Could an orca give a TED Talk? | Karen Bakker

What can happy rats teach us about human joy? Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert describes how her team trained rats to drive tiny cars to earn treats — and noticed something surprising about how effort and anticipation affect the brain. The experiment opens new questions ab ...  Show more

When the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires destroyed his home and neighborhood, scientist Christian Busch encountered the opposite of serendipity: "zemblanity," or bad luck by design. Drawing on more than a decade of scientific research, he explores how people can navigate unpredictabil ...  Show more

What if we could hear nature's ultrasonic communication -- and talk back? From a bat's shrill speech to a peacock's infrasound mating call, conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker takes us through a sound bath of animal noises that are far outside humanity's range of hear ...  Show more

A hardware revolution in recording devices and a software revolution in artificial intelligence is enabling researchers to listen in to all kinds of conversations outside the human hearing range, a field known as bioacoustics. Some scientists now believe these developments wil ...

A hardware revolution in recording devices and a software revolution in artificial intelligence has convinced some scientists that humans will eventually be able to ‘translate’ animal and even plant sounds into human language. But what would be the consequences of humans learn ...

The Canadian scientist and author Karen Bakker, who died unexpectedly in August this year, was a leading voice in the bioacoustic research community. Her 2022 book, The Sounds of Life, explained how it might one day be possible to create a kind of Google Translate for animals ...