This week, listening in on a busy whale banquet.

I mean, I guess we was amazed at the number of vocalizations we received in our data set.

And how do you know where you are when you're not moving?

In our own previous work, we excluded explicitly from our analyses these times when the animal was still, so basically

we just hadn't been looking in quite the right place. Plus the researchers alert to bursts of

radio waves from distant galaxies. I had definitely intended to lie in that day, but the universe

had other ideas. This is the nature podcast for March the 3rd, 2016. I'm Adam Levy. And I'm Kerry Smith.

First up this week, how does an animal know where it is when it stops moving? That sounds like

the kind of question a curious toddler might ask. I'll have you know that I actually have the

mental age of a very

precocious 10-year-old. Though even I was surprised to find that this question, how does an

animal know where it is when it stops moving, is actually the first sentence of a nature paper

this week. You see, we understand pretty well how animals create a mental picture of their

location when they're moving around. But the parts of the brain they use for that, You see, we understand pretty well how animals create a mental picture of their location

when they're moving around.

But the parts of the brain they use for that don't seem to be doing much when they stop

moving.

So how do they, or we for that matter, have a sense of place when they're standing still?

Lauren Frank and colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco, have done research

on rats to try to get to the bottom of this pretty fundamental question.

I gave him a call to see why it's proven such a difficult question to answer.

Our approach to date has been to study animals and their sense of where they are when they're

...