Planet of the crows? These birds understand physics

New research suggests New Caledonian crows may be smarter than previously thought.

BehaviouralEcologyResearchGroup_crow_Oxford

Image: Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Oxford

Back in 2009 scientists at the University of Oxford revealed that New Caledonian crows can – and will – use tools to get out-of-reach food. The crows didn’t need training to learn how to use the tools, and this was interpreted as evidence for advance cognitive abilities.

But are crows really that smart?

Researchers at the University of Auckland designed an experiment based on Aesop’s fable The Crow and the Pitcher to see whether these birds can solve puzzles.

In the fable a thirsty crow finds a half-full pitcher, but when he puts his beak into the mouth of the pitcher, he can’t reach far down to drink. In its despair, the crow has a bright idea: drop pebbles into the pitcher until the water is high enough to quench his thirst.

The researchers presented two tubes to each crow, one tube was partially filled with sand and the other was partially filled with water; both tubes contained a piece of meat. What did the crows do? They wasted no time and started dropping pebbles into the water-filled tube. Minutes later, they were munching on a tasty morsel. More experiments followed to confirm the results.

In their understanding of physics – how objects displace water – the crows were comparable to children between the ages of 5 and 7, the researchers said. In particular, the crows seemed to understand the different effects of hollow and solid objects, the first time a study had shown that.

Research in animal cognition is shifting from what [Sarah] Jelbert called ‘gee-whiz studies, which just look at whether animals can pass clever-looking tasks,’ to an approach where the patterns of success and failure offer clues to what cognitive mechanisms are at work, explained Sharon Begley in her article for The Washington Post.

Does this mean we have to worry about a possible 'planet of the crows' scenario? Watch the video and judge for yourself.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2590046/Crows-intelligent-CHILDREN-Study-reveals-birds-intelligence-seven-year-old.html#v-3400372545001

Comments

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a tattooed , deep-voiced man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called vivianite (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are from him resting near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals back in January, and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory," says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging monogamy ), might have a darker side. The love drug also plays an important role in intensifying negative emotional memories and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain forms memories of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...

Aestus Ajith

Search This Blog