Cats Manipulate People With Their Purrs.

So apparently cats can exploit their caretakers to get what they want through the use of a special purr. I can't say I'm surprised, that's a picture of two of my old cats there (rest in peace, guys). One minute they were purring -- and the next I was teaching them how to read!

Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a "soliciting purr" to overpower their owners and garner attention and food.

Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a "cry", with a similar frequency to a human baby's.

The team said cats have "tapped into" a human bias - producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore.

I dunno, I'm not really that big into babies crying. But maybe that's just my fatherly instincts talking. Read: impregnate and run. What can I say -- I'm a nurturer.

Cats 'exploit' humans by purring [bbcnews]

Thanks to FDSY, Sharkey, RealLifeF***up and Ryan, who are all controlled by an entirely different kind of cat.

This post dedicated in loving memory of The Little Man, October, Jimmy and The Terrorist.

Source: Geekologie. com

Finally, I Can Sleep At Night: Researchers Develop Algorithms To Mimic Water Sounds.

The watery sounds you hear in this video were all made using algorithms developed by researchers at Cornell, because, honestly, curing diseases can wait.

Doug James and Changxi Zheng, researchers at Cornell University, have developed a way to simulate the sounds of flowing or dripping water, which in real life are produced by tiny air bubbles that compress and expand due to surface tension, creating sound waves in the water.

So by using the geometry of a 3D scene, the Harmonic Fluids algorithm they developed can calculate where the air bubbles would have been created in real life and how they would have moved, which allows realistic accompanying sounds to be generated.


Now don't get me wrong, that's neat as hell, I just wish they would have made their research a little more useful in the real world. Like, I dunno, developing an algorithm to mimic the mating calls of prehistoric dinosaurs. Am I right? If we're not gonna cure cancer I should at least get laid.

Cornell Researchers Develop Algorithms To Simulate The Sounds Of Fluids [ohgizmo]

Source: Geekologie.com