Weird science
Kea’s contagious call
Is laughter contagious?
Scientists suggest that, among our mischievous kea, it is.
Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology have found that the parrot has a “play call”.
When other kea hear it, it puts them into a playful mood.
The findings make kea the first known non- mammal to have an “emotionally contagious” vocalisation, the researchers say.
Earlier studies have made similar findings for chimpanzees and rats.
To find out how kea in the wild would respond, the researchers played recordings of play calls to groups of wild kea for five minutes.
They also played other kea calls and the calls of a South Island robin.
When the birds heard the play calls, they played more, and longer, in comparison to the other sounds.
“Many birds did not join in play that was already under way, but instead started playing with other non- playing birds, or in the case of solitary play, with an object or by performing aerial acrobatics,” the researchers write.
“These instances suggest that kea weren’t ‘ invited’ to play, but this specific call induced playfulness, supporting the hypothesis that play vocalisations can act as a positive emotional contagion.”
“If animals can laugh,” study coauthor Raoul Schwing of the Messerli Research Institute in Austria says, “we are not so different from them.”
Pro planet Pluto
thing clear: Pluto is a planet.
So, says Johns Hopkins University scientist Kirby Runyon, is Europa, commonly known as a moon of Jupiter, and Earth’s moon, and more than 100 other celestial bodies in our solar system that are denied this status under the definition of “planet”.
The definition approved by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 demoted Pluto to “non-planet”, thus dropping the number of planets in our solar system from nine to eight.
The change makes no sense, says Runyon, lead author of a new paper making the pro- Pluto argument.
Icy, rocky Pluto had been the smallest of the nine planets, its diameter under three- quarters that of the moon and nearly a fifth of Earth.
Still, Runyon says, Pluto “has everything going on on its surface that you associate with a planet — there’s nothing non- planet about it.”
Runyon has led a group of six authors from five institutions in drafting a proposed new definition of “planet”, and a justification for that definition. The science of . . . jokes Can science explain why we find jokes funny?
Aiming to answer the question of what kind of theory is needed to model the cognitive representation of a joke, Canadian researchers suggest that a quantum theory approach may be a contender.
Their initial quantum- inspired model of humour was tested in a study where participants rated the funniness of verbal puns, as well as the funniness of variants of these jokes, such as the punchline on its own, or the set- up on its own.
The results indicated that apart from the delivery of information, something else was happening on a cognitive level that made the joke as a whole funny.
Because its deconstructed components didn’t have the same effect, this led the scientists to believe a quantum approach was appropriate to study the phenomenon.
For decades, researchers have tried to explain the phenomenon of humour and what happens on a cognitive level in the moment when we “get the joke”.
Previous computational models of humour have suggested that the funny element of a joke may be explained by a word’s ability to hold two different meanings — something called bi-sociation — and the existence of multiple, but incompatible, ways of interpreting a statement or situation. During the build- up of the joke, we interpret the situation one way, and once the punchline comes, there is a shift in our understanding of the situation, which gives it a new meaning and creates the comical effect.
However, the Canadian authors argue that it is not the shift of meaning, but rather our ability to perceive both meanings simultaneously, that makes a pun funny.