Coral Reefs May Be Able to Adapt to Moderate Climate Change

Coral reefs may be able to adapt to moderate climate warming, improving their chance of surviving through the end of this century, if there are large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, according to a study funded by NOAA and conducted by the agency's scientists and its academic partners. Results further suggest corals have already adapted to part of the warming that has occurred.

"Earlier modeling work suggested that coral reefs would be gone by the middle of this century. Our study shows that if corals can adapt to warming that has occurred over the past 40 to 60 years, some coral reefs may persist through the end of this century," said study lead author Cheryl Logan, Ph.D., an assistant professor in California State University Monterey Bay's Division of Science and Environmental Policy. The scientists from the university, and from the University of British Columbia, were NOAA's partners in the study.

Warm water can contribute to a potentially fatal process known as coral "bleaching," in which reef-building corals eject algae living inside their tissues. Corals bleach when oceans warm only 1-2°C (2-4°F) above normal summertime temperatures. Because those algae supply the coral with most of its food, prolonged bleaching and associated disease often kills corals.

The study, published online in the journal Global Change Biology, explores a range of possible coral adaptive responses to thermal stress previously identified by the scientific community. It suggests that coral reefs may be more resilient than previously thought due to past studies that did not consider effects of possible adaptation.

The study projected that, through genetic adaptation, the reefs could reduce the currently projected rate of temperature-induced bleaching by 20 to 80 percent of levels expected by the year 2100, if there are large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

"The hope this work brings is only achieved if there is significant reduction of human-related emissions of heat-trapping gases," said Mark Eakin, Ph.D., who serves as director of the NOAA Coral Reef Watch monitoring program, which tracks bleaching events worldwide. "Adaptation provides no significant slowing in the loss of coral reefs if we continue to increase our rate of fossil fuel use."

"Not all species will be able to adapt fast enough or to the same extent, so coral communities will look and function differently than they do today," CalState's Logan said.

While this paper focuses on ocean warming, many other general threats to coral species have been documented to exist that affect their long-term survival, such as coral disease, acidification, and sedimentation. Other threats to corals are sea-level rise, pollution, storm damage, destructive fishing practices, and direct harvest for ornamental trade.

According to the Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2000 report, coral reefs have been lost around the world in recent decades with almost 20 percent of reefs lost globally to high temperatures during the 1998-1999 El Niño and La Niña and an 80 percent percent loss of coral cover in the Caribbean was documented in a 2003 Science paper. Both rates of decline have subsequently been documented in numerous other studies as an on-going trend.

Tropical coral reef ecosystems are among the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and provide economic and social stability to many nations in the form of food security, where reef fish provide both food and fishing jobs, and economic revenue from tourism. Mass coral bleaching and reef death has increased around the world over the past three decades, raising questions about the future of coral reef ecosystems.

In the study, researchers used global sea surface temperature output from the NOAA/GFDL Earth System Model-2 for the pre-industrial period though 2100 to project rates of coral bleaching.

Read more at Science Daily

New Species of Dolphin Found in Australian Waters

A species of humpback dolphin previously unknown to science is swimming in the waters off northern Australia, according to a team of researchers working for the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and numerous other groups that contributed to the study.

To determine the number of distinct species in the family of humpback dolphins (animals named for a peculiar hump just below the dorsal fin), the research team examined the evolutionary history of this family of marine mammals using both physical features and genetic data. While the Atlantic humpback dolphin is a recognized species, this work provides the best evidence to date to split the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin into three species, one of which is completely new to science.

"Based on the findings of our combined morphological and genetic analyses, we can suggest that the humpback dolphin genus includes at least four member species," said Dr. Martin Mendez, Assistant Director of WCS's Latin America and the Caribbean Program and lead author of the study. "This discovery helps our understanding of the evolutionary history of this group and informs conservation policies to help safeguard each of the species."

The authors propose recognition of at least four species in the humpback dolphin family: the Atlantic humpback dolphin (Sousa teuszii), which occurs in the eastern Atlantic off West Africa; the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa plumbea), which ranges from the central to the western Indian Ocean; another species of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa chinensis), which inhabits the eastern Indian and western Pacific Oceans; and a fourth Sousa species found off northern Australia yet to be named (the formal adjustment of the naming and number of species occurs through a separate and complementary process based on these findings).

"New information about distinct species across the entire range of humpback dolphins will increase the number of recognized species, and provides the needed scientific evidence for management decisions aimed at protecting their unique genetic diversity and associated important habitats," said Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, Director of WCS's Ocean Giants Program and senior author on the paper.

Working to bring taxonomic clarity to a widespread yet poorly known group of dolphins, the authors assembled a large collection of physical data gathered mostly from beached dolphins and museum specimens. Specifically, the team examined features from 180 skulls covering most of the distribution area of the group in order to compare morphological characters across this region.

The researchers also collected 235 tissue samples from animals in the same areas, stretching from the eastern Atlantic to the western Pacific Oceans, analyzing both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA for significant variations between populations.

Read more at Science Daily

Saber-Toothed Attacked Each Other, Skulls Show

Distinctive bite marks on the skulls of cat-like saber-toothed predators that once skulked about North America have revealed a nasty family secret: these felines often ambushed and killed each other.

The discovery came as a result of the accidental unearthing of a new skull of what's called a nimravid -- not a true cat, but a group of cougar-like animals with large saber-like canine teeth that lived from 32 to 34 million years ago. The skull had clear signs of being mortally bitten by another nimravid.

"The nimravid skull was found in 2010 in Badlands National Park by a girl during a Junior Ranger activity right next to the visitor center," said paleontologist Clint Boyd of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, who was working in the park at the time. "It had a magnificent set of bite marks on it."

The skull brought to mind another found in 1936 that also had nimravid bite marks which had long been interpreted as a rare case. But the new skull raised the question of just how common these bite marks are on nimravids.

To find out, Boyd and his colleagues gathered up as many nimravids skulls as they could from collections and took a closer look at them. This included some that were on display for the public.

"Some of the best specimens with bite marks were right in front of people," he said. "Older specimens did not show the bite marks until they were cleaned up." Some actually still had dirt in the holes made by the bite marks and others had had the holes repaired by curators unaware of their significance.

"What we found is that these bite marks are a lot more common than previously thought."

In fact the bite marks make it clear that the nimravids were attacking their competitors from behind and killing by getting one fang into an eye socket or puncturing the skull.

What's even more startling is that nimravid fang marks are not found on the skull of any of their prey, said Boyd, who is presenting his results on Oct. 30 at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver. That's because they used the canines to tear out the soft tissues in the throats of their prey and would have been careful not to bang them on bone, which might have damaged their most important hunting weapon.

"Damaging their canines could be a life-threatening event," said Boyd. Yet fatal nimravid bite marks are found on a surprising 10 percent of nimravid skulls in three species of nimravids over a range of four million years.

"They're still taking into consideration not damaging their canines," said Boyd, noting how the eyes are a common target with the other canine just glancing the skull. But they are definitely taking a bigger chance when they attack their own kind.

Among other things, the discovery suggests that the typical museum mural representation of nimravids facing off in battle is probably dead wrong.

"Upper canines and lower canines can be seen in the (skulls)," he said. "So all the attacks are coming from behind. This was an ambush style attack against a competitor."

The lack of any signs of healing also means that the majority of these attacks were fatal, which rules out another old hypothesis, based on the 1936 specimen (which showed some healing), that the biting might be part of a mating behavior.

Read more at Discovery News

Ghost Stories: The Science Behind Sightings

Apparitions Meet the Scientific Method

In an example of early trick photography, a ghost appears to visit a young girl beside her bed (Photo circa 1860-1869, London, England).

Ghost stories have been around as long as there have been stories themselves. The idea of apparitions from the spirit world goes back to the very beginnings of written history, and probably even farther back in oral traditions. A recent CBS News poll concluded that nearly half of all Americans believe in ghosts, and 22 percent say they have seen or felt the presence of a ghost.

And yet mainstream science has long been clear and unequivocal: There is no scientific evidence of a supernatural explanation for ghost sightings. So how do we explain those incidents when rational people sincerely believe they have seen or felt a ghost? What are some of the scientific, non-paranormal explanations for the phenomenon of ghost sightings?

Psychological States Are Important

As it turns out, there are quite a lot of real-world explanations for ghost sightings. Researcher Loyd Auerbach, author of several books on the subject of hauntings, is a believer in ghosts and has been investigating reported sightings for 30 years. Yet even he concedes that the vast majority of alleged hauntings can be explained away by natural phenomena. Chief among them is the psychological state of the person who experienced the haunting.

"It's often because people are predisposed -- they've been watching too many TV shows, or something bad is going on in their lives," Auerbach said. "Sometimes people are psychologically disturbed, but most of the time I find it's people making mistakes because they're already in a sensitized state due to something else entirely. It's people who are suggestible, and when that nail in the wall finally pops out, they ascribe significance to a mundane event."

Something Doesn't Sound Right

Sometimes a legitimate natural phenomenon, or a combination of different phenomena, can result in a "ghost sighting." For example, research dating back to the 1970s suggests that extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fields can stimulate certain parts of the brain and produce effects that are often associated with hauntings. "I had a case a couple years ago, a family had moved into a house and in a particular room, they got dizzy or got headaches," Auerbach said. "They saw shadows out of the corner of their eyes."

Auerbach investigated and found out the house was directly under high-tension wires that were emitting an electromagnetic field and a low-frequency hum. "It was in the frequency that would vibrate your eyeballs," Auerbach said. "That would cause you to see things out of the corner of your eye."

Low-frequency hums, sometimes called infrasound, can also produce feelings of fear and anxiety, Auerbach said. "Hollywood has known this since the 1950s at least, which is why you get those low frequency tones in horror movie soundtracks."

Something Doesn't Smell Right

In many cases, an alleged haunting is caused by multiple factors that seem supernatural when combined. For instance, Auerbach said that infrasound and electromagnetic waves only explained some of the issues in the house under the high-tension wires. "It wasn't just headaches, the family said they would smell noxious odors that smelled like brimstone," he said. "They would also report bursts of fire that would singe the walls."

Further investigation revealed the house was adjacent to garbage dump, and methane gas was seeping up from the ground. "That was what they were smelling, and there was so much static electricity in the house that the methane would catch fire," Auerbach said.

Don't Believe Everything You See

In an illustration from 1874, Anne Morgan -- said to have been dead for two centuries -- reveals herself under the name of "Katie King," through spiritualistic mediums to ghost seekers in Philadelphia

In cases where people claim to have seen an apparition, but there are no psychological or emitted energy factors, the "ghost" can simply be an optical illusion. Most commonly, it's an incident of light bouncing off a window or other reflecting surface. There's also the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia, where the brain gives significance to random images or patterns -- seeing faces in clouds, say, or the ghost of your grandmother in the shadows of a wardrobe closet.

Dante Centuori, director of creative productions at the Great Lakes Science Center, said that he believes alleged ghost sightings are always the result of natural phenomenon being misinterpreted. Even with incidents we can't explain, it's simply a matter of overlooking something or ascribing false significance.

"We're very error-prone in terms of observation and perception," Centuori said. "We have a predisposition to fill in the blanks with a cultural context, with the images that we're all bombarded with. We see something that doesn't add up, and we jump to: 'It's a ghost.'"

Hallucinations Aren't What They Seem

Taken in Norfolk, England, in 1936 by Capt. Hubert C. Provand, the so-called "Brown Lady Ghost" photo was published in Country Life magazine.

Visual hallucinations are often cited as the scientific explanation behind ghost sightings, and they can be caused by both psychological conditions and -- according to some research -- electromagnetic waves affecting the brain. But there's a giant gray area in this topic, Auerbach said, because an experience that could be accurately termed a hallucination can also be a genuine ghost sighting.

"The key for us is, people might have experiences that could be termed hallucinations," he said. "But if what they're seeing is historically accurate -- if they're describing things they couldn't otherwise know about -- then there's something very worthy of research."

Read more at Discovery News

Australia's Oldest Bird Footprints Discovered

Two thin-toed footprints pressed into a sandy riverbank more than 100 million years ago are Australia's oldest known bird tracks, researchers say.

The prints were found among the fossil-rich cliffs of Dinosaur Cove on the coast of southern Victoria. Researchers think the tracks were left by a prehistoric bird species likely the size of a great egret or a small heron during the Early Cretaceous Period.

At that time, the world was warmer and the continents were arranged in different positions than they are today. The site of Dinosaur Cove was located in a floodplain in a great rift valley that formed as the supercontinent Gondwana started breaking apart, tearing Australia away from Antarctica.

A long drag mark leading up to one of the fossilized footprints was a telltale sign that these tracks were left by flying creatures, explained study researcher Anthony Martin, a paleontologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

The bird tracks were found very close to another footprint that looks like it was left by a non-avian theropod, possibly one of the coelurosaurs, the group of dinosaurs most closely related to birds that includes beasts like the Tyrannosaurus rex.

All three ancient footprints were locked in sandstone in an area smaller than a square foot (650 square centimeters), which gives researchers insight into the types of creatures that lived together at Dinosaur Cove during the Early Cretaceous.

"These tracks are evidence that we had sizeable, flying birds living alongside other kinds of dinosaurs on these polar, river floodplains, about 105 million years ago," Martin said.

The researchers think the footprints were left at a time when the riverbank was covered in moist sand, possibly after spring and summer floodwaters had subsided. Martin said it remains unclear whether these ancient birds lived in the region during the polar winter or migrated there during the spring and summer.

The birds that left their tracks at Dinosaur Cove also had one backwards-facing toe. That feature is found on some bird feet today, and T. rex even had a vestigial rear toe. Studying the changing toe-arrangement of birds and their dinosaur cousins could give researchers insight into the evolution of these species.

Read more at Discovery News

"Lost World" Discovered in Remote Australia

An expedition to a remote part of northern Australia has uncovered three new vertebrate species isolated for millions of years, with scientists Monday calling the area a "lost world."

Conrad Hoskin from James Cook University and a National Geographic film crew were dropped by helicopter onto the rugged Cape Melville mountain range on Cape York Peninsula earlier this year and were amazed at what they found.

It included a bizarre looking leaf-tail gecko, a gold-coloured skink -- a type of lizard -- and a brown-spotted, yellow boulder-dwelling frog, none of them ever seen before.

"The top of Cape Melville is a lost world. Finding these new species up there is the discovery of a lifetime -- I'm still amazed and buzzing from it," said Hoskin, a tropical biologist from the Queensland-based university.

"Finding three new, obviously distinct vertebrates would be surprising enough in somewhere poorly explored like New Guinea, let alone in Australia, a country we think we've explored pretty well."

The virtually impassable mountain range is home to millions of black granite boulders the size of cars and houses piled hundreds of metres high, eroded in places after being thrust up through the earth millions of years ago.

While surveys had previously been conducted in the boulder-fields around the base of Cape Melville, a plateau of boulder-strewn rainforest on top, identified by satellite imagery, had remained largely unexplored, fortressed by massive boulder walls.

Within days of arriving, the team had discovered the three new species as well as a host of other interesting finds that Hoskins said may also be new to science.

The highlight was the leaf-tailed gecko, a "primitive-looking" 20 centimetre-long (7.9 inches) creature that is an ancient relic from a time when rainforest was more widespread in Australia.

The Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko, which has huge eyes and a long, slender body, is highly distinct from its relatives and has been named Saltuarius eximius, Hoskin said, with the findings detailed in the latest edition of the international journal Zootaxa.

"The second I saw the gecko I knew it was a new species. Everything about it was obviously distinct," he said.

Highly camouflaged, the geckos sit motionless, head-down, waiting to ambush passing insects and spiders.

The Cape Melville Shade Skink is also restricted to moist rocky rainforest on the plateau, and is highly distinct from its relatives, which are found in rainforests to the south.

Also discovered was a small boulder-dwelling frog, the Blotched Boulder-frog, which during the dry season lives deep in the labyrinth of the boulder-field where conditions are cool and moist, allowing female frogs to lay their eggs in wet cracks in the rocks.

In the absence of water, the tadpole develops within the egg and a fully formed frog hatches out.

Once the summer wet season begins the frogs emerge on the surface of the rocks to feed and breed in the rain.

Read more at Discovery News

Lost da Vinci Artwork Unearthed Beneath Paint

Drawings sketched by Leonardo da Vinci are emerging from the walls of an Italian castle, announced restorers working on an elaborate fresco devised by the Renaissance master.

One of most original paintings of the 15th century, the mural covers the vault and walls of the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle in Milan. It depticts a garden pergola made of 16 mulberry trees bound together by a golden, knotted rope. The trunk of each tree rises as a column supporting 16 half-moon-shaped spaces above a Gothic vault, producing an evocative, fictive grove.

Now restorers might be able to bring to light extra sections of the original work, possibly providing further insights into Da Vinci’s vision of the highly symbolic decoration.

The work was commissioned in 1498 by the duke of Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza, nicknamed il Moro (the Moor) and was executed by Leonardo, who at that time was the court artist, and his assistants.

Experts agree the master's hand can be detected in a monochrome section of the fresco on the northeast and northwest corner of the room. The apparently unfinished work depicts sturdy roots bursting through rocks.

"Large parts of this mural can be recovered beneath several layers of whitewash," the Opificio Pietre Dure (OPD) the Florence based institute who is carrying out the restoration, wrote in a report.

Preliminary analysis produced "quite interesting results," lending hope that the work will recover "important parts of the preparatory drawings," Marco Ciatti, superintendent of the OPD art restoration institute, said.

Leonardo's work in the Sala delle Asse, or Room of the Planks (after the wood panels that lined it) has remained largely unknown. In 1499 Milan was conquered by the French who stormed the castle. In 1706, when Milan was under the Austrian rule, the castle became soldier barracks and the Sala delle Asse was turned into a stable, its walls covered with abundant layers of whitewash.

The arboreal decoration remained hidden beneath up to 13 layers of paint until 1893, when renovations to the castle revealed traces of frescoes.

In 1901, amid much criticism, the mural was heavily restored.

Only in 1954, the paint applied during the disastrous restoration was finally removed. But damage to Leonardo's work remained.

"The mural is covered by a thick layer of grime. However, our cleaning tests indicate that it can be easily removed. Leonardo's paint won't be damaged in the procedure," the restorers wrote.

Meanwhile, archival research also revealed the room's original name.

It was called "Camera dei Moroni" -- a clear allusion to Ludovico il Moro.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancients Painted Volcano Warning 9,000 Years Ago

A nearly 9,000-year-old mural of a village with a backdrop of an erupting volcano has now been geochemically pinned to a specific eruption of the Hasan Dağ twin-peaks volcano located about 130 km (70 miles) northeast of the ancient Çatalhöyük town site in Turkey.

The mural, painted in ocher on an adobe wall that was long buried, has long been considered the world's earliest depiction of an eruption, as well as the earliest known landscape painting, the first historical news event and the first urban plan. Until now, however the volcano it was depicting had not been confirmed with any dated samples of minerals from the volcano linking the image to a specific eruption.

"The original discoverer of the mural interpreted it as a depiction of eruption of Hasan Dağ," said volcanologist Axel Schmitt of the University of California in Los Angeles. "We're volcanologists. We're trying to find out the eruption recurrence."

Unfortunately, the archeological interpretation of the eruption made its way into the volcanological literature as evidence that Hasan Dağ is an active volcano. Then, archeologists started referring to the volcanological literature as evidence that the volcano was active -- accidentally falling into circular reasoning.

To break out of that circle, Schmitt and some colleagues, including some Turkish volcanologists, gathered volcanic pumice rock from Hasan Dağ and applied to them a new mineral dating technique using uranium-thorium-helium in zircon crystals.

“We've been pushing this dating technique to younger and younger ages,” said Schmitt. “As we do that it overlaps with archaeological timescales.”

The zircons revealed two explosive eruptions. One was about 29,000 years ago and the other at about 9,000 years ago. The latter was compared with the carbon-14 dating of artifacts at Çatalhöyük, including the strata that contains the mural.

"It agrees," Schmitt said. "It overlaps give or take 1,000 years." He will be presenting the results on October 30 at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

Read more at Discovery News

Are Humans Reversing Cat Domestication?

When your cat sees a stranger, does he come and snuggle close or hiss and run away?

Whether a feline friend is a lap cat or a claws-out kitty is largely affected by their socialization as young kittens. But at least part of cats' friendliness may be in their genes. And the widespread practice of spaying or neutering cats before they are adopted may be inadvertently selecting for aloof cats, by ensuring the friendliest animals don't reproduce, one researcher says.

"The very cats that are the friendliest and the ones that don't do much hunting are the very ones we are told we should be neutering," said John Bradshaw, an anthrozoologist at the University of Bristol in England, and the author of "Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet" (Basic Books, 2013).

But not everyone is convinced.

Domestic and feral cats are genetically indistinguishable, so spay/neuter programs are unlikely to nudge the gene pool one way or the other, said Carlos Driscoll, a University of Oxford biologist who is studying the genome of the wildcat from which the domestic cat emerged at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

Subtle differences

Domestic cats arose from a subspecies of cat called Felis silvestris lybica between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago in the Near East or North Africa. But the genetic differences between this wildcat ancestor and its tamer offshoot are very subtle: Wild cats and domestic cats look alike and are able to mate with one another, Driscoll said.

Just 10 to 20 gene changes may be responsible for domestication in the tame cats, though scientists don't know which ones.

Because so few genes are associated with domestication, spay and neuter policies that ensure the friendliest cats don't reproduce could be "pushing domestication backward" to a noticeable degree in the next 50 to 100 years, Bradshaw told LiveScience.

Selecting for less-friendly cats?

To support that notion, Bradshaw conducted a simple test of cat personality in Southampton, England: He had strangers enter the houses of kittens in the area, try to pick up and stroke the cats, and then watched the kitties purr or hide.

In an area where spaying and neutering rates were highest -- more than 98 percent -- kitties tended to be a bit more skittish around strangers, possibly because they have to "import" their fluffy friends since their own pals aren't able to reproduce. Less-affluent areas had bolder, friendlier cats.

"What we suggest is people [in affluent areas] are getting kittens in from the countryside from feral cats that are a little bit wilder," or from a few feral females and just a few tomcats that are "living in the shadows," Bradshaw said.

Therefore, intensive spay and neuter programs may be artificially selecting for the less-tame cats, he said.

"Neutering is -- in terms of biology, in terms of population dynamics -- a mortality factor," Bradshaw said. "If you neuter, you've removed its genes from the pools, so when you look at the next population, you have to rule it out."

The study has a few caveats: It hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the team only looked at about 70 cats in all.

Other solutions

And even if the findings are borne out, Bradshaw isn't suggesting a return to the old days, when cats mated freely and the unwanted kittens were tossed in a sack and drowned.

Cats kill billions of animals a year, so cities rightly want to keep feral-cat colonies in check. But if that's cities' aim, Bradshaw said, they should find the ultimate source of the problem: food.

"Are there people feeding them, are they stealing the food, is it bad hygiene in restaurants?" Bradshaw said.

Reduce the available food, and the feral-cat population will naturally decrease, he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Smart Neurons: Single Neuronal Dendrites Can Perform Computations

When you look at the hands of a clock or the streets on a map, your brain is effortlessly performing computations that tell you about the orientation of these objects. New research by UCL scientists has shown that these computations can be carried out by the microscopic branches of neurons known as dendrites, which are the receiving elements of neurons.

The study, published today (Sunday) in Nature and carried out by researchers based at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at UCL, the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examined neurons in areas of the mouse brain which are responsible for processing visual input from the eyes. The scientists achieved an important breakthrough: they succeeded in making incredibly challenging electrical and optical recordings directly from the tiny dendrites of neurons in the intact brain while the brain was processing visual information.

These recordings revealed that visual stimulation produces specific electrical signals in the dendrites -- bursts of spikes -- which are tuned to the properties of the visual stimulus.

The results challenge the widely held view that this kind of computation is achieved only by large numbers of neurons working together, and demonstrate how the basic components of the brain are exceptionally powerful computing devices in their own right.

Senior author Professor Michael Hausser commented: "This work shows that dendrites, long thought to simply 'funnel' incoming signals towards the soma, instead play a key role in sorting and interpreting the enormous barrage of inputs received by the neuron. Dendrites thus act as miniature computing devices for detecting and amplifying specific types of input.

"This new property of dendrites adds an important new element to the "toolkit" for computation in the brain. This kind of dendritic processing is likely to be widespread across many brain areas and indeed many different animal species, including humans."

Read more at Science Daily