Science News

From Mozart to the Beatles, music evolves as listeners get used to sounds they initially find strange or even shocking. As trailblazing music becomes mainstream, artists strike out in new directions. But in a new study, a computer program shows how listeners drive music to evolve in a certain way. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users' tastes exert their own kind of natural selection, nudging tunes to evolve out of noise.

Pulsing sounds made by technology used to monitor fish stocks may affect how baleen whales communicate, even at great distances.

A growing body of research shows that birds and other animals change their behavior in response to human noise, such as the din of traffic or the hum of machinery. But human clamor doesn't just affect animals.