Can understanding the way birds process sound help make better hearing aids? Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley think so, so they're currently developing a hearing aid that would be able to distinguish between the main signals, such as a person’s voice, and cluttered background noises. Study leader Frederic Theunissen explains that the idea was inspired by studying birds, which are adept at listening in noisy environments.

"So they have all these different calls that they produce, and they're often produced in the background of noise, just because they're outside and the natural environment is noisy, can be windy, there can be other animals and so forth, and they're often also produced with many other animals from the same species also speaking. And I think anybody who's seen, you know, The March of the Emperor knows about the emperor penguin that, where the female, you know, leaves the male for a couple of months while she goes feeding in, he’s sitting on the egg, and then at some point, she comes back to the colony that has millions of male penguins there, right, and finds the mate. And a lot of this is based on vocal signals, right? They're very good at basically listening for sounds in noisy environments and finding them."