Wild Music in the News

Both hemispheres are involved in the brains of people interpreting a whistled variant of Turkish, compared with a left hemisphere dominance when listeners hear the spoken language  

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

When researchers dream about electronics of the future, they more or less dream of pouring liquids into a beaker, stirring them together and decanting a computer out onto the table. This field of research is known as self-assembling molecular electronics. But, getting chemical substances to self-assemble into electronic components is just as complicated as it sounds. The secret behind the breakthrough is... Soap.

When researchers dream about electronics of the future, they more or less dream of pouring liquids into a beaker, stirring them together and decanting a computer out onto the table. This field of research is known as self-assembling molecular electronics. But, getting chemical substances to self-assemble into electronic components is just as complicated as it sounds. Now, a group of researchers has published their breakthrough within the field. The group consists of first-year nanoscience students from the University of Copenhagen.

Monitors. Alarms. Pagers. People. Hospital noise can keep patients from getting a good night's sleep. Sound panels tested in the hallways of a hospital system helped reduce noise around patient rooms.

QMUL machine learning researcher Dan Stowell and his business partner Florence Wilkinson have launched Warblr, their mobile app that can automatically recognise birds by their song.

Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech.

Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech.

People trying to talk to Siri may soon no longer have to look like they're about to eat their iPhones, thanks to a new technology demonstration that solves the 'Cocktail Party' conundrum. The new approach uses metamaterials and compressive sensing to determine the direction of a sound and extract it from the surrounding background noise.

(Phys.org)—Astronomer Burak Ulaş, with the Izmir Turk College Planetarium in Turkey has taken his work into a musical dimension, using star oscillations as a source for a musical composition. He has uploaded a paper describing what he has done along with sheet music and an audio recording of his work to the preprint server arXiv—along with a shout-out to other pioneers in the field, from Kepler to Pythagoras to modern composer scientists Jenő Keuler and Zoltán Kolláth.

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers, two with the University of Wisconsin, the other with the University of California, has conducted a study, the results of which suggest that maybe humans did not get a start on language using only hand gestures as many scientists have theorized. Instead, as Marcus Perlman, Rick Dale and Gary Lupyan note in their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, it may have been a result of both noise-making and gesturing.

In the first single off of Chris Hadfield's new music album, the first album to be primarily recorded in outer space, the astronaut sings "Can't stand on my own two feet, I just float away, I took a ride in a hot hot seat, now I'm ready to play, far away.

A new mystery has been discovered in the migratory behavior of birds! Many songbirds travel long distances during their annual migrations, and it makes sense for them to do everything they can to conserve their energy during these journeys. Researchers have guessed that, for this reason, they might pick an altitude with favorable winds and stick with it rather than climbing and descending repeatedly, but there has been little data to back this up.

Rdio, the music subscription service backed by Skype co-founder Janus Friis, is partnering to bring simulcasts of 500 traditional radio stations to its app in the U.S.

There's a mild disappointment when you meet Shade Shutters and listen to him discuss his area of study.

Acoustic metamaterial can sort sounds according to their direction

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

(University of Pennsylvania) A new study led by Songtao Shi of the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated how regulatory T cells can themselves be regulated, by an unexpected source: hydrogen sulfide, a gas produced by the body's muscle cells and one often associated with the smell of rotten eggs.

To gain even deeper insights into the smallest of worlds, the thresholds of microscopy must be expanded further. Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the TU Dresden, in cooperation with the Freie Universität Berlin, have succeeded in combining two established measurement techniques for the first time: near-field optical microscopy and ultra-fast spectroscopy. Computer-assisted technology developed especially for this purpose combines the advantages of both methods and suppresses unwanted noise. This makes highly precise filming of dynamic processes at the nanometer scale possible. The results were recently published in the research journal Scientific Reports.

To gain even deeper insights into the smallest of worlds, the thresholds of microscopy must be expanded further. Scientists have succeeded in combining two established measurement techniques for the first time: near-field optical microscopy and ultra-fast spectroscopy. Computer-assisted technology developed especially for this purpose combines the advantages of both methods and suppresses unwanted noise. This makes highly precise filming of dynamic processes at the nanometer scale possible.

It's an old joke that many fusion scientists have grown tired of hearing: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away—and always will be.

(Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf) To gain even deeper insights into the smallest of worlds, the thresholds of microscopy must be expanded further. Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and the TU Dresden have succeeded in combining two established measurement techniques for the first time: near-field optical microscopy and ultra-fast spectroscopy. Computer-assisted technology developed especially for this purpose combines the advantages of both methods and suppresses unwanted noise. This makes highly precise filming of dynamic processes at the nanometer scale possible.