【推荐1】A sperm whale (抹香鲸) surfaces. The baby whale comes in close to drink milk. When the baby has had its fill, mom moves her tail. Then, together the pair div e down deep. Gasper Begus watches from a boat. “You get this sense of how vast and different their world is when they dive,” he says. “But in some ways, they are so similar to us.”

Sperm whales have families and other important social relationships. They also use loud clicking sounds to communicate. It seems as if they might be talking to each other.

Begus is an expert majoring in languages. He got the chance, last summer, to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat off the coast of the island nation of Dominica. With him were marine biologists and roboticists. There were also experts in other fields. All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying.

They call this Project CETI. That’s short for Cetacean Translation Initiative. To get started, Project CETI has three listening stations. Each one is a cable (电缆) hanging deep into the water from the surface. Along the cable, several dozen underwater microphones record whale sounds. From the air, drones (无人机) record video and sounds. Robots do the same underwater. But just collecting all these data isn’t enough. The team needs some way to make sense of it all. That’s where artificial intelligence, or AI, comes in.

Now a type of AI known as machine learning can find patterns from vast amounts of data and you can open an app and use it to help you talk to someone who speaks Japanese or French. One day, the same tech might translate sperm-whale clicks.

Project CETI’s team is not the only group turning to AI for help. Researchers have trained AI models to sort through the sounds of prairie dogs, dolphins and many other creatures. Could their efforts crack the codes of animal communication? Let’s take a cue from the sperm whales and div e in head first.

【推荐3】For Caribbean box jellyfish (水母), learning is literally a no-brainer.

In a new experiment, these animals learned to spot and avoid obstacles (障碍物) despite having no central brain, researchers report in Current Biology. This is the first evidence that jellyfish can make mental connections between events and change their behavior accordingly. “Maybe learning doesn’t need a very complex nervous system, but rather, learning is an essential part of nerve cells,” says Jan Bielecki, a neuroethologist at Kiel University in Germany. If so, the new finding could help trace how learning evolved in animals.

Bielecki and his colleagues wondered if Caribbean box jellyfish could learn that low-contrast objects, which might at first seem distant, were actually close by. The team put 12 jellyfish into a round tank surrounded by low-contrast, gray and white stripes. A camera filmed the animals’ behavior for about seven minutes.

At first, the jellyfish seemed to interpret the gray stripes as distant roots and swam into the tank wall. But those collisions (碰撞) seemed to lead the jellyfish to treat the gray stripes more like close roots in dirty water, and the animals started avoiding them. The jellies’ average distance from the tank wall increased from about 2.5 centimeters in the first couple of minutes to about 3.6 centimeters in the final couple of minutes. Their average collisions into the wall dropped from 1.8 per minute to 0.78 per minute.

“I found that really amazing,” says Nagayasu Nakanishi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who has studied jellyfish nervous systems but was not involved in the new work. “I never thought jellyfish could really learn.”

Neurobiologist Björn Brembs views the results more cautiously, noting the small number of jellyfish tested and the variability in their performance. “I want this to be true, as it would be very cool,” says Brembs. Experiments with more jellyfish could convince him that the animals really do learn.

【推荐2】How can you recognize a British, a German, and a Frenchman, apart from their accents and names?

There are ways people dress, but they are very complex and would take a lot of time to explain. Some items of clothing are just more popular in some countries than in others. For example, Germans often wear sandals (凉鞋) with their socks on, which is something a Frenchman would normally never do. In Berlin, where I live, people don’t really dress as smart as they would in Paris or London. The Germans have a reputation for not caring so much about their outward appearance — as long as the clothes are comfortable, they’re happy! They also seem to love sportswear more than people anywhere else.

The French cannot queue, while the British just seem to love it. French people are always late, British people are always on time and the Germans are always early.

French people use their hands a lot more when they speak, and take a lot more time to say something. French people care a lot how things are done or said. The British do care how things are done and said, but only in a context of politeness. The Germans just care how things are done. The French and the British seem to care more how things look, for example, food products and packaging.

When it comes to food, for example in a restaurant, a Frenchman would never think of ordering beer with a meal, which is something tally normal for a German or a British.

I find the Germans the cleanest and most disciplined in public space. The French are the worst and the British somehow in between.