bioacoustics

Humpback whales sing songs that can last 30 hours and travel hundreds of kilometers. Fin whales produce calls at 20 Hz — below the threshold of human hearing — that propagate across entire ocean basins. Sperm whales use click-based dialects specific to family groups. Whale communication is not simple signaling. Biologists now argue it bears hallmarks of culture, the transmission of learned behaviors across generations.

A domestic cat produces one of the most recognizable sounds in the animal kingdom, yet scientists spent decades arguing about how it works. The mechanism turns out to involve a neural oscillator, self-sustaining vocal fold vibrations, and a frequency range that overlaps precisely with medical bone-healing equipment. Here is what the research actually shows.

Cats purr when happy, but also when injured, dying, or stressed. The vibration may be self-medicating — healing bones at 25–50 Hz.