Let’s go, Grue Jays!

New kinds of birds are not usually discovered while browsing Facebook, but an ornithologist spotted something he’d never seen before in a photo, and tracked down the strange bird. Brian Stokes, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered it was actually a previously unknown hybrid of the familiar blue jay and a green jay, better known from southern parts of North America. Climate change likely played a part in bringing the two species together. Their research was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. 

Chimpanzees’ taste for ripe fruit is equivalent to two drinks a day

Chimpanzees in the wild can eat about 10 per cent of their body weight worth of fruit each day, and all of that fruit contains small amounts of alcohol. A team of scientists, including Aleksey Maro from the University of California Berkeley, wanted to understand just how much alcohol the chimps were getting from all this fruit. Three different methods of analysis over three years revealed the chimps were consuming the equivalent of two standard drinks a day. This suggests an evolutionary explanation for the human taste for ethanol. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

Sea life says make homes, not bombs

After the defeat of Germany in 1945, an estimated 1.6 million tons of munitions were dumped into the Baltic sea off the German coast. A team of researchers, including marine biologist Andrey Vedenin from the Senckenberg Research Institute, wanted to understand how this potentially toxic legacy had affected sea life. They were stunned to discover thousands of animals surviving on the abandoned weapons despite the toxic burden they carried. The research was published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

Structure of social media sites 'inherently lead to something problematic'

Our experience of social media sites is that they often descend into extremism, divisiveness and conflict, but this may be a feature, not a bug. In a pre-print study on arXiv, scientists simulated social media interactions between AI-generated participants to test various interventions to see how they'd impact the problems that emerge, such as the rise of echo chambers, the concentration of influence and the amplification of polarized voices. Petter Törnberg, a University of Amsterdam computational social scientist, said he was disappointed to learn that none of the interventions worked.

Your brain’s two halves hand off perception like a baton in a relay race

When something passes from one side of your visual field to the other, something amazing happens, according to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Matthew Broschart, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, tracked how the visual parts of each half of the brain, connected to each eye, do a coordinated dance to create a unified visual perception in primates.

The bear necessities of tracking B.C. grizzlies with machine learning software

Scientists and guardians from five First Nations of the Nanwakolas Council are working together to track individual grizzlies across the southern Great Bear Rainforest  in B.C.. Using camera traps and machine learning techniques, they've developed an automated system through the BearID Project to identify individual bears and track them over the landscape. We spoke with conservation scientist and director of the BearID Project, Melanie Clapham, and Tashina James-Matilpi, from the Tlowitsis First Nation, the project's guardian logistics coordinator for the Nanwakolas Council.