PhysOrg

With Oskar Aszmann and his team at the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery, MedUni Vienna has long been regarded as a world leader in bionic limb reconstruction. It was only last year that the world's first fully integrated bionic arm prosthesis was developed at MedUni Vienna. This is ready-to-use and is described as "Plug and Play." Although all bionic aids have so far been used in humans, the technique known as osseointegration (direct skeletal attachment) has now been used for the very first time in a bearded vulture—the creature was given a new foot. A paper on this ground-breaking procedure has been published in Scientific Reports. View the full article

A University of Plymouth researcher is among the authors of a new report into the causes, effects and solutions of our biodiversity and climate crises and the importance of tackling them in tandem. View the full article

Sweet pittosporum (Pittosporum undulatum) was once a well-behaved tree growing in gullies from Gippsland in Victoria up to Brisbane in Queensland. View the full article

A new study reports that birds across the continental U.S. tend to avoid backyard feeders in louder areas. When light and noise pollution were both present, even more species stayed away. View the full article

A plump robin wearing a tiny metal backpack with an antenna hops around a suburban yard in Takoma Park, then plucks a cicada from the ground for a snack. View the full article

A team of researchers from Oklahoma State University, the University of Central Oklahoma and the University of Arkansas has found that the mere sight of sick birds of their own kind is enough to set off an immune response in healthy canaries. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, the group describes experiments they conducted with caged birds in their lab. View the full article

A team of researchers, led by Northumbria University, have been working to understand and develop a vaccine for an infection that's been killing off rare penguins in New Zealand. View the full article

Using drones and artificial intelligence to monitor large colonies of seabirds can be as effective as traditional on-the-ground methods, while reducing costs, labor and the risk of human error, a new study finds. View the full article

Eggs littered the sand, but there was no sign of life around or in them. View the full article

Every night during the spring and fall migration seasons, thousands of birds are killed when they crash into illuminated windows, disoriented by the light. But a new study in PNAS shows that darkening just half of a building's windows can make a big difference for birds. Using decades' worth of data and birds collected by Field Museum scientists at Chicago's McCormick Place convention center, the researchers found that on nights when half the windows were darkened, there were 11 times fewer bird collisions during spring migration and 6 times fewer collisions during fall migration than when all the windows were lit. View the full article

Researchers in Lund, Copenhagen and Norwich have shown that harmful mutations present in the DNA play an important—yet neglected—role in the conservation and translocation programs of threatened species. View the full article

The melodic and diverse songs of birds frequently inspire pop songs and poems, and have been for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" or "The Nightingale" by H.C. Andersen. View the full article

The North American mockingbird is famous for its ability to imitate the song of other birds. But it doesn't just mimic its kindred species, it actually composes its own songs based on other birds' melodies. An interdisciplinary research team has now worked out how exactly the mockingbird constructs its imitations. The scientists determined that the birds follow similar musical rules as those found in human music, from Beethoven to Kendrick Lamar. View the full article

A new study of pigeons has revealed that they flock together in the presence of predators for the collective benefit, rather than for selfish interest. This is in stark contrast to the long-held 'selfish herd' theory that animal movements in herds are determined by self-preservation alone. View the full article

A recent study by a team of researchers led by Dr. Vinod Kumar Saranathan from the Division of Science at Yale-NUS College has discovered a complex, three-dimensional crystal called the single gyroid within feathers of the blue-winged leafbird. Dr. Saranathan and his team's breakthrough came from their investigation of the feather colors of leafbirds, an enigmatic group of perching birds endemic to South and Southeast Asia (including Singapore), one species of which has evolved the unique crystals in its plumage. View the full article

Siberian jays are group living birds within the corvid family that employ a wide repertoire of calls to warn each other of predators. Sporadically, however, birds use one of these calls to trick their neighboring conspecifics and gain access to their food. Researchers from the universities of Konstanz (Germany), Wageningen (Netherlands), and Zurich (Switzerland) have now examined how Siberian jays avoid being deceived by their neighbors. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that these birds have great trust in the warning calls from members of their own group, but mainly ignore such calls from conspecifics of neighboring territories. Thus, the birds use social information to differentiate between trustworthy and presumably false warning calls. Similar mechanisms could have played a role in the formation of human language diversity and especially in the formation of dialects. View the full article

A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has found that Eurasian jays are less likely than people to be deceived by well-known magic tricks. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their motivation for testing birds with magic tricks and what they learned by doing so. View the full article

From city centres to rural fields, human activity has decimated populations of France's most common bird species, scientists warned on Monday, citing data collected over 30 years by volunteer ornithologists. View the full article

In bear country, it's normal to find bruins munching down on temptations left out by humans—from a backyard apple tree to leftovers in the trash bin—but these encounters can cause trouble for humans and bears alike. One method to reduce human-bear conflicts is to secure attractants like garbage and livestock feed. View the full article

Just as caged canaries once warned coal miners of the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, free-flying seabirds are now warning humanity about the deteriorating health of our oceans. View the full article

Many seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere are struggling to breed—and in the Southern Hemisphere, they may not be far behind. These are the conclusions of a study, published May 28 in Science, analyzing more than 50 years of breeding records for 67 seabird species worldwide. View the full article

With global warming decreasing the size of New Zealand's alpine zone, a University of Otago study found out what this means for our altitude-loving kea. View the full article

A trio of researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Edinburgh has found that people filling garden feeders have a pervasive and long-distance impact on bird populations. In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Jack Shutt, Urmi Trivedi and James Nicholls describe their study of bird droppings across parts of Scotland. View the full article

A pair of researchers, one with the UK's Natural History Museum, the other a King Island historian, has found an almost complete extinct dwarf emu egg on King Island. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Julian Hume and Christian Robertson describe the egg and compare it to other dwarf emu eggs and also with the eggs from the mainland emu. View the full article

The discovery of new information relating to a critically endangered bird species has given scientists new hope for finding the last remaining individuals in the wild—and a roadmap to save the species from extinction. View the full article