(Press-News.org) VIDEO:
The video shows how much goats like cognitive challenges and their motivation to access the box. This goat, called Willow, had already learned how to use the box and retrieve...
Click here for more information.
Goats learn how to solve complicated tasks quickly and can recall how to perform them for at least 10 months, which might explain their remarkable ability to adapt to harsh environments, say researchers at Queen Mary University of London.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Zoology today (Wednesday 26 March), the scientists trained a group of goats to retrieve food from a box using a linked sequence of steps; first by pulling a lever with their mouths and then by lifting it to release the reward.
The goats' ability to remember the task was tested after one month and again at 10 months. They learned the task within 12 trials and took less than two minutes to remember the challenge.
"The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory," said co-author Dr Elodie Briefer, now based at ETH Zurich.
Before each learning session, some of the goats had the opportunity to watch another goat to demonstrate the task.
Dr Briefer added: "We found that those without a demonstrator were just as fast at learning as those that had seen demonstrations. This shows that goats prefer to learn on their own rather than by watching others."
This is the first time that scientists have investigated how goats learn complex physical cognition tasks, which could explain why they are so adaptable to harsh environments and good at foraging for plants in the wild, for example.
Co-author Dr Alan McElligott from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, commented: "Our results challenge the common misconception that goats aren't intelligent animals - they have the ability to learn complex tasks and remember them for a long time.
"This could explain why they are so successful in colonising new environments, though we would need to perform a similar study with wild goats to be sure."
The research was supported through a Swiss Federal Veterinary Office grant and Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship. The data was collected at Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats in Kent.
INFORMATION:
Goats are far more clever than previously thought
2014-03-26
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Study yields 'Genghis Khan' of brown bears, and brown and polar bear evolution
2014-03-26
Male bears are seemingly always on the prowl, roaming much greater distances than females, particularly for mating. For bear evolution, studying the paternally inherited Y chromosome is therefore a rich source to trace both the geographic dispersal and genetic differences between bear species.
This new study is particularly important, because a large part of our current knowledge about range-wide population structuring in mammals relies on data from maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). More extensive male than female movement in bears and many other mammals ...
Pessimism of early global policy architects stunted developing nations' economies: Harvard study
2014-03-26
Influential economic ideas first advanced in 1911 — stressing innovation and entrepreneurialism as the fundamental generators of growth and wealth — were deemed inappropriate for developing countries, stunting progress in many parts of the world throughout the 20th century, says a distinguished Harvard academic.
In a newly-published paper, Calestous Juma of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs calls on emerging economy countries and development agencies to revisit and adopt ideas rejected in the 1950s by "pessimistic" architects ...
Knowing true age of your heart key to curbing lifetime heart disease risk
2014-03-26
The Joint British Societies' consensus recommendations for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (JBS3), which have been drawn up by *11 UK professional societies and charitable organisations, are based on the latest available scientific evidence.
They emphasise the importance of putting patients in the driving seat and starting preventive action early on, using a new method of risk assessment - the JBS3 risk calculator.
Heart disease deaths have almost halved over the past 40-50 years, particularly in high income countries, thanks largely to the identification of ...
Doctors raise blood pressure in patients
2014-03-26
Doctors routinely record blood pressure levels that are significantly higher than levels recorded by nurses, the first thorough analysis of scientific data has revealed.
A systematic review led by the University of Exeter Medical School, and supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (NIHR PenCLAHRC), has discovered that recordings taken by doctors are significantly higher (by 7/4mmHg) than when the same patients are tested by nurses.
Dr Christopher Clark, of the ...
Penicillin prescriptions risk under-dosing children, say experts at King's College London
2014-03-26
VIDEO:
Millions of children in the UK are potentially receiving penicillin prescriptions below the recommended dose for common infections, according to new research led jointly by researchers at King's College London,...
Click here for more information.
Millions of children in the UK are potentially receiving penicillin prescriptions below the recommended dose for common infections, according to new research led jointly by researchers at King's College London, St George's, ...
Million suns shed light on fossilized plant
2014-03-26
Scientists have used one of the brightest lights in the Universe to expose the biochemical structure of a 50 million-year-old fossil plant to stunning visual effect.
The team of palaeontologists, geochemists and physicists investigated the chemistry of exceptionally preserved fossil leaves from the Eocene-aged 'Green River Formation' of the western United States by bombarding the fossils with X-rays brighter than a million suns produced by synchrotron particle accelerators.
Researchers from Britain's University of Manchester and Diamond Light Source and the Stanford ...
Male Eurasian jays know that their female partners' desires can differ from their own
2014-03-26
Knowing what another person wants is not a trivial issue, particularly when the other's desires are different from our own. The ability to disengage from our own desire to cater to someone else's wishes is thought to be a unique feature of human cognition.
New research challenges this assumption. Despite wanting something different to eat, male Eurasian jays can disengage from their own current desire in order to feed the female what she wants even when her desires are different to his. The study, which was funded by the BBSRC, is published today in the Royal Society ...
Study is first to provide direct evidence that response of unborn children to glucose is associated with mother's insulin sensitivity
2014-03-26
A study published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) is the first to provide direct evidence that fetal brain response to a dose of sugar given orally to its mother is associated with the mother's insulin sensitivity. This may indicate that the risk of subsequent obesity and diabetes may be pre-programmed in the womb. The study is by Dr Hubert Preissl and Dr Andreas Fritsche, University of Tübingen, Germany and German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD), Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues.
Diabetes or obesity in the mother ...
Clean cooking fuel and improved kitchen ventilation linked to less lung disease
2014-03-25
Improving cooking fuels and kitchen ventilation is associated with better lung function and reduced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to research published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The study, led by Pixin Ran from the Guanzhou Medical University, China, followed 996 villagers from southern China for 9 years to examine the effects of cleaner fuels and better kitchen ventilation on lung function and disease.
An estimated 3 billion people worldwide heat their homes and cook by burning biomass such as wood or animal dung. The resulting indoor air ...
X-rays film inside live flying insects -- in 3D
2014-03-25
VIDEO:
This video shows the insect thorax reconstructed from
tomograms and highlights the external movements of the thorax
and the location of the indirect power and steering muscles.
Click here for more information.
Scientists have used a particle accelerator to obtain high-speed 3D X-ray visualizations of the flight muscles of flies. The team from Oxford University, Imperial College, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) developed a groundbreaking new CT scanning technique ...