There’s another new episode of the TV adventure documentary series about Japanese Ig Nobel Prize winners, produced by the NHK network. This one is called “Rendering People Speechless.” The series is called “Laugh Then Think — Japan’s Offbeat Science”. The episodes are watchable online, each for a year after its first broadcast. They are also […]
“Did My Cat Just Hit On Me? An Adventure in Pet Translation“, a report in the New York Times on August 29, 2022, by Emily Anthes, tells about new attempts to build computer-based devices that will translate cats’ and dogs’ utterances into human speech. The report does not mention that these devices follow in the footsteps […]
The US Navy has obtained a patent (US patent #11082763, “Handheld acoustic hailing and disruption systems and methods”), here in the year 2021, for a device essentially the same as the invention that earned an Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2012 for a team of Japanese inventors. Unsound Invention, Anew New Scientist magazine reports […]
The biomedical race to understand and tame the COVID-19 virus proceeds rapidly, drop by drop. This new spittle study is the very latest addition to the literature: “Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering,” Philip Anfinrud, Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Christina E. Bax, and Adriaan Bax, New England Journal of Medicine, April 15, 2020. (Thanks […]