There’s something for almost everyone in this new study about an adventure involving ringtones and frog-eating bats: “Long-Term Memory in Frog-Eating Bats,” M. May Dixon, Patricia L. Jones, Michael J. Ryan, Gerald G. Carter, and Rachel A. Page, bioRxiv, 2022. The authors report: We captured 49 wild adult T. cirrhosus, individually marked them, and trained […]
Bat Chat, the podcast produced by the Bat Conservation Trust, visited with Ig Nobel Prize winner Gareth Jones. The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for Biology was awarded to Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for […]
A batty, especially promising Christmas Lecture at the University of Bristol, is upcoming from Ig Nobel Prize winner Gareth Jones: Echoes: reflections on science, sex and shootings 2 December 2020, 3.00 PM – 2 December 2020, 5.00 PM Professor Gareth Jones G13/14 or Zoom online The university offers this preview from Gareth Jones: “…I will […]
Patient: “Doctor, why do we get moles in the first place?” Physician: “No one has the foggiest notion why God gave us moles on our skin … and that’s the honest truth.” There are theories however – the most prominent being that the extra melanin produced in the moles’ melanocytes might help to protect against […]
Wind turbines kill, on average, two bats a month, says a newly published study. The New York Times clarifies this threat: A new study of wind turbines in Britain found that each turbine killed one to two bats each month on average… The risks to birds of the blades of wind turbines are becoming well understood, […]
Although a considerable body of scholarly work has examined the effects of Helium (2He) on human voice production [see, for example (Helium-assisted) High note research] we are by no means the only animals to have been investigated in this respect – here is a (non-exhaustive) list of examples of other creatures who have squawked, croaked, […]
A new paper in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, Vol 7, No 6 (2015) asks, and answers the question: ‘Harvesting the guano of insectivorous bats: is it sustainable?’ Investigators Thet Thet and Khin Mya Mya focused their studies on one cave, in a complex of four caves on Sudaung mountain, Sintkaing Township, Mandalay Region (21044.941’N […]
The Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time,” [by Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang, published in PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e7595] is one of several intellectual forebears (another is a study by Ig Nobel Prize winner Frans de Waal) […]
Until now, no one had produced the Batman theme by using sounds made by actual bats. Here is that doubly batty theme, played with original instruments (plus a bit of technology): The non-bat members of the team wrote this description: Bats produce sounds that are not audible to human ears. First these ultrasounds were digitally […]
To clarify, a global consortium of researchers (co-ordinated via the Active Perception Lab at the University of Antwerp, Belgium ) spent 38 months constructing and testing a bionic bat head called the Chiroptera Inspired Robotic CEphaloid (CIRCE). Much like a real bat head, the bionic bat head has moveable pinnae which can rotate and lock-on to […]