science

https://www.thenewlede.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Dear-President-Masotti.pdf

Osuna-Mascaró hopes the work will inspire scientists to pay more attention to farm animals as well. Though he’s largely studied chimpanzees and cockatoos until now, he wants to continue to work with cows. He’s even put a cow screensaver on his phone. “I think most animals are living a rich life and have something really interesting to tell us,” he says. “We just have to ask the right questions.”

The continuing row highlights long-standing tensions over clinical research trials in Africa that are proposed and run by researchers in other countries. African scientists say that the Guinea-Bissau study shows how political pressure, funding interests and fragmented oversight can push local health priorities aside.

...“The calculation results show enhancements of fusion yields by orders of magnitude with currently available intense low-frequency laser fields,” highlighted the study.

For a collision energy of 1 keV—a level where fusion is normally almost impossible—the application of a 1.55 eV low-frequency laser can transform the reaction rate.

At 10^20 W/cm² intensity, the fusion probability increases by three orders of magnitude, while increasing the intensity to 5×10^21 W/cm² boosts the efficiency by a staggering nine orders of magnitude.

This dramatic increase effectively makes fusion at 1 keV (relatively low temperature) as probable as fusion at 10 keV without laser assistance...

We’re not sure if it’s exciting or not that scientists just discovered new ‘lifeforms’ inside of our bodies. Tiny bits of RNA, smaller than a virus, colonize bacteria inside our mouths and guts and have the power to transfer information that can be read by a cell.

Dubbed ‘wildly weird’ by the team of Stanford scientists writing about the find in Nature, the discovery now has a name: obelisks. And we ... don’t really know their end goal.

“It’s insane,” said Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to Science. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”

Named obelisks because of their rod-shaped structures, they are even smaller than viruses, but they can still transmit instructions to cells. What they’re saying, however, we just don’t know.

It looks more like a worn sock than a fearsome predator. It moves slower than an escalator. By most accounts, it is a clumsy and near-sightless relic drifting in the twilight waters of the Arctic, lazily searching for food scraps.

But the Greenland shark, an animal one researcher (lovingly) said, “looks like it’s already dead”, is also one of the least understood, biologically enigmatic species on the planet.

But this month, scientists made a groundbreaking discovery: the sharks are not, in fact, blind. The newly published findings upend commonly held beliefs and expose the challenges of studying a shark that has long resisted the reaches of science. But the disruptive nature of the research also underscores the challenges scientists face in predicting how a rapidly changing climate might harm or help the elusive fish.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/33287055

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45811590

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/45810913

Cows are not usually credited with thinking on the hoof. They eat, they chew, they stand in fields performing an activity that may look like contemplation but is generally written off as digestion.

They are not typically thought to plan, let alone solve problems. A new study suggests we may have underestimated them.

The research describes what experts claim is the first documented case of flexible, multi-purpose tool use in cattle, observed in a cow named Veronika.

...

Veronika is a Swiss brown cow kept not for milk or meat but as a pet by Witgar Wiegele, an organic farmer and baker in Austria. More than a decade ago he noticed her using a long-handled brush, holding it in her mouth to scratch awkward parts of her body.

When video footage of this behaviour reached Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, it struck her as unusual, largely because Veronika used the brush in different ways to scratch different parts of her body.

“It was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” Auersperg said. “This was a meaningful example of tool use in a species that is rarely considered from a cognitive perspective.”

Auersperg and her colleague Antonio Osuna-Mascaró conducted a series of trials. They placed a long-handled brush on the ground and recorded how Veronika used it.

...

When scratching broad, thick-skinned regions such as her back or rump, Veronika tended to use the bristled end, applying it with sweeping, forceful movements. When targeting softer, more sensitive areas of her lower body, she switched to using the handle to scratch herself, moving more slowly.

Because Veronika directs tools at her own body, researchers describe this as egocentric tool use, which is usually regarded as less complex than tool use aimed at external objects. Even so, flexible, multi-purpose use of a single tool is rare. Outside humans, it has previously been demonstrated convincingly only in chimpanzees, the researchers say in their paper.

They wrote in a study published in the journal Current Biology that the findings “invite a reassessment of livestock cognition”.

...

The researchers suspect that Veronika’s life circumstances have played a role in the emergence of this behaviour. Most cows do not reach her age and they are rarely given the opportunity to interact with a variety of potentially useful objects.

Her long lifespan, daily contact with humans, and access to a rich physical landscape probably created favorable conditions, they said. If that is true, there may be nothing very exceptional about Veronika, other than the opportunities she has been given to exercise her brain.

...

Archive link

Link to the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-03097-0

Per the article,

"These sharks appear to have adapted their physiology to be able to optimize their energy use," Prof. Rummer said. "This work challenges the narrative that when things go wrong—such as warming oceans—that reproduction will be the first thing to go.