February 10, 2025: Today we're covering the thinking person's game, the implications of a suppressed bird-flu study and the origins of joking. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | The Thinking Person's Game | You might still be reeling from, or celebrating, the Philadelphia Eagles' rout last night of the former National Football League champions, the Kansas City Chiefs. However, it is soccer (or "football" to much of the world), not "American football," that typically gets cited as the brainiest sport or the one played by the most intelligent athletes. And now a study has detailed some of the exceptional cognitive capabilities held by elite soccer players. A better working memory and better planning and problem-solving skills are among them, write Spektrum der Wissenschaft editor Christiane Gelitz and Scientific American editor Gary Stix.
How they did it: For the study, more than 200 professional soccer players from Brazil and Sweden filled out a personality survey and performed intelligence tests. About 9 percent of the participants were women. A control group of people with similar education levels and social backgrounds was given the same survey and tests.
What the experts say: American football quarterbacks and running backs, as well as top basketball players, also might score highly on the researchers' measures, says study co-author and neuroscientist Predrag Petrovic. "That is best exemplified in Nikola Jokić [of the Denver Nuggets], who I dream of testing at some point," Petrovic says. | | | Systematic observations of bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans show that they all engage in playful teasing, just as humans do, writes Erica Cartmill, a professor of anthropology, cognitive science and animal behavior. Cartmill's team views this behavior as falling into a gray area between pure aggression and pure play. The researchers found playful teasing to be widespread across all great apes. The roots of human humor and possibly even "the first joke" may go back 13 million years or more to the last common ancestor of bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, humans and orangutans, the team concludes.
How they did it: A validated coding system was developed to generate observations of mainly one-sided provocations in bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that were both playful and annoying. Such behaviors might involve an element of surprise, a look at the target's face and/or repetition. Using this rubric, the team identified a total of 129 examples of playful teasing in which the provocateur's behavior had at least three of five defining traits.
Why this is cool: Cartmill and her colleagues are now looking into whether playful teasing occurs in a few nonprimate species. The focus is on species with large brains, few predators and long childhoods. Examples could include dogs, dolphins, parrots and elephants. You can help with this research by sending observations or recordings of playful teasing in animals to Cartmill's team at: www.observinganimals.org/teasing. | | | • A study of inadvertent bird-flu infections among veterinarians who treat cattle is among the pieces of research suppressed by the new U.S. presidential administration. The results could yield insights into how the H5N1 avian influenza passes from cattle to humans. The missing report is yet another sign of the extent to which the U.S. is unprepared for bird flu in humans, writes Scientific American chief opinion editor Megha Satyanarayana. | 4 min read
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Speaking of the can, in a different sense of the word, a sewer "fatberg" in Perth, Australia, reportedly forced officials to cancel a Bryan Adams concert set for last night.
| —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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