In October 9 issue:
Calling long distance
Nigel Williams
Current Biology October 9, 2007: 17 (19) p. r819
?Our data demonstrate that cellular telephony is a viable method of
remote playback for certain applications,? the authors write. But they
do caution about the range of sounds that can be transmitted and
recorded. The phone systems have been optimized for the perception of
humans which may create problems with higher frequency sounds used by
other species.
African elephants run from the sound of disturbed bees
Lucy E. King, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and Fritz Vollrath
Current Biology October 9, 2007: 17 (19) p. r832
Encroaching human development into former wildlife areas is
compressing African elephants into ever smaller home ranges, causing
increased levels of human?elephant conflict . African honeybees have
been proposed as a possible deterrent to elephants . We have performed
a sound playback experiment to study this hypothesis. We found that a
significant majority of elephants, in a sample of 18 well-known
families and subgroups of varying sizes, reacted negatively ?
immediately walking or running away ? when they heard the buzz of
disturbed bees, while they ignored the control sound of natural
white-noise. Whether the observed response was the result of
individual conditioning or of learning by social facilitation remains
to be established. Our study strongly supports the hypothesis that
bees ? and perhaps even their buzz alone ? may be deployed to keep
elephants at bay.
Neurogenetics: Singing in the Brain
Charalambos P. Kyriacou
Current Biology October 9, 2007: 17 (19) p. r841
The fruitless gene is well-known to play a key role in determining the
sexual identity of the fruitfly's nervous system, but new results show
that doublesex is also required in thoracic neurons to generate normal
male lovesongs.
Auditory-Visual Crossmodal Integration in Perception of Face Gender
Eric L. Smith, Marcia Grabowecky, and Satoru Suzuki
Current Biology October 9, 2007: 17 (19) p. 1680
The Essential Role of Premotor Cortex in Speech Perception
Ingo G. Meister, Stephen M. Wilson, Choi Deblieck, Allan D. Wu, and
Marco Iacoboni
Current Biology October 9, 2007: 17 (19) p. 1692
Neural Basis of the Ventriloquist Illusion
Bjoern Bonath, Toemme Noesselt, Antigona Martinez, Jyoti Mishra, Kati
Schwiecker, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and Steven A. Hillyard
Current Biology October 9, 2007: 17 (19) p. 1697
--
Jean-Francois Julien
Centre de Genetique Moleculaire
C.N.R.S.
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