The sound is sharp, spare and strange, a burst of clicks cutting through seawater. For years, researchers treated those sperm whale signals mostly as timing patterns, measuring pauses and rhythms the ...

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New research from UC Berkeley’s Linguistics Department, in collaboration with Project CETI, suggests that sperm whale communication may mirror the structure and complexity of human language far more ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales—enormous, ocean-dwelling ...

The way sperm whales communicate may be more similar to human language than previously thought. The acoustic properties of whale calls resemble vowels, a defining feature of human language, according ...

Say you want to listen in on a group of super-intelligent aliens whose language you don't understand, and whose spaceship only flies by Earth once an hour. It's not unlike what Harvard scientists and ...