In a discovery that deepens our understanding of animal social bonds, a study led by University of Oxford researchers in collaboration with the University of Leeds has demonstrated that wild great tits exhibit clear behaviours signalling ‘divorce’ long before the breeding season. The findings, published today (30 /29 July) in Royal Society Proceedings B, provide valuable new insights into how animals navigate complex social decisions.

A new analysis suggests that posts in hate speech communities on the social media website Reddit share speech-pattern similarities with posts in Reddit communities for certain psychiatric disorders. Dr. Andrew William Alexander and Dr. Hongbin Wang of Texas A&M University, U.S., present these findings July 29^th in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health.

In JASA Express Letters, researchers find that it is easier to understand twangy female voices when surrounded by noise. They recruited four male and four female participants to record twangy speech samples, which they then used to create a text-to-speech system. The generated speech samples were then played over noisy environment sounds. Participants listened to both male and female twangy speakers and neutral speakers, and the researchers found that in general, twangy voices were understood more than neutral voices, but participants had the easiest time understanding twangy female voices.