Snapshots From the Meeting

摘要

Sleepy talking. Slumped posture and bloodshot eyes are giveaways of extreme lack of sleep, but speech betrays fatigue, too. A team led by Suzanne Boyce, a linguist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, recorded people giving directions after a good night's rest and after 34 to 58 hours of sleep deprivation. By analyzing phonetic features of each person's speech-pauses and the loss of syllables-a computer spotted a pattern associated with drowsiness. "This work is very exciting," says Sarah Hawkins, a linguist at the University of Cambridge, U.K. "It promises to ... not only help with practical applications such as detecting when machine operators like airline pilots are tired but will also give us greater insight into ... how speech is produced." How polar bears and tigers hear. The results of the first hearing tests of large carnivores were welcomed by conservationists eager to know the frequency ranges at which these animals can perceive human noise. A team led by Anne Bowles, a biologist at the Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute in San Diego, California, trained polar bears to respond to tones in order to receive a snack. The bears had a hearing range similar to that of humans, between 125 and 20,000 hertz.