Slashdot Mirror
Singing Mice and Brain Chemistry
Shirlockc writes "The Public Library of Science has a research article on how male mice actually sing in the presence of females. They actually posted some of the audios adjusted for human ears as these songs are ultrasonic. The authors are comparing these warbles to bird songs. The songs are quite complex so do the mice learn them and/or improve on them? This can be a potential model for investigating how brain chemistry works during learning."
This should not be a surprise. Mice are truly the smartest most intelligent species to inhabit the Earth, followed by dolphins, then humans.
My singing attracted the ladies.. :-(
- Aetheral Research -
DJ Rat is recording his new mixed tape, which should be released early next Spring. The FCC; however, is not so thrilled, because the mixed tape "is one of the dirtiest fowlest things I have ever heard" said an FCC spokesman. "But it wasn't a suprise I guess, you know- he is a rat after all".
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
That's copyright infringemnt! Those mice songs are rip off from our records! ;P
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Are they sure it wasn't the mouse equivalent of "Hey baby, are you a parking ticket? Cause you have 'fine' written all over you!"
CHEEEEEESE-ings, nothing more than cheeeeese-ings
Trying to forget my CHEEEESE-ings for you
CHEEEEEEESE-ings,
Woah woah woah CHEEEEEESE-ings,
Woah woah woah CHEEEEEESE-ings,
OK, that's enough, I'm now annoying even myself.
M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!
Hey there, hi there, ho there, you're as welcome as can be.
M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!
Mickey Mouse! (Donald Duck!) Mickey Mouse! (Donald Duck!)
Forever let us hold his banner high, high, HIGH, HIGH!!
Come along and sing the song and join the jamboree.
M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E!
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Maybe to get help in the female department, you can try developing some social skills.
This isn't "dumb research". It actually helps understand things like language development in humans, learning processes in animals and such, since songs (birdsong included) are quite complex.
I've been emitting high-pitched squeals whenever attractive women come near me for years. Why does nobody call it a "song" then? ;(
Grasshopper mice are known to howl and hunt for meat. They are the wolves of the mouse world.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Watched male and female humans in their late teens to mid 20's when they really want a "piece of the action"?
Its almost amusing! Like watching the waggle dance of a bee or something.
Seriously, if your in that age group, do whatever your hormones tell you to do. But for us outside of that, you guys and gals are really funny.
And yes, I've "been there done that". It seemed right at the time (hormones again). But humans when they are at their most "animal-like" are pretty funny. Fights can be a part of it, but those are funny too all to themselves.
42
and already has recording mice patented and copyrighted. They are seeking to pass legislation through congress that will allow them to plug all of the analog holes these mice may have, unless the mice are genetically altered and the alteration is not open source.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Now we just need to work on reverse-engineering their secret ultrasonic communications so that we can find out what they plan to do with us.
11*43+456^2
Though the article makes a brief reference to insects' mating vocalizations, it really doesn't capture the image of a male fruit fly running after a female with his wings out as he frantically "sings" to her. In doing a quick search for the genes responsible for producing the correct song in D. melanogaster I stumbled across this appropriately named gene.
"It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss
With all these marbles in my mouth"
Has anyone tried playing the original (ultrasonic) tracks in a room where there are cats?
I am wondering if the cats would react?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"I'm seriously wondering where we manage to get so much money from in order to just waste it on dumb research."
This is why unimaginative people wouldn't be good scientists. From the writeup:
"This can be a potential model for investigating how brain chemistry works during learning."
The study isn't about putting on an all-mouse musical, it's about animal behavior, which has all sorts of other applications. Just because you can't imagine what those might be doesn't make it useless research.
I always wondered why there were so many female mice following Mariah Carey around. Those ain't vocal harmonics she's ripping, rather she's singing mouse love songs!
Mind you, if noisy environments where you can't hear yourself think are inherently repellent, I guess all the nightclubs should have gone out of business years ago...
A saying about how the "world will beat a path to your door" comes to mind. Why haven't I heard more about how this phenomenon might be used for rodent control? Surely the sounds could be either digitized and played back, or ... even better ... a heuristic process could listen to the male's response to a pheromone bait-trap, and then the 'gizmo' would warble back ...
Am I the only one who is thinking this?
Big money here. Rodents cause many millions of dollars of damage to grains stores annually.
Ever heard of diminishing returns? Apparently not. Ever heard of serendipity? Didn't think so. I'm glad there's people out there whose curiosity pushes them to investigate things that seem trivial and obvious, because no one knows where the next big breakthrough will come from.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
What are we going to do tonight pinky?
We're going to do what we do every night...
1..2..1..2..3..4...
"New York, New York...."
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
David Attenborough, noted naturalist, remarked upon the discovery of a rare night-singing tree mouse found in the Sheba Islands in the south Pacific. The musendrophilus has a very haunting song. Also their webbed paws are highly prized by the natives for the creation of their musical instruments.
It is unknown if they are related to the rare "tree squeaks" that live in the treetops and squeak every time the wind rustles their home's boughs.
1. Fund some obscure research department
2. Have them teach mice to sing.
3. Publish results to world, touting the musical abilities of mice.
4. Make micro-nano iPods to affix to the mice.
5. PROFIT!!!
1. Whistle 2. ? 3. Cheese 4. Sex!
Smile.
I challange someone to make a music remix out of this!
With this news we should be able to program small robots to seek out the singers and kill them. Or draw female mice to a killer robot with a fake male mouse song.
Phillip
I think the /. geeks "get" HHGTTG because they are quite a sarcastic, smartass bunch, more likley to get a kick from humiliating someone intellectually. And that's the sort of mind set most Bristish have.
PS. I'm an Aussie.
So why do the male mice sing to the females, eh? I mean, it's not like they need sound to find each other or tell the pitchers from the catchers -- they can sniff each other out in the total dark, et cetera.
/. and hoping horny girls mod you +5, Insightful Interesting Funny Yes Yes Oh Yes Take Me Now You Utter Stud.
Why would natural selection push male mice to develop this talent?
I sure don't know, but just for amusement I'll propose something along the lines of the OP's comment: suppose we argue an important characteristic of mice is that they are damn clever for their size. Seems likely they're a lot smarter, for example, than snakes or lizards or even birds of equivalent mass. Maybe they need smarts to succeed at a lifetime of scampering and hiding and thieving bits of food from larger predators.
If this is so, maybe it makes sense that the smartest males want to advertise their intelligence, and females are interested in listening to those ads, so that they can pick out good genes for the pups.
Now, clearly it takes brains to learn a complex song, spice it up with a couple of individual flourishes, and memorize it. So maybe what these mice fellas are doing by singing is advertising how smart they are. And maybe the girl mice by listening in are evaluating the sexy braininess of boy mice as it's expressed in their composition.
It would be, in essence, the auditory equivalent of posting clever comments on
OK I'm not sure if it's just that it's high pitched, but my I've never seen my cat react to a sound like he did for this. He was all interested and looking around. Wonder if he understands what it means better than I do?
Anyone else with pets care to share observations?
All I could think of when i read this was R. Kelly.
"I want to piss on you.. I really do..."
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
Look at the URL. It was an April Fool's joke.
Cats etc don't hear "ultrasound" as a distinct thing. They hear what is for them perfectly normal noise that happens to be high-pitched. But they'll as likely recognise an unusually low-pitched mouse call as you would recognise an unusually low pitched meow or bark.
Except that even the cards with the 192kSample/sec DACs won't reproduce much above 20 kHz. Remember, in a proper design you have to follow the DAC with a reconstruction filter as your signal will have spectral aliases every Fs. The idea of running a 192 kSample/second rate is to allow the reconstruction filter to gradually roll off from 20kHz to the Nyquist frequency of 96kHz, rather than the rather sharp roll-off from 20kHz to 22.05 kHz you see in 44.1kSample/sec gear. You also avoid the sin(x)/x roll-off in the reconstructed audio, as the roll-off in a 96kHz Nyquist frequency system is still pretty flat at 20kHz.
However, if you wanted to experiment with this, you could try to find an old (and I do mean old) Zenith remote control from the 1970's - they used ultrasound rather than IR as modern gear does, at about a 30kHz frequency. You could then drive that speaker from a DAC on the printer port, possibly with a simple timer chip to create the sample clock so that the computer "thinks" it is seeing a normal printer on the interface (that way you can avoid a great deal of the latency issues, especially if you use a printer port with a hardware FIFO.) You could eliminate the reconstruction filter as the transducer will do most of your filtering for you. Failing that, here are some transducers that will Git 'R Done.
www.eFax.com are spammers
As someone who works in the lab that just released this paper (but who was not an author), it's interesting to read the discussion about whether this counts as "dumb research" that shouldn't be funded.
A little background: whether or not these mouse vocalizations count as "song" is in no way the primary focus of our lab. Our work actually focuses on using the pheromone-detection system of mice (aka the accessory olfactory system) as a (relatively) simple model system in which questions about pattern recognition and memory formation can be asked. The idea isn't that how mice recognize other mice and what they do next is intrinsically interesting, but rather that questions of how mammalian brains put together circuitry that can recognize and remember patterns in incoming sensory information is both intrinsically interesting and in the long run highly pertinent to many areas of medical research (ranging from exploring the causes of autism to developing treatments for Alzheimer's) - and that this system happens to be one of the most accessible systems in which these phenomenon can be studied.
This paper was actually a complete tangent to this primary focus, which came about when my boss and a coworker were trying to use these vocalizations as a behavioral indicator of whether a male mouse thinks it is or is not detecting the presence of a female (something that can help us understand the rest of our lab's data). As long as they were recording the vocalizations, however, they figured they might as well look at them a bit - and were startled to discover how complex they were. Thinking that this it was possible that knowing about this complexity could prove useful to other researchers who study stuff more related to this kind of thing (for example, the study of how birdsong develops is proving to be really fruitful right now - but if you could do this kind of work in an animal where genetic modification is becoming routine, the pace could be improved even more), they submitted a paper that contained primarily an analysis of the original point of the research but with an additional section analyzing the vocalizations. It was the journal itself that suggested that it made more sense to publish the analysis of the vocalizations as a separate paper.
We in the lab have all been rather taken aback by the press coverage of this story. Seeing as it was in many ways a tangent to the main purpose of the lab (and not actually a part of ANY grant, just to answer the implied question in a comment a bit further down), it's a bit startling to see it become a popular story. It's really somewhat frustrating to realize just how much a science story's media coverage is determined by the "cuteness" of the story - in this case, the popularity of the story seems to be due primarily to the fact that 1) all of the words involved are easy to understand (everyone knows what mice are, and knows what singing is...), 2) people like to hear about things that have to do with mating and/or relationships and/or pheromones, and 3) the mental picture of mice singing songs is cute.
Partly because of this, we've been wondering a bit what the impact of this coverage will be on the public's perception of the utility of science funding. I absolutely believe that funding of basic science is in the long run the best way to promote major advances with real utility - the discovery of DNA through an offshoot of what seemed to be obscure molecular work and its current centrality to the majority of medical research is one of the best examples - and I certainly wouldn't be working the hours I work for the pay I receive if I didn't believe in what I was doing. But even in the 4-5 years I've been at this institution the decrease in the availability of funds for basic research has been obvious, and I worry a lot about the extent to which this concept is communicated to the public & what failures in this realm will mean for future funding of basic research.
If anything, this recent experience of how the media covers science has made me