As you can imagine, a human intelligence test doesn’t really cut it for birds. It isn’t that easy to assess how an animal perceives information from the environment, processes it and decides to act. But researchers have developed a range of clever experiments to find out more about their cognitive abilities. Do they recognise each […]
Author: Marta Irigoyen is a postdoctoral researcher at CIC bioGUNE Since COVID-19 disease arrived in our lives at the beginning of last year, we are giving increased importance to our immune system status. We are worried about if it is working properly and can attack correctly the SARS-CoV-2. For this reason, lot of people are […]
Poland is planning to build a wall along its border with Belarus, primarily to block migrants fleeing the Middle East and Asia. But the wall would also divide the vast and ancient Białowieża Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site which harbours more than 12,000 animal species and includes the largest remnants of primeval forest that […]
When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the “darkest” objects in the cosmos, as not even light can escape their incredibly strong gravity. Because of this, it’s impossible to directly image black holes, making them mysterious and quite perplexing […]
We live in a time when scientific applications are growing by leaps and bounds. This exponential growth has been possible, among other tools, thanks to the application of nanotechnology. There is something that nanotechnology has taught us: In science, size matters. When studying matter at nanometric levels, we find that the properties are completely different […]
In the mid-1990s, there was research going on at Stanford University that would change the way we think about computers. The Media Equation experiments were simple: participants were asked to interact with a computer that acted socially for a few minutes after which, they were asked to give feedback about the interaction. Participants would provide […]
The brain plays an essential role in how people navigate the world by generating both thought and behavior. Despite being one of the most vital organs of life, it takes up only 2% of human body volume. How can something so small perform such complex tasks? Luckily, modern tools like brain mapping have allowed neuroscientists […]
We tend to think Antarctica is isolated and far away – biologically speaking, this is true. But the continent is busier than you probably imagine, with many national programs and tourist operators crisscrossing the globe to get there. And each vessel, each cargo item, and each person could be harbouring non-native species, hitchhiking their way […]
The American evolutionary psychologist David Buss contends in his 2005 book The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill that the evolutionary process humans acquired psychological adaptations to facilitate homicide. Natural selection, it is hypothesized, winnowed and perfected psychological mechanisms that solved certain problems by facilitating homicidal behavior. Of course, to solve […]
In 2000 and 2001, the use of child slaves on cocoa farms in West Africa was exposed in a series of documentaries and pieces of investigative journalism, sparking an international outcry . This series of events was far from unprecedented. As discussed in my paper, since the 19th century, when cocoa was first introduced to […]