How the brain controls the voice

Bats are famous for their sonar-based navigation. They use their extremely sensitive hearing for orientation, emitting ultrasound noises and receiving an image of their surroundings based on the echo. Seba's short-tailed ...

Simplified voice box enriches human speech

An ongoing debate among scientists, on why chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates cannot speak or sing like humans, has focused mainly on evolutionary changes in human brain development. Attention has now expanded to anatomical ...

Brain study: Singing mice show signs of learning

Guys who imitate Luciano Pavarotti or Justin Bieber to get the girls aren't alone. Male mice may do a similar trick, matching the pitch of other males' ultrasonic serenades. The mice also have certain brain features, somewhat ...

Beat-keeping sea lion shows surprising rhythmic ability

Ronan, a California sea lion at Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, became an Internet sensation last year when UCSC scientists published a paper describing her ability to bob her head in time ...

A common mechanism for human and bird sound production

When birds and humans sing it sounds completely different, but now new research reported in the journal Nature Communications shows that the very same physical mechanisms are at play when a bird sings and a human speaks.

Genes tell story of birdsong and human speech

His office is filled with all sorts of bird books, but Duke neuroscientist Erich Jarvis didn't become an expert on the avian family tree because of any particular interest in our feathered friends. Rather, it was his fascination ...

International team maps 'big bang' of bird evolution

The genomes of modern birds tell a story of how they emerged and evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs and almost everything else 66 million years ago. That story is now coming to light, thanks to an ...

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