Let’s go, Grue Jays!

New kinds of birds are not usually discovered while browsing Facebook, but an ornithologist spotted something he’d never seen before in a photo, and tracked down the strange bird. Brian Stokes, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered it was actually a previously unknown hybrid of the familiar blue jay and a green jay, better known from southern parts of North America. Climate change likely played a part in bringing the two species together. Their research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. 

Chimpanzees’ taste for ripe fruit is equivalent to two drinks a day

Chimpanzees in the wild can eat about 10 per cent of their body weight worth of fruit each day, and all of that fruit contains small amounts of alcohol. A team of scientists, including Aleksey Maro from the University of California Berkeley, wanted to understand just how much alcohol the chimps were getting from all this fruit. Three different methods of analysis over three years revealed the chimps were consuming the equivalent of two standard drinks a day. This suggests an evolutionary explanation for the human taste for ethanol. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Sea life says make homes, not bombs

After the defeat of Germany in 1945, an estimated 1.6 million tons of munitions were dumped into the Baltic sea off the German coast. A team of researchers, including marine biologist Andrey Vedenin from the Senckenberg Research Institute, wanted to understand how this potentially toxic legacy had affected sea life. They were stunned to discover thousands of animals surviving on the abandoned weapons despite the toxic burden they carried. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

Structure of social media sites 'inherently lead to something problematic'

Our experience of social media sites is that they often descend into extremism, divisiveness and conflict, but this may be a feature, not a bug. In a pre-print study on arXiv, scientists simulated social media interactions between AI-generated participants to test various interventions to see how they'd impact the problems that emerge, such as the rise of echo chambers, the concentration of influence and the amplification of polarized voices. Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam computational social scientist, said he was disappointed to learn that none of the interventions worked.

Your brain’s two halves hand off perception like a baton in a relay race

When something passes from one side of your visual field to the other, something amazing happens, according to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Matthew Broschart, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, tracked how the visual parts of each half of the brain, connected to each eye, do a coordinated dance to create a unified visual perception in primates.

The bear necessities of tracking B.C. grizzlies with machine learning software

Scientists and guardians from five First Nations of the Nanwakolas Council are working together to track individual grizzlies across the southern Great Bear Rainforest  in B.C.. Using camera traps and machine learning techniques, they've developed an automated system through the BearID Project to identify individual bears and track them over the landscape. We spoke with conservation scientist and director of the BearID Project, Melanie Clapham, and Tashina James-Matilpi, from the Tlowitsis First Nation, the project's guardian logistics coordinator for the Nanwakolas Council.

Dust from car tires can be bad for fish — what might it do to us?

As car tires wear, they shed billions of ultrafine particles of rubber that contain a complex mix of chemicals, including one called 6PPD-Quinone that’s been linked to mass die-offs of migrating salmon. Now researchers are sounding the alarm that this chemical is accumulating in humans, and we have no clear understanding of its toxicity. An international team of scientists, including Rachel Scholes from the University of British Columbia, are calling for more scrutiny of the chemicals that go into car tires, since so much ends up in our environment. Their paper was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Fecal Transplants seem to have lasting metabolic effects

Transplanting the gut microbiome has been held out as a hope for a range of disorders, from obesity to mental health issues. A study that followed obese adolescents four years after receiving a fecal microbiota transplant from healthy individuals has shown positive impacts on the recipients' weight and metabolic health. Dr. Wayne Cutfield, a pediatrician and professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said they also found after all this time that the donor bacteria have remained established in the recipients' gut microbiome. The study is in the journal Nature Communications. 

An ant queen clones sexual slaves of another species for her daughters

In a truly bizarre tale from the animal world, researchers have discovered a species of ant where the queen gives birth to males of two totally different species. Somewhere along their evolutionary path, these Messor ibericus queen ants in southern Europe developed an ability to clone male Messor structor ants for her daughters to mate with and to produce a hybrid working class. Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Montpellier in France, said these M. ibericus ants essentially domesticated ants of another species. The study was published in the journal Nature. 

Why other apes can’t walk a mile in our shoes

A feature that distinguishes humans from other primates is the ability to walk upright. The major evolutionary change in the structure of our pelvis that allows for our bipedalism has now been traced genetically and developmentally. Human pelvic blades initially form in the embryo like other primates, but then flip their growth from vertical to horizontal, to give the human pelvis its unique basin shape. This new research led by Terence Capellini, Chair of the human evolutionary biology department at Harvard University and postdoctoral student Gayani Senevirathne, was published in the journal Nature.

Women glow. So do men. Understanding our 'inner light'

You might have been told by an admirer that you have a unique glow. In two groundbreaking studies, researchers have demonstrated the reality of that poetic compliment. Using ultra-sensitive instruments capable of detecting individual photons, Canadian researchers have imaged a biological source of incredibly faint light, known as Ultraweak Photon Emissions (UPE), that has potential as a future non-invasive diagnostic imaging tool. 

Daniel Oblak, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, oversaw a study where they unequivocally demonstrated that living things, like mice, give off an extremely faint glow that dims when they die. His study was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. 

In a separate study, Nirosha Murugan, — an assistant professor of tissue biophysics at Wilfred Laurier University — discovered that these UPEs can also detect different mental states in the brain. That study was published in the journal iScience.

10 years ago we first saw gravitational waves — what we’ve seen since

In September 2015, LIGO—or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—captured the ripples in spacetime produced by the cataclysmic merger of two black holes, from over a billion light years away. This discovery confirmed Einstein’s hypothesis about gravitational waves and gave astronomers a new way to explore the cosmos. In the decade since, LIGO’s scientific team, including physicist Nergis Mavalvala, has been busy, including new results announced this week confirming a 50-year-old prediction by Stephen Hawking about how black holes merge. Mavalvala is the dean of the school of science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The latest discovery was reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

What wild killer whales sharing food with humans says about their intelligence

After an experience of being offered a recently killed seabird by an Orca, cetologist Jared Towers decided to document other instances of killer whales approaching humans to share a snack. Towers, the executive director of the marine research nonprofit Bay Cetology, found dozens of examples of this behaviour. It’s a perhaps unique example of a wild creature sharing food with humans for its own diversion and curiosity. The research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Sweat science — This research really was 90% perspiration

While the biology of perspiration is relatively well understood, the physical process by which water excreted from our skin cools us is not. This motivated engineer Konrad Rykaczewski to strap himself into a specialized full-body, tube-filled suit to observe how water emerges from sweat glands over the skin. Rykaczewski, a thermal and materials engineer at Arizona State University, found that sweat rises out of sweat glands in pools, eventually spilling out and soaking the top layer of the skin. The research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

What came first, the tomato or the potato?

As it turns out, the potato came from the tomato. By tracking their genetic lineage, an international team of researchers, including University of British Columbia botanist Loren Rieseberg, have found that the noble potato actually resulted from the tomato naturally cross-breeding with another unrelated species, more than eight million years ago. The research was published in the journal Cell.

Bringing science education to the incarcerated

We speak with a scientist who spent much of his summer working in Canadian prisons doing brief, but intense, science education courses. Phil Heron created the Think Like a Scientist program to teach critical thinking skills to those who may have had negative experiences with education. He believes that the scientific method will help people understand how failure in life, as in science, can be a pathway to success.

We spoke to:

Phil Heron, assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough campus, in the department of physical and environmental sciences and founder of the Think Like a Scientist program.

Dalton Harrison, founder of Standfast Productions and former program participant finishing a masters degree in criminal justice and criminology.

Phoenix Griffin, university student in criminal justice and criminology and former program participant.

Jamie Williams, a director with Spectrum First Education and a co-facilitator of Think Like a Scientist.

Every summer, Canadian scientists leave their labs and classrooms and fan out across the planet to do research in the field. This week, we’re sharing some of their adventures.

Camping out on a remote island with thousands of screaming, pooping, barfing birds

Abby Eaton and Flynn O’Dacre spent their summer on Middleton Island, a remote, uninhabited island that lies 130 kilometers off the coast of Alaska. They were there to study seabirds, in particular the rhinoceros auklet and the black-legged kittiwake, as a part of a long-term research project that monitors the health of the birds to help understand the health of the world’s oceans. Eaton and O’Dacre are graduate students working under Emily Choy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario

Dodging lions and mongooses to monitor what wild dogs are eating in Mozambique

PhD student Nick Wright spent his summer in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. After a brutal civil war wiped out 95 per cent of the large mammals in the park, much work has been done to bring back a healthy wildlife population, to mixed success. Nick was monitoring wild dogs this summer to learn what they’re eating, and what effects their recent re-introduction has had on the other animals. Wright is in the Gaynor lab at the University of British Columbia.

Saving ancient silk road graffiti from dam-inundation

The legendary silk road is a network of trade routes stretching from Eastern China to Europe and Africa, used by traders from the second century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Travelers often left their marks, in the form of graffiti and other markings on stone surfaces along the route. Construction of a dam in Pakistan is threatening some of these petroglyphs, and an international team is working to document them online while there is still time. Jason Neelis, of the Religion and Culture Department, and Ali Zaidi, from the Department of Global Studies, both at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, are part of the team.

Prospecting for World War II bombs in an Ottawa bog

Pablo Arzate's tests of sensor-equipped drones developed for mining uncovered 80-year-old relics leftover from World War II bomber pilot training in the Mer Bleue bog southeast of Ottawa. Arzate, the founder of 3XMAG Technologies from Carleton University, says his newly-developed technology revealed a trove of unexploded ordnance lurking beneath the bog’s surface. 

Technology allows examination of Inca mummies without disturbing them

Andrew Nelson and his team spent the summer in Peru devising new methods of non-invasively scanning Peruvian mummies dating to the Inca period – so they can study them without unwrapping them. In Peru, ancient human remains were wrapped in large bundles along with other objects.  Nelson is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Western University in London, Ontario. This work is done in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture of Peru.

Eavesdropping on chatty snapping turtles in Algonquin Park

Since 1972, scientists have been spending their summers at the Algonquin Park research station to monitor the turtles living in the area. In recent years, the researchers discovered that these turtles vocalise –– both as adults, and as hatchlings still in the egg. So this summer, Njal Rollinson and his students set out to record these vocalisations to try and understand what the turtles are saying. Rollinson is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.

We're on hiatus for the summer, but we'll return with new episodes on September 6. In the meantime visit our website at cbc.ca/quirks to browse our archives. Have a great summer!

Politically-driven chaos is disrupting U.S. scientific institutions and creating challenges for science in Canada. Science is a global endeavour and collaborations with the U.S. are routine. In this special episode of Quirks & Quarks, we explore what Canadian scientists are doing to preserve their work to assert scientific sovereignty in the face of this unprecedented destabilization. 

Canadian climate scientists brace for cuts to climate science infrastructure and data 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on climate science are putting our Earth observing systems, in the oceans and in orbit, at risk. Canadian scientists who rely on U.S. led climate data infrastructure worry about losing long-term data that would affect our ability to understand our changing climate. 

With: 

Kate Moran, the president and CEO of Ocean Networks Canada and Emeritus Professor of Oceanography at the University of Victoria 

Debra Wunch, Physicist at the University of Toronto

Chris Fletcher, Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo

U.S. cuts to Great Lakes science and monitoring threaten our shared freshwater resource

U.S. budget and staffing cuts are jeopardizing the long-standing collaboration with our southern neighbour to maintain the health of the Great Lakes, our shared resource and the largest freshwater system in the world. 

With: 

Jérôme Marty, executive director of the International Association for Great Lakes Research and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa

Greg McClinchey, policy and legislative director with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission

Michael Wilkie, Biologist at Wilfred Laurier University

Brittney Borowiec, research associate in the Wilkie Lab at Wilfred Laurier University

Aaron Fisk, Ecologist and Canada Research Chair at the University of Windsor

Unexpected ways U.S. culture war policies are affecting Canadian scientists 

One of the first things President Trump did after taking office was to sign an executive order eliminating all DEI policies in the federal government. This is having far-reaching consequences for Canadian scientists as they navigate the new reality of our frequent research partner’s hostility against so-called “woke science.”

With:

Dr. Sofia Ahmed, Clinician scientist, and academic lead for the Women and Children’s Health Research Institute at the University of Alberta 

Angela Kaida, professor of health sciences and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver

Dawn Bowdish, professor of immunology, the executive director of the Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health and Canada Research Chair at McMaster University

Kevin Zhao, MD/PhD student in immunology in the Bowdish Lab at McMaster University

Jérôme Marty, executive director of the International Association for Great Lakes Research

Canada has a ‘responsibility’ to step up and assert scientific sovereignty

A 2023 report on how to strengthen our federal research support system could be our roadmap to more robust scientific sovereignty. The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System made recommendations to the federal government for how we could reform our funding landscape. The intent was to allow us to quickly respond to national research priorities and to make Canada a more enticing research partner in world science. 

With: 

Frédéric Bouchard, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of philosophy of science at the Université de Montreal. Chair of the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System.

Have you ever wondered how particle accelerators work? Or what microwaves really do to food? Have you spent time pondering the mystery of how ice ages changed the Earth’s rotation or why whales haven’t figured out how to breathe underwater? Well you’ll find out all this and more on our Quirks & Quarks listener question show!

Mutant super-powers give Korean sea women diving abilities

The Haenyeo, or sea women, of the Korean island of Jeju have been celebrated historically for their remarkable diving abilities. For hour after hour they dive in frigid waters harvesting sea-life, through pregnancy and into old age. A new study has shown they are able to do this because of specific genetic adaptations that appeared in their ancestors more than a thousand years ago. These genes make them more tolerant to the cold, and decrease diastolic blood pressure. The women also spend a lifetime training, beginning to dive at age 15 and continuing on until their 80s or even 90s. Melissa Ilardo of Utah University and her team published their findings in the journal Cell Reports.

This dessert is automatic and autonomous 

Care for a slice of robo-cake? Scientists in Europe have baked up a cake with pneumatically powered animated gummy bears, and candles lit by chocolate batteries. They think their edible robotics could develop in the future to food that could bring itself to the hungry and medicine could deliver itself to the sick. Mario Caironi of the Italian Institute of Technology and his colleagues presented their creation at Expo 2025 Osaka.

Shrinking Nemo — heat is causing clownfish to downsize

Scientists have found that clownfish, made famous by the Disney movie Finding Nemo, have an ability never seen before in fish in the coral reefs. When the water they live in gets warmer, they are able to shrink their bodies — becoming a few per cent of their body length shorter — to cope with the stress of the heat. Melissa Versteeg of Newcastle University says the size of the clown anemonefish is important for their survival and their ranking within their hierarchical society. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

When the music moves you — the brain science of groove

You know that groove feeling you get when you listen to certain music that compels you to shake your bootie? Scientists in France investigated how our brains experience groovy music to better understand how we anticipate rhythms in time. They discovered that we perceive time in the motor region that controls movement. Benjamin Morillion from Aix Marseille Université said they also found a specific rhythm in the brain that helps us process information in time, that could predict if a person thought the music was groovy. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

Scientists hope a new storm lab will help us understand destructive weather

Extreme weather is far less predictable than it used to be, and now a new research centre at Western University wants to transform our understanding of Canada’s unique weather systems. The Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory will collect nation-wide data on extreme weather, including hailstorms, tornadoes, and flash flooding, and look for patterns to help predict where they’ll be hitting and how to prevent the most damage. 

Producer Amanda Buckiewicz spoke with:

Greg Kopp, ImpactWX Chair in Severe Storms Engineering and CSSL founding director at Western University

Harold Brooks, senior research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory

John Allen, associate professor of meteorology at Central Michigan University

Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western University.

Tanya Brown-Giammanco, director of Disaster and Failure Studies at NIST

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.

The ‘bone collector’ caterpillar covers itself with body parts

It’s like something from a horror movie. A creeping, carnivorous creature that in a macabre attempt at disguise and protection, covers itself with the dismembered remains of dead insects. This super-rare caterpillar is one of the strangest insects in the world. It lives on spider webs inside of trees and rock crevices in a 15 square kilometre radius on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu. Daniel Rubinoff, from the University of Hawaii Insect Museum, found about 62 of these caterpillars over the past 20 years. Their research was published in the journal Science. 

If a dolphin pees in the water, does anybody know it?

Researchers observing river dolphins in Brazil were first surprised to see the animals turning on their backs and urinating into the air, and then further amazed to see other dolphins sampling the falling stream. The Canadian and Brazilian team, led by Claryana Araújo-Wang from the CetAsia Research Group, believe this aerial urination may be a way to communicate dominance among males. The research was published in the journal Behavioural Processes.

How the snowball Earth made life bloom on our planet

700 million years ago our planet was frozen from pole to pole during a period known as snowball Earth. Glaciers at that time scoured deep into the continents below like a giant bulldozer, grinding the rock into fine sediments. In a new study in the journal Geology, scientists found that as the glaciers melted, a lot of that loose material was injected very rapidly into the oceans. Branden Murphy, from St. Francis Xavier University, said this chemical cocktail fertilized the oceans, and set the stage for rise of multicellular complex life on Earth.  

How a team of microbiologists use cars to sample air across the country

Understanding the distribution of bacteria that might be a concern for human or animal health across an entire country is a huge job. But a team from Laval used a very clever shortcut to gather their data. They collected car air filters from vehicles across the nation, and looked in them to see what they sucked up. They found regional differences in the antimicrobial resistance genes specific to the agricultural activities and environmental factors at each location. Paul George, from Laval University, was the lead researcher on the study published in the journal Environmental DNA.

Albertan obsidian artifacts are the end point of a widespread Indigenous trade network

Obsidian — volcanic glass used to make super-sharp tools — is found as artifacts from chips to blades to arrowheads at hundreds of sites across the Rockies of Alberta and B.C., dating back thousands of years. However, there are no volcanos in the area so archaeologists are using this volcanic glass to chart Indigenous trade routes through North America. New research, led by Timothy Allan of Ember Archeology, has traced the obsidian’s point of origin to a site nearly 1,000 kilometres away, suggesting the material travelled over long distances and passed through many hands. The research was published in the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Do his gills ring a bell? Fish can recognize humans

Scientists at a Mediterranean research station kept noticing that particular fish would follow them around whenever they would try and do experiments. To find out if the fish were actually capable of recognizing individual humans, a team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany decided to turn this annoying behaviour into a scientific experiment. They found that the fish were indeed capable of remembering which humans had shared tasty treats in the past. The research was published in the journal Biology Letters.

All the colours of the rainbow, plus one

Researchers have fired lasers directly into the eye to stimulate photoreceptors, and produce the perception of a colour that does not exist in nature. They describe it as a “supersaturated teal,” and hope the technique will allow them to better understand colour vision and perhaps lead to treatments for vision problems. Austin Roorda has been developing this technology using mirrors, lasers and optical devices. He is a professor of Optometry and Vision Science at University of California, Berkeley. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

Following in the footsteps of an ancient ankylosaur

Paleontologists have found fossil footprints of an armoured dinosaur in the Canadian Rockies that fill in a critical gap in the fossil record. The footprints belonged to a club-tailed ankylosaur about five to six metres long, and are the first evidence of this type of dinosaur living in North America in a period known as the middle Cretaceous. The research was led by Victoria Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum, and published in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology.

Did the Neanderthals die from sunburn?

Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago, and new research suggests this corresponds to a period of weakness in the Earth’s magnetic field that allowed an increase in the solar radiation reaching the surface. Researchers think they have evidence that modern humans were able to protect themselves from the sun better than Neanderthals could, and this might have contributed to the Neanderthal extinction. Raven Garvey is an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Her team’s research was published in the journal Science. 

Cloudy with a chance of ammonia mushballs

New observations and models of activity within Jupiter’s stormy atmosphere is giving a weather report for the giant planet, and it’s pretty extreme. Most interestingly, researchers predict conditions that could lead to violent lightning storms producing softball sized frozen ammonia “mushballs” that would rain through the upper atmosphere. The research was led by Chris Moeckel, a planetary scientist and aerospace engineer at the University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and was published in the journal Science Advances.

Shattering heat records: climate change is turning out to be worse than expected

In the last few years, we’ve seen global temperatures rising faster, with more extreme localized heatwaves, than climate models predicted. Climate scientists are trying to understand this by investigating the underlying factors behind these heating trends. 

Richard Allan, from the University of Reading in the U.K., was expecting a larger than normal rise in global temperatures due to natural fluctuations, but global temperatures in 2023 and 2024 were much higher than expected. Their recent study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found a growing imbalance in the earth’s heat system, with increasingly more heat coming in than leaving, in large part due to changes we’ve seen in global cloud cover.

This global heating is not happening evenly around the world. Kai Kornhuber, from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and Columbia Climate School in New York, found regional hotspots that are experiencing unexpected extreme heat, likely due to a combination of factors. That study is in the journal PNAS. 

How a helpless baby bird protects itself from hungry hunters

There’s not a more vulnerable creature in nature than a baby bird. Tiny and immobile, they’re easy pickings for predators. But the chicks of the white-necked jacobin hummingbird have evolved a unique defence. They disguise themselves as poisonous caterpillars to discourage those that might eat them. Jay Falk, an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and Scott Taylor, director of the Mountain Research Station and associate professor at the University of Colorado, studied these birds in Panama. Their research was published in the journal Ecology.

Seals have a sense of their oxygen levels, which makes them better divers

Seals can dive at length to tremendous depth thanks to some remarkable adaptations, like the ability to collapse their lungs, and radically lower their heart rate. Chris McKnight, a senior research fellow at the University of St Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit in Scotland, led a study looking to see if tweaking oxygen and C02 levels changed the seals’ dive times. The researchers discovered that the seals have the unique ability to measure the oxygen levels in their tissues, so they can anticipate when they need to return to the surface before they get into trouble. The research was published in the journal Science.

Fruit flies can show a playful side

As the joke goes, time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Researchers recently demonstrated that fruit flies enjoy more than just aged produce. Using a custom carousel built to fly scale, scientists found that some, but not all, of their fruit flies would play on it, enjoying an activity that had nothing to do with the necessities of life. This brings up the possibility  of variability in personality for fruit flies. Wolf Hütteroth is an associate professor at Northumbria  University, Newcastle and was part of the team, whose research was published in the journal Current Biology.

Scaring krill with a dose of penguin poo

Krill, the small, shrimp-like creatures that swarm the world’s oceans and are particularly abundant in southern oceans, play a big role in marine food webs, connecting microscopic organisms with many of the oceans’ larger animal species. Researchers in Australia investigated how krill respond to predator cues, like the smell of their feces. Nicole Hellessey, from the University of Tasmania, said the mere whiff of penguin feces affects the Antarctic krills’ feeding behaviour and causes them to take frantic evasive action. The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. 

Fossils tell us what dinosaurs were. How do we know what they did? 

Dinosaur bones can tell amazing stories about these prehistoric beasts, but how do we piece together how they behaved? A new book dives into the many lines of evidence that can shed light on the behaviour of these extinct creatures. From fossils, to tracks they left behind, to their modern day descendents, paleontologist David Hone from Queen Mary University of London explores how scientists develop robust theories about how dinosaurs lived in his new book, Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know.

A tree has evolved to attract lightning strikes — to eliminate the competition

Scientists working in Panama noticed that a particular tropical tree species was frequently struck by lightning, but was infrequently killed by the strikes. Forest ecologist Evan Gora found that Dipteryx oleifera trees were often the last ones standing after a lightning strike, which can kill over 100 trees with a single bolt. His team discovered the giant trees were more electrically conductive than other species, which allows them to not only survive strikes, but also channel lightning into parasitic vines and competing trees around them. The research was published in the journal New Phytologist.

Anti-anxiety drugs we pee out could be affecting wild salmon

Our bodies only process some of the pharmaceuticals we take, which means when we pee, we’re releasing traces of drugs into the ecosystem. A study of the impact of trace amounts of anti-anxiety drugs on juvenile salmon suggests they might become too brave for their own survival.  Jack Brand is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and led the research published in the journal Science.

Fossil discovery gives new insight into the mysterious Denisovans

A jawbone pulled up by fishers off the coast of Taiwan in 2008 has proven to be a unique discovery. Analysis of preserved protein in the fossil has proved it is from a male Denisovan — a mysterious species of ancient human known from only fragmentary bones and ancient DNA. This gives new insight into how widespread this mysterious branch of humanity was. The research was led by a team including Takumi Tsutaya and Enrico Cappellini at the University of Copenhagen, and published in the journal Science.

Earth’s inner core is a lot more dynamic and smushy than we previously thought

Scientists used to think the inner core of our planet was a solid sphere of metal, but a new study in Nature Geoscience suggests its softer outer layers shift and deform over time. The researchers used pairs of earthquakes from the same location as X-rays to peer inside Earth to gauge what the inner core is doing; much like a stop-motion film. John Vidale, from the University of Southern California, said this insight can shed light on how a planet like ours evolves. 

Human noise has an impact on wildlife — here are two unique examples

Traffic, aircraft, industry, construction. Our world is saturated with artificial noise. We know noise impacts us and other animals, but new research is shedding light on how past experiences factor into the ways wildlife adapt to our noise pollution. 

Researchers in one study in Animal Behaviour found that yellow warblers in the Galapagos Islands that live closer to traffic become aggressive when defending their territory in noisy conditions compared to birds in quieter areas. Çağlar Akçay, from Anglia Ruskin University, said the birds exposed to more traffic have learned their warning calls aren’t as effective when things get too noisy; and they resort to physical violence. 

Another study in Current Biology shows how spiders that are exposed to loud noises construct their webs differently in ways that could affect their ability to sense vibrations from prey or a potential mate. Brandi Pessman, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, found that spiders tune their webs in noisy environments like a volume dial: city spiders turn their web volume down whereas country spiders turn it up.

An attractive new strategy for brain surgery

A Canadian team is developing minimally-invasive micro-tools for brain surgery that can be operated by magnetic fields from outside of the skull. The tools, including scalpels and forceps, will enter the cranium through small incisions, and then be controlled by focused and precise magnetic fields. Eric Diller is associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto and his research was published in the journal Science Robotics.

Animal tool use is fishy

In recent decades scientists have discovered animals from primates to birds and marine mammals can use tools — a capacity once thought to be exclusive to humans. Now scientists have discovered fish using hard surfaces to crack open hard-shelled prey and get at the meaty meal inside. The research, led by Juliette Tariel-Adam from Macquarie University, included recruiting divers and scientists from around the world to report any sightings of tool use, which led to 16 reports across five species of wrasses. The results were published in the journal Coral Reefs.

Bad news — a long cold bath may be good for you

For a hardy few, soaking in cold water has long been held out as being healthful and invigorating. Well, unfortunately, the latest research suggests that they’re right. Volunteers who soaked in cold water for an hour a day for a week showed improvements in autophagy, an important cellular clean-up function that typically declines with age. Kelli King is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ottawa and was co-lead on this study, published in the journal Advanced Biology. 

How the unicorn of the sea uses its horn

The Narwhal is a small whale distinguished by its long spiral horn — an elongated tooth. Researchers have long speculated about what the ostentatious bit of dentition is actually for, but the elusive narwhal has, until now, been hard to study. Now scientists, including Cortney Watt from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, have used drones to learn that the horn is used in several ways: to play, explore, and forage. The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Why your body and brain might be fighting your efforts to get and stay slimmer

New research is revealing why it’s so difficult to keep weight off after you’ve lost it. 

One study in Nature found that genes in the fat cells of people who lost a significant amount of weight through bariatric surgery largely continued to behave as if they were still obese. Ferdinand von Meyenn, from ETH Zurich, said that despite these individuals becoming, in many respects, much more healthy, genes that became active during obesity remained active, and genes that were turned off, remained turned off, predisposing them to regain lost weight. In formerly obese mice, their fat cells remained much better at taking up sugars and fats. 

In addition, another study revealed that neurons in a primitive part of the brain hold onto memories of fat and sugar that can drive our cravings, according to a study on mice in Nature Metabolism. Guillaume de Lartigue, from the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania, said specific neural circuits in the brain light up, depending on whether the gut received sugar or fat. Removing these neurons protected the mice from diet-induced weight gain, something de Lartigue is hoping to translate to humans to dial down impulsive eating behaviour.