Wired's Mary Bates notes new evidence for a high level of intelligence among cetaceans: they celebrate with speech acts.

Sam Ridgway first noticed the sounds he would come to call ‘victory squeals’ in 1963. When three new dolphins arrived at his research facility, an engineer placed underwater microphones in their pool. As the researchers tossed ( Read more... )

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Oh, Japan. From National Geographic News:

Japan announced Thursday that it will restart its scientific whaling program next year in response to a new resolution adopted by the International Whaling Commission placing stricter regulations on scientific whaling ( Read more... )

Jane J. Lee's National Geographic article profiles, with distressingly--but necessarily--graphic pictures, the ongoing controversy over whaling in the Faroes.

One positive sign is that apparently it has become much less an issue of subsistence or economics and more a cultural trait. These can be changed more readily.

The recent arrest of 14 ( Read more... )

Tristin Hopper's recent National Post article describing how Greenpeace's new support for limited native whale hunts among the Inuit, seen as necessary to enlist local allies against oil drilling in the Arctic, is actually not appreciated by locals who remember the past ( Read more... )

Charles Siebert's article in the June 2014 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, describing a beluga whale named Noc who seemed to be trying to use human language while in captivity, got quite a lot of attention on Facebook. Siebert's article describes a whale who sounds hauntingly like an individual.

Millions of years before we humans came along, the ( Read more... )

New Scientist's Hal Hodson reported on what might be a startling breakthrough in human-dolphin communication. It's still early, but, I wonder?

It was late August 2013 and Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean. The dolphin pod she had been tracking for the past 25 years was playing around her boat. Suddenly, she heard one of them say, " ( Read more... )

• At the blog Buffer, Kevan Lee shows what lengths--in characters and in words--tweets and blog headlines and blog posts should be, according to science.
• Patrick Cain notes that Canadians have no way of knowing how many banned guns there were under the former registry since its junking.
• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining what, exactly, is ( Read more... )

• Anders Sandberg, as a good scientist, takes a look at the evidence same-sex marriage could be associated with floods (as a Briton claimed) by looking at his native Sweden.
• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling thinks that a Facebook executive's prediction of the death of E-mail is substantially a Facebook power grab.
• BlogTO chronicles the history of the ( Read more... )

Via io9 I came across Lori Marino's article in Aeon Magazine making the obvious point that trying to heal children by having them swim with dolphins is, among other things, a pseudoscientific misuse of smart predators who are almost certainly themselves suffering. It's truly a very bad idea all around ( Read more... )