Nate Rott

Like, do you prefer this song sparrow?

Or this one?

And they found that overall, humans agreed with the animals' preferences, suggesting we share a sense of beauty with the natural world.

Nate Rott, NPR News.

And Nate Rott.

Hello.

And another that looks at a, let's call it counterintuitive grooming behavior in birds.

Well, Elsie, it turns out some wild populations are able to survive this exceptional drought through something called rapid evolution.

It's when populations go through genetic changes in a very short time period.

Slow and steady.

How did the scientists even figure this out?

Well, so they looked at the same populations of scarlet monkeyflowers for over a decade.

They hiked out to these, like, remote populations of monkeyflowers, checking which plants lived, which died, and they collected their seeds for genetic sequencing.

Like, so what if an insect comes along or there's a prolonged period of rain?

Will the survivors have enough genetic variation within them to respond again?

That's kind of the role of the dice that evolution brings.

And this is the kind of science that shows how it all goes down.

Yeah, so Elsa, it's not the kind of bathing that you might be thinking of.

This study looks at the mechanics of something called dust bathing, which I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't even know it was like a thing.

Right?