Tagged chronobiology, circadian rhythms, deep sea, marine ecosystem, tides
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