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Search resuls for: "Tom Metcalfe Writes About Science"


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The incessant drumming of a woodpecker on a hollow tree can be an annoying distraction for anyone who has to listen to it. “When you study songbirds, hummingbirds and parrots, you find areas that control vocal learning express parvalbumin more than other parts of the brain,” Fuxjager said. Future studies will look for other similarities, such as if the patterns of woodpecker drumming are learned at an early age, like the singing of songbirds, he said. Fuxjager noted that there are more than 200 species of woodpecker around the world and that they inhabit every continent, except Australia. Scientists study the singing of songbirds — and possibly now the drumming of woodpeckers — because it has parallels to human speech.
No one knows what all the sperm whale codas mean, but they can have distinctive rhythms and tempos, known as “dialects,” Hersh said. They’ve now determined that there are at least seven distinct sperm whale “vocal clans” across the Pacific Ocean, each with their own identity codas, Hersh said. And the sperm whale clans may be thousands of years old. Beguš is part of Project CETI — the Cetacean Translation Initiative — which was established last year to decipher the sounds of sperm whales. “As the authors note, we still understand little about the function of sperm whale codas,” she said in an email.
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