and as usual with any news headline involving evolution, it's worded the wrong way round. It should say something like "Fed urban birds have tended to survive more" i.e. looking back, not looking forward as though birds are capable of intentionally changing the genes of future generations
"By an odd coincidence, at least two other people were independently inspired at about the same time"
I wasn't aware that there had been other cubes ( at least 1 using the same mechanism) invented independently, but this is a very common phenomenon. For example, calculus was independently invented by (at least) Newton and Leibniz.
What's behind this phenomenon ? How is that different people, without communicated and in times gone by without any obvious common influences, imagine and invent the same concepts within the same timeframe ?