Our book, "Nature Beats" is finally out. It talks all about how we can study rhythm across species and what that can tell us about the evolution of music. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

1/4 Orcas making sunfish explode One orca firmly holds the carcass of a sunfish (whose viscera have already been removed) while an adult male crashes into it at high speed, making it explode into countless pieces. (paper) www.frontiersin.org/journals/eth...

Can behaviour and cognition support conservation efforts? 🐭💡🌍In this new paper we offer some insights into how dietary innovation and neophobia can help assess small mammals' responses to human disturbance in a protected area. It was a long journey, but I'm so proud of this! doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...

Seals have a superpower: they are the only mammals with amphibious hearing! They hear well both in-air and underwater. My collagues and I have a new study in Proceedings B on the origins and evolution of amphibious hearing in pinnipeds 🦭🔊🧪 doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

The origin and evolution of amphibious hearing in pinnipeds

Abstract. Pinnipeds (true seals, eared seals and walruses) are the only mammals that can hear effectively in both air and water. How and when they achieved

doi.org

1/11 The dimensions of animal empathy In this study, the authors attempt to understand the different forms that empathy may take in other species. (paper) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New paper! I am now officially a bowhead song researcher thanks to Seth's cool new paper - see thread for details - there is so much work to do on bowhead song and I am excited to continue this collaboration! @seamammalresearch.bsky.social @taylorhersh.bsky.social @sethharris15.bsky.social 🐋🦑🧪

Seth Harris@sethharris15.bsky.social · 4w ago

New paper on bowhead whale song out with @lrendell.bsky.social, @taylorhersh.bsky.social and Kate Stafford! 🐋 tinyurl.com/3svw5pzp

Dream PhD opening! Innovation in wild falcons! Application deadline Aug 1🦅

link.springer.com/article/10.1... Just out - complicated integrative perspective with a bunch of great marine mammal folks, including @stephanielking.bsky.social and @andrearavignani.bsky.social. We take an expansive trip through the peripheral effector, CNS, and social domains of vocal rhythm.

Nature@nature.com · last mo.

The rhythmic patterns of laughter found in apes and humans reveal that complex primate vocal control might have started evolving 15 million years ago go.nature.com/4eO0lkT

How do other animals experience time? It's been a pleasure to work with @singhal.bsky.social and @anilseth.bsky.social on a paper exploring how temporal illusions and other experimental strategies can shed light on this. It's our today! www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

New paper from Ulanovsky's group: With brain recordings from🦇 flying in a 200m tunnel, the group discovered that place cells of CA1 exhibit dense spatial coding, i.e., multiple place fields, and cells of CA3 exhibit ultrasparse coding, i.e., one place field. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sparse-to-dense coding transformation between hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1 - Nature

The hippocampus exhibits a CA3-to-CA1 coding transformation that combines fast learning with an efficient, compressed neural code.

nature.com

Zeng et al. (2026, Science) reported an intriguing study of rhythmic pattern discrimination in bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). Yet the claim that ‘[they] form robust abstract rhythm representations’ may be premature. See doi.org/10.31234/osf....

Great work from Simone Videsen. We found sperm whale slow clicks maintain extreme isochrony with inter-click intervals up to ~10s. That's beyond any known neural system for precise interval timing. May be a long-distance communication system. nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

NYAS Publications

In this study, we show that male sperm whales produce low-frequency slow clicks at low repetition rates with extreme source levels > 200 dB re 1 µPa (pp), making them the loudest mammalian communicat...

nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Very interesting new work by @lingzhongfan.bsky.social & colleagues, identifying an arcuate fasciculus homolog in the marmoset brain — with implications for the evolution of the neural scaffold supporting vocal communication 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Homologous specialization of arcuate fasciculus ventrolateral frontal connectivity in marmosets and humans | PNAS

The arcuate fasciculus (af) is a crucial dorsal pathway underpinning human language, yet its weak frontal connectivity in macaques—the standard pri...

pnas.org

www.science.org/content/arti... Yikes - rhe empathetic urge to help suffering animals is good, and we should cultivate it. But the urge is anthropomorphic and needs to be informed, in action, by dispassionate science

Chaotic whale rescue shocks marine biologists

Timmy, a humpback whale stranded in Germany 6 weeks ago, was ailing and may already be dead

science.org

Out in the UK today! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

The Fox, the Shrew, and You

A leading neuroscientist describes the long evolutionary process that led to the human brain

press.princeton.edu

www.popsci.com/environment/... Fun to see this guy next to the California sea lions -- but as impressive as he is, Chonkers really isn't that unusual for a male steller. They regularly top out over 2000 lbs. They're not as common in CA, but it is part of their southern range.

Chonkers the 2,000-pound sea lion is making waves in San Francisco Bay

The Stellar sea lion reportedly sounds like a falling tree when he belly flops onto floats.

popsci.com

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Did a spot on Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald about seal vocal neurobiology. Some other really interesting segments on there as well. www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks...

Apr 11: Moving beyond animal testing, and more… | CBC Radio

Harbour seals 'talk' with their parrot-like brains, 'flaming hot' ice in Uranus and Neptune, Yellowstone's wolves and ravens, a thigh bone from the earliest human and the future of animal testing

cbc.ca

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... "mental imagery reactivates the same sensory codes used during visual stimuli, suggesting the existence of a generative model capable of synthesizing detailed sensory contents from an abstract, semantic representation."

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

This is fascinating - bees learned non-isochronous temporal patterns that indicated reward and then spontaneously generated them across tempos and sensory modalities. Bees have like 1 million neurons, so you don't need a big brain for this. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form ...

science.org

Explore “Brainstorming,” @thetransmitter.bsky.social’s new LinkedIn newsletter that looks at how neuroscientists are solving research challenges. The first edition features nontraditional model organisms that are well suited for studying certain behaviors or neurological conditions. bit.ly/4v6x506

The nontraditional model organism renaissance

Each month, The Transmitter explores creative approaches neuroscientists are taking to solve problems that arise in their research. In this installment, we see how researchers work backward from speci...

bit.ly

New OA paper @royalsocietypublishing.org: What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation? royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Lovely collab with @lirsamuni.bsky.social Martin Surbeck and Richard Connor.

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species) he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

I have a new PhD position available on any topic related to musicality or animal communication that aligns well with our current research programs. Deadline March 31: oeaw.ac.at/jobs?jh=795a... For more info about my Musicality and Bioacoustics group: oeaw.ac.at/en/ari/resea...

Professor Peter Cook publishes groundbreaking new research on how pinniped brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity in the publication Science. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Love this framing by @biotay.bsky.social - I always lead with vocal learning and then work back to breathing, but the reverse is far less cognitively frictive.

Tay (Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró)@biotay.bsky.social · 5mo ago

1/5 Did diving help seals “talk”? In part, it did: life in the water selected for very fine voluntary control of breathing, and that seems to have opened the door to greater control over the voice and, eventually, vocal learning. (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... by @pfcook.bsky.social

Dolphins washing up on the shores of Patagonia may have been fleeing orcas in the area

Dolphins have been stranding in droves on the shores of Patagonia. Scientists think they’ve found the culprit

Dolphins washing up on the shores of Patagonia may have been fleeing orcas in the area

scientificamerican.com

By mapping the brains of seals and sea lions, researchers have uncovered specialized neural circuits that have evolved to support the control of complex vocal behavior and learning in the species. Learn more this week in Science: https://scim.ag/4bpsJYU