Chris Simms, Author at ��è��Ƶ

Collapse of AMOC ocean current may already be locked in

Chris Simms — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:49:54 +0000

The fate of the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Europe’s climate warm depends on our carbon emissions and the rate of ice melt from Greenland, but there is a chance that a shutdown is already inevitable

Orangutan mothers seem to plan playdates for their offspring

Chris Simms — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:28:59 +0000

Female orangutans are generally solitary, but they travel more and eat less in an apparent effort to ensure their offspring have someone to play with

Some of the last Neanderthals were surprisingly genetically diverse

Chris Simms — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:00:03 +0000

Genetic analysis of Neanderthals in north-western Europe reveals that this population was surprisingly genetically diverse, hinting that inbreeding didn’t lead to the species' demise

Elite Maya people had teeth placed in a cave far from their tombs

Chris Simms — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:00:57 +0000

A cave in Belize contains teeth from dozens of important Maya people buried elsewhere, which may attest to a ritual intended to ensure their passage to the underworld

Faecal transplant makes the brains of old mice act young again

Chris Simms — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:48:29 +0000

Older mice that received a faecal microbiome transplant from younger animals went on to have improved brain plasticity, which suggests their brains could overcome a neurological condition that is typically successfully treated only in childhood

Pigeons lock their eyes in place when they are flying

Chris Simms — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:00:11 +0000

Pigeons are always looking ahead

yod67/Alamy

��è��Ƶs have tracked the eye movements of a bird in flight for the first time, revealing that pigeons in the air lock their eyes in place rather than looking around. The behaviour may help them control their flight, but it could also leave them more vulnerable to predators.

If animals on the ground want to look at something, they move their head or eyes to fix their gaze on it, then use rapid and sometimes wide-ranging movements of the pupil, known as saccades, to give a stable view of the object relative to its surroundings. But no one really knows what happens when birds are flying.

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To find out, at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues designed a lightweight rig of mirrors and cameras that can be attached to the head of a common pigeon (Columba livia) as it flies, as well as a small backpack that houses a camera control board and battery.

A pigeon fitted with eye-tracking equipment

Andrew Biewener

They then trained six pigeons to fly between two perches about 20 metres apart indoors, and three to fly some 25 metres outdoors to return to a coop.

During test flights in both environments, the head-mounted eye-tracking system revealed that after take-off, the birds increased their pupil size and adopted a fixed and consistent eye position in their heads, essentially locking their eyes in place.

“Whenever they start flying, the eyes rotate forward on average,” says Ros.

If their heads moved, their eyes moved in synchrony with them. The fixed eye position aligns with the primary horizontal axis of the birds’ vision and their vestibular system – the sensory network that controls balance and spatial orientation.

“Pigeons have been shown capable of moving their eyes independently and that they can be moved by a maximum amplitude of about 15 degrees,” says at the University of Birmingham, UK. “Therefore, to show that, during flight, eye movements are less than 1 degree does suggest that the birds are actively stabilising the position of their eyes when in flight.”

Why they are locking their eyes isn’t certain, says Ros. He thinks the alignment with the vestibular system suggests the behaviour may help pigeons distinguish their own motion from external motion – such as the movement of a tree’s branches, or a car or predator – to help them balance and navigate.

It’s also possible that reducing eye movements minimises the computational load on the brain. “The world during flight moves a lot faster than it does during non-flight,” he says.

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Eye movements give pigeons a , but Ros says locking their eyes into a forward-facing position is likely to reduce this, leaving a larger blind spot behind them where they couldn’t see predators.

He is curious about what pigeon eyes would do in other situations, because all the tests were done when the birds were low to the ground. “It might be different if pigeons were flying higher up, where there aren’t lots of objects rushing past,” says Ros. He also wonders what would happen when pigeons fly in flocks. “Would they look at other pigeons? At predators? Or at something on the horizon?”

Martin thinks other birds might also stabilise their eye position during flight, including predators. When in pursuit of prey, , he says. “This presumably would require the peregrine to fix the position of their eyes rather than move them about.”

Journal reference:

Current Biology,

Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead

Chris Simms — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:01:51 +0000

Scrape marks inside a skull and sharpened limb bones in a set of remains found in Scotland may be evidence of unusual Iron Age funerary rituals

Frozen squirrel scat preserves ancient DNA from hundreds of species

Chris Simms — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:00:33 +0000

Arctic ground squirrels gather food from a wide variety of sources and store it in burrows

Government of Yukon

A rich and complex ecosystem stretching back 700,000 years that included woolly mammoths, bison, horses and big cats has been unveiled thanks to DNA preserved in frozen faeces. (��ǳ��ٱ��ܲ��貹��⾱��) are rodents about 40 centimetres long, found in cold regions of both North America and Siberia. These areas were joined by a land bridge in the past, with the whole region being known as Beringia.

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“The squirrels hibernate for about eight months of the year, and in the four months that they’re conscious, they really need to get out there and eat and bring as many resources as they can back to their burrow,” says at the Hakai Institute in Campbell River, Canada. This means their burrows often contain a wealth of faecal pellets and food caches, which makes the animals like “natural archivists”, says Murchie. To see what might be stored in this archive, he and his colleagues looked at preserved faeces – known as coprolites – from 13 Arctic ground squirrel burrows in the central Yukon in Canada that were frozen in permafrost. The burrows dated to between about 700,000 and 30,000 years ago. From the droppings, each of which is about 1 to 2 centimetres long, the team extracted DNA belonging to a wide range of organisms. These include microbes, more than 200 different plant groups and animals including insects, other rodents, woolly mammoths, horses, grey wolves, steppe bison and a big cat that was either an or a cougar. “It’s the whole cast of organisms that lived in the Beringian ice-age ecosystem,” says Murchie. You might assume that ground squirrels would primarily eat nuts and seeds, but that’s not the case, he says. “They’re actually quite omnivorous, almost like little bears. There are reports of ground squirrels eating carcasses of moose and lynx, so the fact that we find all of these large animals in their coprolites isn’t actually that surprising.”

Ancient faecal pellets left by Arctic ground squirrels, found in Yukon, Canada

Duane Froese, University of Alberta

Murchie and his colleagues were able to use the DNA they found to reconstruct mitochondrial genomes of many animals from different points in time. These included 12 ground squirrels – one lineage of which dated back 700,000 years – three horses, two bison and one hare. They also found enough DNA to piece together six woolly mammoth genomes, but details of those will be published separately. “These are fantastically preserved samples that really showcase the ecological diversity of the Yukon through time,” says at Clemson University in South Carolina. She says it is hard to know whether DNA from a given species is present in a coprolite because it was eaten by a ground squirrel, or because it existed in the environment and leached in. But she does say it is feasible that the rodents consumed mammoth meat, given how much DNA was present in the samples and that ground squirrels are often scavengers.

Journal reference:

Nature Communications

Ötzi’s frozen remains may harbour metabolically active microbes

Chris Simms — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Researchers studying a 5300-year-old mummified man have identified bacteria that lived in his gut when he was alive, as well as cold-tolerant fungi that colonised his body after death

Huge study of Alzheimer’s genetics identifies new drug targets

Chris Simms — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:00:24 +0000

Almost 50 more genes have been flagged as being linked to Alzheimer’s, along with changes in activity in crucial cells that disappear as dementia progresses

Chris Simms, Author at ��è����Ƶ

Collapse of AMOC ocean current may already be locked in

Orangutan mothers seem to plan playdates for their offspring

Some of the last Neanderthals were surprisingly genetically diverse

Elite Maya people had teeth placed in a cave far from their tombs

Faecal transplant makes the brains of old mice act young again

Pigeons lock their eyes in place when they are flying

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Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead

Frozen squirrel scat preserves ancient DNA from hundreds of species

Sign up to The Earth Edition

Ötzi’s frozen remains may harbour metabolically active microbes

Huge study of Alzheimer’s genetics identifies new drug targets

Chris Simms, Author at ��è��Ƶ