Whale Vowels - Monkey Geometry - Heart's Brain - Bashing Heads

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Jul 22, 2026, 1:41:09 PM (19 hours ago) Jul 22

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/22/sperm-whales-dominica-clicks-vowels-language-changes-shipping-noise-project-ceti

Sperm whales change ‘vowel’ sounds when boats are nearby

Emma Bryce

Sperm whales produce a specific pattern of clicking noises when they hear the noise of boats, researchers have found. The pattern is so distinct that the scientists who identified it said they can now use it to predict when ships are nearby.

Researchers from Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), a non-profit research organisation working to decode sperm whale communication, spent four years tuning in on the calls of 15 sperm whales off the coast of Dominica.

They discovered specific differences in sperm whale “codas”, the discrete and distinctive patterns of clicks that this species utters to communicate when those whales encountered shipping. Individual click sequences became shorter, and one type became more prominent than another. Their findings are published in the journal Ecological Informatics.

“This research begs the question: are whales talking about the ships, or is it an impact on their voices because the ships are around?,” said David Gruber, the founder and chief executive of Project Ceti. “And then if we’re able to discern what they’re saying about the ships, how might that impact policy and laws?”

Under normal conditions, recordings from one of the whales, named “Atwood”, picked up one type of coda comprising five clicks in a 1-1-3 pattern (two clicks preceding three quicker ones), which, Gruber explained, is unique to this specific clan of sperm whales off the Caribbean coast of Dominica. With the background hum of a ship, Atwood issued the same 1-1-3 click rhythm but noticeably faster, with the whale reducing the intervals between each click.

The association was so strong that “in general, from their vocalisations alone, we can predict whether ships are around,” said Gašper Beguš, linguistics lead at Project Ceti.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/science/monkeys-cognition-shapes-geometry.html

Monkeys Understand Shapes in Almost the Same Way as Humans

By K. R. Callaway

You (probably) won’t find a monkey in a geometry class, but it looks like our fellow primates can swing the basics.

Just like people, monkeys seem to grasp the abstract qualities of geometric shapes, such as whether they are symmetrical, have parallel sides or contain right angles, according to a new study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This ability allows the monkeys — and us — to understand when two shapes are the same, even when they’ve been rotated or resized.

This finding challenges a long-held notion that humans’ geometric abilities are part of what makes our brains one of a kind. “Our hypothesis was that humans are not that unique,” in possessing this mathematical understanding, said Jialin Li, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the lead author of the study.

In their experiment, Ms. Li and her colleagues decided to give monkeys (a total of eight rhesus macaques and olive baboons), preschoolers and adult humans with different education levels the same geometric task. That way, if humans truly had an innate advantage, it would show up when comparing the young children and the monkeys. And if the advantage was learned, it might show up when comparing the humans who had different levels of schooling.

It was a challenge to find a task simple enough that even preschool-aged children and monkeys could reasonably complete it, but the team eventually decided to have all the study participants do a matching task. All were shown a shape with a specific size and geometric form on a screen. Then they were asked to pick that same shape out of a group of others.

“By manipulating the similarity of the shapes, we were able to look at what kinds of rules they’re using,” said Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University whose lab conducted the study.
© 2026 The New York Times Company
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02269-y

The heart has a ‘little brain’ — and it protects against stress

Lynne Peeples

Every heartbeat is choreographed not just by the brain but also by a mysterious nervous system embedded in the heart itself. Now, scientists studying mice have started to unravel how this complex system works to keep the heart beating steadily even at times of extreme stress — findings that challenge the classic view that all cardiac neurons are alike.

“The key is to keep the heart functional no matter what happens. Because if the pump function stops, you will die,” says Rui Chang, a neuroscientist at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and co-author of the new paper.

The findings, published today in Cell1, could inform better treatments for heart disease.

Like the gut’s widely recognized ‘second brain’, the heart contains a mini-brain of its own — known, more formally, as the intrinsic cardiac nervous system. This network of neurons is embedded in the fat pad surrounding the heart. The system’s neurons exchange messages with the brain and with each other, and are the final players in a long chain of neurons that controls cardiac function. But because intrinsic cardiac neurons are exceedingly rare, making up only about 0.01% of the cells in a piece of heart tissue, their precise roles have been hard to pin down, says Chang.

Damage from a heart attack comes from brain signals, mouse study suggests

To fill that gap, his team genetically engineered mice to label all of the animals’ cardiac neurons. The scientists sequenced genes isolated from these neurons and identified markers for two neuronal subtypes. They then used techniques such as high-resolution imaging to identify the genetically distinct subtypes’ core functions and to map their locations.

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https://www.science.org/content/article/goats-love-bash-heads-it-might-give-them-brain-damage

Goats love to bash heads—but it might give them brain damage

BY Christie Wilcox

Goats spend a lot of time bashing their heads into things. Winning a headbutting contest shows other members of the herd who’s boss—but bumping heads is also a way to play or explore new objects, so it’s often assumed goats must be protected against head injury by the shape of their skull and strong neck muscles.

A new study challenges that assumption. Researchers have found early signs of neurodegeneration in headbutting goats at just 1 year old, they report in a preprint posted to bioRxiv this month. The findings, they say, suggest goats could be a useful animal model for studying the link between head injuries and neurodegeneration seen in humans.

“I think the overall conclusions are pretty convincing,” says Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the work. Traditionally, researchers have used rats and mice as animal models for studying brain injuries, and the field has become a “rodent monoculture,” he says. But rodent and human brains are very different, which could be partly to blame for the poor translation of preclinical findings to human trials, so it’s “really interesting to see this work in goats.”

Nicole Ackermans, a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama, first identified signs of neurodegeneration in wild headbutting animals in 2022, finding that the brains of dead muskoxen contained an abnormal version of the protein tau. In humans, these tangled tau proteins are associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and can form after head injuries. “I thought, ‘OK, this is something really interesting to look at for modeling brain damage,’” she says. But tracking how damage accumulates over time in wild animals is not feasible. That’s where the goats came in.

The team acquired three 6-month-old male goats—Alvin, Simon, and Theo—from farms and moved them to a nearby agricultural college where cameras recorded them for 6 months to track their headbutts. Each month, the researchers collected samples of blood, saliva, and brain fluid to look for biomarkers of brain injury and, at the start and end of the study, scanned the animals’ brains using positron emission tomography–MRI to spot any structural damage.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/america-is-embarking-on-a-risky-experiment-with-glp-1s-and-aging/

America is embarking on a risky experiment with GLP-1s and aging

By Liz Seegert

More than one in 10 Americans takes a GLP-1 medication for weight loss. As more people take a GLP-1, or glucagonlike peptide 1, receptor agonist, such as Wegovy, so, too, do more older adults—and those numbers are set to skyrocket.

Last week the Trump administration launched the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program, a new initiative that would set the cost of three weight-loss medications— Wegovy, the KwikPen version of Zepbound (tirzepatide) and Foundayo (orforglipron)—at $50 a month. That may be welcome news for the estimated 38.9 percent of adults aged 60 and up in the U.S. who are living with obesity. But it could also supercharge an ongoing and risky experiment in growing old on weight-loss drugs.

For years, clinicians have had few good options to safely treat obesity in older adults. But while GLP-1s, long used to treat diabetes, are now approved for weight loss, the evidence supporting their use in the age-60-and-older population is limited. Someone in their 70s may benefit as much from weight loss as a person in their 30s but may respond very differently to these drugs’ side effects; we simply don’t have enough evidence yet to make informed conclusions, experts advise.

“Eligibility doesn’t mean benefit automatically,” says Ruchi Gaba, an associate professor of endocrinology at Baylor College of Medicine. “We have to individualize.” And within the 60-and-older group, there is huge variety: a healthy, active 68-year-old with obesity and sleep apnea is a very different patient than an 88-year-old who’s frail, has poor appetite and is at risk of falls, Gaba says.

Older adults are underrepresented in the clinical trials for GLP-1 drugs. Despite the high prevalence of obesity among this age group, only about one in 10 participants in early GLP-1 trials was age 65 or older, says Alissa Chen, a primary care physician and a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, who specializes in obesity. Older adults are more heterogeneous than people in younger age groups in terms of chronic conditions and multiple medications, Chen says, which can pose challenges with both prescriptions and side effects.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/science/susumu-tonegawa-dead.html

Susumu Tonegawa Dies at 86; Nobel Laureate Showed How Antibodies Fight Infection

By Dylan Loeb McClain

Susumu Tonegawa, a Japanese molecular biologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1987 for figuring out how the body can produce sufficient antibodies to combat a multitude of infections, and who later advanced the understanding of how the brain works by discovering how memories are stored, died on July 11 at his home in San Mateo, Calif. He was 86.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Tonegawa was a professor, announced his death.

“Few scientists have reshaped our understanding of biology as profoundly,” Myriam Heiman, the director of M.I.T.’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, which Dr. Tonegawa founded in 1994, said in a statement. “His intellectual fearlessness, extraordinary creativity and relentless pursuit of fundamental questions opened entirely new frontiers in both immunology and neuroscience.”

For decades, scientists were confounded by the antibodies created in the white blood cells known as B lymphocytes.

Those antibodies, which fight disease, are shaped like Y’s, with two long and two short symmetrical chains of proteins built from amino acids, all bound together by bridges of sulfur atoms. Most of the long proteins and some of the short ones are considered constants because they are the same in all antibodies.

At the end of each strand are variable amino acids that allow the antibodies to bind to antigens on an array of infections, disabling them. A common analogy is that the constant amino acids are like the shaft of a key, and the variable ones are the notches that turn the lock. As with a key, each combination of notches is unique.

Even so, scientists were puzzled by how the antibodies could create enough combinations to fight millions of infections.

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