Elephant Seals Know When Their Opponents Are Talking Shit. Yelling at each other online is a beloved human tradition.

Other animals like to shout at each other too, they just don’t have the luxury of a screen separating them. But of all the petty creatures in the animal kingdom, it turns out elephant seals might be most like humans when it comes to talking shit. A new study published on July 2. Current Biology suggests that elephant seals are able to recognize the tone and rhythmic patterns of their rivals’ calls.

Just as it is with people who squabble online, maintaining dominance is very important to elephant seals’ social order. A team of researchers spent weeks studying an elephant seal colony in A. The team changed the rhythm and timbre of the call, and presented two modified versions back to the seal colony, in addition to the original. When the researchers played the original alpha male call to ten “beta” males, the non- dominant seals scrambled away in fear. When they played their edited versions, however, the beta males were unafraid when the changes in the beat were more extreme. Therefore, the researchers concluded that the beta seals understood that they were not hearing the alpha male’s call.“This is the first natural example where on a daily basis, an animal uses the memory and the perception of rhythm to recognize other members of the population,” co- author Nicolas Mathevon of the Universit. Humans can do this too, of course.“There have been experiments with other mammals showing that they can detect rhythm, but only with conditioning,” Mathevon added.

In general, elephant seal calls sound like a broken car. But while they might not be the most elegant musicians, elephant seals need to understand each others’ calls so that they don’t die.“It is possible that maybe the ability to perceive rhythm is actually very general in animals,” Mathevon said. Competing for females, the males fight very violently, even to the point of killing one another. So it’s very important for them to accurately recognize the voices, to be able to choose the right strategy, to know to avoid a fight with a dominant male, or even to start a fight with an inferior one.”Of course, there are some limitations here.

This study only analyzed one colony—maybe they were just some really socially- conscious elephant seals. More research is needed to determine weather or not all elephant seals can understand pitch and the “beat” of other elephant seal “speech.”Anyway, while elephant seals aren’t the most eloquent species, I’d still rather listen to their caterwauling over any Chainsmokers song.

The Uncanny Sound Illusion That Creates Suspense in Christopher Nolan's Movies. Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. But the director does have a knack for creating an unnerving degree of tension. Turns out he’s using a little bit of musical magic to do it. The magic is actually a science- based audio illusion called a Shepard tone. Named after psychologist Roger Shepard, a pioneer in our understanding of spatial relation, the effect sounds like an infinitely ascending or descending scale.

The tones are constantly moving upwards or downwards, but they never seem to reach a pinnacle or nadir. This is accomplished by stacking scales on top of each other—typically one treble scale, one midrange, and one bass—with an octave in between, then playing them in a continuous loop. A Shepard tone is sometimes referred to as the barber pole of sound. You can even see the similarity, when you hear it and look at the spectrum view of a Shepard tone.

Don’t listen to this too long, or you might lose your mind: Anyways, Christopher Nolan just loves this. With longtime collaborator Hans Zimmer, the acclaimed director has used a Shepard tone in almost every one of his films in the last decade. He even writes his scripts to match the effect. In a recent interview, Nolan explained how he used Shepard tones in his newest film, Dunkirk: The screenplay had been written according to musical principals. There’s an audio illusion, if you will, in music called a “Shepard tone” and with my composer David Julyan on “The Prestige” we explored that and based a lot of the score around that.

And it’s an illusion where there’s a continuing ascension of tone. It’s a corkscrew effect. It’s always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle.

I interwove the three timelines in such a way that there’s a continual feeling of intensity. Increasing intensity. So I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principals. Knowing this, you gain a deeper understanding of films like Interstellar, Inception, and The Prestige.

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• Ever notice how Christopher Nolan’s movies (Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige) feel like an anxiety attack? Well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit.

I really like beer. No, I really like beer. That means I’m constantly on the hunt for beers I can’t get in my current hometown of San Francisco and broker deals. A new study published on July 20 in Current Biology suggests that elephant seals are able to recognize the tone and rhythmic patterns of their rivals’ calls.

It also explains why these films seem somehow inconclusive. A Shepard’s tone creates a conflict that can’t be resolved, just like Nolan’s plots. Hi-Def I Am The Blues (2017) Movie.