Eye Regeneration - Sleep in Birds - Exercise & Sleep - Boozy Evolution?

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/snail-human-eye-regeneration

 This snail may hold a secret to human eye regeneration

By Tina Hesman Saey

A snail may hold the key to restoring vision for people with some eye diseases.

Golden apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata) are freshwater snails from South America. Alice Accorsi became familiar with the species as a graduate student in Italy. “You could literally buy them in a pet store as snails that clean the bottom of the fish tanks,” she recalls. Turns out, the snails are among the most invasive species in the world. And that got Accorsi thinking: Why are they so resilient and able to thrive in new environments?

She began studying the snails’ immune systems and has now found they are not the only parts of the animals able to bounce back from adversity. These snails can completely regrow a functional eye within months of having one amputated, Accorsi and colleagues report August 6 in Nature Communications.
Side-by-side images of snail eyes. On the left is a normal, intact snail eye. On the right is an eye that has regrown two months after it was surgically removed. The eyes look similar. They are both round with a black spot in the middle.
A snail’s eye was surgically removed, but it grew a new one. Two months after amputation the new eye (right) looks much like the uninjured one (left).Alice Accorsi

Scientists have known for centuries that some snails can regrow their heads, and research has revealed other animals can regenerate bodies, tails or limbs. But this finding is exciting because apple snails have camera-like eyes similar to those of humans. Understanding how the snails re-create or repair their eyes might lead to therapies to heal people’s eye injuries or reverse diseases such as macular degeneration.    

Accorsi, now a developmental biologist at the University of California, Davis, used the molecular scissors called CRISPR/Cas9 to genetically disable certain key genes involved in eye development and established lineages of snails carrying those mutations. 

© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025. 
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/behavioral-neuroscience/bird-brains-and-behavior-an-excerpt/

 Sleep in birds

By Andrew Iwaniuk, Georg Striedter

Sleep is the most obvious behavior that, in most animals, follows a circadian rhythm. But have you ever seen a bird asleep? Maybe you have, though they usually wake up before you get close enough to see whether they have their eyes closed. Moreover, just because an animal is still and closed its eyes, does that really mean it is sleeping? Maybe it is just resting. Conversely, might some birds sleep with one or both eyes open?

Indeed, it is difficult to tell whether an animal is sleeping just by observing it. To overcome this problem, researchers may prod the animal to see whether it is less responsive at certain times of day. A more definitive method for demonstrating sleep in vertebrates is to record an animal’s brain waves (its electroencephalogram, or EEG), because these waves change significantly as an individual falls asleep and then progresses through several stages of sleep. In birds, the use of EEG recordings is essential because they can sleep with one or both eyes open, presumably so they can stay alert to threats. Ostriches, for example, tend to sleep while sitting on the ground, holding their head up high, and keeping both eyes open. They certainly look alert during this time, but EEG waves reveal that they are actually asleep

Types and patterns of sleep

An EEG measures the activity of many neurons simultaneously. In mammals, it is usually recorded from multiple electrodes placed over the neocortex; in birds, the electrodes are typically placed on top of the hyperpallium (aka the Wulst; see Chapter 1). In addition to performing an EEG, sleep researchers typically record the animal’s eye movements and an electromyogram (EMG), which is a measure of muscle activity, often characterized as muscle “tone.”

These kinds of studies have revealed that, in mammals, the transition from the waking state to sleep is marked by a shift from EEG waves that are low in amplitude (i.e., small) and high in frequency (>20 Hz) to waves that are much larger but lower in frequency (1–4 Hz). Because the latter state is characterized by powerful low-frequency EEG waves (aka slow-wave activity), it is commonly called slow-wave sleep (SWS). The mechanisms that cause SWS are complicated and involve a variety of sleep-promoting processes. However, the large amplitude of these slow waves reflects that, during SWS, numerous neurons fire in rhythm with one another so that their electrical potentials sum when they are recorded through the EEG electrodes.

© 2025 Simons Foundation
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/best-exercise-improve-sleep-yoga

 What is the best exercise to improve sleep?

By Kamal Nahas

High-intensity yoga for less than 30 minutes, twice a week, may be the best workout routine for catching high-quality shut-eye, a new study shows. But before people jump on the yoga trend, researchers say more experiments are needed to confirm the study’s findings.

While exercise in general is known to improve sleep, a meta-analysis published July 11 in Sleep and Biological Rhythms presents a broad comparison of exercise routines and their influence on sleep quality. By indirectly comparing 30 trials from about a dozen countries, researchers at Harbin Sport University in China ranked how well different exercise methods influence sleep.

Yoga won out, followed by walking, resistance training and aerobic exercise.

While sleep disorders can be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy or sleeping pills, these interventions don’t work for everyone. “Medications are helpful in the short-term, but some of them have negative effects on the elderly,” says Saurabh Thosar, a sleep researcher at the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences in Portland.

Exercise offers an alternative, but it’s tough to tell which routine is best, making it unclear how best to prescribe it. Trials that investigate this question tend to include one or two types of exercise differing in factors such as how hard, how often or how long they were performed for. Given the global prevalence of sleep problems such as insomnia, which recent estimates say affects about 16 percent of people worldwide, there is a pressing need to find the best exercise to prescribe for a good night’s snooze.
© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.
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https://www.science.org/content/article/our-ape-ancestors-taste-fermenting-fruit-may-have-paved-boozy-evolutionary-path

Our ape ancestors’ taste for fermenting fruit may have paved a boozy evolutionary path

 By Bridget Alex 

More than 10 million years ago, ancestral apes in Africa rummaged through leaf litter for tasty morsels: fallen, fermenting fruit. Tapping this resource may have given some apes a nutritional boost, an advantage that could have paved the way for the evolution of our own alcohol tolerance.

A study out today in BioScience adds support to this so-called “drunken monkey” hypothesis by examining just how often living apes indulge in fallen—presumably boozy—fruits. The research also gives this behavior a much-needed name: “scrumping.”

The work provides “a fresh and useful perspective on the importance of fallen fruit,” says Amanda Melin, a biological anthropologist at the University of Calgary who was not involved with the research. She adds that scrumping “is an efficient and evocative way to describe this behavior” that she will use in the future.

The form of alcohol we imbibe, ethanol, occurs naturally when yeast grows in fruits, saps, or nectars. Many animals, from elephants to songbirds, can get buzzed off these wild taps.

Meanwhile, most human societies have invented ways to ferment food and drink. Biomolecular traces on artifacts show that by at least 8000 years ago, people in the Caucasus region were brewing alcoholic beverages from grapes, while people in China were sipping on boozy drinks made from many ingredients, including millet, rice, ginger, and yam. These beverages’ arrival coincides roughly with the start of farming. In fact, some scholars think cereals may have been domesticated for beer rather than bread.

The idea that our species’ ability to consume alcohol arose in our distant primate ancestors was formulated by evolutionary biologist Robert Dudley 25 years ago as he was studying monkeys—hence the name of the hypothesis—rather than the chimps and other apes analyzed in the new study. Rank, fermenting fruit is easy to sniff out, the idea goes, so being able to eat it would have given ancient apes an additional resource that other animals avoided.
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