Is this what dolphins do after work?
Every day, as music and sounds of the sea play in the background, dolphins at a dolphinarium in Port-Saint-Père, France, show off their skills for an adoring audience and squawk and whistle just like dolphins should. But at night, they make strange noises that researchers believe are imitations of humpback whale songs included in the performance soundtrack.
If so, it would mark the first time dolphins have been heard to rehearse new sounds hours after hearing them rather than right away, providing insights into how they store and process memories.
Ethologist Martine Hausberger of the University of Rennes 1 in France and her colleagues had hung underwater microphones in the tank because little is known about what dolphins sound like at night. One night, they suddenly heard 25 whale-like sounds the dolphins had never made before.
So why would dolphins want to mimic whales? Hausberger believes that it might be because the shows prime the animals to learn and remember information.
Peter Tyack, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who studies animal vocalization, says that the idea that dolphins might delay their rehearsals for hours is intriguing. But he isn't convinced from the small number of recordings that the researchers obtained that the dolphins were imitating whales. But songbirds rehearse their imitations of other noises at night, so he thinks it's not unlikely that dolphins might do the same.
Researchers find way to listen in on minds
In a new study, neuroscientists connected a network of electrodes to the hearing centers of 15 patients' brains and recorded the brain activity while they listened to words like "jazz" or "Waldo." They saw that each word generated its own unique pattern in the brain. So they developed two different computer programs that could reconstruct the words a patient heard just by analyzing his or her brain activity.
Reconstructions were good enough that the researchers could accurately decipher the mystery word 80 to 90 percent of the time. The study was published online in PLoS Biology. ScienceNOW
Archaeopteryx likely soared, clues say
The winged dinosaur Archaeopteryx is often proposed as an intermediate creature between reptiles and birds, but could it even fly? New research offers some intriguing clues.
For one thing, Archaeopteryx probably had black feathers on its wings. And the wings seem to have been strong and rigid, suggesting that it could have soared.
Researchers used a powerful scanning electron microscope to analyze a fossilized feather that was found 150 years ago.
"We looked at the microstructure of the feather and compared it to the structure of modern birds," said Ryan Carney, a doctoral student in paleontology at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who was involved with the study.
He and his colleagues from the United States and Germany reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
New York Times
