You may find vocal fry irritating, but don’t automatically attribute it to women Cavan Images / Alamy If you have listened to a podcast or watched a video on TikTok lately, you will probably be familiar with vocal fry, even if you didn’t know it had a name. Vocal fry describes the creaky sound that…
New experiments with rice suggest that the acoustic vibrations of falling droplets can jolt dormant seeds into growth, offering the first direct evidence that plants can sense natural sound. Rice and related seed types can sense the sound of rain impacting the soil or water surface above them and respond by accelerating germination at depths…
In the cold, wave-battered channels off southern Chile, scientists have identified what they say is a new species of the steamer duck genus Tachyeres, a group of notoriously aggressive, often flightless waterfowl found only in South America. Detail of the color pattern of the bill in adult specimens of the Chiloe steamerduck (A) and the…
