Some Of The World’s Languages Are Whistled (Cool Weird Awesome 954)
It's National Mother Language Day. Many of the world's thousands of languages are spoken, written and/or signed... and at least a few are whistled.
It's National Mother Language Day. Many of the world's thousands of languages are spoken, written and/or signed... and at least a few are whistled.
Research from the Ohio State University just found that the words we use to describe food can affect how we perceive its taste. Erin Krakow Krakowmoji GIFfrom Erin Krakow GIFs [...]
This week in 2008, local officials in Swanzey tried to get English-to-Welsh translation for a road sign they wanted to put up. They got a Welsh sentence in response, but it wasn't what they thought. Plus: today in 1969, the first network message on ARPANET goes through, though without a few key letters.
If you’ve ever been around a baby you probably heard some cooing, gurgling and babbling, as the babies try to make the sounds adults make. Some new research finds if you spend time with baby bats, you might hear them doing essentially the same thing. Plus: the YouTube channel Steadycraftin finds a pretty cool way to reuse some of those old orange plastic prescription bottles.
A project out of MIT is using artificial intelligence to scan lost languages and find rules and conventions that may help us figure out what all those words from years ago might mean. Plus: historic signs in South Nyack, New York are using QR codes to tell us something timeless - a message that's never gonna give us up.
There is at least one person in the world who's paid to be a wizard. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand, contracts with him to "provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch." Plus: there's a museum exhibit in Switzerland featuring works of art that showcase imaginary or invented languages.
In the 1980s Deaf children in Nicaragua were sent to a new school that was supposed to help them learn finger spelling. Instead, they built up their own language, now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language. Plus: divers in Mexico find a cave that looked like it hadn't been visited before, only to find a link to civilization thousands of years ago.
Vivid Maps released a map of the U.S. by demonym, which is the term for a word that describes people from a certain place. Some are straightforward, but there are also plenty of surprises. Plus: you've heard of Four Corners, but did you know there's also a Tri-State Marker where you could stand in the states of Idaho, Wyoming and Utah all at once?
A team at UCLA has built technology into a glove that can recognize the hand movements from American Sign Language and translate those movements into spoken English in real time through a smartphone app. Plus: scientists in Australia say they can modify cotton to make its own color, without not-so-eco-friendly chemical dyes.
Amazingly, the English alphabet added its last letter in 1524, and no, that letter wasn't Z. We'll explain how an Italian grammarian convinced the world to add one more letter to the list. Plus: Andoni Bastarrika is a Basque artist who works with sand, but we’re not talking about basic beach sand castles here.