Birds

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.

New modeling studies suggest that birds migrate to strike a favorable balance between their input and output of energy.

The neuroscientist Erich Jarvis found that songbirds' vocal skills and humans' spoken language are both rooted in neural pathways for controlling learned movements.

Scientists are exploring a mysterious pattern, found in birds’ eyes, boxes of marbles and other surprising places, that is neither regular nor random.