Laughing and crying
“Ever wondered how many of our everyday laughs, groans and sighs are instinctive rather than learned from our peers? It now seems that only expressions of laughter and relief are instinctive, whereas other emotional outbursts need to be learned from other people,” New Scientist reports. “To find out which sounds are instinctive, a team led by Disa Sauter of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, asked eight deaf and eight hearing individuals to vocalize nine different emotions, but without words. These included fear, relief, anger, hilarity, triumph, disgust and sadness. Afterward, Sauter and her colleagues played back the recordings to a panel of 25 hearing individuals, and asked them to match each utterance to an emotion. It turned out that the only two easily identifiable emotional sounds made by the deaf participants were laughter and sighs of relief.”
Who needs the tabloids?
– “Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke” (Guardian): The 84-year-old actor apparently dozed off once on his surfboard and woke up out of sight of land. A group of porpoises pushed him all the way to shore.
– “Teacher fired for napping in class” (UPI): A 71-year-old high-school teacher in Ohio was fired after an investigation found that she frequently arrived late and slept during classes.
– “Scientists discover unknown lizard species at lunch buffet” (CNN.com): “Researchers have identified a previously undocumented species of all-female lizard in the Mekong River delta that can reproduce itself by cloning. ... Leilepis ngovantrii is a small lizard found only in southern Vietnam. A Vietnamese reptile scientist who came across tanks full of the remarkably similar-looking reptiles at small diners in rural villages in Ba Ria-Vung Tau province became intrigued when he noticed that all of the lizards appeared to be female.”
– “Conn. man who was shot after buying sandwich went home, ate before going to hospital” (Associated Press): The 25-year-old was shot twice; one bullet hit him in the left leg, another in the groin. Police say he went home and ate the sandwich, then asked his father to take him to a hospital.
Wheat terrorism?
“More than a year after they crushed ethnic rebels and put an end to a decades-long civil conflict, the authorities in Sri Lanka have declared war on wheat,” The Independent reports. “Such is the passion and nationalist fervour of some government ministers to replace wheat products with domestically produced rice, that they are talking of a ‘war against wheat-flour terrorism.’ The drive by the government ... has imposed bans on wheat products being served in government offices, prisons, schools and hospital canteens and is scrapping a government subsidy for it.”
All hail Peggy
“It was two years ago, at 4 a.m. at her apartment in Maryland, that Peggielene Bartels got the news from West Africa. A relative called from Ghana to say that her uncle, the king of the fishing village of Otuam, had died,” National Public Radio reports. “The news didn’t end there. She was also informed that she had been anointed his successor: King Peggy. ‘He said, ‘No, no, no, no, Nana, don’t hang up,’’ Bartels recalls. ‘‘We chose so many names, male and everybody, and somebody suggested that we choose your name, also. And when we poured libation and did the rituals, as soon as we mentioned your name, it started vapouring and we were surprised. So we did it three times. So that’s when we got to know that you are the king.’’ Nana Amuah-Afenyi VI is Bartels’s new title, but she is better known as King Peggy.”
Robots get personal
– “The brown-haired, brown-eyed woman made her Tokyo stage debut in a tearjerker about a girl suffering a fatal illness. Her voice was calm, but her performance a bit mechanical,” Reuters reports. “It wasn’t just first-night nerves. She was an android. Her name was Geminoid F. ... Seated on a chair throughout the performance, the human-sized [android] carried out conversations and monologues, dressed in a dark, scoop-necked shirt and dark pants. Her eyes blinked and her chest rose and fell as if she was breathing even as she spoke, smiled and looked surprised, though her face lacked the depth of expression of a real person.”
– A team at Georgia Tech is looking to replace your sponge-bath nurse with a robot named Cody, Discover magazine reports. “The robot uses cameras and lasers to evaluate the human’s body, identifying dirty spots, then gently wipes with its towel hands, making sure not to apply too much or too little pressure. It has flexible arm joints with low levels of stiffness to make sure that it doesn’t push too hard.”
Thought du jour
“Many men easily do without truth but none is strong enough to do without illusions.”
Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), French social psychologist
