Baboon-Trackers Herald New Age of Animal Behaviour Research

"By fitting wild olive baboons with sophisticated GPS collars, which automatically record their movements, Margaret Crofoot from University of California, Davis had learned exactly how they make decisions about where to go and whom to follow. Some of her results are surprising, others are more intuitive; regardless, her study heralds a new age of zoology, in which scientists can analyse animal behaviours on a scale that was previously impossible." (Image: SajjadF)

The Distributed Brainpower of Social Insects

"Social insects also benefit from swarm intelligence, where individuals can achieve astonishing feats of behaviour by following incredibly simple rules. They can build living buildings, raise crops, vaccinate themselves, and make decisions about where to live. In some cases, they make decisions in a way that’s uncannily similar to neurons—a colony behaves like a giant brain, and in more than a merely metaphorical way. They have a kind of ‘distributed cognition’, where many of the mental feats that other animals carry out using a single brain happen at the level of the colony." (Image: David Hill)
 

Book recommendation

BEING WRONG, by Kathryn Schulz, is an utter masterpiece. This exploration of what it means to be wrong, why we are so bad at dealing with error (or even the possibility of error), and how we might learn to embrace it, is the kind of book you finish with a deep exhale, a wide smile, and a full brain. It is erudite without ego, deeply philosophical but delightfully playful, full of high culture and low culture, and perfectly written.

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life tacitly assuming (and sometimes noisily insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken – and why do we typically react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness and shame?

In Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken, and how this attitude toward error corrodes our relationships—whether between family members, colleagues, neighbors, or nations. Along the way, she takes us on a fascinating tour of human fallibility, from wrongful convictions to no-fault divorce, medical mistakes to misadventures at sea, failed prophecies to false memories, “I told you so!” to “Mistakes were made.” Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan, and Groucho Marx, she proposes a new way of looking at wrongness. In this view, error is both a given and a gift – one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and, most profoundly, ourselves.
 

More good reads

• Hazing Ravens With Lasers: A Humane Way to Save Baby Tortoises?" By Chris Clarke.
• The genome of Kennewick Man rekindles a legal feud—coverage from Carl Zimmer and Ewen Callaway. Watch out for Jennifer Raff’s superb quote in the latter. 
• Jurassic World wasn’t faithful to science, but so what? Great comment by Stephen Brusatte. (Let's talk about sexism, instead. Or heels. Or hilarity.)
• Astronauts Have Done So, So Much With Duct Tape And Electrical Tape. By Mika McKinnon
• If the sea swallows a country, does it survive as a virtual nation? By Rachel Nuwer
• Vaccines in the '60s made people more likely to develop chlamydia — and now we know why. Arielle Duhaime-Ross on the solving of a decades-old mystery.
• “But the biggest mistake, he said, was a simple one: South Korea did not expect MERS to arrive.” Maryn McKenna on how we forget about the border-hopping abilities of diseases, to our detriment.
• ““What are the odds that you are wrong?” I asked, or so I remember. “I’d say zero,” the critic replied. “No chance.” That’s how you fail the nut test.” How Dan Vergano converted from a climate change skeptic to a believer.
• “A persistent, lopsided cloud of dust is hanging around our moon.” Nadia Drake, on the continuing surprises of our little satellite.
• A single-celled organism with a complex eye. By Michael LePage
• The Relentless Symmetry of a Jellyfish, by Adrienne LaFrance. “When a moon jellyfish is injured, it grows new tissue to become more symmetrical—but not necessarily to replace lost limbs.”

 

More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed