Eric Fortune News Today

Los Angeles's Corey Helford Gallery has a show of art inspired by "The Last Unicorn" for the 40th anniversary of the beloved animated film.

The great duetters in history may have had more than just musical chemistry: for songbirds, there could even be a link between minds.

Duetting songbirds 'mute' the musical mind of their partner to stay in sync, researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have found.

Retired teacher Virginia Rose came up with a map to help the mobility-challenged get outside into nature after finding her own passion for birding. Singers performing a duet, jazz players riffing together effortlessly, paired-up dancers never skipping a step: great performers are so coordinated, they become one. What are the mechanisms that regulate coordination and cooperation? Neurobiologists are learning more from some of natures foremost musical performers: songbirds. The brains of duetting...

‘When we are cooperating well, we become a single entity with our partners’

Plain-tailed wrens are excellent duetters, and now research suggests that they sing together using a 'telepathic' link of minds.

Researchers say that the auditory feedback exchanged between wrens during their opera-like duets momentarily inhibits motor circuits used for singing in the listening partner, which helps link the pairs brains and coordinate turn-taking for a seemingly telepathic performance. The study also offers fresh insight into how humans and other cooperative animals use sensory cues to act in concert with one another.

These unreal fish live in the Amazon river basin, which is swimming with predators like piranhas and other gnarly things full of teeth, so they hide out in refuges and stay still to avoid them. They also tend to follow any changes in position of their refuge. If debris at the river bottom sways one way, they go with it. Because the research team knew they would not be able to control the behavior of some fish for the sake of studying the response in others, they decided to see how a fish would ...