Sensory Ecology Lab - SEL

@sensoryecology.bsky.social

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Dr. Daniel Pessoa
Professor of animal behaviour and physiology at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brazil. Interested in animal communication and sensory ecology.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2516-6766

www.sel.cb.ufrn.br

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“An acoustic analysis revealed a high-pitch component in these solicitation purrs, resembling a cry. This hidden cry taps into our innate sensitivity to distress sounds, making it nearly impossible for us to ignore.” www.sciencealert.com/the-heartwar... 🧪

The Heartwarming Reason Why Your Cat Meows at You Like Thatwww.sciencealert.com A story that goes back thousands of years.

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Chronic electrical stimulation with a peripheral suprachoroidal retinal implant: a preclinical safety study of neuroprotective stimulation www.frontiersin.org/journals/cel... "could potentially be an alternative approach to transcorneal electrical stimulation"; #BCI #NeuroTech

Frontiers | Chronic electrical stimulation with a peripheral suprachoroidal retinal implant: a preclinical safety study of neuroprotective stimulationwww.frontiersin.org PurposeExtraocular electrical stimulation is known to provide neuroprotection for retinal cells in retinal and optic nerve diseases. Currently, the treatment...

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Acoustic monitoring for tropical insect conservation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.03.601657v1

Acoustic monitoring for tropical insect conservation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.03.601657v1 www.biorxiv.org Monitoring the species-specific sounds produced by insects could provide us with a rapid, reliable,

“For these people, these places meant something. It helped them to explain their reality, and their connection with the landscape. It was a portal for them to connect with the supernatural worlds, connecting, perhaps, to other people and their loved ones." www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-s... 🧪

Mysterious Symbols on 4,000-Year-Old Rock Art Hint at an Unknown Culturewww.sciencealert.com Who were they?

“Time takes its toll on the eyes. Now a funky, Hitchcockian video of 64 eyeballs, all rolling and blinking in different directions, is providing a novel visual of one way in which eyes age.” www.sciencenews.org/article/biza... 🧪

A bizarre video of eyeballs illustrates our pupils shrink with agewww.sciencenews.org Pupil size can decrease up to 0.4 millimeters per decade, hinting at why it can be increasingly harder for people to see in dim light as they age.

“We were surprised to find that when we increased the number of synapses, the brain was able to process the extra auditory information. And those subjects performed better than the control mice in the behavioral test." www.sciencealert.com/changing-a-s... 🧪

Changing a Single Gene Gave Mice Supercharged Hearingwww.sciencealert.com Shh, they'll hear you.

“Over the course of 300 pages, Dingfelder proves this point. She is unable to recognize people’s faces. She also can’t see depth, lacks the ability to create mental images and has trouble with memory. Her way of perceiving the world is probably not like yours.” www.sciencenews.org/article/do-i... 🧪

‘Do I Know You?’ explores face blindness and the science of the mindwww.sciencenews.org In her memoir, journalist Sadie Dingfelder draws on her own experiences to highlight the astonishing diversity of people’s inner lives.

“When it comes to how we experience, interact with, and navigate our world, timing is everything. And new research in mice suggests a specific set of cells is fundamental to the way we learn complex behaviors that rely on timing.” www.sciencealert.com/time-cells-i... 🧪

'Time Cells' in The Brain Could Be More Crucial Than We Ever Realizedwww.sciencealert.com They could help detect Alzheimer's too.

“… the algorithm could then be applied in reverse: to try and predict Alzheimer's risk from transcripts of speech samples it had never processed before… important factors, including age and self-reported sex, were added to produce a final predictive score.” www.sciencealert.com/a-signal-of-... 🧪

A Signal of Future Alzheimer's May Be Hidden in The Way You Speakwww.sciencealert.com Early warnings could make all the difference.

“At normal levels, pain and fatigue are best viewed as adaptive responses. Just like pain, fatigue is a warning signal, implying the body needs to rest. The degree of fatigue is influenced by many factors, also at a subconscious level.” www.sciencealert.com/chronic-pain... 🧪

Chronic Pain Treatment May Offer Hope For Long COVID Suffererswww.sciencealert.com Fighting the endless fatigue.

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The perception of changes in visual movement feedback delay is biased by visuomotor congruence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.20.599936v1

The perception of changes in visual movement feedback delay is biased by visuomotor congruence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.20.599936v1 www.biorxiv.org The Weber-Fechner Laws have been evaluated across a wide variety of modalities and tasks, but not ye

“Electronic noses… and other types of mechanical odor-sensing equipment exist, but they’re not exactly the bee’s knees.” “…biology has this ability to differentiate between very, very similar mixtures, which no other engineered sensors can do.” www.sciencenews.org/article/hone... 🧪

Honeybees can "smell" lung cancerwww.sciencenews.org Bees can detect the scent of lung cancer in lab-grown cells and synthetic breath. One day, bees may be used to screen people’s breath for cancer.

“The feeling of disembodiment and removal from the physical realm that characterizes OBEs leads to ego dissolution, the researchers say. That then develops into a strengthening of relationships with other people.” www.sciencealert.com/out-of-body-... 🧪

Out-of-Body Experiences Have a Surprising Effect on Some Peoplewww.sciencealert.com And we might finally know why.

“Nerves in male and female tissues responded differently to the same pain-sensitizing substances.” “If the driving forces that produce pain differ between sexes, then pain medicines can be tailored for males or females…” www.sciencenews.org/article/pain... 🧪

Pain may take different pathways in men and womenwww.sciencenews.org Sex differences in the function of nerve cells in mice, monkeys and humans suggest a new way to treat pain conditions.

“Armies of aggressive ants flush out insects, worms and other easy prey from the forest floor.” “‘Birds come up to a nest entrance and check it out’… ‘and fly into the direction of where the ants are raiding that day’.” www.sciencenews.org/article/bird... 🧪

Some African birds follow nomadic ants to their next mealwww.sciencenews.org Specialized interactions between birds and driver ants in Africa could help explain why the birds are especially sensitive to forest disturbances.

“In the dim twilight hours, many frogs may be capable of emitting a faint green or orange glow. A survey of hundreds of frogs in South America shows that far more frogs are biofluorescent than previously thought…” www.sciencenews.org/article/frog... 🧪

Many frogs glow in blue light, and it may be a secret, eerie languagewww.sciencenews.org Biofluorescence is far more common across frog species than previously thought. The faint twilight glow could have a role in communication or mating.

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PreyTouch: An Automated System for Prey Capture Experiments Using a Touch Screen https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599188v1

PreyTouch: An Automated System for Prey Capture Experiments Using a Touch Screen https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.16.599188v1 www.biorxiv.org The ability to catch prey is crucial for survival and reproduction and is subject to strong natural

“Fairy lanterns… are a type of mysterious, parasitic herb that look like something from another planet. Their pint-size flowers can have psychedelic shapes and bright colors, and they have evolved to lure in fungus gnats and other insects as pollinators…” www.sciencenews.org/article/para... 🧪

This tentacled, parasitic 'fairy lantern' plant is new to sciencewww.sciencenews.org The bizarre new plant from Malaysia parasitizes subterranean fungi and only briefly erupts from the soil to flower.

“As E. woodii is considered extinct in the wild, synthetic images were used in the AI model’s training to improve its ability, via an image recognition algorithm, to recognise cycads by shape in different ecological contexts.” www.sciencealert.com/the-worlds-l... 🧪

The World's Loneliest Plant Is Facing a Sexual Crisis. Does a Female Exist?www.sciencealert.com One hundred years of solitude.

“Taken together, the researchers say, the findings imply that the earliest ants used their antennae to sense each other’s pheromones in a similar fashion as modern ants.” “… ‘evidence that sociality was very much a feature of early ants’.” www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Early ants’ antennae may have let them ‘talk’ using pheromoneswww.science.org 100-million-year-old fossils share the sensory hairs of insects’ modern counterparts

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🧪 Artificial skin that can 'feel' temperatures at a distance? Sounds like some major changes in medical devices are coming soon! Come on over to MNB for the how and why... buff.ly/3Vrv65c

Hot Science: New Material Senses Temperature Without Touch | Medical News Bulletinbuff.ly Chinese scientists are developing heat sensing gadgets that could transform prosthetics and wearable health tech.

“Goldenrods are hardly the only plants known to… privately 'talk' to their neighbors about shared threats. Yet… there is still plenty to be learned about how plants respond to these private communication networks.” www.sciencealert.com/this-flower-... 🧪

This Flower Could Be Defined as Intelligent, Scientists Saywww.sciencealert.com Fascinating.

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PhD position on predictive processing in perception at the Predictive Brain Lab, Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging www.ru.nl/en/working-a... via @predictivebrain.bsky.social; #neuroscience

PhD Candidate: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Predictive Brain Lab | Radboud Universitywww.ru.nl Working as PhD Candidate at the Predictive Brain lab? Check our vacancies here!

“Some species delicately strum the threads of other spiders’ webs to convince the arachnids they’ve caught an insect... Others mimic on a web the signature rhythms of a different spider’s courtship dance, luring would-be suitors to their deaths.” www.sciencenews.org/article/cann... 🧪

Some cannibal pirate spiders trick their cousins into ‘walking the plank’www.sciencenews.org A pirate spider in Costa Rica uses a never-before-seen hunting strategy that exploits the way other spiders build webs.

Today we celebrate Valentine's Day in Brazil. “Are you feeling the pressure of Valentine’s Day and in need of advice on how to find someone special? The animal world has some advice for you.” www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-th... 🧪

The animal guide to finding love | Science Newswww.sciencenews.org Learn to dance, keep an eye on your competition, bring a gift: Animals have some practical advice for finding a mate.

“A male palm cockatoo puts on a musical mating display from trees in his territory. He sings, twirls and drums rhythmically against the tree, often using a percussion instrument, a stick or seed pod, clutched in his left foot…” www.sciencenews.org/article/wild... 🧪

“… a stomach-turning smell reminiscent of rotting flesh, hence the nickname 'corpse flower'. It radiates heat and odor like a gory oil diffuser, to attract flesh-eating pollinators like flies and beetles from nearly a kilometer (half a mile) away.” www.sciencealert.com/kews-most-fa... 🧪

Kew's Most Famous Plant Continues to Turn Heads (And Noses) 135 Years Onwww.sciencealert.com A must-see (mustn't-smell).

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Wild elephants call one another by individual names! 🧪 phys.org/news/2024-06...

Elephants have names for each other like people do, new study showsphys.org Colorado State University scientists have called elephants by their names, and the elephants called back. Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among nonhuman ...

“Tattoos are now a mainstream means to express identity or celebrate milestones in life. Yet we know very little about the long-term health effects. Hazardous chemicals in tattoo ink have received attention in Europe during the last ten years.” www.sciencealert.com/tattoos-link... 🧪

Tattoos Linked to Increased Cancer Risk, Scientists Warnwww.sciencealert.com A serious health problem is emerging.

“It is a scientific fact. There is a bizarre spectrum of weird animal butts that exist in the natural world. They range from wriggling deep sea worms that poop out of their mouths, to flatworms that have myriad butt holes on their backs.” www.sciencealert.com/these-5-weir... 🧪

These 5 Weird Animal Butts Are The Distraction We All Need Right Nowwww.sciencealert.com You're welcome.