A good song can stick with us for a long, long time.
Apparently we’re not the only ones with long musical memories.
A study from Ohio State University finds bats can remember a ringtone for years if they associate the sound with food.
Specifically we’re talking about frog-eating bats.
Scientists know that when these bats hear the mating call of a frog species they like to eat, they fly toward it.
They wanted to learn how the bats might respond to a different kind of sound.
So they took 49 bats and played them a series of ringtones.
When they were trained to associate one of those ringtones with food, the bats would fly towards the speaker and find a treat on top.
A year later, the scientists found some of the wild bats and tested them again.
They did the same thing the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that.
In each of those tests, the bats flew back toward the sound expecting food, just as they had done in the initial experiment.
Some also flew in response to the other ringtones that weren’t associated with food.
But a control group of untrained bats who heard the same ringtones did nothing more than twitch their ears; they didn’t fly anywhere in response.
It’s impressive to think that bat memories are strong enough that they can remember a sound they heard four years ago and still remember what they were trained to do to respond to it.
But my question is: how come none of the bats heard these ringtones played for them and said to the scientists: “aren’t you going to answer that?”
Over the last two years the world has used about 800 zillion face masks, many of which have ended up in landfills.
But a French company, Plaxtil, has another idea.
It collects the old masks, cleans them, breaks them back down into basic ingredients and uses those ingredients to make rulers and protractors for geometry class.
Those efforts seems to be shaping up nicely, am I right?
A rare discovery of long-term memory in wild frog-eating bats (Ohio State University)
Plaxtil Recycles Used Face Masks Into School Supplies (Cool Hunting)
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