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)
Thursday, May 21, 2026
Cows recognize a familiar human face
Cows stared longer at new faces, and could match a familiar person’s voice with their image
Experimental setup for visual preference and cross-modal tests. The cow was positioned centrally between two screens. Each screen showed a video of a person’s face: one familiar and one unfamiliar to the cow. During cross-modal tests, a speaker placed between the screens played the voice of one of the two individuals. Cameras recorded the cow’s behavioral responses throughout the test.
Credit: Amichaud et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Cows show visual preference for new human faces over a familiar one and can match a known handler’s voice to their face, according to a study published May 20, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Océane Amichaud of INRAE in Nouzilly, France, and colleagues.
Domestic species such as cows (Bos taurus taurus) live in close contact with humans, and are also highly social animals. To better understand whether cows could discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar faces, the authors of the study collected data from 32 Prim’ Holstein cows. They played the cows muted videos of familiar and unfamiliar male faces, and measured how long the animals gazed at them. They looked for cross-modal recognition, playing videos of familiar and unfamiliar faces while broadcasting audio corresponding to one of the two men, with each man saying an identical sentence. They also measured the animals’ heart rates as they watched the videos to see if the cows responded emotionally.
The bovines were uncowed by silent videos, and stared longer at videos of unfamiliar people, showing that they could distinguish between a known and unknown face. When the videos were paired with sound, the animals spent more time staring at the video when the voice matched the face, showing the cows could pair a face with the voice they herd. But based on their heart rates, none of the familiar or unfamiliar faces or voices seemed to affect the cows’ emotional response.
While the authors note that a video and sound recording are not a full interaction with a human, the results suggest that cows can tell the difference between familiar and unfamiliar people, and that they can identify people by face and voice. The authors suggest that more studies should example how cows interact with specific people, to better understand the animals and provide for their welfare.
The authors add: “In this study, using visual preference and cross-modal tests, we showed that cows are able to process human faces presented in 2D on videos and to associate familiar and unfamiliar faces with the corresponding voices by integrating multiple sensory modalities.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4u3dWLw
Citation: Amichaud O, Lemarchand J, Cornilleau F, Jardat P, Ferreira VHB, Calandreau L, et al. (2026) Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos. PLoS One 21(5): e0329529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329529
Author countries: France.
Funding: This study was funded by the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Credit: Ben Woodcock, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Beekeepers and their honeybees can be invaluable participants in environmental surveys, according to a study published May 20, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Jennifer Shelton of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and colleagues.
Honeybees can be extremely useful collectors of environmental data, since they gather plant materials from a wide area and amass it in a convenient central location. However, traditional methods of collecting these data are costly and time-consuming and have only been successful at relatively small scales.
In this study, Shelton and colleagues present the results of the UK National Honey Monitoring Scheme (NHMS), which enlisted the volunteer assistance of over 3,500 beekeepers across England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland between 2018 and 2025. These citizen scientists submitted 5,789 samples of honey from their hives, and researchers extracted DNA from pollen grains within the honey to identify which plants the bees were visiting. These analyses identified over 800 species of plants utilized by honeybees and pinpointed the most commonly visited species, including cultivated canola, clovers, and invasive Himalayan balsam.
This study serves as a proof-of-concept of the effectiveness of honeybees for gathering environmental data, and as a model of how to establish and maintain an engaged community of citizen scientists. Beekeepers were involved in the project design, kept up to date through newsletters, and provided with the DNA results from their honey samples.
The current NHMS data includes biases both geographically, with most samples coming from the South of England, and temporally, with most samples being collected in early or late summer. But as the archive grows, these data could be used to track pollinator activity, the spread of invasive plants, or the environmental impacts of pollutants and diseases.
The authors add: “Monitoring environmental change has always been hard at national scales, with the sheer size of nations making the resources to do this of huge costs. Working with beekeepers across the UK, we show the potential of the National Honey Monitoring Scheme and its use of environmental DNA approaches to monitor changes in the wild plants, as well as its role as a resource for understanding new risks from pesticides, and disease risks that these critical pollinators are exposed to.”
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4dblW61
Citation: Shelton JMG, Woodcock BA, Newbold L, Oliver A, Savage J, Grove E, et al. (2026) Using honeybees for national scale long-term eDNA biomonitoring. PLoS One 21(5): e0347485. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0347485
Author countries: UK
Funding: This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) joint research programs NE/N018125/1 LTS-M ASSIST—Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems (www.assist.ceh.ac.uk) and NE/W005050/1 AgZero+: Towards sustainable, climate-neutral farming.
Using honeybees for national scale long-term eDNA biomonitoring
Article Publication Date
20-May-2026
Some beluga whales appear to recognize themselves in a mirror, per a case study of captive whales which may provide the first evidence of mirror self-recognition in the species
Extreme heat events are killing Gentoo penguins in Argentina, but the birds are shifting their breeding season earlier and therefore reducing the impact of potentially deadly hot days
Article title: Rare upside of climate-induced phenological changes: Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) avoid heat events at Martillo Isl., Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Author countries: Argentina, UK.
Funding: ARR received funding from the Wildlife Conservation Society representación Argentina (https://argentina.wcs.org - $1000), ARR received funding from the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (https://www.argentina.gob.ar - ANPCyT, PICT 2016-0267 $4000) for their research. TH was supported by Quark Expeditions ltd. (https://www.quarkexpeditions.com) and John Ellerman Foundation (https://ellerman.org.uk). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Rare upside of climate-induced phenological changes: Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) avoid heat events at Martillo Isl., Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Article Publication Date
20-May-2026
Discovery of new fossils in Northwest Canada changes view of early animal evolution
Ancient deep-sea organisms reveal earlier origins of movement, sexual reproduction, and complex animal life
Reconstruction of a hypothetical deep-water paleocommunity from the new fossil site in Canada’s Northwest Territories, based on fossils recovered by the researchers.
Researchers have uncovered a remarkable fossil site in a remote part of Canada’s Northwest Territories, offering unprecedented insight into the earliest evolution of complex animal life on Earth. Findings from the site represent life from the Ediacaran biota—soft-bodied organisms that lived on the seafloor more than 500 million years ago—and push back the origins of animal movement and sexual reproduction by 5-10 million years. The work is published today in the journal Science Advances and led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History and Dartmouth.
“For 3 billion years, life on Earth was dominated by microbes. Then, all the sudden, we get these strange-looking marine animals big enough to see and capable of behaviors we would find familiar today,” said the study’s lead author Scott Evans, assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. “If we want to understand this transition, when life first became large, complex and unmistakenly animal, this new site has tremendous potential.”
With shapes that vary from flat discs to leafy fronds and ribbed ovals, Ediacaran fossils represent the first direct evidence of multicellular animal life. Ediacaran species are linked to a diverse set of animal groups, including mollusks, nematodes, comb jellies, and cnidarians (a group that spans jellyfish and corals). Others look nothing like any organism alive today but represent the oldest animals known to move in search of food or reproduce sexually.
Ediacaran life existed before most animals evolved the ability to form hard parts like shell or bone, so most are soft-bodied. Thus, these fossils are rare, requiring exceptional conditions to be preserved. While Ediacaran fossils have been identified on most continents except for Antarctica, only a handful of sites contain more than 10 different species, providing limited windows into this critical, roughly 40-million-year interval in Earth’s history.
Scientists currently sort Ediacaran life into three groups, or “assemblages” representing different times in the geologic record: the Avalon assemblage (575-559 million years ago), the White Sea assemblage (559-550 million years ago), and the Nama assemblage (550-538 million years ago). Until now, fossils from the White Sea group had only been found in Europe, Asia, and Australia, not North America. In this study, the researchers found clear evidence of the White Sea assemblage in ancient rocks of Canada’s Mackenzie Mountains on the traditional lands of the Sahtú Dene and Métis, who provided the research team with guidance and permission to access the site.
The discovery builds on earlier geological work in the region but represents a major step forward, with the researchers finding more than 100 fossils, including six groups never before seen in North America. But the biggest surprise was that some of these fossils are estimated to be about 567 million years old, 5-10 million years older than previously documented White Sea specimens and overlapping with the time of the older Avalon assemblage. Intriguingly, the layers in which fossils were found are overlain by hundreds of feet of potentially fossil-rich rock.
“Not only is this new site highly diverse, but also it is from a part of the rock succession where we have previously lacked fossil remains,” said study co-author Justin Strauss, an associate professor of Earth and Planetary sciences from Dartmouth, who has been exploring this area for about 15 years. “This is really exciting. Given our understanding of the regional geology in northwestern Canada, there is great potential here to revisit our understanding of Ediacaran Earth history.”
Among the finds made for the first time in North America are:
Dickinsonia, a flat organism that moved around on the sea floor, lacking a mouth and instead absorbing bacteria and algae through its entire bottom surface, which Evans describes as a “bathmat” or “pancake” with a divided circular body
an immobile tubular organism called Funisia that lived in clusters of similar size and offers the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in the fossil record, likely with coordinated release of sperm and eggs into the water column like coral;
Kimberella, with a muscular foot that fed by scraping the sea floor, widely interpreted as an early relative of mollusks and now potentially the oldest fossil bilaterian—the group of animals with distinct front, back, top and bottom with symmetric left and right sides that makes up more than 99% of all known animals
and Eoandromeda, a possible comb jelly with eight spiral arms
The scientists also discovered that these organisms lived in deeper-water environments than previously recognized for the White Sea assemblage. This finding supports a growing hypothesis that early animals may have originated in offshore, deep-marine settings before expanding into shallower waters over time, the opposite of what is typical of animal evolution after this time.
“These results suggest a pattern where evolutionary innovation begins in deeper environments and later spreads toward the coast,” Evans said. “We think of the deep ocean as a dark, inhospitable place, but it is also relatively stable, with few fluctuations in things like temperature and oxygen essential to most animal life. This stability may have provided key opportunities to support early animal life.”
The fossils uncovered in this study will eventually be permanently accessioned by the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.
Other coauthors on the study include Erik Sperling, Stanford University; and Kimberly Lau, The Pennsylvania State University.
This work was supported by a NASA Exobiology grant (# 80NSSC25K7024); a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant (# EAR-20 2143164); and NSF Frontier Research in Earth Science grants (# EAR-2021324 EAR-2021176).
ABOUT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY (AMNH)
The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, founded in 1869 with a dual mission of scientific research and science education, is one of the world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses more than 40 permanent exhibition halls, galleries for temporary exhibitions, the Rose Center for Earth and Space including the Hayden Planetarium, and the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The Museum’s scientists draw on a world-class permanent collection of more than 30 million specimens and objects, some of which are billions of years old, and on one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Museum offers two of the only free-standing, degree-granting programs of their kind at any U.S. museum: the Ph.D. program in Comparative Biology and the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Earth Science residency program. Visit amnh.org for more information.
A fossil of Dickinsonia, a flat organism that moved around on the sea floor, lacking a mouth and instead absorbing bacteria and algae through its entire bottom surface
The site in Canada’s Northwest Territories where researchers have uncovered a wide diversity of fossils representing Ediacaran biota
