Conversations with friends have an ease that is hard to replicate with someone you have just met—often replies come more ...

A study by UC Berkeley researchers discovered that zebra finches can quickly memorize the individual sounds of up to 50 other birds of their kind. The experiment began in December 2018 and found that ...

Discover the brain science behind how birds learn to sing, from song nuclei to social cues and critical learning windows.

Birds create songs by moving muscles in their vocal organs to vibrate air passing through their tissues, and new research shows that these muscles act in concert to create sound. Scientists describe ...

Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

The ability to learn new motor skills is critical to almost all aspects of our lives. From the time a baby is born, it learns to move its arms and hands, to pronounce words and to walk. Such skills ...

Australian zebra finches sing a rhythmic high-pitched song while incubating their eggs in a hot environment, which researchers have named a “heat call”. Experiments now show that this call influences ...

Zebra finches sing a special song to their eggs to warn them about hot weather, and these calls seem to program the hatchlings’ cells to harness energy from food without creating excessive heat. This ...