The power of song

In another interesting snippet of news about music, it has been discovered that zebra finches can fine-tune their babies' development by singing to them!

According to a report on the BBC News website, the Australian birds can affect the speed of growth of their offspring in the egg by singing to tell them about warm temperatures in the outside world. Scientists have played incubation songs to the eggs and discovered that those eggs exposed to the songs developed more slowly and coped better with the hot conditions. Isn't that a great piece of information for a quiz night!