As any new parent will attest, babies are amazing. And to the list of remarkable things infants can do, here’s a new one: they can distinguish one language from another just by the sight of a talking face, not sound.

Whitney M. Weikum, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues made this discovery in tests of infants up to 8 months old from monolingual (English only) and bilingual (English and French) households.

The researchers showed silent videotapes of a bilingual speaker saying a sentence in French or English until the baby got bored and looked away. They followed that with a tape of the speaker saying the same sentence in the other language, and observed whether that caught the baby’s attention, indicating that the baby recognized a difference and was attracted to something new.

They report in the journal Science that 4- and 6-month-old infants from English-only households were able to tell that a different language was being spoken. Eight-month-old infants from English-only homes, however, were no longer able to discriminate between languages.

Credit Chris Gash

“They’re losing sensitivity to this” as they grow older, Ms. Weikum said. “There’s really no reason for them to hang on to this ability if they are only going to be learning one language.”

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By contrast, 8-month-olds from bilingual households could still discriminate between languages.

It has been thought that visual cues like lip, cheek and head movements provide just redundant information for verbal communication. Auditory signals are much stronger, Ms. Weikum said, and transmit more cues for babies to pick up.

The research shows that infants have the power to process all kinds of cues. “From a very young age, they’re capable of taking in a lot of language information,” she said.

Similar experiments with adults have shown that they can use visual cues to discriminate between two languages if they know one of the languages. Ms. Weikum said the two findings suggested that infants became less sensitive to visual cues as they grew older but that at some point, through experience, adults regained this sensitivity.

As with human fingerprints, no two fisher paw prints are the same. Credit New York State Museum

Which Weaselly Rascal? Now Scientists Can ‘Dust’ for Prints and Find Out

Identifying a wild animal species by its tracks is easy, at least for those with training or experience. But a team of scientists has gone one better — they’ve figured out how to identify individuals of one species by analyzing its paw prints.

Carl J. Herzog of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, with researchers from the New York State Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and other groups, analyzed prints of fishers, a member of the weasel family, left in and around Adirondack State Park. The prints were obtained using soot-covered plates that the animal steps on before stepping on sticky paper.

Fisher prints are something like human fingerprints, though instead of ridges the fisher has tiny raised dots on its paw pads that form patterns. (There are enough similarities that scientists from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services were involved in the work.)

The researchers, whose work is being published in The Journal of Wildlife Management, found that each fisher’s patterns were different enough that the odds of encountering a similar pattern in another animal were very slight. They say the technique could be useful as a relatively inexpensive and noninvasive way to measure the abundance of certain endangered or threatened animals.

A female common eider’s first task of the day involves flying to find food. Credit Kennan Ward/Corbis

Tracking a Duck’s Travels Between Migrations: Dive, Eat, Drift and Repeat

Birds fly long distances to and from nesting sites, but they also make local trips — to escape predators, perhaps, or to find food. While scientists know a fair amount about bird migration, they know less about more run-of-the-mill flights.

A study led by David Pelletier of the University of Quebec at Rimouski aims to fill some of the knowledge gaps. His research on the common eider, a large sea duck that spends most of its time on water, shows that outside of migration, the bird doesn’t fly very much. What flights it makes are related to feeding (the ducks dive for mussels and other food).

The researchers implanted sensors in female ducks that recorded heart rate, pressure (for dive depth) and body angle. From the data and visual observations they were able to identify all the flights of the birds.

As reported in the journal Biology Letters, they found that the birds flew only for about 10 minutes per day. Flights were most frequent around sunrise and appeared related to diving frequency: the greatest amount of diving occurred in the two hours after sunrise.

The researchers suggested that the birds find good foraging grounds during the day, but when they rest at night ocean currents take them far away. So the first thing they do in the morning is fly off to find a new feeding ground.

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