A Language Researcher Who Talks to Parrots

"Most pet owners talk to their animals at one time or another, and some do every day. But how much do our pets actually understand? Is their perception anything like ours? These are the questions that fascinate Irene Pepperberg and she's looking for answers from the animals themselves, specifically -- African Grey Parrots. The Harvard psychology professor is a bit like the character Dr. Doolittle because she's been talking to parrots for decades. With help from the National Science Foundation, she's researching how much the birds understand about shapes, numbers and colors. Her next phase of research involves how the parrots detect optical illusions, and whether they perceive them the way humans do. Her research will also reveal more about how a bird's vision works."

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

"Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer lodge dock florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry ladle cluck wetter putty ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut." 

This is how the story of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut begins. I assure you, you already know who Ladle Rat is and you've heard her tale many times before.  Don't believe me? Go here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/ladle/, listen to the story and read along if you want.  And "pear tension" to the intonation.

A Modern Rosetta Stone

"The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’ "

Read the rest here: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

The Strange Dance Language of Bees

From the article:

"Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, but they do have a secret. "   
Read the rest here.