ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

Sea otters are the smallest marine mammal. As cold-water dwellers, staying warm is a top priority, but their dense fur only goes so far. We have long known that high metabolism generates the heat they need to survive, but we didn't know how they were producing the heat -- until now.

The ability to focus on where we will be in the near future, rather than where we are at present, may be a key characteristic of the mammalian brain's built-in navigation system, suggests a new study. The researchers wirelessly tracked the brain activity of flying Egyptian fruit bats, finding that neural activity in the bats' hippocampuses more strongly represented future locations than current locations.