By Jim Robbins Imagine a chicken that could speak or a pigeon with a voice rivaling that of the most musical songbirds. Granted, the world probably doesn’t need any gossiping chickens or pigeons breaking out in song. But why some birds learn to create a deep repertoire and others are unable to has long been a research focus of the neurobiologist Erich D. Jarvis. “Vocal learning, just like spoken language itself, is a rare trait,” said Dr. Jarvis, who directs the Neurogenetics of Language laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. He studies the small group of species capable of speech, focusing on birds and mice, and he has long hoped to genetically engineer an animal that can vocalize in new ways. Introducing manipulated genes into the brain of a bird or a mouse that doesn’t vocalize could create that ability and provide new clues into the origins of speech. It may also one day help in finding treatments for people with speech problems or brain disorders. Dr. Jarvis, 60, didn’t start his career in neuroengineering. He once hoped to become a professional dancer, performing ballet at Manhattan’s renowned High School for the Performing Arts and then studying at the Alvin Ailey dance school. He was a member of the Westchester Ballet Company when he began wondering how the brain was able to create dance movements. His mentor at Rockefeller was Fernando Nottebohm, the researcher who discovered in the early 1980s that songbird brains generate new neurons each spring to enable them to sing. That revolutionary understanding of neurogenesis led to further findings that all brains, including human ones, grow new neurons throughout life. Until then, it had been scientific gospel that people came into the world with a fixed number. From 2002 to 2005, Dr. Jarvis helped lead the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, a project that renamed the regions of the avian brain to show that it was remarkably sophisticated. The research undermined the use of the term “bird brain” as a pejorative. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30316 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Sandy Ong On a Sunday afternoon in April, the main minibus terminal in Sukabumi, Indonesia, looked sleepy from the outside. But in an open space round the back, hundreds of men were gathered. Amid chatter and cigarette smoke, the air buzzed with excitement, for one of the region’s biggest bird-singing competitions was set to begin, and a motorbike was among the prizes. As the day progressed, dozens of songbirds were brought out for their 10-minute rounds, from tiny garden sunbirds and grey-cheeked bulbuls to larger oriental magpie-robins and orange-headed thrushes. Then the emcee announced the main event — the singing contest among the highly popular, strikingly handsome white-rumped shamas — and a hush fell over the crowd. The shamas’ owners murmured final words of encouragement and stepped away from their cages. Judges swept in with clipboards, assessing each bird for its song, ability to hold a steady tune, volume and showmanship. Soon it was down to a final two birds . . . and then “Baby White” was crowned the winner amid cheers from the crowd. Many men gathered on a patio beneath hanging cages holding songbirds Since the 1970s, songbird competitions have grown in popularity across Indonesia. With goats, motorcycles, watches and money (sometimes worth up to 10 years’ salary) up for grabs, the events are driving hordes of people to keep songbirds as pets. Indonesians have a long-standing culture of keeping birds as pets, and songbirds are especially popular, prized by collectors for their melodious singing and colorful plumage. “I keep songbirds as a hobby, to relieve stress and also gain a bit of money,” explained Harry Gunawan, a 78-year-old businessman and owner of 39 shamas, including the multiple prizewinning Baby White, while waiting for his new motorbike. Gunawan’s shamas are among an estimated 66 million to 84 million caged birds that are kept across Java, the island where 56 percent of Indonesia’s population lives and one in three households owns birds. These include more than 3 million white-rumped shamas and 2 million oriental magpie-robins. Wild birds are believed to be better songsters; hence, many are trapped in forests then crammed into tiny crates, drainpipes and even plastic bottles, destined for pet markets in Jakarta, Surabaya and other big cities. Birds that survive the journey — estimates of mortality rates range from 30 to 80 percent — will spend the rest of their lives confined to cages.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30315 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Azeen Ghorayshi In early June, Ally Betchan and her family made the monthly trek from their small central Texas town to a therapy center in Austin, hoping that she could learn to communicate. Like nearly 30 percent of people with autism, Ally is severely disabled and does not speak. Ally, 22, sat quietly in a small room next to her instructor, Soma Mukhopadhyay, a sprightly 63-year-old who, by contrast, talked almost nonstop. More than 30 years ago, Ms. Mukhopadhyay taught her nonspeaking autistic son, Tito, to write and type independently, creating a communication method that supporters hailed as transformative and critics have challenged ever since. Ms. Mukhopadhyay held up a clear plastic sheet marked with the alphabet, prompting Ally to make up a story. As Ally tugged rhythmically at her purse, she slowly pointed at letters to spell “DONNA KNOWS,” and then seemed to get stuck, pointing to a jumble of letters. “I’m so lost,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said, shaking the sheet and pressing her to try again. As Ms. Mukhopadhyay occasionally tapped under the letter board on her thigh or leaned in the direction of a letter, Ally eventually spelled: “CARING HURTS.” “‘Donna knows caring hurts’ — that is a life lesson,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said, nodding in agreement. Then, Ally jabbed many letters in quick succession, but distinctly: “SHE LOVES THOSE WHO CARE FOR HER.” Sitting beside her, Ally’s mother, aunt and grandmother smiled. Ms. Mukhopadhyay’s technique, called the Rapid Prompting Method, or R.P.M., is one of several intended to help nonverbal people learn to communicate using letter boards held in midair by another person. At the core of these assisted spelling methods is a radical assertion: that nonspeaking autistic people, many of whom have been considered intellectually disabled their whole lives, may have typical or even extraordinary cognitive abilities, obscured by motor problems and an overwhelmed sensory system that has cut them off from the world around them. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Language
Link ID: 30314 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Natalia Mesa To accurately navigate the world, an animal must learn, remember and continually update how its body position relates to what it sees in the world around it. New findings reveal the circuit mechanisms responsible for this process in fruit flies—and upend a widely held assumption that this kind of learning relies on dopamine. The research “solves this long-standing problem of how you learn about landmarks in the world,” says Lisa Giocomo, professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. “Over the last decade, some of the biggest insights into how the brain generates algorithms for navigational systems have come from Drosophila,” she says. “It’s been astonishing to see what’s been possible with that system.” When a neuron in a fly’s internal compass activates at the same time as a cell responding to a visual landmark, a third type of cell called an EL neuron releases the neuromodulator octopamine onto the visual inputs, according to the work, posted as a preprint in December 2025 and presented at the Jane Coffin Childs Symposium in May 2026. Octopamine acts as a signal that modifies the connection between the compass and visual cells, anchoring the fly’s sense of direction to visual cues. To their knowledge, the synaptic and circuit mechanisms the fly uses to update its internal compass work unlike any yet described, the study investigators say. “It’s a completely new learning mechanism, basically,” says Stanley Heinze, senior lecturer of sensory biology at Lund University, who was not involved in the study. Fruit flies, like other animals, have an internal compass made up of head direction cells that selectively activate based on the direction the fly faces. The fly’s internal representation of the world drifts without visual input but quickly reorients when familiar landmarks reappear. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30313 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Jeneen Interlandi In the mid-2010s, when they were still postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin kept bumping into different sides of the same obstacle. Poyet, an ecologist and a microbiologist, was trying to study rare bacterial species, the kind that had never been grown in a lab before. Groussin, a computational biologist in the same lab, wanted to understand how humans and microbes evolved together over millenniums. Each was focused on microbes that make their homes in and on the human body, what scientists collectively refer to as the human microbiome. But the only samples they could find to work with came from the same small sliver of humanity, namely populations that were wealthy, Western and white. “About 90 percent of all human diversity has been completely left out of the picture,” Groussin told me recently. It was as if someone had shone a bright flashlight on one small segment of a giant canvas and left the rest shrouded in darkness. The bright spot was well defined (imagine the face of a man). But they couldn’t really tell what they were looking at (whether that man was a monk, for example, or a matador) without seeing the rest of the canvas. Scientists refer to this vast, unexplored terrain as biology’s dark matter. Our bodies are home to more bacteria — on our skin, up our noses, in our guts and mouths and around our genitals — than there are stars in the Milky Way. These microbes have evolved not only with us but inside us, and scientists who study them closely say that hardly a biological process or system exists in which they do not play a role. They helped create our digestive systems and our immune systems. They influence the size and shape of our bodies. At least some research suggests that they also affect our brains, moods, personalities and behaviors. And yet, most of them have still not been identified, let alone studied. It was tantalizing to think about what a fuller picture might reveal. In recent years, scientists had linked the gut microbiome to a long list of conditions, including Crohn’s and irritable bowel syndrome, Parkinson’s, dementia and autism, and they were hopeful that a better understanding of those links would lead to treatments, if not cures. They were also sifting through the nearly unfathomable array of molecules that microbes produce, in search of biological treasures: not only potential medications but also compounds capable of breaking down pollutants or repairing damaged ecosystems. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 30312 - Posted: 07.08.2026

Christina Jewett The ads were jarring: a man with a hole in his throat where his larynx, or voice box, had once been. A woman whose teeth and jaw had been removed after oral cancer. Another woman speaking in a robotic voice, which was altered when her larynx was removed: “I wish I’d never seen a cigarette in my entire life.” A black screen followed, saying she died two days later. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark. There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign. But the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies. The C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Health, which managed the campaign and worked with states on smoking cessation measures, has been shut down for more than a year, after its staff was laid off as part of the administration’s government downsizing efforts. While hundreds of other federal health employees were eventually rehired, the smoking office staff members have not been. Even after Congress restored the office’s funding late last summer, its employees have remained on paid leave as litigation challenging the firings plays out. In recent weeks, under pressure from Congress, the C.D.C. has given states diminished funding to air ads from the campaign’s archive, but the federal government will not produce new ads or negotiate contracts for them to air nationwide. The ads had prompted millions of smokers to dial state quit lines for help on how to stop smoking. In interviews, people who ran quit lines in several states said that since the ads went off the air, calls have plummeted along with enrollment in programs that offered counseling and nicotine gum and patches. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30311 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Giorgia Guglielmi Neuroscience textbooks have long cast mitochondria as pure neuronal powerhouses: These bean-shaped organelles just crank out a cell’s energy. That picture, however, is starting to look incomplete. Mitochondria do far more than fuel neurons, a growing body of research suggests. They also appear to help synapses communicate, regulate neurotransmitter release and shape social behavior. Mitochondrial function has also been tied to autism and related neurodevelopmental conditions, though that link remains debated. Even memory formation may lean on these tiny, double-membraned structures, according to a study published in Nature Metabolism in February. Increasing mitochondrial metabolism boosted long-term memory in both fruit flies and mice. Mitochondria are “not just permissive but also instructive,” says Ezgi Hacisuleyman, assistant professor of molecular medicine at the Herbert Wertheim UF Scripps Institute for Biomedical Innovation & Technology, who was not involved in the February study. Her unpublished results show that mitochondrial proteins are translated near active synapses, for example. Over the past decade, work from Hacisuleyman and others has fast expanded the repertoire of mitochondria in the brain. Taken together, she adds, the findings put mitochondria “more in the center of how we think about brain function and memory.” Mitochondria may be central to brain function, but they are not central inside neurons. Many synapses sit hundreds of micrometers away from a cell’s soma, so small, mobile mitochondria must travel there to deliver fuel in the form of ATP. In dendrites, mitochondria often linger near spines, and activity recruits them to presynaptic boutons, where they help stabilize neurotransmitter release. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Obesity
Link ID: 30310 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Henry Taylor & The Conversation US You know that feeling when you walk into a room and immediately forget why you came in? Maybe you were there to fetch your keys. On your way to the room, you were thinking about grabbing your keys. But once you arrive, your keys have completely disappeared from your mind. This is sometimes known as the doorway effect, since it often strikes when you walk into a new room. Why does it happen? The answer has a lot to do with a faculty called working memory. Information gets stored in working memory when we need it for the tasks that we are engaged in right now (like remembering to grab your keys). What makes working memory so intriguing is its close link to consciousness. The doorway effect suggests that when information is removed from working memory, it immediately seems to leave consciousness. It also suggests that it is easy for information in working memory to be forgotten. The link between working memory and consciousness is getting increasing attention in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience. Could working memory somehow give rise to consciousness? In my new book, I explore the complex relationship between the two. Working memory: both rich and poor To understand the doorway effect, we’ll need to know a bit about working memory. One thing that makes working memory so special is that it’s so rich, both in terms of the information it has access to, and its processing power. According to recent models of working memory, it can draw information from sensory channels (vision, touch, smell etc), as well as from other memory systems such as long-term memory and also the brain’s system for processing language. In other words, working memory is where a lot of the information in your brain comes together. Once working memory has that information, there’s a lot it can do with it. Inside working memory are a host of different smaller systems for specific tasks, including visual and spatial reasoning (like solving a Rubik’s cube) and storing chunks of information (like a phone number). There’s even a “central executive” system (my favorite). The executive is like a merciless boss, assigning tasks to the different systems within working memory and keeping everything under control. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Consciousness; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30309 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Libby Riddle A bear might seem like the scariest thing you could run into in a national park. But a new study suggests maybe you should be more worried about elk. Out of nearly 3,000 wildlife incidents in Canadian national parks, more than half involved an elk, researchers report July 2 in Frontiers in Conservation Science. But the risk of tangling with a given species also depended on what people were doing, say Holly Landles and conservation biologist Shashank Balakrishna of the University of York in England. Camping out? Be wary of elk grazing near your campsite. Quietly hiking or wildlife watching? Watch out for bears using the same trails. “By identifying situations where a potential conflict scenario is more likely, we can help visitors make informed decisions that improve safety whilst also reducing unnecessary disturbance to wildlife,” says Landles, who conducted this research as an undergraduate at York. Landles and Balakrishna analyzed 2,878 aggressive wildlife incidents from 2010 to 2023 involving five animals: black bears, grizzly bears, elk, coyotes and mule deer. Aggressive behaviors included chasing, attacking or bluffing a charge. The analysis identified which animal–human activity combinations were especially risky. Elk topped the list, involved in 62 percent of all the incidents. One of the riskiest combos was elk and camping — the animals turned up in 84 percent of campground incidents. This may be because Canada’s peak camping season aligns with when the animals mate and give birth — times of heightened aggression for the species. “Elk are herbivorous herd animals that don’t immediately inspire fear like a carnivore does,” Balakrishna says. Visitors may underestimate how aggressive they can be. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 30308 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Jake Currie Memory loss is by far the most notorious symptom of Alzheimer’s disease, but it might not be the initial sign of the illness. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, there’s an even earlier tell—impaired cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is one of the brain’s executive functions governing our ability to switch between different tasks, adapt to novel situations, learn new rules, and so on. To study changes in this vital function, neuroscientists at Texas A&M University used mice genetically engineered to produce the amyloid-beta plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease (5xFAD mice). The team conditioned the mice to learn that a particular action (pulling a lever) led to a reward (a delicious food pellet). They then changed the rules to find out how they reacted. Healthy mice had no trouble adapting to the new regime, but the 5xFAD mice struggled, often repeatedly pulling the original lever without receiving a reward. Importantly, these cognitive flexibility problems surfaced earlier than the kinds of memory problems typically associated with Alzheimer’s. “We found that this function was impaired before we could detect deficits in spatial memory,” study author Jun Wang said in a statement. Taking a closer look into the 5xFAD mice brains, the researchers discovered abnormally high levels of neuroactivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in decision-making and behavioral flexibility. Previous research has shown this kind of hyperactivity can lead to amyloid-beta plaques piling up, which in turn makes neurons even more excitable. It basically leads to a positive feedback loop.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Attention
Link ID: 30307 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Sarah Thau Hunger pangs build with activity in Agouti-related protein (AgRP) neurons, and when we eat, these cells fall silent, signaling to the body that it’s full. Until recently, researchers thought these neurons responded to calorie intake alone, but a new study shows fructose quiets them less effectively than glucose does, even though both simple monomeric sugars carry the same number of calories. “We were really surprised when we tested these different sugars and found that fructose looks much different than glucose,” says study investigator Amber Alhadeff, a member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center and adjunct assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. Fiber photometry recordings of individual AgRP neurons in mice consuming fructose or glucose solutions first tipped the lab off to the fact that fructose is the weaker inhibitor. The same difference surfaced when the team infused the solutions directly into the animals’ guts, controlling for the fact that the mice tended to take more licks of the glucose than fructose. Glucose does not require the vagus nerve to inhibit AgRP neurons, according to previous work from Alhadeff’s group, but fructose does, the new study demonstrates. This study is the first to show “that the brain is responding to these things in different ways, and with a real mechanistic underpinning,” says Martin Myers, professor of diabetes research at the University of Michigan Medical School, who was not involved in the research. “This is an absolutely fabulous lab that is doing things that few, if any, other people in the world can do.” Once the team discovered that fructose acts through the vagus nerve, Alhadeff’s graduate student Aaron McKnight hit the mechanistic ground running. He worked for five years, according to Alhadeff, to show that fructose activates the vagus nerve, releasing a hormone called PYY that signals Y2 receptor-expressing vagal afferent neurons and then inhibits AgRP neurons. Glucose does not lead to increased PYY levels, acting through gut-spinal afferent signaling—a separate peripheral pathway. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 30306 - Posted: 07.01.2026

By Nora Bradford Mirrors are tricky. Even humans aren’t born with an intuitive understanding of them; we have to learn how they work. Now, scientists have discovered that the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) can also learn to use mirrors, researchers report June 3 in Current Biology. When brainstorming octopus experiments, Mary Kieseler, a neuroscientist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, had wondered whether the famously smart creatures could pass the mirror test, which evaluates if an animal can identify itself in a mirror. Because of the challenging logistics the mirror self-recognition test would entail underwater, Kieseler and her team decided to first study whether octopuses could use mirrors as a tool to do something they’re already great at. And octopuses are great at hunting prey. The team began by habituating three wild-caught octopuses to a mirror covering half their tank. They let the octopuses hide from the mirror and even explore the other half of the tank behind it. After the octopuses became comfortable with seeing their reflection and eating in front of the mirror, the team gave them a task: Find a hidden jar with a tasty crab inside, placed where the snack could be found using only its reflection in the mirror. Initially, the octopuses approached the mirror, then turned around to find their prey. But after about 10 to 12 trials, each animal learned to crawl directly to the crab without the mirror pit stop. When using real crabs, there was no way to know whether the octopuses might have been relying on smell or another nonvisual sense to hunt, so Kieseler and her team came up with one final test. Rather than using real crabs, the team used virtual ones. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30305 - Posted: 07.01.2026

By K. R. Callaway Strutting and fluttering around cities, pigeons have adapted to an ever-shifting environment. But their environment isn’t the only thing that’s constantly changing. New research suggests the birds themselves avoid stability in their decision-making, instead choosing to live “at the edge of chaos.” As model species for learning and behavior, these birds are helping researchers test a century-old law about how humans and other creatures learn. When learning something new, people and animals alike tend to repeat behaviors that are rewarded. First proposed by Edward Thorndike in 1898, this principle is so well established in psychology that it's become known as the law of effect. But the law implies that beyond making a behavior more frequent, rewards also make it more consistent: reducing variability in the specific way behaviors are performed over time. Although scientists have repeatedly tested whether rewards increase the frequency of behaviors, their effect on consistency is less well studied. University of Iowa experimental psychologist Edward A. Wasserman and his colleagues decided to put it to the test in pigeons—a species that has been integral to the study of learning at the university’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory for more than 50 years. And the study’s results, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, suggest these birds experience variability as the spice of life. To see how rewarded behaviors vary, the researchers gave pigeons a series of five colorful buttons to peck. They could peck any buttons in any order, but as long as they pecked five times, a treat would appear. Based on previous theories of learning, the scientists expected the pigeons might eventually slip into a routine—perhaps choosing to repeat patterns they know work or simply pecking the button nearest to them five times. Instead they continued pecking in a variety of patterns. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30304 - Posted: 07.01.2026

By Aimee Cunningham Reassuring evidence on acetaminophen’s safety during pregnancy keeps growing. A large, two-decade study in Hong Kong is the latest to find no link between use of the drug — known as Tylenol in the United States — and a risk of autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children. The lack of an association persisted no matter the trimester the drug was prescribed, the dose or the recommended frequency, researchers report June 29 in JAMA Internal Medicine. Joining several other analyses, including ones conducted in Sweden and Japan, the research adds to the body of evidence reporting no association between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and long-term neurodevelopmental disorders in children. All the studies compared siblings born to mothers who had taken the drug at some point, such that some siblings were exposed to the drug in utero and others weren’t. This approach accounts for the fact that both ADHD and autism are largely influenced by genetics. If acetaminophen were also a factor, researchers would expect a difference between siblings exposed to the drug and those not. None of the studies have found one. For the new study, the researchers pored over electronic health records from 2001 to 2023 for more than 700,000 pairs of mothers and children. Around 43 percent of the kids encountered acetaminophen in utero. The team focused on pairs of siblings that differed in exposure and used their records to follow the children for at least two years for autism diagnoses and at least five for ADHD. The autism analysis included more than 124,000 children, while the ADHD component had more than 97,000. Going a step further, the analysis also looked at the timing and amount of acetaminophen that was prescribed. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: ADHD; Autism
Link ID: 30303 - Posted: 07.01.2026

By Michael Howerton Healthy brains may be built through a process of controlled damage and rapid repair. The most dangerous type of DNA damage is a regular feature of healthy early brain development, experiments in mice show. As newborn neurons squeeze through the cramped, narrow spaces of developing brain tissue, they break both strands of their DNA, researchers report June 17 in Nature. The breaks are repaired once neurons reach their destination, usually within a day. It’s a paradox of vulnerability and resilience. Newborn neurons routinely sustain a kind of damage that kills most cells, yet they repair it and emerge intact, the researchers found. The speed of the repair surprised the team. “Somehow neurons can repair [the damage] very quickly without any sign of mutations or bad effect,” says neurobiologist Mineko Kengaku of Kyoto University in Japan. “It seems to be a normal developmental event.” The breaks appear in areas of the genome that aren’t crucial, the team found, which in most cases allows neurons to survive and grow without lasting damage. “It is surprising that, during evolution, the mammalian brain acquires such a clever strategy,” Kengaku says. More research is needed to understand the implications beyond mice, but Kengaku says the effect might even be more pronounced in humans. “During development, neurons have to migrate, and if the brain size is larger, then neurons have to migrate longer distances,” she says. “It is quite likely that neurons in human brains probably generate more DNA damage during development” than neurons in mice brains do. But a flawless break-and-repair cycle is not always guaranteed, Kengaku says. When it fails or is incomplete, the damage could persist. These instances, she says, could help explain some neurological conditions later in life. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 30302 - Posted: 06.27.2026

Ian Sample Science editor A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response. Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings. Her work revealed how the birds announce who they are and what they are doing, and recognise one another regardless of what they are saying by using individual signatures. She also found that at times, the birds confused calls with similar meanings more than those that sounded the same. “I’m really super-honoured,” Elie said on winning the prize, adding that she hoped the work was a step forwards in the “great endeavour” to communicate with animals. Prof Yossi Yovel, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the panel of judges, said the work marked “a key moment in the field”. The prize was launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, which promotes awareness of animal welfare and animal sentience, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. Beyond the annual prizes for progress, the foundation has established a $10m grand prize for cracking the problem of two-way human-animal communication. Elie decided to study zebra finches because they are so vocal – meaning they produce plenty of data. “The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was what are they saying?” she said. For more than a decade, Elie observed and recorded the sounds the birds made and classified the calls according to the situation and the bird that made them. She then used machine learning to analyse what and how information was encoded in the calls. Finally, she ran tests that showed the birds agreed with her classification. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30301 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By K. R. Callaway In the flatwoods of South Florida, tiny brown birds emerge from the underbrush to sing from the branches of pine trees. To human ears, their songs sound nearly identical, but any given population of these birds — Bachman’s sparrows — uses as many as 120 different song types to communicate. Like human language, birdsong is dynamic. Every avian generation makes choices about which songs to continue singing, which to improve upon and which to drop altogether. A single Bachman’s sparrow might learn only 48 of the songs used by its community, and for decades researchers have been trying to figure out how baby sparrows choose which songs to adopt. Previous studies have focused on social and cultural factors. During their critical song-learning phase of development, young songbirds imitate the adult males in their group who are successful in courtship or have elaborately ornamented plumage. Now, a new study of Bachman’s sparrows reveals another possible part of the equation: the physical environment. Trees, dense shrubs and even wind can scatter or block the transmission of some sound waves, and researchers suspect that young sparrows are less likely to latch onto degraded songs, leading in turn to some songs becoming rarer than others. “The rarer song types don’t propagate quite as well over distance than the common ones do,” said Rindy Anderson, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University and an author of the study, which appeared on March 24 in the journal Bioacoustics. All the Bachman’s sparrow song types have a similar form, with a buzzing or whistling note followed by a trill. Some trills are faster or slower than others, and some complex songs contain trills of several frequencies. Researchers recorded a variety of rare and common sparrow songs and then rerecorded them playing in different environments — among dense trees, windy plains and other places that Bachman’s sparrows frequent but that could distort audio signals. Under these conditions, the researchers found that rarer songs did not propagate as well as common songs. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30300 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Phie Jacobs When Charles Darwin visited Ascension Island in 1836, he was perplexed by the vast numbers of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) nesting on its beaches. Every mating season, these intrepid reptiles leave their feeding grounds along the coast of Brazil and journey more than 2000 kilometers across the sea to lay their eggs on this tiny, remote island. How, Darwin later mused in a letter to Nature, did the animals find their way to a “speck of land in the midst of the great Atlantic Ocean?” Since then, scientists have uncovered convincing evidence that sea turtles can sense components of Earth’s geomagnetic field. Now, data collected using a new kind of tracking device lend further support to the idea that these animals use magnetic maps to navigate during their transoceanic voyages. But the system is far from perfect, researchers report today in Science Advances, which means migrating turtles must periodically reorient themselves after veering off course. The findings fit “very comfortably with what we know about turtle navigation,” says Kenneth Lohmann, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wasn’t involved in the research. His team previously conducted laboratory studies demonstrating turtles can sense the strength of geomagnetic fields as well as their angle relative to the surface of Earth—potentially providing migrating turtles with a “bicoordinate” geomagnetic map of their surroundings. Exactly how good they are at using those coordinates in the open ocean, however, has been less clear. Graeme Hays, a marine ecologist at Deakin University, paid his own visit to Ascension Island back in the 1990s. While there, he and Paolo Luschi—now a biologist at the University of Pisa—worked to outfit green sea turtles with satellite tracking devices. Early on, Hays recalls, the pair recognized a significant limitation: Although these tags can accurately track a turtle’s path across the ocean, those data don’t necessarily reflect “where the animal is trying to go.” © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Evolution
Link ID: 30299 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Emily Anthes Humor is deeply personal. A punchline or a pratfall that leaves one person doubled over in delight might elicit blank stares from another. But laughter is universal, an innate instinct shared by humans everywhere. And not just humans. Chimps chuckle, gorillas guffaw, bonobos bust a gut. All the planet’s great apes laugh, and they often do so in the same kind of regular, repeating rhythm that humans do, scientists found in a small new study. The research sheds light on how laughter evolved with and among great apes, becoming faster and more variable in humans than in these other primate species. While nonhuman apes appeared to laugh in ways that were largely fixed, humans were more flexible in their expressions of mirth, changing up the tempo of their chuckles depending on the circumstance, the scientists found. “I think we can say we are the masters of laughter,” said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of the study. “We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.” This wide-ranging repertoire requires significant vocal flexibility and control — the same skills that humans would have needed for spoken language. The study demonstrates the “uniqueness of human laughter,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new research. “It provides a window into human vocal evolution.” In the new study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Communications Biology, the researchers analyzed the recorded laughter of four children and 13 young, captive apes: four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos and four chimpanzees. Some of the recordings featured laughter produced during play, while others captured laughter elicited by tickling. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30298 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Calli McMurray Kanga the marmoset places her hand on the lever and looks at Dodson, a fellow marmoset working with her on a task. As it becomes apparent that Dodson is ready to pull his own lever, neurons in Kanga’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ramp up their firing. The activity reaches its peak as Kanga decides to pull the lever, in sync with her partner. As a reward for their coordinated effort, both marmosets earn a sip of liquid marshmallow fluff. This type of neuronal computation underlies the “evidence accumulation model,” a major theory of how perceptual decisions are made: The brain gathers evidence and executes a decision once the evidence reaches a certain threshold. The marmoset study, which was published last month in Neuron, demonstrates that the model also applies to social decisions. This result wasn’t a given; making a social decision relies on the changing behavior of another animal, and the actions of the decider can influence what the other animal does, says study investigator Monika Jadi, associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University. “It’s a very recurrent system,” she says. Support for the evidence accumulation model has come largely from highly controlled experiments; the fact that the same activity pattern appears in a social and less constrained task “implies that this is a generalizable computation,” says Timothy Hanks, associate professor of neurology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work. Social, perceptual, foraging and other decisions are “categories we’ve created,” but there may not be anything “acutely different” about them, says Cory Miller, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “I love this line of work; I think it’s super powerful.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 30297 - Posted: 06.27.2026