Birds

Slight changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight muscles provide extra energy for birds’ continent-spanning feats.

Complex neural pathways likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

We often consider spoken language to be a feature that distinguishes humans from other forms of animal life. Brain research, however, suggests that other creatures — including certain birds — share some of our neural circuitry related to language. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin explores the origins and underlying mechanisms of human speech and birdsong with neurobiologist and geneticist Erich Jarvis.

Birds flock. Locusts swarm. Fish school. From chaotic assemblies of life, order somehow emerges. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews the evolutionary ecologist Iain Couzin about how and why collective behaviors arise.

A survey of prehistoric bones reveals that T. rex and some of its cousins had more than one way to reach enormous sizes. Evolution may have preserved that variation in modern animals too.

Partnerships between engineers and biologists have begun to reveal how birds evolved their superb maneuverability.

Patterns that guide the development of feathers and other features can be set by mechanical forces in the embryo, not just by gradients of chemicals.

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

Quanta’s In Theory video series returns with an exploration of a mysterious mathematical pattern found throughout nature.