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The Good News Podcast is your thrice weekly reminder that not all news is bad.
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Hi, I'm Neil, the host of the good news podcast.
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This is your source for good news, fun stories and Sonic Joy.
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All of this goodness is coming to you from beautiful Chicago, Illinois.
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Today's good news comes to us out of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina where researchers have been studying sleeping birds and attempting to translate their dream brain activity into bird song.
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For whatever reason.
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I think bird science has really produced some very good and very interesting good news.
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I'm not sure if all of this falls under the realm of ornithology, but I was thinking about those birds that were shown to use nonverbal communication for the first time.
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And about a year ago, there was good news about parrots that loved to be on video calls with each other.
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So if you weren't already impressed with how much we know about birds, then get ready.
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Gabriel Mindlin studies the physical mechanisms of bird song and he's been able to capture the electrical impulses in a bird's brain track that down towards a bird's voice box.
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It's not really vocal chords, it's called syringeal muscles and then take that muscular information translate that with a computer and produce digital bird song from bird dreams, which is so weird and wild and feels extremely futuristic.
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In recent years, the team had already figured out some of this with one particular bird, the Great Kiskadee.
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And they had already figured out how those singing muscles interact with the brain a little bit.
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It was the perfect bird for these tests.
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They slapped some electrodes on the bird, recorded its brain, it slept and then produced the song that it was dreaming and it turns out it was a territorial dispute.
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Basically.
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Get out of here.
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This area is mine.
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I don't know if I've had that exact dream before, but it does feel kind of surprisingly relatable that this bird is dreaming about something that maybe bothered them during the day and is reliving it while they're sleeping that I get super duper interesting.
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And this is really starting to feel like we're just a few years out from watching each other's dreams while they're happening or recording our own dreams so that we can watch them the next day.
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I don't know.
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But I've got a ton of respect for these scientists and researchers who keep doing this.
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Super interesting stuff.
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That's the good news I have for you today.
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Enjoy the rest of your day.
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Thanks for listening.
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The music you hear on the show is from Paddington Bear.
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Have a great day.