It's (Chatty) Turtles All the Way Down
Even typically quiet animals like turtles can vocalize. Recent work suggests that all forms of acoustic communications had a common origin 470 million years ago, evolving in concert with lungs, reports Elizabeth Pennisi for Science Magazine. All land vertebrates vocalize, but only some can mimic sounds that they hear. Neuroscientist Erich Jarvis has found that this "vocal learning" uses the same brain pathways as language. Jordana Cepelewicz interviewed Jarvis for Quanta in 2018.
Stretchy Protons Stunt the Strong Force
Protons are stretchier than expected. Their constituent quarks are pulled apart by an electric field more easily than the Standard Model predicts, reports James Riordon for Science News. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the model that describes how quarks interact with one another, is a notoriously complicated theory. In 2020 Charlie Wood wrote for Quanta about the unwieldy calculations needed for QCD. Recently, physicists helped create a series of animations to better understand the physics happening inside a proton. Last week, Quanta published an explainer using visuals from the collaboration. | |
