【推荐3】Screaming is one of the responses humans share with other animals. Conventional thinking suggests that what sets a scream apart from other sounds is its loudness. However, many sounds that are loud do not raise goose bumps like screams can. To find out what makes human screams unique, neuroscientist Luc Arnal and his team examined a bank of sounds containing sentences spoken or screamed by 19 adults. The result shows screams and screamed sentences had a quality called “roughness,” which refers to how fast a sound changes in loudness. While normal speech sounds only have slight differences in loudness—between 4 and 5 Hz, screams can switch very fast, varying between 30 and 150 Hz, thus considered to be rough and unpleasant.

Arnal’s team asked 20 subjects to judge screams as fearful or not, and found that the scariest are almost always connected with roughness. The team then studied how the human brain responds to roughness using fMRI brain scanners (磁共振颅脑扫描仪). As expected, after hearing a scream, activity increased in the brain’s hearing centers where sound coming into the ears is processed. But the scans also lit up in the amygdale (脑扁桃体), the brain’s fear center.

The amygdala is the area that responds to danger. When a threat is detected, our adrenaline (肾上腺素) rises, and our body prepares to react to danger. The study found that roughness isn’t heard when we speak naturally, but the most annoying alarm clocks, car horns, and fire alarms possess high degrees of roughness.

One potential application for this research might be to add roughness to alarm sounds to make them more effective, the same way a bad smell is added to natural gas to make it the easily to be detected. Warning sounds could also be added to electric cars, which are particularly silent, so they can be efficiently detected by pedestrians.

【推荐1】Litterati is an app that people can use to upload information about litter they collect outside, such as its appearance, material, location, and brand. Shared online, this information contributes to building a global database of “litter maps” , which can influence policy and packaging design.

“Society’s failure to solve the litter problem is not from a lack of trying. There have been public service announcements, and coastal cleanups. But I believe two components are missing from the discussion—community and data,” said Jeff Kirschner, the developer of Litterati app.

Uploading pictures to an app shows users that they are not the only ones picking up litter from public places and that others are invested in cleaning the planet, too. And the data accumulates rapidly telling a story that helps people understand who picked up what, where, and when. In this way, people are encouraged to do more.

In San Francisco, the Litterati app was able to identify and map more than 5,000 pieces of litter in order to determine how much was caused by cigarettes specifically. Using this information, the city successfully challenged a lawsuit by tobacco companies and doubled an existing cigarette sales tax, bringing in US $4 million annual revenue (税收).

By joining forces with others using the same platform, individuals are able to take their anti-litter activism to another level. The power of combined data leads to more Extended Producer Responsibility, which is precisely what we want and advocate here-producers are forced to be responsible for dealing with their own products once consumers no longer find them useful and are incentivized to create more environmentally friendly packaging or better policies as a result of that new responsibility.

Litterati takes a refreshingly non-judgmental approach. It shows a positive we-can-do-it attitude. Just as Jeff Kirschner said, “Our goal isn’t to shame. It’s to provide transparency to the problem. We provide access to data and share insights with cities, citizens and businesses, guiding us all to identify the root cause of the problem,and make informed decisions of how to clean the planet.”

【推荐2】Languages are important. But how they appeared is largely mystery（谜）. It is interesting to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages immediately. Observations have shown that when deaf strangers are brought together in a community, they come up with their own sign language in a considerably short amount of time. However, how exactly this happened has not been recorded, as Manuel Bohn describes, “We know relatively little about how social interaction becomes language. This is where our new study comes in.”

In a series of studies, researchers attempted to recreate exactly this process. But there was a problem: how to make children communicate with each other without them returning to talking to each other? The solution came up in Skype conversations between the two researchers from Germany and their colleague Michael Tomasello in the US. In the study, the children were invited to stay in two different rooms and a Skype connection was established between them. After a brief familiarization with the set-up, the researchers turned off the sound and watched as the children found new ways of communicating that go beyond spoken language.

The childrens' task was to describe an image with different meanings in coordination（协调）game. With concrete things like fork, children quickly found solution by copying the action（e. g. eating） in a gesture. But the researchers repeatedly challenged the children with new, more abstract pictures. In the course of the study, the images to be described became more and more complex, which was also reflected in the gestures that the children produced. In order to communicate, for example, an interaction between two animals, children invented separate gestures for actors and actions and began to combine them.

The studies show that communication cannot be reduced to words alone. When there is no way to use conventional spoken language, people find other ways to get their messages across. This phenomenon forms the basis for the development of new languages.

【推荐3】Muazzez Kocek, 46, is considered one of the best whistlers in Kuskoy, a village in Turkey's northern Giresun province. Her whistle can be heard over the area’s vast tea fields. When President of Turkey visited Kusköy in 2012, she greeted him and proudly whistled, “Welcome to our village!” She uses kus dili, or “bird language”. For hundreds of years, this whistled form of communication has been critical for farming in this place, allowing complex conversations over long distances and making animal herding (放牧) easier to do. However, because of the increased use of cellphones, the language is at risk of dying out.

Turkey is one of a handful of countries in the world where whistling languages exist. They attract linguistic (语言学的) experts very much. There is a long-held belief that language interpretation occurs mostly in the left hemisphere (大脑半球), and tunes and singing on the right. But a study conducted in Kuskoy suggests that whistling language is processed in both hemispheres.

Organ Civelek, 37, who can whistle in full sentences, explained that they are very proud of their linguistic custom and want to share it with visitors. Since 1997, Kuskoy village has been hosting an annual Bird Language, Culture and Art Festival, where the community gathers to practice and compete.

While technology is contributing to the language’s disappearance, it is also being used by some to preserve it. Mr. Civelek, who teaches bird language to children during the summer, uses an application called “Islik Dili Sozlugu,” or whistling language dictionary.

“You can lose or break a phone, but as long as you can breathe, you can whistle,” said Mr. Civelek. “It's a communication tool that you can bring with you anywhere.”