Human activities are a major source of sound under water and such sound could be negatively affecting marine mammals. Research into the effect of sound on the behavior of marine mammals is aimed at understanding how and why marine mammals respond to various sound stimuli. Researchers have found that killer whales and pilot whales change the calls they make when responding to sonar sound. They believe that with greater knowledge about the sounds these animals make, regulations can be created to mitigate the impacts of the sound created by humans on marine life.

Researchers are now asking for the public’s help in classifying the calls of killer whales and pilot whales into distinct categories. Through the Whale Song Project, you can help by matching similar sounding whale calls. The results obtained will help specialists to refine the categories of calls used and discover patterns in the calls. The project is part of the Zooniverse network of projects (see our earlier posts on Zoo Galaxy and Ancient Lives, other Zooniverse projects).
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If you have an interest in astronomy, why not help scientists to classify the hundreds of thousands of amazing images of galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope. More than 250,000 people already have helped the Galaxy Zoo team to classify galaxies according to shape, by determining the presence of features in an image, such as spiral arms and the prominence of a galaxy’s central bulge. According to the Galaxy Zoo team, humans are much better at classifying the images than a computer.

In the latest project, some of the images to be classified come from the Extended Groth Strip, which contains at least 50,000 galaxies.

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Social networking sites are now among the most popular sites on the Web. You can keep in touch with your friends and family on Facebook, receive status updates from Twitter and maintain business contacts on LinkedIn. But did you know there is a social networking site especially for researchers? > > >

Which of the following faces looks more trustworthy?

Most people would say the person on the right, but why? Is it the eyes? The ears? The mouth?

These questions are what Alexander Todorov and colleagues at the Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience Laboratory at Princeton University have been investigating. They found that people, very quickly and unconsciously, make judgments regarding trustworthiness based on appearance alone. Which facial features do you think would appear most trustworthy? Find out the answer in this graphic and these movies. > > >