People are not the only ones who’ve got rhythm — birds can also get into the groove claim scientists.

Researchers have revealed that birds, parrots in particular, can bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway along to a musical beat. Now they believe that other “mimicking” species such as dolphins, elephants, may also like to boogie. The findings show for the first time that a very basic aspect of the human response to a beat is shared with other species.

“We’ve discovered a cockatoo named Snowball that dances to the beat of human music,” said Dr Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California. “We’ve shown that if the music speeds up or slows down across a wide range, he adjusts the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronised to the beat.” One of Snowball’s favourite dancing tunes is Everybody by the Backstreet Boys.

Before this, scientists who studied music and the brain thought that moving to a musical beat might be a uniquely human ability because we don’t commonly see other animals moving rhythmically to music. In fact, as far as they know, birds in the wild do not move in time with sounds, leaving many scientists to think that this ability might be an evolutionary specialisation of the human brain for music cognition. But they now suspect that the parrots’ ability can be traced to another capacity they share with people: vocal learning or mimicry.

Researchers searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals and of more than 1,000 videos that turned up, only those of vocal mimics — representing 14 parrot species and one species of elephant — showed evidence that they could really get into the groove.

To see Snowball and other animals used in the study, go to www.cell.com/current-biology/April30Movie

Cosmic Hand

This amazing nebula from space has been dubbed the “hand of God”. Taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory orbiting 360 miles above the earth, the photo of Pulsar B1509 captures the x-ray nebula in a state shaped like a human hand. NASA estimates the shape spans 150 light years, but is caused by a dense neutron star that’s just 12 miles in diameter.

The cosmic phenomenon was caused when a star exploded in a supernova, creating a rapidly-spinning 12-mile-wide neutron star called a ’pulsar’, which is deep inside the white blob at the hand’s ’wrist’. (Neutron stars are created when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse.)

“The pulsar is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand,” NASA said.

That energy makes B1509 one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators in the Galaxy, with a magnetic field at its surface that’s 15 trillion times stronger than that of Earth’s.

The golden-red lights the hand is reaching for are part of a neighbouring gas cloud, which has been energised by force coming from the pulsar.

Astronomers believe B1509 is roughly 1,700 years old and is located 17,000 light years from Earth.