Research lab
Scottish research university in St Andrews, Fife, known for strong programs in sciences, humanities, and interdisciplinary studies across many fields.
Wild African savanna elephants gesture intentionally, finds an Animal Cognition study that logged about 840 gestures in two South African parks. Its behavioural tests of intent put elephants, a lineage evolutionarily distant from primates, beside the apes in research on how gesture evolved.
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Scottish researchers used bomb radiocarbon in five stranded whales' teeth to show sperm and killer whale tooth layers form yearly through midlife. That gives museum teeth a dated record of each whale's life, though layers formed in old age were a less reliable age marker.
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The Bat1K consortium's Nature paper samples every one of the 21 recognised bat families and dates the group to roughly 65 million years ago, with the geography resting on where 44 fossil bats were found.
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Researchers at the University of St Andrews argue that firelight was bright enough to gather around and too dim to read a gesture by. Ancestral vocal tracts left no fossils, so the case rests on measurements of people alive now.
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Fifteen hours of footage from Dindefelo yielded 33 handovers of dipping sticks and other tools, most of them between relatives, with adults giving up ants they could have eaten to infants who then fished for themselves.
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A survey that began in 2000 as one 2.5-meter telescope pointed north now ships optical spectra from both hemispheres with 18 value-added catalogs, which moves the planning question from telescope time to archive tooling.
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A rider-run charity with a decade of funding, a field test in Fife and one Deliveroo courier's spreadsheet are being pressed into service as evidence, because the party holding the pay logic is not the party being asked to explain it.
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A Proc R Soc B paper argues that fire added as much as four hours to the day, and that fireside storytelling pushed human communication past the ape repertoire. The part worth watching is that a lab can check most of it.
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St Andrews researchers disturbed fjord sediment under controlled conditions and found the loss concentrated at the head of the loch, where peatland runoff settles, which turns a general blue-carbon case into an argument about particular sites.
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