If you were a bird flying thousands of miles over land or sea with other migrating birds, what would you talk about to pass the time?

Songbirds may converse with other species during their long migrations, forming social bonds and possibly exchanging information about the flight, according to a new study led by researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

“The night sky teems with migrating songbirds, aloft in their millions following routes etched in evolutionary time. But those flight paths may not be entirely innate,” a press release from UIUC said.

The researchers analyzed data from more than 18,300 hours of calls recorded in-flight, which suggested songbirds might “talk” with migration mates.

“We can’t be sure what they’re saying, but birds might broadcast calls during flight to signal their species, age, and sex. And we can certainly speculate that these flight calls could relate to navigation or finding suitable stopover habitat,” said lead author of the study Benjamin Van Doren, an assistant professor in UIUC’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, in the press release.

Research from 2024 by co-authors of the new study at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Appalachian Laboratory found evidence to suggest that songbirds “buddy up” with other migrating species at stopover sites, but until now there wasn’t any evidence that different species “pair up or communicate vocally on the wing.”

Van Doren believes memory and innate patterning are important drivers of behaviors during migration, but said “it’s time to rethink songbird migration through a social lens.”

“In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of social information in bird migration, but scientists have mainly documented this in species that travel during the day or in family groups,” Van Doren noted. “The social environment also seems to be important in species like hawks and storks that form huge aggregations during their daytime migrations. Young birds learn behaviors from observing other birds and how they navigate — and not necessarily from family.”

Most songbirds make their journeys at night, when visual cues aren’t necessarily discernable. This led Van Doren to think about the possibility of other social cues, so he used his access to acoustic recordings from 26 sites of autumn nocturnal bird migrations in eastern North America taken over a three–year period.

“These nocturnal acoustic recordings are really the only window onto this unseen but absolutely massive flow of birds — hundreds of millions aloft over the U.S. on any given night during migration,” Van Doren said. “It’s something people aren’t usually aware of because it happens when we’re sleeping.”

The thousands of hours of recordings were processed by a machine learning tool that allowed the research team to detect 27 species’ signature flight calls, including 25 well-sampled songbirds.

The team first identified species, then measured the frequency with which certain calls co-occurred, testing at intervals of 15 seconds, half a minute and one minute. They found associations that were stronger than would be expected by chance, regardless of the time elapsed.

Searching for an explanation of the associations, the researchers found that the similarity of calls and wing lengths of species were most important. By contrast, birds who “buddy up” during migration stopovers were not maintaining the same relationships while flying, nor were they necessarily in the air with closely related birds or species who shared their specific habitat preferences.

“Species with similar wing sizes were more likely to associate, and wing length is directly linked to flight speed. If you imagine two species flying at similar speeds because they have similar wings, then it’s much easier for them to stick together,” Van Doren explained. “As for vocalizations, it is possible that species’ calls have converged over time because of this social link or that species that happen to give similar calls are simply more likely to gravitate towards each other.”

Van Doren noted that 25 individuals was a small representative subset of songbird species who migrate at night, some of whom don’t vocalize during flight. Van Doren and his team have plans to conduct more research, including tracking individual birds’ “conversations” with flight partners by attaching tiny microphones to be worn throughout their migrations.

The preliminary results bring up many speculative theories, such as that short-lived songbird species who aren’t able to rely on their parents for guidance might rely on social ties during the journey. In addition, the rapid loss of bird biodiversity due to habitat destruction and climate change may jeopardize co-migrating partner species.

“This study really calls into question the long-held idea that songbirds migrate alone, solely following their own instincts,” Van Doren said. “Learning more about the consequences of these social connections — not only for migration, but also for other aspects of their biology — will be important to inform and manage the risks they face in a changing world.”

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For decades, 3M — a multibillion-dollar chemical company based in Minnesota — sold its firefighting foams as safe and biodegradable, while having knowledge that they contained toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), according to newly uncovered documents, reported The Guardian.

Starting in the 1960s and continuing until 2003, 3M’s firefighting foams contained perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), two types of PFAS “forever chemicals.”

The synthetic chemical compounds have been linked to a variety of health problems like thyroid disease, hormonal and fertility problems, high cholesterol and cancer. They are called “forever chemicals” because it can take thousands of years for them to break down in the environment.

The Guardian and Watershed Investigations discovered that evidence of the inability of PFOS to naturally biodegrade began to surface as early as 1949. However, 3M continued to publish brochures and information for customers that said the firefighting foams would break down in the environment until the 1990s.

3M firefighting foam brochures from 1979 described the foams as “environmental neutral” and “biodegradable, low in toxicity, and… can be treated in biological treatment systems,” The Guardian reported.

In 1993, 3M data sheets were still claiming that the foams were “treatable in a biological wastewater treatment system,” though they admitted some elements might persist in treated wastewater.

PFAS expert professor Ian Cousins with Stockholm University described the disposal of foams in sewer systems as “disastrous,” since the chemicals would have gone “straight through the wastewater treatment process, either ending up in the effluent from the wastewater treatment plant or in the sludge,” as reported by The Guardian.

From there the effluent was released into rivers, while the sludge was frequently applied to crops.

In 1949, a piece in Scientific American stated that fluorocarbons — which include PFAS — “do not burn, corrode, mold or decay. Neither rodents nor insects nor fungi can find any nourishment in them.”

By 1964, it had been determined by HG Bryce, an employee of 3M, that fluorocarbons were “physiologically inert,” meaning they did not biodegrade.

Lab tests conducted in 1983 showed that PFAS did not degrade, specifying that biodegradation could not be expected “in an aquatic environment.”

In 2018, 3M paid $890 million in settlements following a lawsuit by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson against the company for PFAS pollution.

Five years later, 3M paid over $10 billion in settlements for suits concerning contamination of numerous public drinking water systems without admitting liability.

In addition to the evidence of 3M having early knowledge that toxic PFAS did not degrade, company meeting minutes from 1978 reviewing studies inflicted upon rats and monkeys said PFOA and PFOS “should be regarded as toxic although the degree of toxicity was left undefined.”

The misleading information 3M provided to customers for decades has resulted in an unknown quantity of firefighting foams having been misused globally, contaminating water, soils and human bloodstreams with PFAS.

“When you have a contaminated site, you can clean it up,” Elsie Sunderland, a Harvard University environmental chemist, told ProPublica. “When you ubiquitously introduce a toxicant at a global scale, so that it’s detectable in everyone… we’re reducing public health on an incredibly large scale.”

3M announced in 2000 that certain PFAS compounds, including PFOA and PFOS, would be phased out in products like Light Water Brand aqueous film-forming foams (AFFF). The company said it has “long since phased both materials out of its operations and also permanently discontinued production of AFFF,” The Guardian reported.

Two years later, 3M said it would stop the manufacture of all PFAS worldwide “by the end of 2025 and are on schedule to do so… We have engaged in site remediation at our facilities and have invested in state-of-the-art water treatment technologies at sites where we have historically manufactured PFAS.”

The PFOS-laden foams were finally banned in the UK in 2011, but foams that contain PFOA will not be totally phased out until July of this year. Foams made with other PFAS compounds are still being used by the company.

PFAS pollution is now found in water, soils, animals and humans all over the world.

“PFAS chemicals have been used extensively for over 70 years and their persistence once in the environment unfortunately means there are no quick fixes. We have already begun investigating whether to restrict PFAS in firefighting foams and will set out more detail in due course,” said a UK government spokesperson, as reported by The Guardian.

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The largest mountain range in Oregon, the majestic Cascades stretch from British Columbia, Canada, to Northern California.

Scientists from University of Oregon (UO) and partners recently discovered a hidden gem beneath the Cascade range that is desperately needed in the West: water in volumes much higher than had previously been estimated.

After mapping the amount of water underneath volcanic rocks that lie at the central crest of the mountain range, the scientists discovered an aquifer many times bigger than was once believed — a minimum of 81 cubic kilometers, or nearly three times the full capacity of Lake Mead, the overdrawn reservoir on the Colorado River that supplies drinking water to California, Nevada and Arizona, a press release from UO said.

“It is a continental-size lake stored in the rocks at the top of the mountains, like a big water tower,” said Leif Karlstrom, an Earth scientist at UO who led the study along with collaborators from Oregon State University, Duke University, Fort Lewis College, the University of Wisconsin, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Forest Service. “That there are similar large volcanic aquifers north of the Columbia Gorge and near Mount Shasta likely make the Cascade Range the largest aquifer of its kind in the world.”

The findings have implications for how scientists and policymakers view the region’s water, which has become an increasingly urgent concern across the West as climate change reduces the amount of snowpack, intensifies drought and puts a strain on limited resources.

The discovery also affects our understanding of the area’s volcanic hazards. When magma interacts with large volumes of water it often causes explosive eruptions that send ash and gas spewing into the air, as opposed to eruptions with slower lava flows.

Most Oregonians depend on water originating in the Cascades. The City of Eugene’s drinking water, for example, is supplied by the McKenzie River, which starts high up in the mountains at spring-fed Clear Lake.

However, the discovery of an underground aquifer of that size was surprising.

“We initially set out to better understand how the Cascade landscape has evolved over time, and how water moves through it,” said co-author of the study Gordon Grant, a geologist with the U.S. Forest Service, in the press release. “But in conducting this basic research, we discovered important things that people care about: the incredible volume of water in active storage in the Cascades and also how the movement of water and the hazards posed by volcanoes are linked together.”

Rivers in the western Cascades have carved out deep valleys surrounded by steep slopes. Meanwhile, the high Cascades are flatter and dotted with lakes and lava flow topography.

Built up by millions of years of volcanic activity, the exposed rocks of the high Cascades are much younger than those of their western counterparts. This makes the transition zone of the high and western Cascades around Santiam Pass a natural laboratory for comprehending how Oregon’s landscape has been shaped by volcanoes.

“What motivates our work is that it’s not just how these landscapes look different topographically. It’s that water moves through them in really different ways,” Karlstrom said in the press release.

To get a better idea of how water flows through different volcanic zones, the researchers referenced projects started in the 1980s and 1990s. Scientists had previously drilled deep into the Earth to measure temperatures at varying depths during their search for geothermal energy sources associated with the abundance of hot springs found in the mountain landscape.

Rocks typically get hotter as you dig deeper into the ground. However, water percolating downward changes the temperature gradient, making kilometer-deep rocks the same temperature as those at the surface.

Karlstrom and the research team analyzed where the temperature began to rise again inside the deep drill holes, which allowed them to infer the depth of the groundwater’s infiltration through cracks in the rock. This gave them the information they needed to map the aquifer’s volume.

Earlier estimates of Cascades water availability took mountain springs at face value, only measuring stream and river discharge. But since the holes Karlstrom and colleagues used hadn’t been drilled with the intention of mapping groundwater, not all areas where scientists might prefer to collect data were covered. This means the new estimate might not reflect the actual volume of the aquifer, which might be even bigger.

Karlstrom cautioned that, while the aquifer being much larger than once thought was encouraging, it remains a limited resource that needs further study and must be carefully stewarded.

“It is a big, active groundwater reservoir up there right now, but its longevity and resilience to change is set by the availability of recharging waters,” Karlstrom explained.

The aquifer is primarily replenished by snow, and with high Cascades snowpack predicted to decrease rapidly in the coming decades — precipitation is increasingly expected to be in the form of rain — it may impact how much recharge feeds the aquifer. It is likely resilient to small fluctuations from year to year, but many consecutive years of low rainfall or an absence of snowpack would likely lead to changes to the aquifer’s water level.

“This region has been handed a geological gift, but we really are only beginning to understand it,” Grant said in the press release. “If we don’t have any snow, or if we have a run of bad winters where we don’t get any rain, what’s that going to mean? Those are the key questions we’re now having to focus on.”

The study, “State shifts in the deep Critical Zone drive landscape evolution in volcanic terrains,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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An open letter calling for efforts to increase food production to avert a world hunger catastrophe has been signed by more than 150 winners of the Nobel and World Food Prizes.

The signatories made a plea for political and financial backing to come up with “moonshot” technologies in the next quarter century, a press release from the World Food Prize said.

The laureates warned that humans were “not even close” to meeting the global food needs of the future.

The letter predicted that, by mid-century, humanity would be faced with an “even more food insecure, unstable world,” unless international efforts to support the latest research and innovation were ramped up.

“All the evidence points to an escalating decline in food productivity if the world continues with business as usual,” said Cary Fowler, joint World Food Prize laureate for 2024 and the outgoing United States special envoy for global food security, who coordinated the appeal. “With 700 million food insecure people today, and the global population expected to rise by 1.5 billion by 2050, this leaves humanity facing a grossly unequal and unstable world.”

In its call for “planet-friendly ‘moonshot’ efforts leading to substantial, not just incremental, leaps in food production for food and nutrition security,” the letter cited challenges including climate change, market pressures and conflict.

Among those who endorsed the letter were 1978 Nobel Prize-winner in physics Robert Woodrow Wilson, whose discovery supported the “big bang theory” of creation; the 14th Dalai Lama; Wole Soyinka, who was the first Black African winner of the Nobel Prize; and Sir Roger Penrose, whose work helped advance the understanding of black holes.

“We know that agricultural research and innovation can be a powerful lever, not only for food and nutrition security, but also improved health, livelihoods and economic development. We need to channel our best scientific efforts into reversing our current trajectory, or today’s crisis will become tomorrow’s catastrophe,” Fowler said in the press release.

The letter’s signatories emphasized the climate crisis’ threat to food production, especially in Africa, which has the fastest rate of population growth coupled with forecast declines in staple maize crops across nearly all of the continent’s growing area.

“It’s almost as if people are burying their head in the sand,” said Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist who was the British co-recipient of the 2024 World Food Prize, as The Guardian reported. “It’s very easy to defer tackling it, but if we wait until there really is a massive food crisis then we’ll have 10 to 15 [years] to live in that crisis.”

“You can’t solve that sort of problem overnight. From the time you start a research programme to the time it can have a significant impact on production, you’re talking 10 to 15 years,” Hawtin said. “It does require political will, international political will. It really needs the focused attention of international institutions.”

Other factors impacting crop productivity include land degradation, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, conflict, water shortages and policies that restrict agricultural innovation.

“The impacts of climate change are already reducing food production around the world, but particularly in Africa, which bears little historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions yet sees temperatures rising faster than elsewhere,” said President of the African Development Bank Akinwumi Adesina, recipient of the 2017 World Food Prize, in the press release. “Future temperature rises are expected to be most extreme in countries with already low productivity, compounding existing levels of food insecurity. In low-income countries where productivity needs to almost double by 2050 compared to 1990, the stark reality is that it’s likely to rise by less than half. We have just 25 years to change this.”

The letter cited the most promising emerging fields of research and scientific breakthroughs that could be prioritized in order to boost food production, even in the face of existing and future challenges. These included developing cereals that are able to biologically source nitrogen and grow without fertilizer; improving photosynthesis in crops like rice and wheat to optimize growth; and boosting research into nutrition-rich, hardy Indigenous crops that have mostly been overlooked.

The letter also outlined “moonshot” goals for the improvement of the shelf life and storage of fruits and vegetables, as well as creating nutrient-rich food from fungi and microorganisms.

“This is an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ moment for global hunger. Having the world’s greatest minds unite behind this urgent wake-up call should inspire hope and action. If we can put a man on the moon, we can surely rally the funding, resources and collaboration needed to put enough food on plates here on Earth. With the right support, the scientific community can deliver the breakthroughs to prevent catastrophic food insecurity in the next 25 years,” said Mashal Husain, incoming World Food Prize Foundation president, in the press release.

There will be a webinar on the letter on Thursday, January 16.

“The research-driven green revolution that has dramatically lowered malnutrition across the globe over the past 60 years is losing momentum, with food insecurity once again on the rise, and a looming crisis emerging by 2050. Investment in research, especially in the places that are likely to be affected in the future, will improve food security now, and help alleviate potential future crises,” said Brian Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, in the press release. “This is an eminently solvable problem, relatively inexpensive, with a payoff benefitting all of humanity.”

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Like humans, animals experience complex emotions like empathy, love, grief and joy. They can also hold grudges.

In a recent study, a team of biologists found that ants can learn from experience and hold grudges when confronted with competitors from another nest with whom they’ve had previous negative experiences.

“We often have the idea that insects function like pre-programmed robots. Our study provides new evidence that, on the contrary, ants also learn from their experiences and can hold a grudge,” said Dr. Volker Nehring, an academic counselor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at Germany’s University of Freiburg, in a press release from the university.

Nehring co-led the research team with doctoral student Mélanie Bey.

The team put the ants in the experiment in confrontations with rivals from another nest. The study ants remembered negative experiences they had had during earlier encounters, behaving more aggressively toward ants they had experienced as aggressive than they did toward ants from unknown nests.

Additionally, when they came upon ants from a nest they’d previously encountered who were passive, they were less aggressive.

Ants distinguish between their own nest members and ants from other nests using odors, with each nest having its own unique scent.

Earlier studies have demonstrated that ants behave especially aggressively toward their closest neighbors. They are particularly likely to bite members of neighboring nests with their mandibles, or even spray acid to kill their competitors.

Ants from nests that are further afield are less likely to be subjected to such aggressive maneuvers. But until now, it wasn’t clear why.

The researchers found that ants remember their attackers’ smell, which causes them to be more aggressive when faced with competitors from familiar nests.

The experiment was carried out in two phases. The first involved ants having various experiences: One group had an encounter with their own nestmates, while the second encountered aggressive ants from rival nest A. The third group were faced with another group of aggressive ants, this time from rival nest B.

There were five encounters on consecutive days, each lasting one minute.

“In the subsequent test phase, the researchers examined how the ants from the different groups behaved when they encountered competitors from nest A. The ants that had already been confronted with conspecifics from this nest in the first phase behaved significantly more aggressively than those from the other two groups,” the press release said.

In order to find out how much the ants’ higher aggression was a response to the behavior of rivals from a particular nest, the research team modified the experiment.

“In the first phase, they now distinguished between encounters with aggressive and passive ants. They ensured that an ant behaved passively by cutting off its antennae. In phase two of the experiment, the ants that had previously only encountered passive competitors behaved significantly less aggressively,” the press release said.

Next, Nehring and colleagues plan to look into if and how much ants modify their olfactory receptors in response to their experiences.

The study, “Associative learning of non-nestmate cues improves enemy recognition in ants,” was published in the journal Current Biology.

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