Why cats prefer silver vine to catnip and other May highlights

The key to the discovery was a molecular barcoding technique developed by CSHL’s Anthony Zador, which enabled the team to map out the wiring of thousands of individual neurons in the brains of singing mice and other closely related species. This revealed that there were roughly triple the number of neurons connecting the mouth-movement control region with the cortex that controls hearing, and a midbrain structure that controls vocalizations. The authors suggest it might one day be possible to make an ordinary lab mouse “sing” by making similar neural wiring changes. Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10458-y. Credit: Courtesy of the Charles Darwin Foundation Credit: Courtesy of the Charles Darwin Foundation Foley artists have used so-called “slapsticks” to mimic the sound of the crack of the whip since at least the mid-20th century; it’s used in Leroy Anderson’s holiday classic “Sleigh Ride,” for example. But not all commercial slapsticks are created equal, according to Daniel Ludwigsen of Kettering University, who presented the results of his preliminary experiments comparing five versions at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia. Ludwigsen played each of the five commercial slapsticks five times in an anechoic environment, minimizing any acoustic room effects with absorbing wedges. All shared a high-frequency roll-off and a broad peak between 1,000 and 3,000 Hz, with varying degrees of low-frequency roll-off. The two smallest could be played with one hand thanks to a spring hinge and performed best in the high-frequency range. By contrast, longer models like the “Sleighride Special” performed best in low-frequency ranges. The resulting sound’s tone is influenced by how hard one smacks the sticks together. And preliminary testing of the Pearl slapstick showed roughly uniform sound directionality regardless of frequency, although Ludwigsen emphasized that a more complete study is needed. They also conducted experiments that tracked people’s eye movements and recorded their brain activity as they viewed sets of images—both in the lab and in a gallery. There was more stable integrative brain processing when people looked at real art versus pseudo-art, and the eye movements mapped neatly onto the previously identified topological features, suggesting a link between topologically derived image features, eye movement, and aesthetic experience. PLoS Computational Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1014156. Credit: Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Credit: Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Physical Review Letters, 2026. DOI: 10.1103/9gjj-1df6. Credit: Reiko Uenoyama Credit: Reiko Uenoyama