Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter
Wired.com
Speech Synthesizer Could ‘Resurrect’ Dead Singers
In a few years, you could be listening to an album of new songs featuring a duet between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. No, the two never cut a record together, but engineers and computer programmers are getting closer to being able to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs. Yamaha’s been developing voice [...]
More»National Geographic News
Male Spiders Give “Back Rubs” to Seduce Their Mates
For many spiders, females of the species are much bigger than the males—N. pilipes females are up to ten times larger—so mating is always a risky proposition. An unlucky suitor might get interrupted in his carnal embrace when a female kicks him off and eats him.
More»Scientific American
My 2 Suns: Bounty of New Exoplanet Discoveries Includes a World Orbiting a Binary Star
The hundreds of distant worlds, some large and some small, that are known to dot the galaxy provide plenty of intrigue for the scientists who hunt them. But the catalogued planetary population has just gotten a lot larger and more diverse, thanks to word this week of a newly identified planet orbiting two suns, more [...]
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From the Blog
The perils of not specializingA couple of months ago I got rejected from a freelance position because my undergraduate degree was in English, not the sciences. Then a few days later, I got rejected from a freelance position at the same company because my post-college work was in science, not English lit. Besides scratching my head, there’s not much [...]
More»Lessons From the Library of Congress for Researchers
Three buildings, two librarians, and six hours into my first “real” Library of Congress visit, I’m no closer to getting the research done that I wanted to do. When you’re doing science writing it’s only common sense to look at the literature that’s out there. Most of the time I can access the academic journals [...]
More»The Ultimate High School Curriculum
Inspired by The Oatmeal’s fantastic take on high school classes I began thinking about what the most useful classes I took in high school were. Besides the hard science courses, which have turned out to be serendipitously useful (but I really can’t suggest everyone run out and take physics just because they might decide to [...]
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