geekosystem

Don't take this wrong, but in a lot of ways, you're not so different from a fruit fly. At least, the same sort of things that can make you depressed, like feeling helpless to change or bad situations in your life, also make fruit flies exhibit similar symptoms, such as slower movement and general lethargy. That's according to a study set to be published next month in the journal Current Biology which suggests that the roots of depression may go much deeper than once thought.

Around many ant colonies, laying eggs is a one-woman-show, the duty of the queen ant. It's a facet so ingrained in ants that a number of species have been known to drag females who start laying eggs out of the colony, biting and stinging them to death, a behavior that has been seen in the past as a move to eliminate competition to the queen. According to new research published this week in the journal Current Biology, though, the executions have nothing to do with competition among ants and everything to do with the health of the colony as a whole, suggesting the execution may be analogous to a cellular immune response in other animals.

Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Genetics believe they've captured a world first video -- images of a thought making it's way through the brain of a zebrafish. It's not a particularly complicated thought -- essentially 'Hey, that looks like it could be food.' -- but the fact that the team has imaged the very stuff of even simple thought for the first time is really kind of amazing -- not unlike magic. Keep reading to see the video of this unprecedented look into the mind of a zebrafish.

Oscar Wilde famously wrote "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," and it turns out he might have really hit the nail on the head. After all, you don't get much more in the gutter than dung beetles, a species of insect famed for making balls of other animals droppings, and it turns out those humble creatures are avid stargazers. In fact, without a night sky and the Milky Way above them, the insects seem to get lost and are unable to move in a straight line.

Fly larvae -- fine, maggots -- that are raised on food spiked with alcohol grow up into flies who can't learn normally without the aid of a little booze juice, marking yet another way in which maggots are pretty much just like college students. A study demonstrating the difficulties maggots experienced while trying to process new information without the aid of a morning beer to take the edge off things appears this week in the journal Current Biology, which reminds us that keg stands are not always recreational choices -- sometimes they are educational tools.

Of all the gross things that the human body can produce -- and let's face it folks, we can get pretty gnarly sometimes -- mucus has to be near the top of the heap. As unpleasant as it may be, though, that gunk does serve an important purpose, trapping bacteria and viruses before they can further infect your body. Now, MIT researchers are exploring the possibility that mucus could have the same disease preventing properties outside of your body, preventing bacteria from forming fortresses called biofilms.

The spade-toothed beaked whale is one of the ocean's most mysterious creatures. Known to science only because of a few skulls that have washed up on beaches in Chile and New Zealand, the creature is largely a mystery. Thanks to DNA testing, though, researchers know one more thing about the whales today: there are two fewer than there used to be after a mother and her calf washed ashore dead in New Zealand in 2010, marking the first time anyone had actually seen an intact specimen of the rare species.

I mean, not speak it like terribly well or anything, but still! This is Koshik, an elephant at a South Korean theme park who has picked up a couple words of korean language that he can vocalize to his trainers by sticking his trunk in his mouth. Researchers have just finished a two year study of the animal, trying to understand how it came to imitate human language so accurately. Well, accurately for an elephant. Don't take our word for it, though -- listen for yourself in the following video.

Bad news today for less-than-well-hung males. Well, male seed beetles at least. It turns out that contrary to the gentle reassurances of female seed beetles the world over, males with larger genital spines make for more successful and more attractive mates.

Historical research out of South Korea suggests that male sex hormones may be to blame for the shorter lives of men across cultures. The evidence for this? The shocking longevity of several centuries of Korean eunuchs. Researchers combing through the meticulously detailed birth and death records of the Korean Chosun Dynasty found that eunuchs  -- castrated men who worked as servants at court -- were a staggering 130 times more likely to live to see 100 than men in the modern age.

A new study from the University of Rochester in New York, that will be published in the upcoming journal Current Biology, has proven something most gamers know, but other people may not: gamers make equally accurate decisions faster than non-gamers.

The study focused mainly on action games, most likely because that genre of gaming consists of the quickest stimuli and results in the most negative outcome (usually death), finding that gamers develop a higher sensitivity to their surroundings compared to non-gamers. The authors of the study say gamers' fast decision-making comes from gamers having a faster probabilistic inference, which is the process by which the brain forms and refines probabilities, due to the nature of the stimuli in their games.