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Mar. 16, 2021 , 8:01 PM If you’ve ever counted to three before jumping into the pool with a friend, you’ve got something in common with dolphins. The sleek marine mammals use coordinated clicks and whistles to tell each other the precise moment to perform a backflip or push a button, according to new research. That makes them the only animals besides humans known to cooperate with vocal cues. The new work is “fascinating,” says Richard Connor, a cetacean biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, who was not involved with the research. “We just see so much cooperation ...

Leonardo Carneiro de Almeida / Getty Our fingertips have an extraordinarily high sensitivity to touch – and now it looks like that sensitivity might be largely confined to the ridges of our fingerprints. “They really help us get very detailed information about what we touch,” says Ewa Jarocka at Umeå University in Sweden. Advertisement Scientists have suspected that our circular, winding fingerprints might have evolved to improve our ability to grip objects by creating better friction, says Jarocka. But she says others have suggested they might contribute to our “very refined sense...

How is this horse feeling? New mobile brain wave reader could tell Mar. 9, 2021 , 5:15 PM The famed stallion Black Beauty felt joy, excitement, and even heartbreak—or so he tells us in the 1877 novel that bears his name. Now, scientists say they’ve been able to detect feelings in living animals by getting them straight from the horse’s mouth—or in this case, its head. Researchers have devised a new, mobile headband that detects brain waves in horses, which could eventually be used with other species. “This is a real breakthrough,” says Katherine Houpt, a veterinary behaviorist at ...

Two species of sea slugs take drastic measures to get rid of parasites – they separate their head from their body and then regrow a new one over a few weeks

blickwinkel / Alamy Playing dead might help prey animals stay alive because the tactic leaves predators vulnerable to having their attention diverted elsewhere. Nigel R. Franks at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues were running a study on how the beetle-like larvae of flying antlions ( Euroleon nostras) use grains of sand to build pitfall traps to catch food. They noticed that when they dropped the 12-millimetre-long larvae onto a microbalance to weigh them, the insects would freeze. Advertisement Fascinated, Franks and his colleagues observed the behaviour repeatedly, noting t...