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.
A Delicious Cookie With A Bad Name Won’t Taste As Sweet (Cool Weird Awesome 712)
Research from the Ohio State University just found that the [...]
An Email Mixup Led To A Very Strange Welsh Road Sign (Cool Weird Awesome 645)
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.
Babies Babble, And So Do Baby Bats (Cool Weird Awesome 610)
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.
Can AI Bring Extinct Languages Back To Life? (Cool Weird Awesome 406)
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.
A City In New Zealand Has Its Own Wizard (Cool Weird Awesome 355)
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.
Kids In Nicaragua Created Their Own Sign Language (Cool Weird Awesome 335)
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.
What Do You Call People In Each State? (Cool Weird Awesome 334)
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?
The Smart Glove That Can Translate Sign Language Into Speech (Cool Weird Awesome 331)
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.
The Letters of the English Alphabet Weren’t Added in Alphabetical Order (Cool Weird Awesome 306)
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.