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Dr Katie Slocombe and Dr Anne Schel, of the Department of Psychology at York, examined the degree of intentionality wild chimpanzees have over their alarm calls. The study shows that chimpanzees appear to produce certain alarm calls intentionally in a tactical and goal directed way--they are not simply fear-based reactions. In Uganda, the researchers presented wild chimpanzees with a moving snake model and monitored their vocal and behavioural responses. They found that the chimpanzees were more likely to produce alarm calls when close friends arrived in the vicinity. They looked at and monitored group members both before and during the production of calls and critically, they continued to call until all group members were safe from the predator. Together these behaviours indicate the calls are produced intentionally to warn others of the danger. Dr Slocombe said: "These behaviours indicate that these alarm calls were produced intentionally to warn others of danger and thus the study shows a key similarity in the mechanisms involved in the production of chimpanzee vocalisations and human language. "Our results demonstrate that certain vocalisations of our closest living relatives qualify as intentional signals, in a directly comparable way to many great ape gestures, indicating that language may have originated from a multimodal vocal-gestural communication system."

East Africa's elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants. … [T]he study suggests that this alarm call isn't just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, "Bees!" says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study's lead author. When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the "bee rumble."

Two stories: First, about the Diana monkey (alarm calls), with some new insight. Second, about prairie dog chirps, which have "a grammar of color, shapes, and sizes."

Prairie dogs have different alarm calls for different predators and can also indicate the size, color, speed, etc of the predator. In fact, it was found that the animals could combine and restructure their calls to describe things they hadn't seen before. This was found by having different breeds of dog (a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, a cocker spaniel) wander through the prairie dog territory one at a time and recording the resulting alarm calls; the calls highly varied even though the 'predator' was of the same predator class. They also showed different calls when researchers wearing different colored shirts walked through the territory (the same for different heights and walking speeds).

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

"Mondegreen" means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect. Hearing is a two-step process. First, there is the auditory perception itself: the physics of sound waves making their way through your ear and into the auditory cortex of your brain. And then there is the meaning-making: the part where your brain takes the noise and imbues it with significance. That was a car alarm. That's a bird. Mondegreens occur when, somewhere between the sound and the meaning, communication breaks down. You hear the same acoustic information as everyone else, but your brain doesn't interpret it the same way.

In this article, scientist Wilkie Freud followed a group of chimpanzees around to learn more about the origin of language. The human lineage broke from chimpanzees roughly 7.9 million years ago. The study they found was that the chimpanzees use language when necessary, like when a snake is seen. They will shout an alarm call to warn other about the danger. They also seem to grunt when they enjoy food. This shows how chimpanzees and humans have similar but very different types of language.