Enlarge / Wired for science! (credit: Marianna Boros, Eötvös Loránd University)

Needle, a cheerful miniature schnauzer I had as a kid, turned into a ball of unspeakable noise and fury each time she saw a dog called Puma. She hated Puma so much she would go ballistic, barking and growling. Merely whispering the name “Puma” set off the same reaction, as though the sound of it and the idea of the dog it represented were clearly connected deep in Needle’s mind.

A connection between a word and a mental representation of its meaning is called “referential understanding,” and for a very long time, we believed dogs lacked this ability. Now, a study published by a team of Hungarian researchers indicates we might have been wrong.

Practice makes perfect

The idea that dogs couldn’t form associations with language in a referential manner grew out of behavioral studies in which dogs were asked to do a selective fetching task. The canines had a few objects placed in front of them (like a toy or a bone) and then had to fetch the one specifically named by their owner.

Enlarge (credit: Hinterhaus Productions/Getty Images)

By now, everyone has heard of millennials’ supposed devotion to avocado toast, but is it true that millennials live for brunch more than work? Could Gen Z be the laziest generation of all? These are just some of the stereotypes associated with what generations we are born into, but there may be less to these stereotypes than many people think.

Sociologist Martin Schröder, a professor at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, wanted to find out if some birth cohorts consider work and career more important than others do. Tracking how answers changed over time produced some unexpected results.

Regardless of what generation someone belongs to, the importance of work actually depends on a combination of what year it was and what age that person was at the time of being surveyed. Schröder’s findings showed that younger individuals (regardless of what generation they’re from) tend to find work less important and that the importance of work has been going down over time.

Enlarge / Why wouldn't you trust this little guy? He's so cute! (credit: Thamrongpat Theerathammakorn )

Making mistakes is human, but it's not limited to humans. Robots can also glitch. As we fast-forward into a future with upgraded AI technology making its way into the classroom (and beyond), are kids willing to trust information from a robot , or would they prefer it to come from a human?

That's the question researchers Li Xiaquian and Yow Wei Quin of Singapore University of Technology and Design wanted to answer. To see whether human or machine was more reliable, they ran an experiment with kids ages 3–5, giving them a screen that paired each of them with an accurate human, an inaccurate human, an accurate robot, or an inaccurate robot.

It turned out that both younger and older children trusted an accurate human or robot equally. However, younger kids given information by an inaccurate human or robot were more likely to trust the human—but why?

Enlarge / A greater honeyguide (credit: Keabetswe Maposa )

With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we’ve lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird .

The Greater Honeyguide (highly appropriate name), Indicator indicator (even more appropriate scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people of Tanzania and Yao people of Mozambique realized this long ago. Hadza and Yao honey hunters have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinct calls, and the honeyguide reciprocates with its own calls, leading them to a hive.

Because the Hadza and Yao calls differ, zoologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA wanted to find out if the birds respond generically to human calls, or are attuned to their local humans. They found that the birds are much more likely to respond to a local call, meaning that they have learned to recognize that call.

Enlarge / The invitation might be nice, but you can feel free to say no. (credit: Maryna Terletska )

The holidays can be a time of parties, events, dinners, outings, get-togethers, impromptu meetups—and stress . Is it really an obligation to say yes to every single invite? Is not showing up to Aunt Tillie’s annual ugly sweater party this once going to mean a permanent ban? Turning down some of those invitations waiting impatiently for an RSVP can feel like a risk.

But wait! Turning down an invite won’t necessarily have the harsh consequences that are often feared (especially this time of year). A group of researchers led by psychologist and assistant professor Julian Givi of West Virginia University put test subjects through a series of experiments to see if a host’s reaction to an invitation being declined would really be as awful as the invitee feared. In the experiments, those who declined invitations were not guilted or blacklisted by the inviters. Turns out that hosts were not so upset as invitees thought they would be when someone couldn’t make it.

“Invitees have exaggerated concerns about how much the decline will anger the inviter, signal that the invitee does not care about the inviter, make the inviter unlikely to offer another invitation in the future, and so forth,” the researchers said in a study published by the American Psychological Association.

Enlarge / Sure, they can use tools, but do they know where the nearest subway stop is? (credit: Jonas Adner )

"A thirsty crow wanted water from a pitcher, so he filled it with pebbles to raise the water level to drink , " summarizes a famous Aesop Fable . While this tale is thousands of years old, animal behaviorists still use this challenge to study corvids (which include crows, ravens, jays, and magpies) and their use of tools. In a recent Nature Communications study , researchers from a collaboration of universities across Washington, Florida, and Utah used radioactive tracers within the brains of several American crows to see which parts of their brains were active when they used stones to obtain food from the bottom of a water-filled tube.

Their results indicate that the motor learning and tactile control centers were activated in the brains of the more proficient crows, while the sensory and higher-order processing centers lit up in the brains of less proficient crows. These results suggest that competence with tools is linked to certain memories and muscle control, which the researchers claimed is similar to a ski jumper visualizing the course before jumping.

The researchers also found that out of their avian test subjects, female crows were especially proficient at tool usage, succeeding in the challenge quickly. “[A] follow-up question is whether female crows actually have more need for creative thinking relative to male crows,” elaborates Loma Pendergraft , the study’s first author and a graduate student at the University of Washington, who wants to understand if the caregiving and less dominant role of female crows gives them a higher capacity for tool use.

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The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is basically the same as that espoused by those Snickers commercials: You’re not you when you’re hungry. Except according to Sapolsky, there is no “you”—the hunger is what dictates your behavior, along with your stress level, whether or not you were born with fetal alcohol syndrome or grew up in a culture that valorizes individual freedoms versus one that prioritizes communal responsibility or in one that believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, vengeful deity.

Hormones, neurotransmitters, and how they are affected by your current and historical circumstances—these are the only things that determine how you will act and what decisions you will make at those inflection points when you're called upon to make impactful choices. And all of them are things you did not choose and cannot control.

Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, is not averse to the notion of our having free will; it’s just that he can’t find it. And he’s looked everywhere. He has studied—intensely—not only neurobiology but also endocrinology, behavioral science, philosophy, primatology, criminology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, evolution, and history. Not a single one of these disciplines precludes free will, but all of them together do. All there is to us is biology and the way that biology is affected by our environment. That’s it. We are not, as Yoda suggested, luminous beings; we are only crude matter.

Enlarge / This beer isn't helping. (credit: Grady Reese )

For a phenomenon that is so deeply engrained in the public consciousness, the scientific evidence regarding what has been called "beer goggles" is surprisingly inconsistent. The term refers to finding people more attractive after drinking alcohol, and there is a wealth of scientific evidence both for and against its existence.

The effect has become a trope in popular culture, with countless shows and movies referencing it. Bart sees Aunt Selma as a beautiful young woman through a pair of Duff beer goggles in The Simpsons , while Mythbusters even tested whether the effect was real (they concluded it was plausible).

The latest study to throw its hat into the ring was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs by scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and Stanford University. It has added to the pool of evidence that rejects the existence of beer goggles. But what the work found is that alcohol seems to give people “liquid courage,” increasing their willingness to interact with people they find attractive.

Enlarge / Despite the gaudy clothing, this guy is remarkably crafty. (credit: Arthur Morris )

One of the ways we try to understand the origins of human intelligence is by looking at its equivalents elsewhere in the animal world. But that turns out to be more complicated than it might seem. Humans have a large package of behavioral traits that we lump together as intelligence, while many other creatures only have a limited subset of those traits. Some aspects of intelligence appear in species widely scattered across the evolutionary tree, ranging from cuttlefish to giraffes .

Even in animals with widely acknowledged intellectual capacities like birds, it can be difficult to understand whether evolution has directly shaped their intelligence or their smarts emerged as a side effect of something else that evolution selected for.

A study released today complicates the picture a little further. It does persuasively show that the ability to learn complex new songs is associated with problem-solving in a large range of bird species. But it also shows that other things we associate with intelligence, like associative learning, seem completely unrelated.