Sleeping octopuses might experience fleeting dreams - new study

By Alexandra Schnell, Research Fellow in Behavioural Ecology, Darwin College, University of Cambridge

A couple of years ago an octopus named Heidi was filmed changing colours as she slept. The footage shows her flickering from a ghostly shade of white to yellow and then turning a deep shade of burgundy before morphing into a mottled green pattern.

The video went viral. Millions were instantly mesmerised by Heidi in her slumber, particularly because the narrator speculates that she’s having a vivid dream – dreaming that she’s hunting and eating a crab, like a snoozing dog chasing “dream rabbits”.

Was…

Read complete article

~	Inside Germany's Orwellian crackdown on Palestine Congress

~	Newly uncovered Helen of Troy fresco shows Pompeii’s elite were eager for ancient Greek stories about women

~	London Marathon: how visually impaired people run

~	Crucial building blocks of life on Earth can more easily form in outer space – new research

~	Hard work and happy accidents: why do so many of us prefer ‘difficult’ analogue technology?

~	How a teenager helped identify a new species of giant marine reptile

~	Cities with Black women police chiefs had less street violence during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests

~	5 years after the Mueller report into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election on behalf of Trump: 4 essential reads

~	AI chatbots refuse to produce ‘controversial’ output − why that’s a free speech problem

~	3 things to learn about patience − and impatience − from al-Ghazali, a medieval Islamic scholar