News

Smart glasses

“Spectacles that can provide subtitles have been created by high-tech firm NEC,” BBC News reports. “Resembling glasses but lacking lenses, the headset uses real-time translation to provide subtitles for a conversation between people lacking a common language. The firm said the gadget, dubbed Tele Scouter, was intended for salespeople or employees dealing with inquiries from customers. … But, it said it could also be put to a more exotic use as a translation aid. In this scenario the microphone on the headset picks up the voices of both people in a conversation, pipes it through translation software and voice-to-text systems and then sends the translation back to the headset. At the same time as a user hears a translation, they would also get text subtitles beamed onto the retina.”

Samurai groupies

Young Japanese women are turning old warlords and samurais into objects of hero worship, The Economist reports. “It's like a samurai boom,” said a curator in a village museum in central Japan. “The young women seem to adore the codes of loyalty and friendship by which the samurai lived.” The phenomenon of the “history-loving women” is the serendipitous offshoot of a video game, Sengoku Basara (Devil Kings), which has the usual male fare of flashing swords, castles and conquests. However, there is no severing of limbs or gushing blood. Moreover, the characters are brave, noble and, above all, attractive. To his surprise, the game's creator, Hiroyuki Kobayashi, “found himself besieged by women smitten with the characters – sometimes over their boyfriends' hunched shoulders. Besides the good looks, they said they yearned for the sense of adventure and honour of the medieval era.”

Studying girly men

A large and growing tribe of Japanese metrosexual males, known as “girly men” or “herbivore men” (Social Studies, June 9) is worrying the country's sociologists, The Times of London reports. Such men have no interest in girls and disdain for the conventional accoutrements of traditional manhood. Cultural commentators have produced volumes attempting to explain them, with titles including Love Study of Herbivores ; The Men Who Wear Bras and the Women Who Don't ; and Herbivorous Girly Men Are Changing Japan .

Middle-aged wolves

It takes wolves a year or two to learn how to hunt, but their ferociousness doesn't last long, Emily Sohn reports for the Discovery Channel. According to a new study, most wolves lose their prowess by age three, just halfway through their lives. After that, they have to rely on members of the pack to catch the majority of their meals. The discovery adds to growing evidence that aging affects animals much like it affects people. Wolves live for an average of five or six years and sometimes reach age 10 or even older. “The take-home message is that an adult wolf is only maximally lethal for about 25 per cent of its adult lifespan,” said Dan MacNulty, an animal ecologist at the University of Minnesota, whose study appears in the journal Ecology Letters. “Carnivores simply aren't as ferocious as we think they are.”

Beatle in a droplet?

“The face of the Beatles' drummer, Ringo Starr, has been seen in a droplet of water bouncing on a lotus leaf,” Tom Chivers reports for The Daily Telegraph. “A team researching water-repellant leaf behaviour at Duke University in North Carolina took the high-speed images, showing water drops bouncing on the surface of a leaf.” James Dacey, a reporter for Physics World, describes the so-called Starkey Effect: “Bizarrely, everybody's favourite mop-topped Liverpudlian seems to reveal himself in the high-speed photo images.” Mr. Starr's features can indeed be seen in the images, although they distort as the droplet bounces. Some see the image of George Harrison, who once said, “Life is like a raindrop on a lotus leaf,” when talking about his battle with throat cancer.

Nabbing a roadrunner

For four years, Dr. Dean Ransom of Texas A&M University has ranged throughout the U.S. southwest, using radio telemetry and studying more than 50 nests to track the elusive, rarely studied roadrunner, Matt Palmquist writes for Miller-McCune.com. “The facts you want to know, should you try to, say, catch one: Roadrunners tend to live near substantial tracts of woods for cover – not, ahem, in the wide-open desert. They can fly when pressured. (‘It's not graceful,' Ransom reports, ‘but it works.') And it's difficult to tempt them with feminine wiles; they are monogamous and likely mate for life. Your best bet to snare a roadrunner? Take advantage of its aggression. The roadrunner tenaciously defends its territory against intruders; to hear Ransom tell it, perhaps a wee bit of Acme whisky would do the trick. ‘We witnessed a five-bird brawl that lasted about 90 minutes in 2006,' he says. … ‘Ultimately, the resident pair was triumphant.'”

Thought du jour

“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

– Margaret Fuller (1810-50)