It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, April 19, 2026
You talkin’ to me? Parrots use names in a variety of ways
A sample of parrots living with humans showed the ability to correlate names with individuals, but also to use proper names in ways humans typically don't.
Like many animals, parrots make sounds that suggest they are talking with each other, maybe even calling out to a specific parrot. But do they truly have names in the same way people do? To find out, Lauryn Benedict, a biology professor at the University of Northern Colorado, didn’t set up shop in the tropics to record parrot chatter, as they’ve done in the past. She instead found birds who spoke her language–birds that live with humans and mimic what they hear, including people’s names.
Working with long-time collaborator Christine Dahlin from University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown and a team of researchers from Austria, Benedict analyzed vocalizations from more than 880 captive parrots. They heard many of the birds using names in ways that seemed similar to people, to identify individuals. They also found some unusual ways names popped up in the recordings.
One of the benefits people get from using proper names is the ability to more readily organize complex social interactions. Plenty of animals in nature use sounds in ways that are at least analogous to names, and for seemingly the same reason. Although animal researchers have been studying these vocalizations, Dahlin said, ”We cannot conclude that they are analogous to human names both because animals signals are often so different and because we don’t understand the full intent behind the signals.”
Thankfully, plenty of parrots do speak of our language. To find them, Benedict and team used data from the ManyParrots project, a network of researchers who study parrot vocal learning and cognition by collecting survey data and audio recordings.
The researchers sorted through survey data on over 889 parrots. For a subset of those birds, the survey respondents provided additional context that allowed the research team to better understand how the birds were using names.
Nearly half of the survey takers included examples of parrots using names. Of those 413 clips, 88 seemed to be birds using names as labels for people and animals. The research team also found strong evidence that some birds applied names not only to a particular category, such as “people,” but to a single individual.
On the other hand, many of the birds also used these labels in ways that people typically wouldn’t. For instance, parrots sometimes said their own name just so they could get some attention.
Ultimately, Dahlin said, this research suggested that parrots do have the cognitive and vocal skills to use names in different ways, from communicating with people to even talking about someone who isn’t there. The variation across species and even across individuals of the same species, however, leaves room for plenty of questions about how, when and why animals do or don’t use these skills to call out another creature by name.
This work was funded in part by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) project ANIML (LS23-014) to MH. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Placed within a borehole drilled deep through the layers of a landslide, a fiber optic cable captured tiny, periodic stick-slip events that offer a unique glimpse at the complex movements within the landslide’s shear zone.
At the Lantai site in northern Taiwan, researchers concluded that the timing and pace of these stick-slip events was linked strongly to typhoon rainfall and earthquake shaking, they reported at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting.
Recurring stick-slip events at the base of a deep-seated landslide like Lantai, where the sliding interface extends to the bedrock, have been detected on a few exceptional occasions using ground-based sensors prior to large failures, said Hsin-Hua Huang of Academia Sinica. In those cases, the stick-slip events were thought to be precursors to a major landsliding event.
“In contrast, our findings suggest that these stick-slip events are persistent rather than episodic—they are simply too minute to be detected by surface instrumentation under normal conditions,” Huang explained. “By leveraging borehole DAS sensing, we can now clearly ‘see them’ and characterize their spatiotemporal patterns for the first time.”
“Continuous monitoring of these repeating events may therefore offer a practical framework for developing accurate landslide early warning systems to mitigate future hazards,” he added.
DAS uses the tiny internal flaws in a long optical fiber as thousands of seismic sensors. An interrogator at one end of the fiber sends laser pulses down the cable that are reflected off the fiber flaws and bounced back to the instrument. When the fiber is disturbed by movement, researchers can examine changes in the reflected pulses to learn more about the resulting seismic waves.
Researchers are using a host of geophysical instruments to monitor the Lantai site, but most of their observations are confined to the ground surface. And compared to other borehole instruments, DAS is easier and less expensive to deploy to the depths where the overburden of rock and soil slides against bedrock.
“These deep interfaces also entail a massive volume of material, and consequently, the resulting damage is catastrophic upon failure,” said Huang.
The research team at Lantai wanted to study the possible interaction between extreme environmental events such as typhoons and changes in the landslide’s structure. When a typhoon alert is issued for the area, the team deploys the DAS interrogator to the Lantai borehole for two weeks to a month.
During five of these DAS deployments, Huang and colleagues captured both accelerated landslide movements and recurring stick-slip events at the soil-bedrock interface, 20 to 30 meters deep.
Rainfall can trigger shallow landslides or debris flows, but “while rainfall is also considered a primary factor driving deep-seated landslides, the correlation is not as direct or immediate due to the depth of the interfaces,” said Huang. “Rather, it involves a complex network of fractures and fluid pathways that evolve dynamically during rainfall and are difficult to predict.”
DAS deployments like the one at Lantai can help scientists analyze how rainfall impacts frictional changes and other landslide mechanics at the landslide shear plane itself, which was “unattainable in the past,” said Huang.
Treetops glowing during storms captured on film for first time
Weather phenomenon that eluded scientists for decades captured in nature as corona discharges glow on tips of leaves
The glow of coronae are much easier to see in the nearly pitch-dark environment of a meteorology and atmospheric science lab at Penn State, left. On right, the spruce branch produces coronae during a thunderstorm, yet there is too much visible light from the sun to see these coronae glows with our eyes.
UNIVERSITY PARK — In a converted 2013 Toyota Sienna affixed with a hand-built telescopic weather device protruding from the roof, Penn State experts in meteorology and atmospheric science made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024 in search of Florida’s famed near-daily summer thunderstorms.
They were hoping to catch corona discharges, a long-hypothesized atmospheric weather phenomenon where miniscule pulses of electricity dance at the tips of tree leaves, causing the canopy to glow in the ultraviolet (UV). For more than 70 years, scientists have suspected treetops might emit these corona electrical discharges because of odd electric field activity in and over forests during storms, yet they have never been documented outside the lab.
The team, consisting of William Brune, distinguished professor of meteorology and atmospheric science; Patrick McFarland, a doctoral candidate in meteorology and atmospheric science; Jena Jenkins, assistant research professor; and David Miller, a former associate research professor who is now at the Penn State Applied Research Lab; worked to be the first to document this effect.
They chose the Sunshine State because of its propensity to produce frequent thunderstorms. However, as is often the case during research endeavors, the typical weather proved atypical.
For three weeks in Florida, McFarland and Brune chased pop-up storms that left as quickly as they formed.
The researchers had little to show for their efforts until, as they made their way back to Penn State, massive and sustained storms began cropping up just west of Interstate 95. The team caught an exit, nestled in a parking lot at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and trained their instruments to the top branches of a sweetgum tree that the rangefinder logged as 100 feet from their van.
The thunderstorm flashed lightning and poured rain for nearly two hours, giving them time to also observe corona on a nearby long needle loblolly pine tree as the storm waned. The results, which were the first directly-observed corona discharges occurring in nature, were recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.
“This just goes to show that there’s still discovery science being done,” said McFarland, lead author on the paper. “For more than half a century, scientists have theorized that corona exists, but this proves it.”
Corona discharges take shape during storms, the researchers said, because clouds build up strong negative charges that attract the opposite positive charge on the ground below. Opposites attract and this positive electrical ground charge rises up through the trees to the highest point, causing an electric field on the tiny, hair-like tips of leaves that is great enough to create the weak corona glow in both visible and UV form. This UV from the corona breaks apart water vapor, producing hydroxyl.
Hydroxyl is the atmosphere’s main oxidizer. Oxidizers clean the air by reacting with chemicals emitted into the air, making other chemicals that are easier to remove. These chemicals include volatile organic compounds emitted by trees or human activities and the greenhouse gas methane. The team’s prior research found corona discharges to be a substantial source of atmospheric cleansers in the forest canopy.
The chemical conversion is what researchers keyed in on. Several years ago, the team applied high-voltage, low-current electrical impulses to tree branches and found a strong correlation between the UV emissions from corona discharges and the creation of hydroxyl compounds. In that project and the more recent observations, researchers noted leaf damage at the point corona was emitted.
To capture the phenomena in nature and make use of this correlation, the team developed the Corona Observing Telescope System, a Newtonian telescope that feeds into a UV camera. It’s geolocated, equipped with a device for measuring atmospheric electricity and calibrated for UV emissions using a mercury lamp. The solar UV wavelength band is completely blocked, leaving corona, lightning and fire as the only sources of UV in the field.
In North Carolina, this system captured 859 coronae events on the sweetgum tree and 93 on the loblolly pine. Events ranged from a blink to several seconds, McFarland said. During the field campaign, researchers observed coronae in four additional thunderstorms and on four additional tree species.
“It’s nearly invisible to the naked eye but our instruments give rise to a vision of swaths of scintillating corona glowing as thunderstorms pass overhead,” McFarland said. “Such widespread coronae have implications for the removal of hydrocarbons emitted by trees, subtle tree leaf damage and could have broader implications for the health of trees, forests and the atmosphere.”
While the researchers have confirmed the phenomena, they said they still don’t know much about the potential impacts of these corona discharges and have more questions, such as: Are trees harmed during this process? Or do they benefit in some way? Have they evolved to withstand it? Does the atmospheric cleansing have a benefit to the forest? The researchers are beginning collaborations with interested tree ecologists and biologists to answer these questions, thus blazing new paths of discovery into the natural world around us.
This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Brune, Jenkins and Miller were co-authors on the research.
The research team points the periscope on top of the Toyota Sienna van at a palm tree under a thunderstorm in Florida.
LOS ANGELES — A diet rich in fruit, vegetables and whole grains is generally recommended for better health and to lower the risk of cancer and other diseases.
However, new research from USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of Keck Medicine of USC, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research suggests that this type of diet may put non-smoking Americans under the age of 50 at greater risk of developing lung cancer.
“Our research shows that younger non-smokers who eat a higher quantity of healthy foods than the general population are more likely to develop lung cancer,” said Jorge Nieva, MD, a medical oncologist and lung cancer specialist with USC Norris and lead investigator of the study. “These counter-intuitive findings raise important questions about an unknown environmental risk factor for lung cancer related to otherwise beneficial food that needs to be addressed.”
Nieva and his fellow researchers speculate that this risk factor may be the pesticides used to keep crops pest-free. Commercially produced (non-organic) fruits, vegetables and whole grains are more likely to be associated with a higher residue of pesticides than dairy, meat and many processed foods, according to Nieva. He also notes that agricultural workers exposed to pesticides typically have higher rates of lung cancer, which adds credence to the theory.
The study also showed that young women who don’t smoke have a higher incidence of lung cancer than men, and that women tended to also have a diet higher in produce and whole grains than men.
A New Epidemic of Lung Cancer
Lung cancer has typically been a disease that affects older adults (the average age of lung cancer onset is 71), men more than women, and smokers.
Smoking rates have fallen since the mid-1980s, which has led to fewer lung cancer cases across the United States, except for one unique group — non-smokers age 50 and younger, especially women, who are now more likely to get lung cancer than men.
To investigate this trend, researchers launched the Epidemiology of Young Lung Cancer Project, which surveyed 187 patients who were diagnosed with lung cancer by age 50. Patients provided details on demographics, diet, smoking history and lung cancer diagnosis.
Most patients had never smoked and had a form of lung cancer biologically different from lung cancer caused by smoking. A 2021 study from the Epidemiology of Young Lung Cancer Project, the Genomics of Young Lung Cancer Project, found that the subtypes of lung cancer seen in people under 40 were distinct from lung cancer in older adults.
Researchers used the Healthy Eating Index (HEI), a ranking of the overall quality of Americans’ diet on a scale of 1-100, to compare patients’ diets with the broader United States population. Young non-smoking lung cancer patients had an average HEI score of 65 out of 100, compared to the national average of 57. Among participants in the study, women had higher HEI scores than men.
On average, the young lung cancer patients ate more daily servings of fruit, vegetables and whole grains than the general population. For example, participants averaged 4.3 servings of dark green vegetable and legumes and 3.9 servings of whole grains per day, while the average U.S. adult eats 3.6 servings of dark green vegetables and legumes and 2.6 servings of whole grains per day.
More Research Needed
The link between pesticides and lung cancer in young people, especially women, needs more research, said Nieva.
In the study, researchers did not test specific foods for pesticides. Instead, they used published data on average pesticide levels for food categories such as fruits, vegetables and grains to estimate exposure. The next step, said Nieva, is to confirm the link by directly measuring pesticide levels in blood or urine samples from patients. This could also help reveal whether or not some pesticides increase lung cancer risk more than others.
“This work represents a critical step toward identifying modifiable environmental factors that may contribute to lung cancer in young adults," said Nieva. “Our hope is that these insights can guide both public health recommendations and future investigation into lung cancer prevention.”
The research is supported by the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute, a nonprofit focused on advancing lung cancer research and care, as well as AstraZeneca, the Beth Longwell Foundation, Genentech, GO2 for Lung Cancer and Upstage Lung Cancer.
Researchers also received funding from the National Institutes of Health, grant number R25CA225513 and the National Cancer Institute, grant number P30CA014089.
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For more information about Keck Medicine of USC, please visit news.KeckMedicine.org.
Disclosure: Dr. Nieva has received consulting payments from AstraZeneca and Genentech.
Andes volcanoes – the missing link between algae blooms, whales and climate millions of years ago
Record volcanic eruptions in the Andes could explain the mysterious death of dozens of whales about 5 to 8 million years ago, according to a study led by University of Arizona researchers.
Researchers work in the field at Cerro Ballena near Caldera, Chile, as part of a study showing that an increase in volcanic activity in the Andes in the Late Miocene Epoch likely resulted in a cooling of the Earth between 5.4 million and 7 million years ago. From left are team members Carolina Gutstein, Mark Clementz, Barbara Carrapa, Whitney Worrell, Priscilla Martinez and FabÃan Muñoz.
In 2010, construction workers on the Panamerican Highway traversing Chile's Atacama Desert stumbled upon a nearly perfectly preserved fossilized whale – and once paleontologists rushed to the site to document the ancient treasures in a race against time while the road project was on hold, more were unearthed in quick succession.
Totaling more than 40 specimens – whales, porpoises and other marine mammals – dating from about 6 to 9 million years ago, the site known as Cerro Ballena, or "Whale Hill," is now famously recognized as the world's largest concentration of whale fossils. Paleontologists soon realized the animals perished quickly and in a relatively small area. But why?
As if one mystery wasn't enough, around the same time marine life experienced important changes, whales became bigger and climate data reveal a dramatic shift toward cooler sea surface temperatures. Geologic records from that time, known as the late Miocene, bear witness to intense volcanic eruptions in the wake of tectonic upheaval that led to the building of the Andes mountain range along the western edge of South America.
Now, a study led by researchers at the University of Arizona provides a previously unrecognized piece of the puzzle: The vast amounts of volcanic ashes released into the atmosphere ended up in the ocean, particularly in the Southern Ocean, where they provided a smorgasbord for marine algae to feast on. Volcanic ash is known to contain important nutrients, including phosphorus, iron and silicon. A significant increase in volcanic activity in the Andes peaking between eight and four million years ago, therefore, likely delivered a significant pulse of nutrients – especially iron – to the Southern Ocean.
This induced a chain reaction driving environmental changes by increasing productivity among primary producers – organisms that consume carbon dioxide and use sunlight to create their own food and energy. Increased productivity also supported larger body size in whales. However, in some localities, like Cerro Ballena, nutrients from Andes volcanoes lead to widespread algal blooms, which released toxins that proved detrimental to any whales in the affected areas. The same algal blooms also would have removed large amounts of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere, which would have helped cool the planet.
Volcanic eruptions have long been recognized as major sources of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, thus driving warming. But the role of volcanism in doing the opposite – cooling down the Earth system – has gone largely unrecognized, said Barbara Carrapa, a professor of geosciences in the University of Arizona College of Science and first author of this study, which is published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
"Once you put a lot of very important nutrients coming from volcanoes into the ocean, then your primary producers are going to go crazy, because all of a sudden they have a lot of nutrients available to them, and that, in turn, is going to affect the entire marine ecosystem," she said.
Among those primary producers, some of the globally most abundant are diatoms, single-celled algae that build intricate silicate shells.
Bringing together experts from a variety of fields, including climate modeling, ocean geochemistry, geology and paleobiology, the study showed that Andean volcanoes provide the missing link between changes in ocean geochemistry and marine ecosystems and ultimately resulted in carbon sequestration and global cooling via biological processes in the ocean. Surprisingly, the geochronology of volcanic ashes in the region and the relationships between volcanism, ocean productivity and ultimately climate had been largely unexplored.
By combining paleoclimate records, fossil evidence and geologic data with computer climate modeling simulations, the study shows a potential link between sustained, large-scale volcanism in the Altiplano-Puna Volcanic Complex in the Central Andes, the largest active silicic magma system on Earth, and global climatic and ecological change.
The Miocene witnessed a major transition in both geography and climate, continuing a cooling trend that had begun around 60 million years ago, at the end of Mesozoic era, also known as the "Age of the Dinosaurs." The continents had taken their present-day positions for the most part, only Antarctica was covered by ice, extensive forests were replaced by grasslands in many places of the world, and mammals were diversifying.
According to co-author Kaustubh Thirumalai, an associate professor in the U of A's Department of Geosciences, the Miocene was a time of profound change, establishing the ecosystems we see today. Giant mammals roamed the continents, including ground sloths, mammoths and whales, which had set out as moderately sized creatures, embarked on an evolutionary trend toward the gigantic sizes they are known for.
Not surprisingly, the cooling trend, particularly during the late Miocene, was accompanied by declining carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but the exact cause was a mystery, Thirumalai said. Was the change caused by a decrease in volcanic activity releasing less carbon dioxide, or by an increase in chemical weathering, which takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
To find answers, the team took advantage of climate simulation models to test various scenarios, Thirumalai explained.
"To illustrate our approach, we'd say, 'Let's start erupting the Andes on purpose and see what happens,'" he said. "And what we found is that there is another component that wasn't really appreciated – the biology of the ocean responds, with feedback effects on climate worldwide."
These feedback mechanisms can help store carbon in the deep ocean resulting in global cooling, Carrapa explained.
"Once you take the biological effects of volcanoes fertilizing the ocean into consideration, we could see a beautiful correlation between Andean volcanism and all those changes that are happening in the ocean, specifically those looking at the late Miocene cooling event," she said. "Together with the Humbold Current, which serves to distribute nutrients along the Pacific coast of South America, everything together created the perfect storm where, if you put the ash in the right place, and you ignite primary production, you eventually affect marine ecosystems as a whole, including whales."
"This work improves our understanding of how natural processes can regulate Earth's climate, which is directly relevant to anticipating future climate change and its impacts on society," said co-author and whale expert Mark Clementz, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Wyoming and co-author of this study. "By identifying links between volcanism, ocean productivity, and carbon dioxide drawdown, it provides insight into mechanisms that can influence global climate over long timescales."
Now extinct, Cerro Aconcagua in northwestern Argentina was an active stratovolcano until the Miocene epoch, when it was part of the Altiplano-Puna Volcanic Complex in the Central Andes, the largest active silicic magma system on Earth.
Two of the study's co-authors, Mark Clementz and Carolina Gutstein, are pictured with an outcrop bearing whale fossils.
In subduction zones, the sites of the world’s largest earthquakes, tectonic activity may generate a “pump” that transports long-buried subseafloor microbes back toward the seafloor, according to research presented at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting.
These microbes are the world’s most dedicated sleeping beauties, lying dormant for thousands or even millions of years beneath a kilometer-deep blanket of ocean sediment. They survive this prolonged dormancy with the help of a range of specialized adaptations.
But to pass on these adaptations to the next generation, the microbes must eventually reach the shallowest layers of the seafloor where they can eat, grow and disperse.
That’s where the tectonic pump comes in, said Zhengze Li, a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California.
Li and his colleagues suggest that fault slip in subduction zones drives fluid flow that transports long-buried subsurface microbes back toward the seafloor. According to their models, this tectonic pump could circulate more than 1 million gigatons of fluid per million years, potentially transporting up to 1030microbial cells.
At the meeting, Li explained how this microbial “elevator” might work. In subduction zones, where one tectonic plate descends beneath another, layers of sediment on the downgoing plate are scraped off and accumulate in a wedge against the overriding plate.
Some of the deep, dormant microbes remain on the downgoing plate and continue their descent beneath the overriding plate toward the mantle, a journey Li and his colleagues call “the trip to hell.”
Microbes that avoid that fate, however, may be transported upward through fractures and faults in the sediment wedge, or more diffusely through the sediments, driven by subduction-related slip.
Relocated to the shallow seafloor, the microbes “can now be reactivated and can reproduce,” Li said. “The full cycle—from burial and transport with the subducting plate to eventual return—can take tens of millions of years or longer.”
Cold seeps on the seafloor, where fluids are preferentially discharged from the subseafloor, provide direct evidence of active fluid transport and are consistent with ongoing tectonic pumping. These seep sites also offer accessible windows for sampling microbial communities, enabling further evaluation of the relationship between tectonic processes and subseafloor microbial life.
“We can also examine how seismic activity relates to the relative abundance of different microbial groups, and we find a positive correlation between seismic energy and the abundance of subsurface-associated microbes,” Li said.
The researchers have examined this idea in the subduction zone of Costa Rica and found that higher seismic energy indices are associated with greater relative abundance of microbial taxa typically found in subsurface environments.
Tectonic pumping is not limited to large earthquakes, Li added. Even seismically “silent” slow slip events, tremor, and aseismic creep can generate stress perturbations that drive fluid mobilization and microbial transport.
Research by Li’s coauthor Karen Lloyd, a microbial biogeochemist also at USC, and others has identified a range of adaptations that allow deep-buried microbes to survive long-term dormancy, including DNA repair mechanisms and enzymes that enable the degradation of organic matter at depth.
Genomic studies further suggest that mutations in these microbes often act to preserve traits over thousands to millions of years.
For a chance to pass on these adaptations and undergo genetic innovation, the microbes have to wait for the tectonic elevator to bring them to a more hospitable realm.
