To understand how crows make decisions using cues in their environments, the researchers trained two carrion crows to complete a visual task on a touchscreen. The birds watched a cloud of white dots moving against a black background. Some dots moved to the left or right while others moved randomly. The crows had to determine the predominant direction of the dots' movement and peck the corresponding target on the screen to earn a mealworm reward.
By changing the proportion of dots moving together, the researchers could make the decision easier or harder for the crow. When most dots moved in the same direction, the answer was fairly obvious for the birds. But when only a small percentage moved together, the birds had weaker visual evidence to base their decisions on.
One of the carrion crows used in the study completes a decision-making task. (Image credit: Andreas Nieder)The crows reached nearly 100% accuracy when many dots were involved and the motion was clear. But even when just 3% of the dots moved in concert, both birds performed significantly better than just guessing, getting the answer right 50% of the time.
The birds maintained high accuracy in different rounds of the experiment, suggesting they were not sacrificing judgement for quickness.
The study did not directly compare crows to humans and monkeys performing the exact same task. However, previous studies suggest that humans and monkeys take roughly twice as long on comparable, self-paced visual motion tasks.
What happens inside the crow brain?
To understand how the birds reached their decisions so quickly, the researchers recorded activity from 248 neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) — a region of the bird brain that's considered functionally comparable to the prefrontal cortex in humans and primates. Birds lack the layered cerebral cortex found in mammalian brains, but the NCL performs similarly advanced functions.
In primates, neurons accumulate sensory information and their activity increases until it hits a critical threshold and the brain reaches a decision. The new findings suggest that crows use a comparable process, the researchers concluded.
"The bigger implication is that a brain does not need a mammalian neocortex to perform sophisticated computations," Nieder said.
The team could use neural activity to predict the crows' eventual choice "as early as 70 milliseconds after" the dots appeared, Nieder said. That was roughly 170 milliseconds before the crows' behavioral responses, meaning their pecks at the screen.
The speediness of the crows' decision-making may reflect the demands of the birds' daily lives.
"Flight places enormous demands on visual processing and sensorimotor [sensation and movement] coordination," Nieder said. "Birds must navigate three-dimensional environments, avoid obstacles, and react quickly to moving objects. Finding food and capturing prey can also require rapid, precise decisions. These pressures may have favoured fast information processing."
But for now, scientists don't know why crows seem to outpace primates in this particular type of decision-making. The study included only two birds and no direct comparisons to primates, so more work could be done to confirm the results and explore that question further.
For Nieder, observing the faster decision-making process in crows raises a broader question about how scientists define intelligence.
"Rather than assuming that the mammalian brain is the blueprint for intelligent behaviour," he said, "we can study different species to discover which computational principles are shared across animals and which reflect adaptations to their particular environments."
Are you a bird nerd? Find out with our bird quiz!
'> Crows may make lightning-fast decisions, sometimes twice as fast as humans, study hints fMRI scans performed during the study revealed similar patterns of brain activity when participants compared integers and fractions. Smaller numbers are represented in reddish hues and larger numbers in bluish hues; these activity patterns represent an average across the study participants. (Image credit: Valério D, et al., 2026, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 )The brain's shared map brings different number formats into a common system based on the quantities they represent, the researchers concluded.
"For me, it is how the brain gets from a symbol to its meaning," said Abiot Derbie, a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of the company LifeByLogic, which makes psychology assessments.
The fraction "¼" contains the digit "4," but the fraction's value is much closer to zero, he noted. "The activity patterns reflected that numerical relationship, going beyond the digits themselves," Derbie, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.
The idea that the brain represents numerical magnitude in the parietal lobe is not novel. However, scientists mostly understood how the brain dealt with whole numbers, while its strategy for fractions was not well understood. The new work builds on that existing research by exploring how both numerical magnitude and number type are processed together.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the geometry of neural representations in a task involving both integers and fractions," the researchers wrote in their report. "In the future, it might be interesting to expand the present work to decimal numbers."
From previous work, "scientists already knew that fractions and whole numbers engage overlapping parts of the brain's number-processing network," Derbie said. "This study gives us a clearer picture of how their values are organized."
In the future, the team could examine how this neural representation varies across people of different ages, educational levels and mathematical backgrounds, Derbie suggested. The study also included only native French speakers, so may not reflect differences across language or culture.
"I would want to see how this organization develops as people learn," Derbie said. For instance, the team could follow children before and after they learn about fractions, to see whether changes in brain activity accompany better understanding.
In the current study, the participants found it more difficult to compare fractions than to compare whole numbers, the researchers noted; they were slower and made more errors while working with fractions, which was expected. But the study's results don't offer hints as to why.
"Our study was not designed to explain why fractions are harder to learn or understand," Valério and Dehaene told Live Science. "What is new in our study is that we show that these different types of numbers are organized within a shared map in the brain."
See how much you know about the most complex organ in the human body with our brain quiz!
'> Brain scans reveal 'number line' that's used to mentally compare values Dwarf reed snakes are secretive, often nocturnal species that live across Southeast Asia, where they are prey for birds and other snakes. Although the snakes are extremely cryptic and usually hidden beneath leaves or other natural objects, people occasionally observe the serpents' dazzling rolls.
In a 2023 study, researchers formally documented the rolling behavior for the first time in one dwarf reed snake species (P. longiceps), which researchers observed in northwestern Malaysia in 2019. Kojima's team started independently observing the behavior around the same time in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on Borneo.
"I had never seen anything like it before, and I immediately wanted to learn more about it," Kojima said.
For the new study, researchers filmed the rolling behavior multiple times in three dwarf reed species — P. saravacense, P. collaris and P. longiceps — between 2019 and 2022. The team also studied three reed snakes from another genus (Calamaria), which didn't perform the behavior.
Kojima said their study builds on the 2023 research by quantifying the rolling movements, confirming the overall movement pattern that research described, and revealing further details, including how the snakes stabilize their heads.
Snakes aren't the only tumblers in nature. For example, some desert spiders can roll away from danger, as can mother-of-pearl moth caterpillars (Pleurotya ruralis or Patania ruralis). However, the snakes are unique in that they seem to have good control over their rolls.
Rolling movements typically destabilize the head and disrupt sensory-guided adjustment, especially at high speeds, according to the authors of the new study. In other words, it's hard for animals to control their bodies when they're rolling around. The snakes' technique of keeping their heads relatively fixed and often elevated off the ground likely counters what would otherwise be destabilizing effects.
Pseudorabdion saravacense is one of three dwarf reed snake species now known to perform the rolling behavior. (Image credit: Yosuke Kojima)In addition to studying speed and form, the researchers found that the snakes could move in a relatively straight line, readily moving along a "racetrack" that was only 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide. The researchers noted that the snakes often ended their tumbling routine by diving underneath nearby objects, so they seem to remain aware of their surroundings.
The rolling is a behavioral innovation that allows the snakes to overcome their physical constraints and pull off an otherwise impossible movement, according to the researchers.
"Behavioral innovation can give rise to surprising new abilities that we would not expect from an animal's appearance alone," Kojima said.
Researchers have speculated that the bizarre behavior could surprise and confuse predators, in addition to being a rapid means of escape. The authors of the 2023 study also hypothesized that rolling would result in a patchy scent trail, and because king cobras (Ophiophagus) use scent cues to locate their prey, this could make it harder for the predators to hunt dwarf reed snakes.
How much do you know about snakes? Test your knowledge with our snake quiz!
'> Watch bizarre snake 'cartwheel' away from danger at more than 12 feet per second . The historic endeavor marks another major step toward humanity's shared goal of understanding — and perhaps eventually colonizing —
, experts say.
If the mission is successful, the returned samples will finally settle a decades-old mystery about the origins of both moons. The findings could also help paint a picture of Mars' ancient history and provide clues about what the early solar system was like.
"This mission marks a transformative leap in our capacity to investigate the Martian system," Sonia Fornasier, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who has studied Phobos and Deimos extensively and is a project scientist for MMX's infrared spectrometer instrument (MIRS), told Live Science. It "ranks very high" among the missions we have sent to the Red Planet so far, she added.
JAXA launched the MMX probe on board an H3 rocket, which lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima prefecture at 3:41 p.m. EDT Monday (4:41 a.m. Tuesday local time), Live Science's sister site Space.com reported. (The mission was initially scheduled to launch in 2024, but it was delayed due to initial concerns about the H3 rocket.)
The camper-van-sized spacecraft successfully separated from the rocket's fairing just over an hour later, and on Wednesday (Oct. 21), JAXA announced that the mission had passed the "initial critical operations phase," meaning the probe is now locked into its roughly 140 million-mile-long (225 million kilometers) journey to Mars, which will take around 10 months.
"MMX took its first step today," Naoki Murakami, general manager of Mitsubishi Electric’s space division, which led the design of the MMX probe, said in a postlaunch news conference early Tuesday morning (Oct. 20), according to The Japan Times. "This marks the beginning of a long, five-year journey."
Once the probe arrives at the Red Planet in August 2027, it will insert itself into a "quasi-satellite orbit" around Phobos. In other words, MMX will circle Mars alongside the moon but will not be gravitationally bound to it, similar to around half a dozen "quasi-moons" that currently accompany Earth around the sun.
After collecting data from a distance for a few months, MMX will swoop down and attempt to land on the surface of Phobos — not once, but twice.
During the first landing, MMX will hover just above the moon and deploy a mini rover, dubbed Idefix, onto the moon's surface. The wandering robot, built by the French and German space agencies, will have to contend with extremely weak gravity as it trundles across the surface of Phobos: The rover weighs around 55 pounds (25 kilograms) on Earth but will weigh only around half an ounce (15 grams) on Phobos, according to ESA.
Once Idefix has completed its initial assessment of the moon's surface, the entire MMX probe will set down on Phobos, on top of the spacecraft's four-legged lander module. Mission scientists hope this goes a lot more smoothly than the attempted landings of Japan's "Moon Sniper" and Resilience lunar landers, which crash-landed on Earth's moon in 2024 and 2025, respectively.
Two of the MMX lander's legs contain built-in sampling devices — one that will drill into Phobos and another that will hoover up surface material. The second device, dubbed the Pneumatic Sampler (or P-Sampler), was built by the Blue Origin-owned private company Honeybee Robotics on behalf of NASA and will collect its material in a "matter of seconds," Kris Zacny, vice president of the Exploration Technology Group at Honeybee Robotics, said at an Oct. 15 NASA news conference. "You blink, and it's all done."
In total, JAXA aims to collect around a third of an ounce (10 grams) of material from Phobos. That would be around twice as much material as the space agency managed to snag on its most recent sample-return mission, Hayabusa2, which collected samples from the "spinning-top" asteroid Ryugu in 2019, finding materials rich in surprising organic compounds.
Once the samples have been acquired, at some point between late 2028 and early 2029, the probe will conduct a series of close flybys of Mars' smaller moon, Deimos, before beginning the long trip back to Earth in late 2030 — the first return flight ever attempted by a spacecraft sent to Mars.
When the probe returns to Earth in 2031, it will release its samples in a 20-inch-wide (60 centimeters) container that will fall back to our planet's surface, most likely somewhere in Australia, according to ESA.
Phobos is dominated by the 6-mile-wide (10 km) Stickney crater, which was left by an ancient asteroid impact. The larger moon is also slowly falling toward Mars and may eventually be ripped apart before it reaches the Red Planet's surface.
"Mars is right in our cosmic backyard, and yet we haven't explored the planet's moons," Nancy Chabot, a space exploration expert at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and the deputy principal investigator of NASA's MEGANE instrument on board MMX, told Live Science in an email. "MMX will do this!"
The biggest mystery surrounding Phobos and Deimos is their origin. Some researchers suspect the satellites are asteroids, or maybe even comets, that have been captured by Mars' gravity, while others think the moons emerged from the debris of an ancient impact on the planet's surface, similar to how Earth's moon formed.
For example, explaining how Mars captured the moons is "quite hard from an orbital mechanics perspective," but if they did form from a debris disk from an ancient impact, they should have coalesced into better-defined spheres, Edwards said.
"MMX will solve this debate thanks to the spacecraft observations and the detailed analysis of the samples of Phobos on Earth," Fornasier said. The data the probe collects from its flybys of Deimos will also allow researchers to generate a "full characterization of this body," she added.
Fornasier is "particularly excited" by the possibility that the moons are captured asteroids because that would mean they would likely contain "organic and hydrated materials," which would have a big "astrobiological implication" and would shed light on what the early solar system was like.
Regardless of how the twin moons formed, researchers also stand to learn a lot about Mars and how planets form and evolve.
If the moons did form via an impact scenario, the samples MMX collects may also contain actual pieces of Mars for researchers to study.
"If these objects are in fact pieces from the Martian surface that have coalesced moons, we'll collect the best-preserved samples of the Martian surface," Edwards said. Other fragments of Mars have already reached Earth as meteorites. However, entry into Earth's atmosphere can transform them.
During its three-year stay in the Red Planet's system, the Japanese probe will also collect lots of data on Mars that could contribute to a wide range of future findings. "MMX will conduct in-depth studies of the Martian atmosphere, with a particular emphasis on dust and water transport mechanisms and the escape processes shaping Mars' atmospheric dynamics," Fornasier said.
Analysis of craters on the Martian moons could also provide clues about other events in Mars' history. For example, some researchers think the Red Planet may have once had rings like Saturn or a larger moon.
Other experts are hopeful that the MMX findings could help lay the groundwork for future missions to explore — and perhaps colonize — Mars. "The samples from MMX will bring forth paradigm-shifting science on the Mars system for generations to come, especially as NASA prepares to send the first humans to Mars," Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a recent statement.
The next sample-return trip to Mars will be China's Tianwen-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2028 and will aim to land on and retrieve samples directly from the Red Planet's surface, according to Space.com.
'> Japan launches world's first round-trip mission to Mars.
Equatorial temperatures spiked, making much of the land too hot for life. Meanwhile, the oceans became acidic and most of the creatures in them suffocated from lack of oxygen. Known as the Permian-Triassic mass extinction or the "Great Dying," it ultimately destroyed more than 90% of ocean life and 70% of terrestrial species.
However, in a corner of what is now China, a refuge of pollen-producing plants avoided that fate and created an oasis for surviving animals. Research suggests that this was not the only place where plants were able to weather catastrophic climate change during the Great Dying, and that plants may have been better able to withstand the extinction event than other organisms.
"Plants do indeed sometimes have a lot of resilience because they can't move individually, and even as a population, they're not very good at moving," Chris Thomas, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of York in the U.K., told Live Science. As a result, many plants have evolved mechanisms to survive in place despite difficult conditions, he said.
As climate change raises global temperatures and throws ecosystems into upheaval, plants will need to draw once more upon this resilience. Many plant species have evolved unique adaptations that help them weather harsh conditions. Experts told Live Science that these adaptations — along with a hefty dose of luck — will now decide the difference between survival and extinction.
Growing with the flow
Unlike most animals, many plants have the ability to regenerate limbs — and those limbs can make them better able to adapt to new environment conditions. Plants in general have higher developmental plasticity than animals, which means that they have greater flexibility to change how their cells and tissues grow and develop.
"Many plants have what we call indeterminate growth and modular body plans," Amy Angert, a botanist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Live Science. Indeterminate growth means that an organism continues to grow and develop indefinitely throughout its lifespan.
"If we lost an arm, it would be gone forever. But on plants, if you cut off a branch, they can sprout new ones and those new ones can then receive signals from the current environment instead of being stuck with sort of developmental programs from the past environment."
For example, researchers found that resprouts on holm oak trees (Quercus ilex) are better able to cope with drought than those that had not resprouted.
And because buds can go dormant, many plant species can resprout after catastrophic events, such as fire. Cape Floristic Region in South Africa, for example, is the smallest of the world's six recognized floral kingdoms, and most of its plant species depend on fire — its plants resprout after fire and many of their seeds require fire to germinate.
Some plants, such as the Snow Gum (Eucalyptus pauciflora), have a thick layer of insulating bark to protect their buds, while others like stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) bury them underground in a "bud bank". The soil insulates the seed's buds from extreme heat and cold and protects most of the plant from life-threatening conditions. This widespread adaptation allows herbaceous plants to endure through the winter and plants with bulbs to hide their tissues from the ravages of fire.
Snow gums (Eucalyptus pauciflora) under snow at Mount Franklin, Namadgi National Park, Australia. (Image credit: Auscape via Getty Images)Storing seeds for better times
Plants can also store seeds underground when times are difficult. Almost 350,000 plant species produce seeds. For most of these species, the seeds contain dormant tiny versions of the young plant, with all the structures that will turn into leaves and roots.
"Seeds can live essentially in stasis in the soil," Daniel Anstett, an evolutionary ecologist at Cornell University, told Live Science. "You can have the seed bank where certain seeds might come back, and there's access to the backward library of genetic information that many plants can ultimately draw upon."
Seed banks are a vital tool for resilience in many plant species. They create the opportunity for metabolically inactive individuals to reanimate when environmental conditions improve, according to a 2021 paper published in the journal Nature Communications. "When lucky, at least some of these individuals will awaken in the future when the environment is more conducive for growth and reproduction," the authors wrote.
Rapid evolution
Seedbanks can also be reservoirs of genetic diversity, which is integral to being able to adapt to new environments.
"The raw material for adaptation comes from genetic variation," said Angert. "Genetic variation is larger in large populations, and genetic variation can be shared between populations as the environment changes — if individuals can disperse successfully between them."
In a paper published in journal Science earlier this year, researchers, including Angert and Anstett, showed rapid evolution saved scarlet monkey flower (Erythranthe cardinalis) populations from prolonged drought in the U.S. and Mexico between 2010 and 2018.
"They can either grow really fast, flower and put out seeds before the fall drought takes effect, or they can grow much more slowly and bunker down,” Anstett explained.
Scarlet Monkeyflower (Erythranthe Cardinalis) in a greenhouse drought experiment. (Image credit: Daniel Anstett)The researchers sequenced the genomes of 55 scarlet monkeyflower populations to find areas within their genomes linked to coping with stress and drought. They tracked the populations and how they changed over the period. Some populations experienced rapid evolution to cope with the changing environment.
They found that, based on populations’ genetic diversity, they could predict whether a population would be able to survive the drought — even before it started.
While this is only one plant species, Anstett believes it could be true of other organisms too.
Flexible photosynthesis
Some plants are able to transform how they produce energy to endure a changing environment. This is what Zhen Xu, a paleobotanist at the University of Leeds in the U.K, thinks allowed some plant species to survive the Permian-Triassic mass extinction and might become increasingly important for plants in today's changing climate.
Plants use photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen, and use stomata, or small pores on their leaf surface, to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide entering the plant.
Reproductive cone (strobilus) of a Triassic lycophyte from South China. It is approximately 2.4 inches (6 centimeters long). (Image credit: Zhen Xu)Many plants open their stomata during the day to let in CO2 and release oxygen. Others use CAM photosynthesis, which stands for "Crassulacean acid metabolism," to close their stomata during the day and protect themselves from the heat. At night, they absorb CO2 and transform it into an acid, which they store in their tissues to be used to make sugars during the day.
"CAM photosynthesis is very common in present day desert plants, like the cactus and succulents," Xu told Live Science. "It's a very smart way to escape from the high temperature or aridity during the daytime."
In a study published in journal Nature Ecology & Evolution earlier this year, Xu and colleagues showed that plants that used CAM photosynthesis had an advantage during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction.
They found that Lycophytes, or are ancient vascular plants, switched to CAM photosynthesis around the time of the mass extinction. "We think CAM photosynthesis may be the special strategy to survive" and allowed these plants to dominate after the mass extinction, Xu said.
Hopeful monsters
Some plants go to even more extreme lengths. During cataclysmic events, plants have turned into "hopeful monsters" to survive environmental upheaval, past research shows.
In nine separate events over the past 150 million years, many flowering plants duplicated their whole genome to give themselves a better chance of survival, according to research published in journal Cell earlier this year. The duplicate genome gives them more opportunities to evolve and adapt to challenging environmental conditions.
"We see clusterings of whole genome duplications in time, and every time it corresponds with a described, important geological event, whether it's a global cooling period, whether it's a global warming period, or whether there's an extinction event," study co-author Yves Van de Peer, a genome biologist at Ghent University in Belgium, told Live Science at the time.
Boils down to luck
Still, the survival of specific plant populations or species often boils down to luck, experts told Live Science.
Plants "essentially have this broad toolkit" but "some of the plants have some pathways, and other plants have others, and some have some traits, and some have others", Anstett said. Whether the particular tools they have will help depends on the conditions they face.
During the Triassic-Permian mass extinction, the plants in refugia in China (and elsewhere) were in the right place at the right time, with the right suite of potential adaptations at their disposal and enough genetic variety to tap into them.
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The same holds true for modern-day species facing a changing climate and potential extinction. Angert said there are ways to make plant species "luckier" in the years ahead, such as connecting fragmented populations to increase genetic diversity, which increases the suite of potential tools at a plant species' disposal.
"The best thing we could do is to leave larger and better connected populations on the landscape," she said.
Anstett agreed. "If populations become really disconnected, then potentially we're eroding away whatever toolkit that these plants have to be able to adapt."
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'> Will plants survive climate change? The 'Great Dying' reveals clues about their resilience.