Young whales can speak

Young whales can imitate the voices of humans, according to a new paper that highlights the vocal mimicry skills of one whale in particular. Dr Sam Ridgway, of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, studied the possibility of the marine mammal to copy the sound of people. It first happened to a young white whale, also known as a beluga, named NOC. It could make a sound similar to the human word “out”. Then it copied human words so well, that at first researchers thought they were hearing humans conversing in the distance. This study revealed an amplitude rhythm in NOC's vocalizations that was comparable to human speech. Fundamental frequencies in the whale's vocalizations were also in the same range of human speech and were several octaves lower than the whale's usual sounds. The whale NOC also went to a lot of trouble to make the sounds. The researchers explain that the whale had to vary the pressure in his nasal tract while making other muscular adjustments and inflating the vestibular sac in his blowhole. But when the whale turned 4 years he stopped his human vocal mimicry. Researchers say that there might be two reasons for this. The first is that hormonal changes related to sexual maturity may diminish a whale's urges to mimic. Another possible reason is that the novelty might have simply worn off...
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Higher-math skills entwined with lower-order magnitude sense

While many animals understand the concept of less and more, only humans can learn formal math. By Carol Clark: The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system,” says lead authorStella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. “We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated with variations in our intuitive sense of magnitude.” Babies as young as six months can roughly distinguish between less and more, whether it’s for a number of objects, the size of objects, or the length of time they see the objects. This intuitive, non-verbal sense of magnitude, which may be innate, has also been demonstrated in non-human animals. When given a choice between a group of five bananas or two bananas, for example, monkeys will tend to take the bigger bunch. “It’s obviously of adaptive value for all animals to be able to discriminate between less and more,” Lourenco says. “The ability is widespread across the animal...
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