Hot MedFax

It's for the birds.  The way we learn, that is.  A recent study has found that the way birds learn to sing is the same way humans learn to talk. According to newswise.com, songbirds " learn their songs during development in a manner similar to how humans learn to speak. Songbirds memorize the song of their father or tutor, then practice that song until they can produce a similar song." In much the same way babies mimic their parents and others who speak to them, and why it's so important for people to talk to babies all the time, even when you know they can't understand you.  The sound of the words is what's important. “As adults, (songbirds) continue to produce this learned song, but what's interesting is that they keep it just a little bit variable” the Web site quotes  Duke University, Professor Sarah Woolley   . “The variability isn’t a default, it isn’t that they can’t produce a better version, they can -- in particular when they sing to a fem...

As I see it, the middle ear's good for balance and not much else. But scientists have just discovered that the bones of the middle ear could provide huge clues about our evolution and how we developed as humans. According to newswise.com, a team from the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M and Binghamtom University (the State University of New York), working with one from Spain, discovered this when they examined a skull believed to be almost 2 million years old, and found that the bones in the ear "together show a mixture of ape-like and human-like features, and represent the first time all three bones have been found together in one skull." The middle ear appears to be very human-like, newswise.com reports, while other bones from the ear are more chimpanzee-like or ape-like. "The discovery is important for two reasons,” Darryl de Ruiter of Texas A&M tells newswise.com. “First, ear ossicles are fully formed and adult-sized at birth, and they ...