The large toothed whales are known for their signature vertical sleeping skills. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Two sperm whales in the vertical sleeping phase in a position called candle in Mauritius Island, Indian Ocean. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

They may be talking about you. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Like a group of scheming teens shifting their conversation when a teacher walks by, sperm whales () change the way they communicate when ships are near.

Sperm whales communicate in short sequences of clicks known as codas. We present WhAM (Whale Acoustics Model), the first transformer-based model capable of generating synthetic sperm whale codas from any audio prompt. WhAM is built by finetuning VampNet, a masked acoustic token model pretrained on musical audio, using 10k coda recordings collected over the past two decades. Through iterative masked token prediction, WhAM generates high-fidelity synthetic codas that preserve key acoustic features of the source recordings. We evaluate WhAM's synthetic codas using Fréchet Audio Distance and through perceptual studies with expert marine biologists. On downstream classification tasks including rhythm, social unit, and vowel classification, WhAM's learned representations achieve strong performance, despite being trained for generation rather than classification.

Sperm whales communicate in short sequences of clicks known as codas. We present WhAM (Whale Acoustics Model), the first transformer-based model capable of generating synthetic sperm whale codas from any audio prompt. WhAM is built by finetuning VampNet, a masked acoustic token model pretrained on musical audio, using 10k coda recordings collected over the past two decades. Through iterative masked token prediction, WhAM generates high-fidelity synthetic codas that preserve key acoustic features of the source recordings. We evaluate WhAM's synthetic codas using Fréchet Audio Distance and through perceptual studies with expert marine biologists. On downstream classification tasks including rhythm, social unit, and vowel classification, WhAM's learned representations achieve strong performance, despite being trained for generation rather than classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/Project-CETI/wham

Scientists decoding whale clicks found patterns that echo the building blocks of human speech. The marine mammals have a complex communication system that scientists are working to decode. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A new study discovered a fresh component of their various vocalizations and could hint at potential language structures. Sperm whales exhibit patterns similar to human vowels and diphthongs-a connected pair of vowels in a word, such as the "oi" in .

Marine biologists are inching closer to understanding the ins and outs of sperm whale communication. But in order to decode what the cetaceans are saying, they must first need to find them and know where they will surface. This is no easy feat, since sperm whales can dive over 10,000 feet andstay way below the surface for up to 60 minutes. Their habitats themselves stretch for thousands of miles. Now, scientists from Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and Harvard University are proposing a new method for finding sperm whales and predicting where they will surface using autonomous robots and a rich combination of sensor data.

Scientists studying sperm whales have discovered that they communicate through a sort of "phonetic alphabet", enabling them to build a rough equivalent of what humans refer to as words and phrases. The study, published on Tuesday, involved sperm whales living around the Caribbean island of Dominica, describing how they communicate by squeezing air through their respiratory systems to make rapid clicks resembling Morse code, with sets of the noises making up the basic building blocks of language. Research showed the "expressivity" of sperm whale calls was bigger than previously thought, said Pratyusha Sharma, a lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications. "We do not know yet what they are saying. We are studying the calls in their behavioural contexts next to understand what sperm whales might be communicating about," she said.

Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) navigate underwater with a series of impulsive, click-like sounds known as echolocation clicks. These clicks are characterized by a multipulse structure (MPS) that serves as a distinctive pattern. In this work, we use the stability of the MPS as a detection metric for recognizing and classifying the presence of clicks in noisy environments. To distinguish between noise transients and to handle simultaneous emissions from multiple sperm whales, our approach clusters a time series of MPS measures while removing potential clicks that do not fulfil the limits of inter-click interval, duration and spectrum. As a result, our approach can handle high noise transients and low signal-to-noise ratio. The performance of our detection approach is examined using three datasets: seven months of recordings from the Mediterranean Sea containing manually verified ambient noise; several days of manually labelled data collected from the Dominica Island containing approximately 40,000 clicks from multiple sperm whales; and a dataset from the Bahamas containing 1,203 labelled clicks from a single sperm whale. Comparing with the results of two benchmark detectors, a better trade-off between precision and recall is observed as well as a significant reduction in false detection rates, especially in noisy environments. To ensure reproducibility, we provide our database of labelled clicks along with our implementation code.

Dana Goodyear's article about the scientist He Jiankui captured the terrifying potential of gene editing ("Dangerous Designs," September 11th). However, many of the problems that certain scientists are trying to remedy with the gene-editing tool CRISPR already have controversy-free solutions. Conditions such as Batten disease, caused when a baby inherits one pathogenic gene from each parent, can be prevented by pre-conception screenings of would-be parents. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is inherited from one parent, can be averted using pre-implant genetic diagnosis, a common I.V.F. Gene editing will eventually have a place in clinical medicine, but its use will likely be minimal, compared with these currently accessible, effective, and less buzzworthy techniques.

David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. "It was a dream," he recalled recently. "I didn't know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do."