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Podcast: The World, the Universe and Us
Episode: Weekly: Do sperm whales have an alphabet?; Why dark energy is so weird; US bird flu outbreak
Description: #249Do whales have their own alphabet? We’ve long thought the clicking sounds that sperm whales make is their way of chatting to each other, but those clicks may be even more sophisticated than we realised. After analysing whale recordings, researchers suggest the different click patterns are complex enough to form an alphabet – the closest thing to human communication we’ve yet seen in animals. We know very little about dark energy – and it turns out we may know even less than we thought. This mysterious force, which accelerates the expansion of the universe, may be changi...