Saturday, September 30, 2017

My heart beats to your tunes only! Kirill Tokarev on how male song promotes monogamy in zebra finch.

You might have seen the reality shows that put multiple bachelors together and it ends up in dramatic cases of cheating and adultery. Mixing attractive people provides a good recipe for amorous behavior. Polygamy should follow in close-knit and passion-filled social environment. However, we do know that individual male-female bonding can arise and be maintained even under such situations. How can monogamy be sustained?

Kirill Tokarev and colleagues used zebra finches as model to understand development of monogamy in a close-knit social structure. Female zebra finches are attracted to the singing of the male song, and in a community, multiple male songs would be heard by the female. Evolution of monogamy would require atleast two conditions:
1. after bonding, females responding to their partner's singing only,
2. to maintain harmony in the society males not being aggressive to other singing males.

How do both these conditions arise in zebra finches? To know that, please listen to Kirill.




To know more, please refer to:
Sexual dimorphism in striatal dopaminergic responses promotes monogamy in social songbirds
Tokarev et al., eLife 2017  

Monday, September 4, 2017

Deux in one! Krista Byers-Heinlein on how bilingual babies comprehend two languages.

We all have a dream to learn that foreign language. Could be French for your love of Paris or French cuisine. Or could be Japanese because of the anime industry. But, its really tough! Isn't it? However, millions of bilingual kids do this so effortlessly. How are they able to achieve this feat, which so many of us find so demanding.

Krista and colleagues study language comprehension in kids to understand how they make sense of a bilingual world. They wanted to know how kids monitor the language they are spoken to. Interestingly, they found an 'expectation' for one language within a single sentence. This suggested that kids efficiently parse information that helps them comprehend and learn multiple languages at the same time. To know more, please listen to Krista.


To know more, please refer to:
Bilingual infants control their languages as they listen
Krista Byers-Heinlein et al., PNAS, 2017