The songbirds are even better at mimicking the'Star Wars' robot than parrots. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Songbirds like parrots and parakeets might be well known for squeaking out embarrassing one-liners and certain four-letter words, but those aren't the only sounds they can mimic. Birds have been observed copying dog barks, car alarms, and even chainsaws . But it turns out some species are better equipped to copy the droid's high-pitched beeps and boops than others.

Phantom Liberty is CD Projekt RED's masterpiece. Not only is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty graphically easily three generations ahead of the entire industry and redefines how we experience video games with pathtracing, it's also written even more thrillingly and staged even more explosively. Anyone who doesn't enjoy this several times in different play styles has never loved video games. Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion is a reminder of how incredibly explosive gaming has become – and the perfection with which CD Projekt RED manages to involve its actors. When Idris Elba is on a train out of Dogtown, joking with Songbird about how they really need to eat that one famous burrito of his together sometime, and there's such an eerie silence to the flirtation – the nervous looks of the head hacker because she's about to betray him – these are moments that feel like they'd belong in House of Cards or 24.

Pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, are currently the most trafficked mammal species. Criminals can be resourceful and unrelenting in their efforts to find a way around obstacles. Wildlife traffickers are no exception. Today's trade in wildlife and wildlife products has shifted from physical markets to online marketplaces where traffickers apply e-commerce business models and use encrypted messages in an attempt to evade detection by law enforcement. While the move towards online platforms started several years before the Covid-19 pandemic, the restrictions imposed to contain the virus accelerated this digital transformation.

We are all born with a predisposition for music, a predisposition that develops spontaneously and is refined by listening to music. Nearly everyone possesses the musical skills essential to experiencing and appreciating music. Think of "relative pitch,"recognizing a melody separately from the exact pitch or tempo at which it is sung, and "beat perception,"hearing regularity in a varying rhythm. Even human newborns turn out to be sensitive to intonation or melody, rhythm, and the dynamics of the noise in their surroundings. Everything suggests that human biology is already primed for music at birth with respect to both the perception and enjoyment of listening. Human musicality is clearly special. Musicality being a set of natural, spontaneously developing traits based on, or constrained by, our cognitive abilities (attention, memory, expectation) and our biological predisposition.

Songbirds provide a model system that neuroscientists use to understand how the brain learns and controls speech and similar skills. Much like infants learning to speak from their parents, songbirds learn their song from a tutor and practice it millions of times before reaching maturity. Also like humans, songbirds have evolved special brain regions for learning and producing their vocalizations. These newly-evolved brain regions in songbirds, known as the song system, are found within broader brain areas shared by birds and humans across evolution. So by studying how the song system works, we can learn about our own brains.