Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet

 

Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet

Image courtesy of Guilhem Duvot, SUAQ Project

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution,  orangutans  are almost human,  so they are able to copy some of the traits of humans and from other apes. But animal intelligence is not something we would smirk at. Some birds are intelligent than apes. 

Young orangutans acquire a substantial body of knowledge before they can survive independently, which they must do by the time they are 8.5 years old. This includes understanding what foods are safe to eat, where to fi intelligrent than apes. nd them and how to process them in a rainforest offering hundreds of food options of varying levels of accessibility – from easy-to-access leaves to the more inaccessible but also manimal ore nutritious seeds at the heart of a tough, spiny neesia fruit.

The findings suggest that orangutans have different strategies for developing broad survival skills, says Revathe Thillaikumar at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

Scientists already know that orangutans can acquire this knowledge both by observing their mothers and other individuals in their social circle – a process known as social learning – and by exploring entirely on their own without any input from others, which is known as individual learning. But how these two forms of learning work together – and how they affect what orangutans learn to eat before becoming independent – hasn’t been clear.

To find out, Thillaikumar and her colleagues analysed nearly 7000 instances of learning recorded during more than 1700 hours of observations of wild Sumatran orangutans at Suaq Balimbing, a research station in Indonesia.

Youngsters who learned by watching others also tended to continue manipulating new objects or trying new foods for about 145 minutes after they had closely observed another orangutan. This activity is reminiscent of the way in which children will spend time imitating an activity they have just seen demonstrated by an adult, says Thillaikumar. “Yeah, it’s practice.”

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet | New Scientist 24 September 

Fire amoeba breaks heat tolerance record for complex life

 

Incendiamoeba cell reproducing at 63°C Image courtesy of Felix Mikus.

Joel Kontinen

Animals cam be incredible,  A species of amoeba discovered in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park can survive and thrive in temperatures that had been considered impossibly high for complex life.

Previously, according to Angela Oliverio at Syracuse University, New York, 60°C was considered the “4-minute mile” barrier for eukaryotes.

But the four minute mile has been broken.

Oliverio and her colleagues collected I. cascadensis from a small geothermal stream within California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, flowing through a “beautiful meadow” less than half a metre wide for most of its length. Temperatures in the stream range from 49°C to 65°C, with a pH range of 6 to 7.

At full stretch, I. cascadensis is, on average, about 40 micrometres long and 10 µm wide, says Oliverio.

“This is over 10 times the size of the average bacterial cell, and closer to the width of a human white blood cell,” she says. In such a hot environment, the fire amoeba is the top-order predator, feeding on thermophile bacteria, which are far more common.

Bob Leung at Monash University, Australia, says the discovery means he will have to rewrite his lectures on extremophiles.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Fire amoeba breaks heat tolerance record for complex life | New Scientist 22 September

Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged

 A 9.5-day-old mouse embryo. The front of the brain is blue and the back of the brain is red, which extends into the spinal cord.  Loh Laboratory/Stanford Medicine

Joel Kontinen

Our brain may be a hybrid of two ancient nervous systems that were packaged together hundreds of millions of years ago. This is based on the finding that the front and back brain regions in people and several other species develop from two distinct cell types in embryos, instead of sharing the same developmental origin, as previously thought..

This is based on Darwinian speculation that has no backfiring in real science.

This is what the evolutionists say of this incredible fusion;

The research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” says Kyle Loh at Stanford University. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

Loh and his colleagues studied early stages of mouse embryo development and found its brain develops from two types of early progenitor cells, proliferative cells with a limited capacity of self-renewal. One type expresses a gene called OTX2 and turns into the neurons found in the front part of the brain, comprising the forebrain and midbrain.

The hindbrain coordinates fundamental life-sustaining processes, such as breathing, sleeping, eating and the beating of the heart, .

The researchers also studied early-stage embryos of chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms, and found their nervous systems are similarly derived from two different types of progenitor cells. This suggests our shared two-origin brain system arose at least 550 million years ago.

What would, evolution do without millions of years.

Source:

Alice Klein 2026 Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged | New Scientist 18 September 

Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century

 

The tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo) in an animal refuge in La Paz, Bolivia. Image courtesy of Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionist say that animal species die all the time.  Contrast to this a tiger cat recently found in Bolivia.    

The tiger cat is one of the creatures they describe as Lazarus animals.

Tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus.

Eduardo Eizirik at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from across their known range.

L. tilcayo has a combined head and body length of between about 42 and 50 centimetres and weighs between 1.5 and 2 kilograms. The genomes revealed that it diverged from the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years ago.

Source:  

Chris Simms 2026 Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century | New Scientist 17 September 

Asteroid hit the moon and flung rocks 120 kilometres from the crater

 

The crater site, before and after impact  Image courtesy of NASA/Mark S. Robinson et al. 2026

Joel Kontinen 

An asteroid hit the moon. The area was  222 metres across.

A newly formed crater on the moon is teaching us about our nearest neighbour’s complex geology. The crater, formed by an asteroid impact in 2024, is the largest that we’ve ever watched form in real time.

It was first spotted last year, when researchers compared sets of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in both 2024 and 2025, and was named McGetchin crater. According to models of how often impacts occur on the moon, one this big – about 222 metres across – is only expected to occur about once every 132 years.

Thus gives us an opportunity to learn about the lunar surface and its geology. “Cratering is probably the most common process that happens in the solar system, so we spend a lot of time trying to understand how a new crater will modify a surface and watching that degrade over time,” says Tyler Powell at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

Some evolutionist think that this  incident will help us to understand what happened on the moon tens or thousands of years ago.

 Source: 

Leah Crane 2026 Asteroid hit the moon and flung rocks 120 kilometres from the crater | New Scientist 16 September

Exquisite 66-million-year-old bird feather preserved in dinosaur dropping

 

Image courtesy of O'Connor et al.

Joel Kontinen

A bird that was eaten and partially excreted by a dinosaur 66 million years ago has left behind the best-preserved feathers ever recovered by scientists from dinosaur-age rock.

“This is the best feather we’ve ever seen in a Mesozoic [252 million to 66 million years ago] deposit,” says Jingmai O’Connor at the Field Museum in Chicago. “[It’s] like a feather you could pick up off the ground.”

Further analyses showed that the 9.3-millimetre-long primary feather had a water-repellent structure, similar to that of modern pelicans, says O’Connor. Both this and a second, smaller wing feather also had lightweight, spongy cores surrounded by a harder outer layer. This combination makes them both light and stiff, which is typical of modern feathers.

According to evolution, millions of years have gone by. So where is the evolution?

“These are the feathers that are responsible for keeping the body warm, right?” says O’Connor. “So maybe these primitive feathers were good enough to keep them warm during the greenhouse world of the Mesozoic, but not good enough to keep them warm during this environmental catastrophe that was triggered by this impact event.”

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Exquisite 66-million-year-old bird feather preserved in dinosaur dropping | New Scientist 10 September

Gamma ray burst may have been two supernovae in one

 

Image courtesy of Stocktrek Images, Inc./Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Some researchers are guesting whether a black hole and a pulser  were born at the same time, but others say that the conclusion is premature.

On New Year’s Day in 2022, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a massive burst of gamma rays from a distant galaxy. After four years of analysis, a group of astronomers has proposed a dramatic story for the burst of light – known as GRB 220101A – in which a collapsing star triggered the formation of both a pulsar and a black hole.

The event began, according to a team led by Remo Ruffini, an astronomer at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network in Italy, with the collapse of the core of a massive older star, which had earlier been transformed via nuclear reactions into a mix of carbon and oxygen.

Yes, space is wonderful. We never think what may happen next.

 Source:

Matt von Hippel 2026 Gamma ray burst may have been two supernovae in one | New Scientist 10 September