Rachel Kaufman, freelance reporter » My Best Stuff

Speech Synthesizer Could ‘Resurrect’ Dead Singers

Rachel — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:35:43 +0000

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 synthesizers for years — think Mac’s text-to-speech meets AutoTune — under the brand name Vocaloid. But to build a Vocaloid “voice library,” a singer typically had to sing every possible syllable, one at a time, in the target language. A computer later would synthesize the fragments into songs.

But now the Vocaloid team has announced that it has succeeded in building a library based on the voice of someone who couldn’t participate in the painstaking process: Hitoshi Ueki, a popular Japanese vocalist who died in 2007. The initial results were revealed on a Japanese video-streaming site earlier this year.

(Creepy, yes? Read on…)

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Male Spiders Give “Back Rubs” to Seduce Their Mates

Rachel — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:32:29 +0000

When a male golden orb-weaver spider Nephila pilipes wants to get busy, he pulls out a special trick: He gives his mate a “back rub,” new research shows.

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.

(So then what?)

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My 2 Suns: Bounty of New Exoplanet Discoveries Includes a World Orbiting a Binary Star

Rachel — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:36:16 +0000

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 than a dozen newfound “super-Earths,” and strong indications that the Milky Way Galaxy is home to an almost unfathomable number of planets awaiting discovery.

The most exotic of the latest batch of exoplanets is the world with two suns, like Tatooine of Star Wars or Dr. Who’s Gallifrey. The planet, named Kepler 16 b for the NASA Kepler spacecraft that spotted it, revolves around two stars locked in a tight binary pairing; the planet’s wide, nearly circular orbit keeps it well outside the stars’ orbital dance. The trio is not the only so-called circumbinary system known, but it is the first for which researchers have been able to measure the properties of both stars and the planet so precisely, and the first system where the planet has been directly detected, rather than inferred.

(So?

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Snails Survive Being Eaten by Birds—A Mystery

Rachel — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:30:49 +0000

Tiny snails can survive being eaten by birds—and the gastropods come out the other end perfectly healthy, a recent study says.

Researchers studying feces of wild Japanese white-eye birds had noticed a surprising number of intact snail shells, especially of Tornatellides boeningi. This 0.1-inch (0.25-centimeter) snail is common to Hahajima Island (see map), about 620 miles (a thousand kilometers) south of Tokyo.

So Shinichiro Wada, a graduate student at Tohoku University in Japan, and colleagues fed more than a hundred snails to captive white-eyes and 55 to captive brown-eared bulbuls, another bird known to eat T. boeningi.

(And then?)

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Bug With “Singing” Penis Among World’s Loudest Animals

Rachel — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:25:34 +0000

Although not the loudest animal in terms of sheer decibels, the 0.07-inch (2-millimeter) water boatman species Micronecta scholtzi, pictured, does make the loudest sounds relative to its body size, scientists announced in June in the journal PLoS ONE.

Engineers and evolutionary biologists in Scotland and France recorded the boatman—which is roughly the size of a grain of rice—”singing” in a tank. The aquatic insect’s songs peaked at 105 decibels, roughly equivalent to the volume of a pounding jackhammer within arm’s reach.

The chirps are loud enough that humans can hear the sounds while standing at the edge of a boatman’s pond. Fortunately for nature lovers, though, nearly all the sound is lost when the noises cross from water to air.

Remarkably, the boatman creates his songs by rubbing his penis against his belly, in a process similar to how crickets chirp. Sound-producing genitalia are relatively rare within the animal kingdom, but animals have evolved hundreds of other ways to boost their hoots, howls, and snaps.

Read the rest at NationalGeographic.com

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3-D printers launch small businesses

Rachel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:28:20 +0000

They are machines straight out of ”Star Trek” or ”The Jetsons.”

It’s now possible for anyone with an idea to create tangible items — flowerpots, cell phone cases, jewelry, or nearly anything — from 3-D printers. All the person has to do is send a design for a product to a 3-D printer and out pops a real 3-D object.

Most 3-D printer owners are big businesses or tinkerers, because the machines are so expensive. But some innovators are using this technology to start new businesses and earn money.

Legos and Rubiks Cubes ahead at the original article on CNNMoney.com!

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Fire Ant Swarms Form Living Life Rafts

Rachel — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:32:08 +0000

When a city floods, humans stack sandbags and raise levees. When a fire ant colony floods, the ants link up to form a literal life raft, such as the one pictured. Now, new research shows exactly how the ants manage this feat.

Engineering professor David Hu and graduate student Nathan J. Mlot at Georgia Institute of Technology had heard reports of ant rafts in the wild that last for weeks. (Watch a fire ant video.)

“They’ll gather up all the eggs in the colony and will make their way up through the underground network of tunnels, and when the flood waters rise above the ground, they’ll link up together in these massive rafts,” Mlot said. Together with Georgia Tech systems-engineering professor Craig Tovey, the scientists collected fire ants and dunked clumps of them in water to see what would happen.

In less than two minutes the ants had linked “hands” to form a floating structure that kept all the insects safe. Even the ants down below can survive this way, thanks to tiny hairs on the ants’ bodies that trap a thin layer of air.

“Even when they’re on the bottom of the raft, they never technically become submerged,” Mlot said.

Read the rest at National Geographic News.

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Oil-Reliant Islands Seek Green Energy Restart

Rachel — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:24:18 +0000

Some of the world’s most alluring tourist traps are turning into testing grounds for cleaner energy.

Island-dwellers have a good reason to be renewable power pioneers: The waters that lap their beaches isolate them from the pipelines and grids that deliver cheaper electricity on the mainland. As a result, islands around the globe typically rely on expensive, polluting diesel oil for electricity.

Dependence on tanker deliveries of oil for lighting and air-conditioning means that islands are uniquely vulnerable to spikes in the global price of oil. So from the Caribbean Sea to the South Pacific, islands are seeking new ways of capturing energy from the same native resources that draw so many people to their shores each year�sun, sea, breeze, and stunning (often volcanic) terrain.

A case in point: the U.S. Virgin Islands, where electricity prices jumped to 54 cents per kilowatt-hour, quadruple the national average, when oil prices spiked to $140 a barrel in 2008. “These are not rich communities,” says Adam Warren, group manager for the deployment group of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). “It really put people in a bind. I think [island leaders] know if oil goes back up to $140 a barrel and they haven’t done anything, they’ll be held responsible.”

Read the rest at National Geographic News

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Ray Cats, Artificial Moons, And The Atomic Priesthood

Rachel — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:20:06 +0000

How about picking up the latest issue (Mar-Apr 2011) of Mental_Floss? You’ll find my piece on nuclear waste disposal, with all the crackpot theories that were once proposed, is on pages 30 and 31. Related posts:Urban Foragers Cropping Up in U.S. In Sacramento, they pick figs, kumquats, and plums from public... Related posts:

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Five Forerunners of NASA’s Robot Astronaut

Rachel — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:23:42 +0000

Astronauts of the future, meet your competition: When the space shuttle Discovery launches later today, Robonaut 2 (R2)�seen above on the left�will become the first humanoid robot in space.

R2 is bound for the International Space Station, and scientists will spend a year simply studying how well the robot moves in zero G. Once mission managers are satisfied, the android will be assigned one of its first tasks: house cleaning.

To keep the crew healthy, astronauts on the ISS have to use disinfecting wipes on all handrails every week. “Jobs like that are really crummy for humans,” said Robert Ambrose, the Robonaut project leader at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. Fortunately for the ISS crew, R2 wasn’t programmed for snarky backtalk.

Besides, Ambrose said, “we’re designing [Robonaut] for EVA”�extravehicular activity, the NASA term for spacewalking�”and you can’t really hear your robot crack jokes in a vacuum.”

These days, plenty of robots have landed on other planets and been put to work. Still, building a machine that can operate in microgravity around humans but without human control was a unique challenge. The mature, responsible R2 owes its shot at glory in space to a host of robotic “ancestors,” earlier androids that never left Earth as well as less human-like machines that are already hard at work on the ISS.

Read the rest at NationalGeographic.com

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