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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Scientists Discover That Drunk Birds Sing Like Drunks

If you've ever listened to karaoke at a bar, you know that drinking can affect how well someone can sing. Christopher Olson and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University recently set out to find if the same was true for birds, specifically zebra finches.
"We just showed up in the morning and mixed a little bit of juice with 6 percent alcohol, and put it in their water bottles and put it in the cages," Olson told All Things Considered's Arun Rath. "At first we were thinking that they wouldn't drink on their own because, you know, a lot of animals just won't touch the stuff. But they seem to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it."

The finches long have been used as a model to study human vocal learning, or how people learn to communicate using language, Olson said. Obviously, alcohol affects human speech, so Olson and his team checked for similar problems with the birds.

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh, now that's really special. how much did you take from me to do that stupid study? MORE WASTE and ABUSE of MY money.

Anonymous said...

Why not use real alcoholics? More plentiful, easy to maintain and a wider repertoire of songs!

Anonymous said...

Are birds also 10 feet tall and bulletproof when they're drinking?

ginn said...

If Oregon Health and Science University had just used the $$ wasted on this to work toward R&D on 'over unity' or 'LENR' humanity might have a non-polluting future to look forward to. Instead, now we know birds can get drunk., extremely useful knowledge to a energy reliant society.