The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor.

The dolphin, then pinned the cuttlefish with its snout while standing on its head, before killing it instantly with a rapid downward thrust and "loud click" audible to divers as the hard cuttlebone broke.

The dolphin then lifted the body up and beat it with her nose to drain the toxic black ink that cuttlefish squirt into the water to defend themselves when attacked.

Next the prey was taken back to the seafloor, where the dolphin scraped it along the sand to strip out the cuttlebone, making the cuttlefish soft for eating.

"It's a sign of how well their brains are developed. It's a pretty clever way to get pure calamari without all the horrible bits," Mark Norman, the curator of molluscs at Museum Victoria.

A separate 2005 study provided the first sign dolphins may be capable of group learning and using tools, with a mother seen teaching her daughters to break off sea sponges and wear them as protection while scouring the seafloor in Western Australia.

Related:
Just How Smart Are Dolphins?.

New Caledonian Crows Find Two Tools Better Than One.

What may seem like simple amusement for Guinness and her fellow canines is in fact revolutionizing cognitive research. Range is the first animal researcher to attempt to lure domestic dogs to a touch screen. Scientists in her field have spent decades working with pigeons pecking at pictures, conversing with apes using brightly colored touch symbols, and listening in on the grunting noises made by seals. But the talents of Canis familiaris remained largely unexplored.

"Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered," says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig.

"When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes even close to the dog," says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at interpreting human gestures.

The researchers held two containers, one empty and the other containing food, in front of chimpanzees and dogs. Then they pointed to the correct container. The canines understood the gesture immediately, while the apes, genetically much more closely related to humans, were often perplexed by the pointing finger.

That's not all. Many dogs were even capable of interpreting the researcher's gaze. When the scientists looked at a container, the dogs would search inside for food, but when they looked in the direction of the container but focused on a point above it on the wall, the dogs were able to understand that this was not meant as a sign.

Dogs are so geared toward communication with people that it seems to run in their genes. Kaminski and her fellow researchers repeated the pointing experiment with six-week-old puppies. Astonishingly, even the puppies understood immediately that it was worth investigating the area the human finger was pointing to.

Range has already shown that dogs use a learning strategy -- selective imitation -- that, until recently, was believed to be unique to human children once they turned a year old. She taught her own dog to push a handle to open a food dispenser. Every dog would instinctively use its snout to push on such a device. But Guinness was only rewarded when she used her paw.

Once Guinness had learned the technique, individual dogs were brought in to observe her. If Guinness had a ball in her mouth, so that it was obvious that she could not use her snout, most of the observers pushed on the handle with their snouts. But when they saw Guinness without a ball they usually used their paws. If Guinness chose the more difficult method for no apparent reason, the dogs apparently concluded that there must be some advantage to this behavior.

Young children behave in a similar way.

Nowadays dog owners send their beloved pets to agility training, where they balance on ramps and crawl through tubes. Some dogs attend "dog dancing" sessions, and puppy training has become all the rage. "Dog education has changed," says Range.

Border collies like Rico and Guinness would probably be happiest watching over their own herds of sheep. "They simply want to work," says Range. American dog researcher Stanley Coren is convinced that the border collie is the most intelligent of the roughly 400 breeds of dog.

As clever as dogs are when it comes to all things relating to their masters, they fail miserably when logic comes into play.

• How is information coded in neural activity?

  It is likely that mental information is stored not in single cells but in populations of cells and patterns of their activity. Although traveling bursts of voltage can carry signals across the brain quickly, those electrical spikes may not be the only—or even the main—way that information is carried in nervous systems. ­

• How are memories stored and retrieved?

  Almost all theories of memory propose that memory storage depends on synapses, the tiny connections between brain cells. When two cells are active at the same time, the connection between them strengthens; when they are not active at the same time, the connection weakens. Out of such synaptic changes emerges an association.

  There is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly. Moreover, the act of retrieval can destabilize the memory. When you recall a past event, the memory becomes temporarily susceptible to erasure.

• What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?

  Some of the baseline activity may represent the brain restructuring knowledge in the background, simulating future states and events, or manipulating memories. Most things we care about—reminiscences, emotions, drives, plans, and so on—can occur with no external stimulus and no overt output that can be measured.

  The awake state may be essentially the same as the dreaming state, only partially anchored by external stimuli. In this view, your conscious life is an awake dream.

• How do brains simulate the future?

  Many neuroscientists have suggested over the past few decades that perception arises not simply by building up bits of data through a hierarchy but rather by matching incoming sensory data against internally generated expectations.

  Your memories about your life may come to be understood as a special subtype of emulation, one that is pinned down and thus likely to flow in a certain direction.

• What are emotions?

  Emotions are measurable physical responses to salient stimuli: the increased heartbeat and perspiration that accompany fear.

  Modern views propose that emotions are brain states that quickly assign value to outcomes and provide a simple plan of action. Thus, emotion can be viewed as a type of computation, a rapid, automatic summary that initiates appropriate actions.

  One goal of emotional neuroscience is to understand the nature of the many disorders of emotion, depression being the most common and costly. Impulsive aggression and violence are also thought to be consequences of faulty emotion regulation.

• What is intelligence?

  Recent experiments explore the possible relationship of intelligence to the capacity of short-term memory, the ability to quickly resolve cognitive conflict, or the ability to store stronger associations between facts; the results are not yet conclusive. Many other possibilities—better restructuring of stored information, more parallel processing, or superior emulation of possible futures—have not yet been probed by experiments.

• How is time represented in the brain?

  Your notion of the smooth passage of time is a construction of the brain. Clarifying the picture of how the brain normally solves timing problems should give insight into what happens when temporal calibration goes wrong, as may happen in the brains of people with dyslexia. Sensory inputs that are out of sync also contribute to the risk of falls in elderly patients.

• Why do brains sleep and dream?

  In humans, continuous wakefulness of the nervous system results in mental derangement; rats deprived of sleep for 10 days die.

  There are at least three popular (and nonexclusive) guesses. The first is that sleep is restorative, saving and replenishing the body’s energy stores. However, the high neural activity during sleep suggests there is more to the story. A second theory proposes that sleep allows the brain to run simulations of fighting, problem solving, and other key actions before testing them out in the real world. A third theory—the one that enjoys the most evidence—is that sleep plays a critical role in learning and consolidating memories and in forgetting inconsequential details. In other words, sleep allows the brain to store away the important stuff and take out the neural trash.

  Dreaming is akin to an off-line practice session.

• How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?

  While the brain’s ability to do parallel processing is impressive, its ability to rapidly synthesize those parallel processes into a single, behavior-guiding output is at least as significant.

  There is no special anatomical location in the brain where information from all the different systems converges; rather, the specialized areas all interconnect with one another, forming a network of parallel and recurring links. Somehow, our integrated image of the world emerges from this complex labyrinthine network of brain structures.

• What is consciousness?

  The mechanisms underlying consciousness could reside at any of a variety of physical levels: molecular, cellular, circuit, pathway, or some organizational level not yet described. The mechanisms might also be a product of interactions between these levels. One compelling but still speculative notion is that the massive feedback circuitry of the brain is essential to the production of consciousness.

Researchers have found that New Caledonian crows--which are known to make complex food-getting tools in the wild--can also spontaneously use one tool on another to get a snack.

It appears that the birds may have solved the problem that confronted them by using analogical reasoning rather than simple trial and error. Analogical reasoning requires the ability to see a novel situation as being essentially the same as a previous situation, the researchers explained.

In the study, the researchers presented crows with some meat in a hole and a stick that left the meat out of reach. The birds needed to get a long stick out of a "toolbox" in order to get the meat from the hole. However, the long stick was also out of reach. "The creative thing the crows did was to use the short stick to get the long tool out of the box so that they could then use the long stick to get the meat," said Alex Taylor, also of the University of Auckland.

In a second experiment, the researchers reversed the positions of the two sticks so that the small stick was inside the toolbox and the long stick was handy. The crows then briefly probed the box containing the short stick with the long stick before correcting their error by taking the stick directly to the hole.

Gray said. "Six out of seven birds tried to get the long stick with the short stick at their first attempt at solving the problem. To do this, they had to inhibit their normal response of trying to get the food directly with the short stick and realize that they could use the short stick to get the long stick."

Behavioural Ecology Research Group provide many details on the research of New Caledonian crows tool making and using behaviour.

New Caledonian crow tool manufacture and use - University of Auckland.