Transgenic songbirds provide new tool to understand the brain

Over the decades, scientists have learned a lot about the basic life processes shared by many animals — including people — by manipulating the DNA of the “lower” species, such as mice and worms. But to date, they have been unable to readily probe the genetic contribution to one higher cognitive capacity of particular interest — the ability to learn language from one another. Now scientists have worked out a method for altering the genes of the zebra finch, one of the handful of social animals that learn to “speak” in a way that is analogous to humans.

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