The odd mechanics of living things, by Maren.
Sorted newest first.
In 1971 Roger Payne released an LP titled 'Songs of the Humpback Whale,' and millions of people heard for the first time that whales sing. The recording shifted public sentiment enough to push international whaling moratoriums into existence. Half a century later we know the songs are richer, s
An octopus has eight arms, three hearts, blue blood, and roughly two-thirds of its neurons distributed across its limbs rather than its central brain. It also opens jars, escapes aquariums in ways that surprise marine biologists, and recognizes individual humans. Here is what we know about how
Two children, one cake. The classic solution (one cuts, the other chooses) generalizes into a mathematical field with surprising depth: envy-free divisions, proportional shares, the sorrow of the indivisible item, and the 1995 Brams-Taylor algorithm that solved the four-person envy-free problem a...
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...
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...
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.
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
How many shuffles does it take to randomize a deck of cards? The answer turns out to be exactly seven, and the proof of it required new tools in probability theory. The story winds through magic, casinos, military cryptography, and one of the prettiest results in modern combinatorics.
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.
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.
When seats are allocated by population, mathematics steps in to decide who gets the leftover. The methods we choose carry hidden ideologies.
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.