Audio
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Humans
Here’s where jazz gets its swing
Swing, the feeling of a rhythm in jazz music that compels feet to tap, may arise from near-imperceptible delays in musicians’ timing, a study shows.
- Planetary Science
Mars has two speeds of sound
High-pitched clacks from a laser on NASA’s Perseverance rover zapping rocks traveled faster than the lower-pitched hum of the Ingenuity helicopter’s blades.
- Animals
These baby greater sac-winged bats babble to learn their mating songs
Greater sac-winged bat pups babble their way through learning their rich vocal repertoire, similar to how human infants babble before speaking.
- Archaeology
Humans made a horn out of a conch shell about 18,000 years ago
Ancient find may have sounded off during rituals in a cave adorned with wall art.
- Animals
Naked mole-rat colonies speak with unique dialects
Machine learning reveals that these social rodents communicate with distinctive speech patterns that are culturally inherited.
- Animals
A sparrow song remix took over North America with astonishing speed
A variation on the white-throated sparrow’s song spread 3,300 kilometers in just a few decades.
- Animals
Southern right whale moms and calves may whisper to evade orcas
Mother-calf whale pairs call to each other quietly to stay in touch while avoiding attracting the attention of predators, a study suggests.
- Ecosystems
Moonlight shapes how some animals move, grow and even sing
The moon’s light influences lion prey behavior, dung beetle navigation, fish growth, mass migrations and birdsong.
- Animals
Parasites ruin some finches’ songs by chewing through the birds’ beaks
Parasitic fly larvae damage the beaks of Galápagos finches, changing their mating songs and possibly causing females to pick males of a different species.
- Health & Medicine
A neural implant can translate brain activity into sentences
With electrodes in the brain, scientists translated neural signals into speech, which could someday help the speechless speak.
- Earth
This volcano revealed its unique ‘voice’ after an eruption
Identifying patterns in a volcano’s low-frequency sounds could help monitor its activity.
- Animals
Here’s what narwhals sound like underwater
Scientists eavesdropped while narwhals clicked and buzzed. The work could help pinpoint how the whales may react to more human noise in the Arctic.
