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In Scientific Controversies, we tackle complex, conceptual, occasionally amorphous topics like animal consciousness and string theory. To watch is a feast. 5 Takeaways is a snack, an amuse-bouche for the mind.

In Scientific Controversies, hosted by our own Janna Levin, we tackle complex, conceptual, occasionally amorphous topics like animal consciousness and string theory. These rich, hour-long conversations take place in person at Pioneer Works, and feature big thinkers engaged in big questions. To watch is a feast. “5 Takeaways” is a snack, an amuse-bouche for the mind. Because comprehension sometimes demands—or, at the very least, appreciates—distillation, and the internet loves a listicle. Below, for the benefit of lay science enthusiasts, 

 Assistant Editor Stella Belt serves up key takeaways from a conversation between Janna Levin and bird neuroscientists Erich Jarvis and Lauren Riters. Watch their full discussion on 

1. Birds aren’t the descendants of dinosaurs—they 

Birds are the last living dinosaurs, offering a glimpse into prehistory. Modern birds are embedded in the theropod group of the dinosaur family tree, within the same bipedal category as fearsome predators like the T. Rex. Songbirds and parrots are known to have evolved from the monstrous “terror bird,” a giant towering at 10 feet tall.

Could other dinosaurs sing, like birds do? Possibly. Learned vocalization evolved separately among birds and humans, so it’s possible that other species developed it, too. Regardless, language and speech are rare because they attract attention. A singing species has to be an apex predator of sorts (or at the very least, smart enough) to survive. All vocal-learning mammals—whales, dolphins, elephants—are at the top of their food chains; except for bats, who vocalize in an ultrasonic range that most other species can’t hear.

2. Pigeons can tell a Picasso from a Monet.


Humans long mistook the smoothness of the bird brain as evidence of a feeble intellect (hence the derogatory expression). The consensus was that the vastly increased surface area granted by our cranial folds gave us an unparalleled advantage. But avian behavior is far too complex to result from a simple mind. Most bird brains actually have twice the neurons per cubic millimeter compared to mammals, and songbirds have four times that neural density. 

organized differently than ours, it has many of the same neurochemicals. And their visual systems are far superior, with four cones (cells in the retina) to our three. Their capacities for visual memory are incredible, too: shockingly, pigeons can learn 700 different paintings and differentiate between artistic styles, remembering individual pieces better than humans do.

The Truth About Bird Brains

3. If you can talk you can sing. If you can sing you can dance. 


Only vocal learning species can learn how to dance. In birds and humans alike, vocal pathways are embedded in the brain regions that control movement, allowing us to synchronize our movements to rhythm. When the pathway that hears sound is rapidly integrated with the one that produces it, this contaminates the rest of the motor system, meaning that other muscles start moving to the music, too. This is epigenetic, meaning the DNA is pre-existing, but gene expressions are “turned on” when birds and humans sing and release oxytocin.

Birds Sing (and Dance!) Because It Feels Good

All vocal learning species must be raised by parents of a sort, because their skills require nurturing, listening, and models to imitate. Researchers discovered that birds learn songs from adult tutors, though they can typically only learn the melodies of their own kind. As languages are passed down through generations, it turns out that different birds of the same species can develop regional dialects.

In a cowbird study, an Oklahoman flock of males was moved to Indiana and housed with a native female. The researchers figured that the midwesterner would want to mate with her new southern companions, but she seemed disinterested. Despite being outnumbered, she didn’t assimilate to their ways, nor did she adjust her taste—rather, all the Oklahoman males began to sing Indianan carols to attract her. Perhaps among birds, opposites don’t attract. But geography clearly shapes the character of their communities, informing the way individuals speak, sing, and even who they desire.

Birds sing to attract mates and defend territories, but they also sing simply because it feels good. New York City’s skies fill with song in the spring, as seasonal breeders time their flirtations to match resource availability. Some birds take in daylight through their skulls rather than their eyes, allowing sun to reach deep brain structures and produce sex hormones in the warmer months.

While dopamine is partly responsible for reward-related processes, endogenous opioids (like heroin and fentanyl, but 

) play a strong hand in facilitating bird song, too. 

If you stimulate avian opioid receptors, they sing at high rates—but they aren’t singing mating songs. In fact, differences in song function can be intuited from the fact that they’ll stop singing altogether if you interrupt their romantic melodies with a dope hit. Breeding leads to an endogenous opioid release, so males will halt their tunes once they’ve received it. And as they practice in the fall, their songs are rewarded by a low-level endogenous release, which triggers different brain patterns than when they’re singing to attract a female. Alone, they’re able to explore different melodies without chasing an ideal, as we might while singing in the shower. And if you take a bird to a certain spot and let it sing, studies have shown that it will develop a strong attachment to that venue. ♦

5 Takeaways: Birdbrain

In Scientific Controversies, hosted by our own Janna Levin, we tackle complex, conceptual, occasionally amorphous topics like animal consciousness and string theory. These rich, hour-long conversations take place in person at Pioneer Works, and feature big thinkers exchanging on big questions. To watch is a feast. “5 Takeaways” is a snack, an amuse-bouche for the mind. Because comprehension sometimes demands—or, at the very least, appreciates—distillation, and the internet loves a listicle. Below, for the benefit of lay science enthusiasts, leading astronomy journalist Stuart Clark serves up key takeaways from a conversation on the 

between Wendy Freedman and John Mather, clips of which we've sprinkled throughout.

What’s with the buzz about this thing called JWST?

is the largest telescope we’ve ever sent into space. A joint effort between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency, the telescope is so big, it had to be folded origami-style into the nose cone of ESA’s Ariane 5 rocket. Weeks after its launch on Christmas Day, 2021, NASA engineers and enthusiasts everywhere held their collective breath as the JWST successfully completed a series of maneuvers, with numerous single points of failure, each of which could have doomed the mission. Soon after separating from the rocket, it deployed its solar array and sped towards a special place in space called the second Lagrange Point (L2), almost a million miles from Earth. During the first week of its journey, JWST opened its sunshield, a tennis court-sized barrier that shelters the telescope from the heat of the Earth and the Sun. Made of five layers of polymer material, each about one thousandth of an inch thick each, the sunshield had to unfold perfectly, with no snags or tears. And it did. Its purpose is to create a temperature difference of about 570 degrees Fahrenheit between its sunward side and the telescope’s optics and instruments, which work in its shade. The JWST took a month to reach L2, at which point it had deployed its telescope tower, and the primary and secondary mirrors, all while powering up its instruments. At 6.5 meters across, the JWST’s primary mirror is now the largest telescope mirror in space.

John Mather on the Unfolding of the James Webb Space Telescope

It has 6.25 times the light collecting area of its predecessor, the 2.4-meter mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Also, unlike the HST’s monolithic mirror, the JWST’s mirror has eighteen hexagonal elements, each made of ultra-light and stiff beryllium. JWST unfolded its mirror as it flew to L2, and once it arrived, NASA engineers aligned these hexagonal elements to a precision of about ten-thousandths of the thickness of human hair. This allows them to act as a single, large mirror. The mirror’s size, and the chill afforded by its sunshield, means that the JWST can observe light at infrared wavelengths. Compared to the HST, which sees mainly in optical wavelengths, JWST can detect cooler objects. Since infrared light can go through dust, much like X-rays through bodies, the JWST can peer through dust clouds, which often harbor newly-forming planets and stars. It might even see some of the earliest objects that formed in our universe, because the cosmos’ expansion would have stretched the light from these objects into JWST’s infrared range.

Hubble Deep Space vs. James Webb Field Image

Why should astronomers study these earliest objects?

Scientific curiosity, for one. JWST is designed to look for the first objects that formed a few 100 million years after the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the big bang’s fossil radiation, flooded the universe. Were these objects stars or galaxies or black holes? JWST should see the first glimmers of such objects and thus help answer an astrophysical mystery: how did the supermassive black holes that we see today at the center of most galaxies get so big so quickly? Did they start forming soon after the big bang, or did they arise from processes we don’t yet understand? The JWST will look for the potential seeds of these supermassive black holes. Finding them could give astrophysicists further insights into the formation of galaxies, in particular, and the general evolution of structure in the universe.

What the James Webb Space Telescope Tells Us About Black Holes

What else can such observations tell us about the universe?

The JWST will also help solve another mystery that’s been exquisitely set up by the Hubble Space Telescope. Before the HST was launched in 1990, astronomers were struggling to put bounds on something called H0 (read that as “H-naught”), the Hubble constant—a single number that tells us how fast the universe is expanding today. Calculating this number requires precise measurements of the distances to objects such as Cepheid variable stars and type IA supernovae. Before HST, estimates of H0 varied wildly, landing anywhere between 50 and 100 kilometers per second per megaparsec. The HST’s observations have helped astronomers pin this number down to 73.04 ± 1.04. But an entirely different method, using precise observations of the cosmic microwave background, gives H0 to be 67.49 ± 0.53. Either one of these estimates is wrong or we are missing something crucial in our understanding of the universe and its evolution. The JWST will help resolve this debate by studying so-called red-giant-branch stars, which are stars at the end of their lives that have expanded and cooled somewhat. JWST will accurately measure the luminosity of such stars, which will help astronomers calculate the distance to galaxies that host these red giants and make a more precise estimate of H0.

James Webb Space Telescope Images of the Ring Nebula

Is there anything close by that the JWST will set its sights on?

Yes, among its targets are exoplanets in our own galaxy. The JWST has the instruments to analyze the spectrum of starlight that filters through the atmosphere of planets orbiting other host stars. The spectrum can tell astronomers about the chemical elements in the planet’s atmosphere: is there water, or carbon, or oxygen, or methane, for example? Already, the JWST has found carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a Saturn-sized planet orbiting a star about 700 light years from Earth. JWST will soon study a system of seven rocky, Earth-sized planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, a red dwarf star that’s a mere 40 light years away. A number of these planets could be potentially habitable. So even as we marvel at JWST’s ability to look deep into the distant past, its most momentous discoveries may come from closer to home. ♦

Stuart Clark is an astronomy journalist and author of several books about space, both non-fiction and fiction, including 

James Webb Space Telescope

5 Takeaways: James Webb Space Telescope

In Scientific Controversies, hosted by our own Janna Levin, we tackle complex, conceptual, occasionally amorphous topics like animal consciousness and string theory. These rich, hour-long conversations take place in person at Pioneer Works, and feature big thinkers exchanging on big questions. To watch is a feast. “5 Takeaways” is a snack, an amuse-bouche for the mind. Because comprehension sometimes demands—or, at the very least, appreciates—distillation, and the internet loves a listicle. Below, for the benefit of lay science enthusiasts, contributor Anil Ananthaswamy serves up key takeaways from a conversation on 

 between guests Yann LeCun and Max Tegmark.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to software or hardware that attempts to mimic human intelligence in ways small and large. The current approach to building AI involves machine learning, in which computer systems learn about patterns in data, and then use this knowledge to make predictions about new data and take actions. An email spam filter, for example, uses machine learning: it examines a large sample of emails that have already been annotated as spam or not-spam and figures out patterns that typify spam. It then uses this knowledge to filter out spam from future emails, while continually learning to keep abreast of new tactics by spammers. Such machine learning systems have been extremely successful at tasks such as face and speech recognition, and language translation.

Current AI systems are good at specific tasks: image recognition, for example. Such AI is called weak or narrow AI. The effort is ongoing to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which refers to AI that will ostensibly match or even exceed human intelligence, in that it’ll be capable of thinking and tackling a wide variety of problems, even those that it wasn’t explicitly trained to solve. Some worry that AGI will eventually become supremely intelligent and autonomous and pose a threat to human existence. But whether this will happen, let alone exactly when, is a topic of intense debate. Scientists also differ in their opinions about when we should start planning for such an eventuality. Some advocate that now is the right time, while others argue that we should wait until we know what such an AGI will look like.

Maybe. Certain materialist philosophers assert that humans are material beings and that everything about us—including our consciousness—can eventually be understood as the outcome of the interactions and organization of matter that comprises our brains and bodies. In this way of thinking, everything—from the tiniest to the most complex of lifeforms—is made up of a hierarchy of interacting systems built from the bottom up; and the mind—both the conscious and unconscious aspects of it—is the outcome of such machinery. In other words, we may be biological machines.

Could machines become sentient, and how could we tell?

If the materialist philosophers are correct—and that’s a huge 

—then our subjective feeling of consciousness as something non-material is simply an illusion. If so, it’s possible that we will one day build machines that will have similarly subjective experiences of consciousness. To tell whether or not a machine is conscious, we’d have to design a suitably aggressive Turing Test. Such an aggressive test would probe a machine’s claims of internal conscious experience to gauge if it is truly intelligent. Also, if neuroscience deciphers the brain processes that give rise to the illusion of subjective consciousness in humans, then we could simply look for similar processes at work in machines.

Is intelligence limited to carbon-based life?

Not necessarily. Carbon, it turns out, is an excellent element for engendering life. Each carbon atom can chemically bond with up to four other atoms, enabling the formation of biologically important long-chained molecules such as proteins and DNA. Carbon is the substrate of life on Earth. But there is no reason to think that machinery built out of other elements, such as silicon, cannot be imbued with intelligence and consciousness; there is no scientific basis for carbon chauvinism. Artificial general intelligence built using software and hardware could one day demonstrate that properties considered the purview of carbon-based lifeforms may indeed be substrate-independent. ♦

Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning journalist and author of