Wild Music in the News

At the I/O developers conference this week, Google rolled out a Spotify-like music platform called All Access. 

If you listen to global warming deniers, or even much of the public , it seems like there is some stack of scientific studies somewhere that refute anthropogenic--human-caused--climate change. If someone would just let them reach into that pile and pull out a paper, we'd all see that climate change is "a hoax," or so it seems in our fractured discourse.

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New research shows that blind and visually impaired people have the potential to use echolocation, similar to that used by bats and dolphins, to determine the location of an object. The study examined how hearing, and particularly the hearing of echoes, could help blind people with spatial awareness and navigation.

A new study published in the April issue of PLoS One by an interdisciplinary team of Virginia Commonwealth University researchers sheds light on the way a tiny parasitic wasp produces its courtship song.

Johnny Cash may have preferred this galaxy's burning ring of fire to the one he sang about falling into in his popular song. The "starburst ring" seen at center in red and yellow hues is not the product of love, as in the song, but is instead a frenetic region of star formation.

By day, insects provide the white noise of the South, but the night belongs to the amphibians. In a typical year, the Southern air hangs heavy from the humidity and the sounds of wildlife.

Health officials have gone nine consecutive days without hearing about any new cases of H7N9 infections.

(AP)—Sonic the Hedgehog is rolling with Nintendo.

Johnny Cash may have preferred this galaxy's burning ring of fire to the one he sang about falling into in his popular song. The "starburst ring" seen at center of a new image in red and yellow hues is not the product of love, as in the song, but is instead a frenetic region of star formation. The galaxy, a spiral beauty called Messier 94, is located about 17 million light-years away.

(Phys.org) —Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have uncovered new hard-to-detect methods that criminals may use to trigger mobile device malware that could eventually lead to targeted attacks launched by a large number of infected mobile devices in the same geographical area. Such attacks could be triggered by music, lighting or vibration.

If you're a left-brain thinker, chances are you use your right hand to hold your cell phone up to your right ear, according to a newly published study. The study shows a strong correlation between brain dominance and the ear used to listen to a cell phone.

Whether we're listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research. For instance, Mozart's jaunty Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major is most often associated with bright yellow and orange, whereas his dour Requiem in D minor is more likely to be linked to dark, bluish gray.

Google Inc. unveiled a streaming music service called All Access that blends songs users have already uploaded to their online libraries with millions of other tracks for a $10 monthly fee. The service puts the Internet goliath in competition with popular paid subscription plans like Spotify and Rhapsody and free music services like Pandora.

Google on Wednesday launched a subscription-based music service, allowing users of Android phones and tablets to listen to their favorite songs and artists for a monthly fee.

In a digital world, literature, art and music are often the result of collaborative efforts. But who owns what, and can copyright law cope? New research aims to find out.

Recent research discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process. This research points to ways that people can actively improve their moods and corroborates earlier research.

A small ensemble of musicians can produce an infinite number of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. So too, do a handful of workhorse signaling pathways that interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body. In fact, crosstalk between two of those pathways -- those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors -- occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain.

Yesterday, former International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield fell from space like a meteor and gently touched down on his home planet after five months in a state of constant free fall. He was greeted with a recliner and a blanket, ready to cradle his thinner bones and atrophied muscles. Maybe, as he was comforted and challenged by gravity once again, his eyes turned back longing to the sky. I hope he knows that we did the same when he turned a camera lens into the eyes of the world.

Chris Hadfield is a triumph of science communication. He began by simply tweeting out pictures of the Earth in all its often-overlooked beauty from his Twitter account. As a consequence of these breathtaking pictures, and Hadfield's famous response to a tweet from William Shatner, Hadfield soon became a social media phenomenon. At this writing, he has amassed 920,000 Twitter followers (up almost 150,000 from my last edit 12 hours ago!). The Canadian Space Agency quickly capitalized on Hadfield's fame, making a series of wonderfully explanatory videos with Hadfield doing everything from shaving to simulated crying to explaining exactly how he gets those amazing pictures. Hadfield's outreach didn't stop there. Many of his videos were direct answers to student questions . A surprisingly good singer and guitarist, Hadfield performed the first space-earth music collaboration with the lead singer of the Bare Naked Ladies. He covered David Bowie's classic "Space Oddity" brilliantly . And to the delight of nerds everywhere, he even had a chat with William Shatner about Star Trek .

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By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The lives of urban-dwelling bears are chronicled in neck-cam video clips showing their trash-trawling, birdseed-raiding and bear-bonding antics as several of the burly creatures caroused through Alaska's biggest city.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game collected about 60 hours of footage last summer from tiny cameras mounted on the collars of four black bears and two brown bears known to frequent the environs in and around Anchorage, a city of some 30,000 humans.

The cameras, equipped with locator technology and designed to fall off the animals after two months, captured a trove of images confirming biologists' longstanding warnings that bears are attracted by unsecured garbage, unprotected gardens and unattended bird feeders.

"They seem to get into garbage or birdseed very, very frequently, about every day," said Sean Farley, the state biologist leading the project.

But preliminary examination shows that the city-roaming bears spend about twice as much time scrounging natural food as they do scavenging trash, birdseed or other edibles left outside by humans, Farley said.

The Fish and Game Department recently posted some excerpts of the footage on its website, inviting the public to watch and learn.

One clip features a close-up view of glistening drool flowing from the jaws of a bear about to chow down on an open bag of bird seed.

It was one of several instances in which bears, seen lumbering about town with their tongues hanging out of their mouths, are shown to often behave "like dogs when they're excited," Farley said.

There also is footage of bears moving through groves of trees and munching berries, plucking insects from rotted wood, gulping gulls' eggs and chewing on the carcass of a dead moose calf.

In one particularly surprising revelation, all the camera-equipped animals were seen acquiring bear buddies during the video period.

A mother bear shared her den with another adult, as well as with her three cubs. [More]

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- In a high-flying, perfectly pitched first, an astronaut on the International Space Station is bowing out of orbit with a musical video: his own custom version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."...