A new study compared the songs of 367 bird species with speech and song from 52 human languages and found shared acoustic patterns. Researchers looked at features such as pitch, rhythm and how sounds are structured over time, and found that birdsong and human speech follow similar regularities despite their very different origins. The work suggests that some constraints on vocal sound come from the physics of the voice and from how brains learn and produce sequences, rather than from language alone. It is a broad comparative study, so its value lies in showing which patterns are common across very different vocal systems. The findings add to a long debate about how language evolved and why so many animals produce structured sound.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.