Gossiping prairie dogs.

• Position: Language - Study on prairie dogs' chirps - Brief article

If you've ever gone hiking m the Colorado Rockies, you've probably heard the prairie dogs. Their chirps, it turns out, weren't just noise. Those prairie dogs were talking--and probably about you. Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent the past 30 years trying to decode prairie dogs' sophisticated language system. What he's learned so far through a series of experiments is pretty remarkable. The prairie dogs--which communicate in squeaks that sound something like "chee chee chee," the professor told NPR News--have different calls for different kinds of predators, such as...