The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) as depicted above, was chosen as a reference for the ‘Networked Yawn Detector’ (a car-driver safety-monitor) developed by Zhengrong Yao and Haibo Li of the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Sweden. “We test our system publicly, 26 students from the Applied Physics and Electronic Engineering Department […]
Tag: yawning
Budgies Also Yawn (contagiously)
The 2011 Ig Nobel Physiology Prize was awarded to Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of The Netherlands, Hungary, and Austria), Isabella Mandl (of Austria) and Ludwig Huber (of Austria) for their study “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.” However, although Red-Footed Tortoises don’t seem to contagiously yawn, many other animals […]
A look back at contagious yawning in tortoises
This 2011 BBC TV News report profiled Ig Nobel Prize winner Anna Wilkinson: A Nobel prize may be the most sought after gong in the scientific world, but a lecturer from the University of Lincoln has picked up the next best thing. Dr Anna Wilkinson has won an Ig Nobel prize, to honour achievements that […]
The tortoise and the touchscreen
Ig Nobel Prize winners Anna Wilkinson [pictured here, with a tortoise] and Ludwig Huber have now done an experiment with four tortoises and a touchscreen. (Wilkinson and Huber, together with colleagues Natalie Sebanz and Isabella Mandl, were awarded the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for physiology, for their study “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.”) The new study is: […]