We’ve long known that humans are susceptible to something called the “bouba-kiki effect,” a weird trick of the brain that links the nonsense words “bouba” and “kiki” to specific shapes. “Bouba” feels soft and rounded, while “kiki” feels sharp and spiky, both looking a little like comic-book impact effects, or stars, with solid centers surrounded by spokes. Not that you needed me to explain that. You probably already imagined it.

As it turns out, a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences suggests dogs might be just as susceptible to this weird quirk of the brain as we are.

Researchers at the University of Parma gathered 51 domestic dogs and their humans to test whether the dogs share this quirk of the brain. Sitting in a room flanked by screens displaying the respective shapes, the dogs listened to a human voice broadcast the nonsense words while cameras and AI tracked their gaze.

When “bouba” played through the speakers, the dogs lingered on the rounded shape; when “kiki” dropped, they stared harder at the spiky shape.

Dogs and Humans Share a Strange Brain Quirk, New Study Finds

To make sure the owners weren’t influencing the results, the researchers reran the trial with owners wearing headphones blasting rock music. The results stayed the same.

The first cohort showed only a mild overall bias toward the spikier “kiki” shape, which the scientists attribute to the fact that dogs’ faces look much more angular and pointy than ours. This goes hand in hand with humans showing a similarly slight bias toward “bouba,” since we’re used to seeing rounded features.  But in the second test, where the human owners wore headphones, the dogs were just as likely to think of “kiki” as spiky and “bouba” as round as we were.

This suggests that whatever drives our ability to associate sounds with symbols isn’t exclusive to us, as recent studies also show that baby chicks and even macaque monkeys seem to agree that “kiki” is spiky and “bouba” is round. This sensory wiring could be shared across species.

Who knows, maybe other animals associate the sharpness or roundness of words with the sharpness or roundness of shapes?

The post How Your Dog’s Brain Works More Like Yours Than You Think, According to Scientists appeared first on VICE.

According to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a team of Latin American and European scientists identified 57 new species and 5 new genera in just two weeks! Most interestingly, one discovery from a 2025 mission they analyzed, though not a new species, is back in the news: Meet the starfish that strongly resembles Patrick Star—the beloved dunderhead companion of children’s cartoon protagonist SpongeBob SquarePants.

The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census led the Species Discovery Workshop, which, in partnership with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, resulted in the identifications. It took place in Buenos Aires from July 13-24, 2026. Participants examined deep-sea biological samples, mostly from the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Underwater Oasis of the Mar del Plata Canyon expedition.

The expedition ran from July 23 to August 12, 2025, aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor (too), with help from the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian.

A Patrick Star Look-Alike and a ‘Loki’ Sea Cucumber Made This Ocean Expedition Hard to Forget

Over 4 million people witnessed the 2025 deep-sea live stream, where “Patrick Star” first captivated the public. Fortunately, however, he was left to his own devices rather than captured. During the event, viewers compared a crab to a “drag queen.” One look-alike deemed a new species this year was “Loki the Sea Cucumber” (Peniagone sp.), whose horn-like appendages earned him his name.

Many will remember that SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg (1961-2018) was a marine biologist, so it’s a shame he couldn’t be around to see the findings.

The post Scientists Found a Starfish That Looks Like Patrick. Yes, That Patrick. appeared first on VICE.

The 1975 film “Jaws,” in which a local government hires a shark hunter to protect the town’s tourism industry, delighted me as a 10-year-old. But other than its infamous opening sequence, I don’t recall being scared. My younger sister, however, developed a years-long fear of deep water, even our 11-foot-deep pool. Maybe I’d just cultivated too much shark knowledge, well aware that these apex predators are docile and do not hunt humans like they do in Peter Benchley’s novel. The book and the film — I consumed both and can report that Steven Spielberg’s adaptation is better — only instilled in me a deeper love and respect for sharks. They are still my favorite fish to observe in aquariums or the ocean.

Outside of the movies, shark bounties are uncommon these days. That’s why news this week that Greenland was planning to cull 1,000 Greenland sharks was so alarming to many online. Officials in the Avannaata municipality on the island nation’s west coast approved the plan, offering fishers 300 Danish kroner, or about $45, per shark heart. The government complained that hungry sharks are eating too much Atlantic cod and Greenland halibut, cutting into what humans can bring home and damaging their gear. Lars Erik Gabrielsen, mayor of Avannaata, told The Guardian, “We need to safeguard the income of fishermen and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations.”

Conservationists and shark lovers were outraged at the proposal. Nick Dulvy, a professor and marine conservationist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, called it a “disaster” and said that biologically, the sharks are “the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing.” Marine ecologist Spencer Roberts, whose advocacy work includes calling out shark poaching, posted on X that “There is a psychotic sense of entitlement spreading around the world that imagines humans own the fish in the sea and demands retaliatory killing of predators who rely on these fish. Even centuries-old sages of the Arctic Ocean are not safe from this deranged human delusion.”

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Indeed, the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is bizarre and misunderstood, basically being the couch potato of the depths of the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, where waters are just above freezing. Known as an abyssal species, it slothfully trawls the shadows like some mournful Lovecraftian being, possessing an especially sluggish metabolism, which isn’t surprising considering its size. Greenland sharks weigh in at one ton and reaching up to 23 feet in length. The maximum lifespan can average 400 years, the longest lifespan of any known vertebrate, meaning there are apparently Greenland sharks that are older than the United States. If that doesn’t blow you out of the water, I don’t know what will. Humans are famously bad at mentally fathoming deep time, so thinking about these ghostly rotund things hiding in the dark of the ocean, outliving empires like an ichthyological Ozymandias, fills me with even more awe than most sharks do.

In a rare spot of good news, the local government dropped the plan after national officials questioned its legality, but a future cull hasn’t been ruled out. Still, it’s worth upholding this turnaround as an example of why speaking out on animal rights can be successful. We don’t need to just sit back and watch the extinction of any species that doesn’t directly benefit us, while of course recognizing that fishers have to eat too. Some have proposed reimbursing fishers or using acoustic deterrents instead of mass slaughter.

But it’s more than just Greenland sharks at risk, with an estimated 79 million sharks dying in fisheries in 2019. At least 25 million of those species are threatened. As coral reefs struggle to survive, many sharks are losing their main food source, but humans are to blame for that one. These animals can be dangerous, same as a grizzly bear or elephant, but people tend to value sharks a lot less. This is in spite of their critical role in a healthy environment. Sharks aren’t monsters, they evolved to fill very specific roles in the ocean — a huge block in the Jenga of life — and if they go, our oceans would dramatically tumble in ways that would negatively impact humans too.

“Jaws” is a fantastic film if you can suspend your disbelief about a great white being the menace of the seas. That’s really us, but it doesn’t have to be.

The post Leave the Greenland sharks alone appeared first on Salon.com.

Watch a playful capybara twirl a stick around his mouth like he's performing a trick at a talent show. He seems very dedicated to the art of stick twirling. His serious expression says it all.

Another capybara hanging out nearby simply chews on a stick to pass the time. — Read the rest

The post Watch a serious capybara twirl a stick in his mouth appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you have ever eaten French fries in the vicinity of seagulls, you have experienced kleptoparasitism, even if you don't know the word. Seagulls snatch fries from humans. Bald eagles harass ospreys into dropping fish. Pea crabs live inside mollusks like clams and oysters and steal their food. — Read the rest

The post A dolphin in Australia steals food from fish in the grossest way appeared first on Boing Boing.

I watched this video on The Kid Should See This; it's a time-lapse of "jelly bean" isopods eating chunks of sweet potato. I've not heard of jelly bean isopods before, so I looked it up and learned that it's a rare color variety of pill bug that came from a single colony on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia and comes in a variety of colors: orange, gold, red, yellow, black, striped, and speckled. — Read the rest

The post Jelly bean isopods, rubber ducky isopods, and other pill bugs people keep as pets appeared first on Boing Boing.

A new species of wild cat has been identified in a Bolivian forest: The Tilcayo cat is in the genus Leopardus, a group of small cats native to the Americas, and is smaller than a domestic cat.

The new wild cat species is about the size of a domestic kitten and lives in Bolivia.

— Read the rest

The post A tiny new wild cat species was just found in Bolivia appeared first on Boing Boing.

Maybe you learned that thousands of years ago, a now-extinct species of cheetah sped across the plains of North America. New genetic evidence shows that these animals weren't cheetahs, but were more closely related to American pumas. Paleontologists had been fooled by the animal's morphological similarity to African cheetahs, but it turns out that similarity was just an instance of convergent evolution. — Read the rest

The post Ancient DNA shows the extinct American cheetah was really a puma appeared first on Boing Boing.