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 […]
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, […]
Treefrogs often find themselves faced with the Cocktail Party Problem. Those who study the Cocktail Party Problem have their own complicated mess to make sense of: They try to understand how someone amidst a yacketing group can understand one particular conversation even though many other conversations are equally audible. This study sees treefrogs as possibly being […]
Jason Goldman, writing in The Guardian, today tells of the long history of frogs being sent (by humans) into space for scientific purposes: “Frogs in space: one giant leap indeed“. Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug [pictured here] has an intimate relationship with the history of frogs in space. Among his publications in that realm: “Emesis and […]
“WHILE FLYING THE VISUAL APCH [approach], ABOUT 10 MI [miles] OUT, I FELT SOMETHING LAND ON MY R [right] FOOT. REACHING DOWN WITH MY R [right] HAND, I WAS SURPRISED TO FEEL SOMETHING COLD AND DAMP, WHICH MOVED …” So begins an airline pilot’s report (number ACN: 311910) as archived by the US Aviation Safety […]
New research about things that get under frogs’s skin, and what can happen to those things: “Removing the rubbish: frogs eliminate foreign objects from the body cavity through the bladder,” Christopher R. Tracy, Keith A. Christian, Lorrae J. McArthur and C. M. Gienger, Biology Letters. published online 2010. (Thanks to investigator Barry Pinshow for bringing […]
Here’s a fun TV news report about the 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes. This was on the MSNBC Countdown program. The news anchor was in an unusual mood. Click on the image to go to the MSNBC site and watch the interview: