Untrained parrots have been solving complex mechanical problems that involved undoing a series of locks one after another; impressive feats that scientists say reveal new levels of intelligence in birds. The scientists, from Oxford University, the University of Vienna, and the Max Planck Institute, report on their experiments with Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffini) in the […]
Anxiety and excessive worry, traits that are usually viewed as maladaptive, appear to have co-evolved with the attribute that is viewed as most adaptive – human intelligence. Details of this intriguing research, led by Jeremy Coplan, professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, appear in the journalFrontiers in Evolutionary […]
SETI’s (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) quest to find radio signals transmitted by extraterrestrial civilizations has so far failed to locate any alien shock jocks, so two astronomers have suggested a new technique for finding aliens: look for their city lights. In their paper, Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Edwin Turner, of […]
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers have made an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as the human brain can. Detailing the work in Nature, lead author Lulu Qian explained that the neural net consisted of four artificial neurons made […]
How human sexual selection evolved over time is becoming clearer with new findings from the University of Colorado at Boulder showing that women in their fertile phase are more likely to fantasize about masculine-looking men and that a man’s intelligence has no effect on a female’s choice of partner. The researchers say this lack of […]
Psychologists at the University of California – Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia have found that exposure to surrealism, by say, reading a book by Franz Kafka or watching a film by director David Lynch, enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee the implicit learning functions in the brain. The research was reported in […]
Reporting their findings in the journalIntelligence, researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry in the UK say that men with higher intelligence tend to produce better quality sperm. This, say the researchers, suggests a closer-than-expected relationship between intelligence and evolutionary fitness. The intelligence/sperm analysis was conducted as a precursor to possible further study involving the associations […]
A new study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, has shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids. UC Berkeley’s Robert Knight says that normal 9 and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences […]
SETI and other ET initiatives are wasting their time if a scientist from the University of East Anglia, UK, is correct. Professor Andrew Watson has just completed a new mathematical model that suggests that the odds of finding new life on other Earth-like planets are extremely low. Central to Watson’s new model, published inAstrobiology, is […]
Snack food company Doritos is sponsoring a competition in the UK to beam a user-created advertisement (using a 2-billion watt transmitter) at the 47 Ursae Majoris solar system 42 light years away from Earth. Entrants have to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be. On the 12th June, the […]
