Curio Cabinet

Some voices can be heard for a country mile. According to a paper published in JASA Express Letters, researchers at Indiana University have found that twangy voices are the easiest to hear over loud noises. Apparently, twangy, female voices are the easiest to understand in an environment filled with neutral noise. However, “twangy” doesn’t just refer to the stereotypical country accent, but includes those found in major U.S. cities like New York and Chicago. These voices have what the researchers called “bright” and “brassy” qualities. In the study, researchers took four male and four female participants with twangy voices and had them record speech samples. When played along with background noises like plane or train sounds, listeners were able to understand the twangy voices better than ones with a “neutral” accent. Although the reason for this isn’t clear, it may have to do with the fact that twangy voices tend to have a higher pitch than neutral ones. High-pitched sounds are perceived more clearly than low-pitch sounds, especially when ambient noise is also low pitched, which it often is. They also believe that a twangy timbre might have applications in voice therapy, which allows the speaker to “maximize acoustic output while minimizing effort.” You could call it a different kind of talk therapy.

[Image description: A digital illustration of a word bubble with three exclamation points inside, with four curved lines representing soundwaves.] Credit & copyright: Author-created image. Public domain.
 

These mermaids are a bit chunkier than the fairy tales claimed. Famously mistaken for mermaids at various points in history, manatees have managed to remain humble, drifting through warm, shallow waters at a leisurely pace of around five miles per hour. These friendly aquatic mammals are often compared to seals, but their true lineage is much more surprising.
 
Manatees have earned their distinction as gentle giants. They can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh up to 1,200 pounds, on average. They’re friendly enough to be tourist attractions, floating alongside snorkeling travelers. They’re not the only giants in their family tree, either. Manatees’ closest living relatives are elephants, though the two species obviously evolved in very different directions after splitting from their common ancestor around 60 million years ago. Their interesting lineage and general appearance, from their cow-like faces (from which they get their nickname “sea cow”) to their pudgy bodies, makes it all the more intriguing that they were once mistaken for mermaids. It does make some sense, considering that early Europeans often painted animals from the “new world” without ever having seen them in person, which could lead to discrepancies when one actually came across them. After seeing manatees for the first time in 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote, “Yesterday, when I was going to the Rio del Oro, I saw three sirens that came up very high out of the sea. They were not as beautiful as they are painted since, in some ways, they have a face like a man.” Despite Columbus’s scathing assessment, Manatees (along with dugongs) are part of the order Sirenia, named after mythical sirens, or mermaids.
 
Manatees frequent coastal waters in certain areas of North America, South America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, where they live mostly solitary lives, feeding on aquatic vegetation like algae and kelp. Although West Indian Manatees (which includes those sometimes called “Florida manatees”) haven’t been listed as endangered since 2017, they still face plenty of threats. They’re too big to be harmed by most natural predators, but habitat loss, dangerous pollution, and collisions with boats have all taken a toll on global manatee populations. Boat collisions can be especially deadly, and conservationists suggest that boaters avoid shallow waters and wear polarized sunglasses to better spot manatees beneath the surface. Crashing into a mermaid has got to bring bad luck.

 
[Image description: A manatee floating underwater surrounded by small fish.] Credit & copyright: Ramos, Keith, USFWS. USFWS National Digital Library. Public Domain.

What’s stronger than concrete or steel? Maybe wood. When it comes to versatility and ease of use, nothing beats wood for construction. Even if a building requires steel beams due to its size, lumber is bound to be used somewhere, whether for siding or walls. But what if there was a way to replace steel and make large structures entirely out of wood? That would require some very dense wood—denser than any that exists in nature. One startup, called InventWood, might have created such a material. Their Superwood is produced from scrap wood that has been chemically treated and then compressed by 25 percent, making it denser, harder, and stronger. According to them, this new type of engineered wood is stronger than steel but far lighter. It’s also bulletproof and resistant to fire. The density of the material is achieved by compressing it to make the wood’s cellulose fibers pack more tightly together, collapsing the circulatory system that once fed the tree but now acts as dead space in the lumber. Still, any new construction material that will be used as structural elements must first be certified, meaning that Superwood can only be used for non-structural purposes at the moment. Like any material, Superwood has specific properties that would need to be taken into consideration during construction projects. New designs, especially those for very tall buildings, would have to account for the fact that Superwood flexes more readily than steel. There is precedent for using wood in such buildings, though. Another type of engineered wood, called cross-laminated timber, has already been used to construct skyscrapers, including the Ascent MKE Building in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The process produces fewer carbon emissions and often makes construction quicker than with conventional skyscrapers. It could be that for wood, not even the sky is the limit.

 
[Image description: A pile of logs with pine trees in the background.] Credit & copyright: Stex-1999, Wikimedia Commons. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.