A species of Indonesian parrot can solve complex mechanical problems that involve undoing a series of locks one after another, revealing new depths to physical intelligence in birds.

A team of scientists from Oxford University, the University of Vienna, and the Max Planck Institute, report in PLOS ONE a study in which ten untrained Goffin's cockatoos [Cacatua goffini] faced a puzzle box showing food (a nut) behind a transparent door secured by a series of five different interlocking devices, each one jamming the next along in the series.

To retrieve the nut the birds had to first remove a pin, then a screw, then a bolt, then turn a wheel 90 degrees, and then shift a latch sideways. One bird, called 'Pipin', cracked the problem unassisted in less than two hours, and several others did it after being helped either by being presented with the series of locks incrementally or being allowed to watch a skilled partner doing it.

Watch a video of cockatoos solving the puzzle box: http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/group/kacelnik/lb_movie_s1.mov

The scientists were interested in the birds' progress towards the solution, and on what they knew once they had solved the full task.

Astronomers have for the first time detected a population of ultrashort radio bursts with properties that strongly suggest that they originate from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Lasting for a few thousandths of a second and estimated to erupt roughly every 10 seconds, the mysterious bursts are likely to be caused by a previously unknown class of radio-emitting phenomenon, researchers report in Science¹.

"This is one of the most important radio discoveries in the last couple of decades," says Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, who was not part of the study.

Although radio signals that vary over days to months have been recorded from distant galaxies for decades, ultrashort signals from beyond the Milky Way had never been definitively detected, notes study co-author Dan Thornton, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, UK.

He and his colleagues embarked on a search for extragalactic radio bursts after a report in 2007 suggested that one such signal had been tentatively found².

Using archived data from the 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia - the same instrument that had recorded the tentative single burst - Thornton and his collaborators found four bursts that seemed to come from outside the Galaxy.

A unmanned Russian Proton-M rocket exploded moments after leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today, destroying its payload of three satellites intended for Russia's Glonass GPS system. Fortunately nobody was injured, but local news service Interfax is reporting that nearly 500 tons of fuel from the craft has contaminated the crash site. There's no word on what caused the disaster, but this model's recent history is fraught with equipment failures -- so if you'd like to see the latest disaster (spoiler: explosions), the video resides after the jump.

Fourth of July is the perfect time to watch fiery masses streak across the sky. This speedy guy, the comet ISON, looks like it pretty much fits that bill. Except that it's actually quite icy at its core, and it's barreling toward the sun at around 48,000 miles per hour, faster than any firework.

This five-second loop of video is a compression of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over a period of 43 minutes in May, during which ISON covered 34,000 miles.


At the time, the comet was between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, 403 million miles away. As it approaches the sun, it will warm up, and its tail of gas and dust will grow longer as the ice of its nucleus sublimates more quickly. It'll get brighter, and we should be able to see it jaunt across the sky with the naked eye by sometime in November.

Sergio Canavero says he has improved on a procedure that has been unsuccessful in animal experiments. Head transplants could be used to treat conditions like muscular dystrophy.

In what sounds like a science-fiction novel come to life, one scientist says he is close to being able to affix one person's head to another human body.

Italian scientist Sergio Canavero believes he has come up with an outline to successfully complete the first human head transplant in history, which could lead to solutions for those suffering from muscular dystrophy or tetraplegics with widespread organ failure.

Head transplants have been attempted since the 1950s, when Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov experimented with dogs. Twenty years later, American neurosurgeon Robert White conducted a successful head transplant by moving the head of one monkey to the body of another. The monkey lived for several days, but because White could not connect the two spinal cords, the monkey eventually died.

Canavero describes in a recent paper a step to connect donor and recipient spinal cords - the one component that was missing from previous procedures.

First cousins who marry run twice the risk of having a child with genetic abnormalities, according to the findings of a study in the English city of Bradford, published Friday in The Lancet.

The city, which has a high proportion of South Asian immigrants and their descendants among its population, served as a microcosm for examining the risk of blood relative couplings.

About 37 percent of marriages among people of Pakistani origin in the study involved first cousins, compared to less than one percent of "British unions", said the researchers.

University of Leeds investigator Eamonn Sheridan led a team that pored over data from the "Born in Bradford" study, which tracks the health of 13,500 babies born at the city's main hospital between 2007 and 2011.

Out of 11,396 babies for whom family details were known, 18 percent were the offspring of first-cousin unions, mainly among people of Pakistani heritage.

A total of 386 babies -- three percent -- were born with anomalies ranging from problems in the nervous, respiratory and digestive systems, to urinary and genital defects and cleft palates.

This Bradford rate was nearly twice the national average, said the study.

Cholera kills thousands of people a year, but a new study suggests that the human body is fighting back. Researchers have found evidence that the genomes of people in Bangladesh - where the disease is prevalent - have developed ways to combat the disease, a dramatic case of human evolution happening in modern times.

Cholera has hitchhiked around the globe, even entering Haiti with UN peacekeepers in 2010, but the disease's heartland is the Ganges River Delta of India and Bangladesh. It has been killing people there for more than a thousand years. By the time they are 15 years old, half of the children in Bangladesh have been infected with the cholera-causing bacterium, which spreads in contaminated water and food. The microbe can cause torrential diarrhea, and, without treatment, "it can kill you in a matter of hours," says Elinor Karlsson, a computational geneticist at Harvard and co-author of the new study.

The fact that cholera has been around so long, and that it kills children - thus altering the gene pool of a population - led the researchers to suspect that it was exerting evolutionary pressure on the people in the region, as malaria has been shown to do in Africa.

Another hint that the microbe drives human evolution, notes Regina LaRocque, a study co-author and infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, is that many people suffer mild symptoms or don't get sick at all, suggesting that they have adaptations to counter the bacterium.

To tease out the disease's evolutionary impact, Karlsson, LaRocque, and their colleagues, including scientists from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh, used a new statistical technique that pinpoints sections of the genome that are under the influence of natural selection. The researchers analyzed DNA from 36 Bangladeshi families and compared it to the genomes of people from northwestern Europe, West Africa, and eastern Asia. Natural selection has left its mark on 305 regions in the genome of the subjects from Bangladesh, the team reveals online today in Science Translational Medicine.

Whales flee from the loud military sonar used by navies to hunt submarines, new research has proven for the first time. The studies provide a missing link in the puzzle that has connected naval exercises around the world to unusual mass strandings of whales and dolphins.

Beaked whales, the most common casualty of the strandings, were shown to be highly sensitive to sonar. But the research also revealed unexpectedly that blue whales, the largest animals on Earth and whose population has plummeted by 95% in the last century, also abandoned feeding and swam rapidly away from sonar noise.

The strong response observed in the beaked whales occurred at noise levels well below those allowed for US navy exercises. "This result has to be taken into consideration by regulators and those planning naval exercises," said Stacy DeRuiter, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, who led one of the teams.

"For whales and dolphins, listening is as important as seeing is for humans - they communicate, locate food, and navigate using sound," said Sarah Dolman, at charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation. "Noise pollution threatens vulnerable populations, driving them away from areas important to their survival, and at worst injuring or even causing the deaths of some whales and dolphins." Dolman said there were no accepted international standards regarding noise pollution and there was an urgent need to re-evaluate the environmental impacts of military activities.

The most comprehensive catalog of great-ape genome diversity to date offers insight into primate evolution, revealing chimpanzees have a much more complex genetic history than humans.

In a new study, researchers sequenced a total of 79 great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, eastern and western gorillas, orangutans and humans, as well as seven ape subspecies. The animals were wild- and captive-born individuals from populations in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Much attention has been focused on studying the diversity among human genomes, said study researcher Tomas Marques-Bonet, a geneticist at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Spain. "If we want to understand the genetic diversity of humans, we need to measure the genetic diversity of our nearest relatives," Marques-Bonet said.

As part of the study, Marques-Bonet and his colleagues were looking for genetic markers corresponding to changes in a single letter in the genetic code that define a subspecies. The researchers identified millions of such markers, which are important for conservation efforts.

For instance, these markers allow people who manage wild-ape populations to identify different kinds of ape. Most of these animals are captured from illegal trade, so scientists don't know how they're related, Marques-Bonet told LiveScience.

Surprisingly, Marques-Bonet said, the genetic history of chimpanzees turned out to be much more complex than that of humans. Compared with chimps, "it looks like our [humans'] history has been really simple," Marques-Bonet said. Human populations encountered a bottleneck when they left Africa, and have since expanded to colonize the whole planet. By contrast, chimpanzee populations have undergone at least two to three bottlenecks and expansions, Marques-Bonet said.

The idea of transplanting the human head has (so far) been left in the (fictitious) realm of the rich and crazy - see the incredibly strange 1971 horror movie The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant or its apparent 'followup' the year after The Thing with Two Heads or The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror II in 1991 - but now an Italian neuroscientist believes that it may actually be possible.

There have been stories over the years of scientists transplanting the heads of dogs and monkeys - btw, that's between two dogs (by Vladimir Demikhov in the 1950s) and between two monkeys (by R.J. White in the 1970s), not between a dog and a monkey - with a fair amount of hype, but apparently, according to Steven Novella, from his Neurologica Blog, those weren't true transplants. For it to be a true transplant, the head has to be able to control its new body, and in those cases, it was simply that the body supplied blood to the head. In order to have control over the new body, there has to be a successful connection of the spinal cord. Without that, it's no dice.

Now, in the fictitious examples I mentioned above, Manuel Cass (the 'maniacal killer' from The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant) was an actual transplant, as he had some control over the body, but for Dr. Maxwell Kirshner in The Thing with Two Heads and Mr. Burns in Treehouse of Horror II, they were just grafted on.

However, although I've been using examples from horror movies and cartoons, there actually is some real promise for this idea, apparently.