Scientists have turned up new evidence showing that ocean noise can affect the communication of whales.

Studying blue whales off the eastern Canadian coast, they found the animals changed their vocalisations in response to an underwater seismic survey. The survey was conducted using gear considered to have a low impact. Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers say this is the first evidence that whales will increase calls in response to underwater noise. At this site, on a feeding ground, the whales make frequent calls of just a few seconds’ duration, rather than the long “songs” that can be heard across vast tracts of ocean.

“The calls are used for short-range communication within a range of a few hundred metres,” said Lucia Di Iorio, based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. [ read more ]

“Survival of the fittest” is helping us understand not only the origin of species but also love, politics, and even the cosmos.

You could call Helen Fisher a Darwinian matchmaker. The acclaimed anthropologist from Rutgers University is also a best-selling author of books on love and the chief scientific adviser to an online dating service called Chemistry.com. This service utilizes a questionnaire that Fisher developed after years of research on the science of romantic attraction. It reveals which of four broad, biologically based personality types an applicant displays and helps identify partners with compatible brain chemistry. In designing the questionnaire, Fisher relied on the principles of evolutionary psychology, a field inspired by Charles Darwin’s insights. She has even used those principles to size up Darwin himself. (He is a “negotiator,” “imaginative and theoretical,” “unassuming, agreeable, and intuitive”—but also married, alas, and dead.) [ read more ]

It’s the ultimate revenge of the nerds as product developers use their big brains to create sex machines that kick pleasure into overdrive. In fact, the very nature of the sex “toy” is changing as a new generation of sex-positive engineers infiltrates the industry.

From the smooth, silent glide of the Monkey Rocker Tango to Le Chair’s ability to put two people into a dozen compromising positions, the new products and prototypes unveiled at this week’s Adult Novelty Expo straddle the line between toy (a passive, frivolous object) and machine (a substantial apparatus that inspires commitment and even emotional attachment).

Here are some of the most interesting. [ read more ]

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Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. [ read more ]