biology
A slime mold is a single cell with millions of nuclei, no brain, no nervous system, and the demonstrated ability to solve shortest-path problems, design rail networks that match the topology of Tokyo, and remember which directions to avoid. The cell is doing computation in a substrate that biolog...
biology
A honey bee colony is, in aggregate, a foraging optimization algorithm. The waggle dance encodes distance and bearing. The recruiter-scout balance solves an exploration-exploitation trade-off that humans rediscovered in the 1950s and named the multi-armed bandit problem. The colony's collective b...
science
A lichen is not a plant. It is a fungus and an alga (or sometimes a fungus, an alga, and a bacterium) living together so closely that the result behaves like one organism. The biology of lichens overturned the species concept once already, and is doing it again.
science
A bar-tailed godwit can fly 12,000 kilometers nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand and arrive within sight of its destination. The mechanisms it uses to navigate are at least four, possibly five, and they involve quantum chemistry, magnetic field perception in the eye, infrasound f
biology
Crows recognize human faces, hold grudges across decades, manufacture compound tools, and apparently grasp something like analogy. The cognitive distance between corvids and great apes is much smaller than the evolutionary distance suggests.
science
A sourdough starter is one of the oldest pieces of biotechnology humans have kept running. Inside the jar is an ecological community older than agriculture, and the rules that govern it are stranger than the recipe books admit.
science
Forests are not the silent kingdoms of the lay imagination. The mycorrhizal networks under your feet are doing more communication than the surface ever shows, and the science of what they actually do is still being argued out.
science
Archaeologists have found three-thousand-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still edible. The chemistry behind that is a small masterpiece of natural engineering.