“He/she/they shouldn’t be allowed to say that!” is perhaps a natural human response, but it’s still one that must be overcome if free speech is to flourish. Which is why I find a recent technological development rather disturbing.

Imagine if, instead of shouting down people who say things we disagree with (as, disturbingly, so many people seem to think is the best way to deal with disagreeable speech, even—especially, it sometimes seems—on university campuses), squelchers-of-free-speech had a gun that could prevent someone from talking.

It sounds bizarre, but that’s exactly what Japanese researchers Koji Tsukada and Zautaka Kurihara believe they have come up with.

They call it the “SpeechJammer,” and it works because, in order to speak properly, we need to hear what we’re saying: we modulate our speech based on this auditory feedback. Singers can sing better when they can hear their own voices over headphones in the recording studio, or over the monitors on-stage: radio personalities, ditto.

But interfere with that auditory feedback by delaying the sounds coming back to our ears by just a tiny bit, and we become discombobulated: it’s thought that the delay actually interferes with our brains’ cognitive processes. And that’s exactly what the SpeechJammer does: it squirts a person’s own words back to them after a delay of 0.2 seconds.

As the researchers put it in their paper, “This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately the speaking stops. Furthermore, this effect does not involve anyone but the speaker.”

The researchers’ prototype SpeechJammer consists of a directional microphone and speaker attached to a box that also holds a laser pointer and a distance sensor (and, of course, a computer, which computes the delay based on the distance to the speaker). To interfere with someone’s speech, you point the SpeechJammer at the person talking, using the laser pointer as a guide, and simply pull the trigger. It can be effective up to 34 metres away.

The researchers conducted a preliminary study with five participants, testing various settings and using the SpeechJammer on two different kinds of speech: “reading news aloud” and “spontaneous monologue.”

They found that speech jamming occurred more frequently in the “reading news aloud” context than in the “spontaneous monologue” context, and that it never occurs when meaningless sounds such as “Ahhh” are uttered over a long time period.

Their preliminary study has pointed them toward further research to make their device work better, but the technology seems so simple and straightforward (so straightforward they’re not even attempting to patent it) that it will almost certainly find real-world applications.

Which is where it gets a little creepy. Imagine politicians cut off in mid-speech because someone is jamming them. If you think that sounds grand, you’re not thinking hard enough, because it won’t just be the politicians of the hated other party getting squelched, but the brilliant orators of your own beloved movement.

Or imagine you’re at a meeting where your boss is presenting changes to the workplace you strongly disagree with—but you are unable to voice your concerns because the conference table is equipped with a SpeechJammer at every seat that allows whomever is chairing the meeting to literally control who gets to talk, and for how long.

That’s not to say I can’t imagine plenty of occasions when I think such a device might be useful and even desirable—but the point is, you might imagine plenty of occasions, too, and they’re probably not the same occasions.

As Peter, Paul and Mary didn’t sing (but might have), “If I had a jammer, I’d jam you in the morning, I’d jam you in the evening, all over this land…”

The world might be quieter. But a lot less free.

(The photo: Me, giving a speech.)

Anyone who has learned to touch type has probably wondered about the peculiar arrangement of the standard keyboard, usually called QWERTY. Why aren’t the letters in, say, alphabetical order?

The fact is, some of the earliest typewriters did have keyboards in alphabetical order. But they had a problem: alphabetical order put some frequently used letter pairs too close together on the keyboard, resulting in mechanical clashes.

QWERTY was invented in 1868 and adopted by Remington for the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, whose brand name eventually became the generic name of all such machines—one sure sign of a commercial success.

The other sign of the machine’s success is the fact that its QWERTY layout was soon adopted by all other manufacturers.

QWERTY was designed to prevent the mechanical clashes that arose in early machines when two adjacent keys were struck in quick succession. It did that by separating frequently used letter pairs to opposite sides of the keyboard. (It also, not coincidentally, contains all the letters for the word “typewriter” in the top row, allowing salesmen to easily demonstrate the machine.)

QWERTY is now everywhere, which means that most of what you read passed, at some time, through a QWERTY keyboard. And now there’s research that suggests that the QWERTY arrangement actually affects the emotional content of what we read.

Linguists and psychologists talk about the “articulators” used in language production. They usually mean part of the vocal tract, but with so much language being produced using a keyboard, increasingly we’re letting our fingers do our articulation for us.

In spoken language, a portion of the meaning of words is linked to the way they are articulated. Researchers Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto wanted to find out if the same held true for typed language.

How does this supposed effect work? The QWERTY keyboard is asymmetrical: there are actually more letters on the left side of the midline than on the right. This means it is slightly more difficult to type words that use left-side letters than those that use right-side letters (something which has been demonstrated experimentally).

The researchers decided to test the hypothesis that “right-side words,” because they are easier to type, might be viewed more positively than left-side word. Not only that, but this might carry over to spoken language, because touch-typists (like me) actually implicitly activate the positions of keys when they read words.

To test this, Jasmin and Casasanto conducted three experiments, using three QWERTY-using languages (Dutch, Spanish, and, of course, English.) In the first, they set out to find out if the QWERTY effect carried across different languages—and found that it did. They showed participants a list of words and had them rate the emotional “valence” on a scale of one to five (using “manikins,” a smiling figure at the positive end and a frowning figure at the negative end).  Overall, words with more right-side letters were rated to have a more positive meaning than words with more left-side letters.

Next, they tested whether QWERTY influences new words more than old words…and found that the QWERTY effect was indeed more apparent in words coined after the invention of QWERTY.

Finally, they tested for the effect with pseudowords, made-up words with no meaning. (Science fiction and fantasy writers take note! We make up words all the time.) Sure enough, made-up words with more right-side letters were judged to have more positive meanings.

In the words of the researchers, “It appears that using QWERTY shapes the meaning of existing words and may also influence which new words and abbreviations get adopted into the lexicon and the ‘texticon’ by encouraging the use of words and abbreviations whose emotional valences are congruent with the letters’ locations on the keyboard.”

And the practical applications?

“People responsible for naming new products, brands and companies might do well to consider the potential advantages of consulting their keyboards and choosing the ‘right’ name.”

And for what’s it worth, I just realized that my name, Edward, is typed entirely using the left-hand keys.

It’s a wonder I have any friends at all.

And best of all, just this week some research results were released that indicate popcorn is also a very healthy food!

I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, some background.

Nobody knows who first popped popcorn, which is thought to have originated in Mexico. Ears found in the Bat Cave of West Central New Mexico were dated to some 5,600 years ago, and 1,000-year-old grains of popcorn found in tombs along the east coast of Peru were so well-preserved they could still be popped.

By 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, popcorn was widespread in the Americas. English settlers were introduced to it at the famous first Thanksgiving feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to which Quadequina, brother of the Wampanoag chief Massasoit, reportedly brought a deerskin bag full of popped corn.

Popcorn kernels pop due to water stored inside a layer of soft starch beneath a hard outer casing. Heat the popcorn up to about 230 degrees Celsius and that water turns to steam, which creates so much pressure that the casing gives away. The kernel explodes, turning inside out, the starchy layer beneath the casing becoming the fluffy white confection we like to eat.

And perhaps we should be eating more of it. At the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, Joe Vinson of the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania and his colleagues reported on a new study that found that the healthy antioxidants known as polyphenols are actually more plentiful in popcorn than in fruits and vegetables.

That’s because, Vinson says, popcorn averages only four percent water, while fruits and vegetables are 90 percent water, which dilutes the polyphenols. (Dried fruits have more polyphenols per serving than fresh fruit for the same reason.) Popcorn provides levels of polyphenols similar to those in nuts.

The highest concentration of polyphenols and fiber is actually in the hull, which isn’t exactly everyone’s favorite part of the popcorn, but perhaps the fact they’re, as Vinson calls them, “nutritional gold nuggets,” will make you feel better about having them stuck in your teeth. Thanks to that hull, popcorn is also the only snack that is 100 percent unprocessed whole grain, far better than your typical “whole grain” cereal, which only has to be 51 percent whole grain to qualify for that title.

Specifically, the study found that popcorn contains up to 300 mg a serving of polyphenols compared to 114 mg for a serving of sweet corn and 160 mg for a serving of fruit. One serving of popcorn provides up to 13 percent of the average daily intake of polyphenols per person in the U.S, and more than 70 percent of the recommended daily intake of whole grain.

Now for the caveats! How healthy popcorn is depends a great deal on how it’s prepared. If it’s cooked in a pot of oil, slathered with butter (or worse, butter-flavored topping like that used in some movie theatres), covered with salt or cooked as “kettle corn” in oil and sugar, then obviously, though the polyphenols will still be there, there are other concerns with fat, salt and calories.

According to Vinson, the lowest-calorie form of popcorn you can eat is, as you’d expect, hot-air-popped. Microwave popcorn has twice as many calories. And fat-wise, microwave popcorn has even more than popcorn you pop in oil yourself: 43 percent of regular microwave popcorn is fat, compared to 28 percent if you pop it yourself (and zero percent if you pop it in hot air).

Does this nutritional good news mean you should eat popcorn instead of, say, oranges, apples and bananas? Well, no: fruits obviously contain many other valuable vitamins and nutrients that popcorn doesn’t have.

But it does mean, if you’re looking for a satisfying snack you can actually feel pretty good about eating, you can fire up the hot-air popper without guilt.

My personal tip: use a really good olive oil on it instead of butter. Healthier, and yummy, too!

Although my daughter swears by soy sauce. But, hey, to each his or her own.

(Photo: Unpopped popcorn cobs, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Fact is, though, that most of them, at least in Saskatchewan, aren’t alkaline at all, but saline. True alkaline soils are low in soluble salts, but have a high sodium content and a high pH (over 8.5, which falls between egg whites and ammonia on the alkaline side of the pH ledger).

Saline soils are those with a lot of soluble salts in them, and although estimates vary widely, it’s generally agreed that several million acres of Saskatchewan soil are affected by salinity to some degree, with some 600,000 acres within the cultivated area of the province so badly affected they have zero productivity.

Saline soil makes life difficult for plants because it deprives them of water. In ordinary soil, salt in the sap in plant roots draws water (and dissolved nutrients) into the plant via osmotic pressure. When the water in the soil is also salty, that pressure is reduced and water doesn’t flow into the root, slowly starving the plant. In addition, sodium can build up in the plant’s leaves, interfering with photosynthesis and other important processes.

Saline soils are bad news wherever they occur, and they occur everywhere: it’s estimated that more than 20 percent of the world’s agricultural soils are affected. They’re a particular problem in the wheat-growing areas of Australia, which is the world’s second-largest wheat exporter after the United States. (What, you thought that was Canada? No, we actually rank fourth, behind Russia, and just ahead of the European Union.)

The gene pool of modern wheat is rather narrow, thanks to domestication and breeding over the years, which has made it vulnerable to environmental stress. Durum wheat, which is used for pasta, among other food products, is particularly susceptible to soil salinity.

But now researchers at CSIRO Plant Industry in Clayton South, in the Australian province of Victoria, have successfully bred salt tolerance into a variety of durum wheat so effectively that it shows an improved grain yield of 25 percent on salty soils.

And even if you’re dead-set against genetically modified wheat, you needn’t throw up your hands in horror: this improved variety was created using non-GM crop-breeding techniques. Not only that, but the scientists at the University of Adelaide’s Waite Research Institute are digging deeper into the plant to discover exactly how salt tolerance works genetically.

It all comes down to a salt-tolerant gene (TmHKT1;5-A, if you must know) which produces a protein that removes the sodium from the cells lining the xylem, the “pipes” that move water from the plant’s roots to its leaves.

The gene was discovered in an ancestral cousin of modern-day wheat called Triticum monococcum (as a Star Trek geek, I wish it was called quadrotriticale, but alas…). Through a selective breeding process, they were able to introduce that gene into a variety of durum. In field trials at a variety of sites across Australia, not only did the new salt-tolerant durum outperform its parent under salty conditions by up to 25 percent, it performed the same as its parent under normal conditions.

“This is very important to farmers, because it means they would only need to plan one type of seed in a paddock that may have some salty sections,” points out Richard James, lead author of the CSIRO Plant Industry study, which was published last week in Nature Biotechnology.

The new version of durum will now be used by the Australian Durum Wheat Improvement Program to see what the impact will be of incorporating it into recently developed varieties as a breeding line.

That means new varieties of salt-tolerant durum wheat could soon be available commercially—and since it was created through a non-GM breeding process, it can be planted without any of the restrictions sometimes placed on GM varieties.

Nor is salt-tolerant durum the end of the road for the research. The scientists have already bred the salt-tolerance gene into the kind of wheat used to make bread. It, too, is currently undergoing field trials.

The world population continues to grow, and that means a growing demand for food…which could make salt-tolerant varieties of wheat immensely valuable in the decades to come: not just in Australia, but right here at home.

(The photo: a particularly salt-tolerant variety of wheat in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, although it is rather susceptible to rust.)

And, in fact, the Earth’s solid shell, called the lithosphere, is cracked: broken up into numerous “tectonic plates” that scoot around on top of the more fluid layer beneath, called the asthenosphere.

Well, “scoot” might be an overstatement: plate speeds range from around 10 millimeters a year all the way up to a whopping 160 millimeters a year (about as fast as your hair grows).

This means Earth’s oceans and continents are constantly changing shape, and if that sounds just a little bit crazy even today, think how it sounded a century ago when meteorologist Alfred Wegener put forth his notion of “continental drift,” a theory he expanded in a 1915 book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans.

Wegener wasn’t the first person to posit something of the kind (after all, he was hardly the first to notice that South America and Africa look uncannily like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle separated by a few thousand miles of ocean), but he put forward as solid an argument as could be managed at the time, pointing to the similarity of rock formations on the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa, fossils shared by South America, Antarctica, India and Australia, and more.

But it took a slow accumulation of additional evidence over the next few decades to convince the bulk of the geological community of the fact of continental drift. One reason was that nobody could quite figure out how, exactly, pieces of crust could move around. Certainly Wegener’s concept of the continents as “icebergs” of low-density granite floating in a “sea” of denser basalt didn’t seem adequate to explain the phenomenon.

Eventually, though, the evidence became overwhelming, and plate tectonics, as it became known, took its rightful place as central to the proper understanding of earth’s geological history. (Though not, alas, in time for Wegener to see his “crazy” notion properly vindicated: he died in 1930.)

The wholesale shifting around of continents appears to have gotten underway about three billion years ago, and three times since then, all of the continents have mushed together into a single supercontinent. The most recent of these, called Pangaea, only broke apart about 250 million years ago, eventually creating the familiar shapes you memorized in geography.

In some places (“divergent boundaries”), the plates are pulling apart. Rock from the asthenosphere rises to the surface and becomes new lithosphere, mostly in the middle of the oceans, where this forms enormous rifts.

In other places (“convergent boundaries”) the plates are running into each other. In some places, this results in subduction, with one plate being forced under the other. In the ocean, this creates deep trenches. As one plate is driven deeper into the Earth, it heats up and fluids within it melt the surrounding rock, creating magma that feeds volcanoes like those of the famous Ring of Fire that surrounds the Pacific Plate. When two continents run into each other, mountains—for example, the Himalayas—are forced up.

The constant upwelling of rock at the divergent boundaries and sinking of rock at the convergent boundaries creates a conveyor-belt effect that is the main force driving the movement of the plates.

In some regions (“transform boundaries”), plates aren’t running into each other or pulling apart from each other: they’re just rubbing each other the wrong way. The best-known example is the San Andreas Fault. As the plates grind together they generate earthquakes.

There are seven major plates—the African Plate, the Antarctic Plate, the Indo-Australian Plate, the Eurasian Plate, the North American Plate, the South American Plate, and the Pacific Plate—and dozens of smaller plates, all constantly in motion.

Which means you shouldn’t get too attached to that map of the world you memorized. In 250 million years, after all, schoolchildren (or, at least, schoolthings) living on the new supercontinent Pangaea Ultima may well look back at our era and laugh at the strange shapes of our fragmented world.

(The image: The aftermath of colliding plates, a.k.a. the Canadian Rockies.)

And you know what? That would have warmed the cockles of Hugo Gernsback’s heart.

What’s that? You never heard of Hugo Gernsback? Well, you’re about to!

Modern science fiction stands primarily on the shoulders of two writers: France’s Jules Verne and England’s H. G. Wells. Verne played on the public’s interest in burgeoning technological and scientific advances as the 19th century advanced, and told stories of fantastic journeys to the moon, beneath the seas, to the center of the Earth, and even Around the World in 80 Days.

Wells focused less on the future of technology than on the future of society. The Time Machine was a parable concerning future relations between the working and ruling classes. And The War of the Worlds, the first alien invasion tale, was more about the insignificance of humanity in an uncaring universe than the likelihood of life on Mars.

Yet neither Wells nor Verne is considered “the father of science fiction.” That title belongs to Hugo Gernsback.

Gernsback wasn’t a writer, at least not to start with. Rather, he was a pioneer in the fields of electricity, radio and television. He sold America’s first home radio kit in 1904 ($7.50 at Macy’s). When government regulation of radio put him out of business, he repackaged the left-over parts as kids’ electronics kits. He also founded New York radio station WRNY, where some of the world’s first regular TV broadcasts began in 1928.

But he also moved into publishing. In 1908 he founded the world’s first radio magazine, Modern Electrics. For a 1911 issue, finding himself short of material, he filled a few empty pages with a piece of fiction, entitled “Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660.” The story was so popular he wrote more, even publishing them as a novel in 1925.  As a prose stylist, Gernsback left a lot to be desired (“Bang! Bang! Bang! Three shots rang out! Each more horrible than the last!”) But he wasn’t worried about style. He used his stories to toss off scientific predictions like one of his electrical devices might toss off sparks.

Microfiche, skywriting, solar power, holograms, fax machines, aluminum foil and a “parabolic wave reflector” (radar) were all part of Ralph’s daily life—but certainly not yet part of the daily lives of Gernsback’s readers.

Based on Ralph’s success, Gernsback founded a new magazine: Amazing Stories. The first issue from April 1926 (which you can read online, along with many other old magazines, at pulpmags.org) featured old stories by Verne and Wells and Edgar Allen Poe, but was nevertheless, Gernsback claimed in his introduction, “entirely new—entirely different” from other fiction magazines, because it would be devoted to what he called “scientifiction.”

He defined scientifiction as “a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” His rationale for the new magazine could have been written yesterday: “It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. Two hundred years ago, stories of this kind were not possible. Science, through its various branches of mechanics, electricity, astronomy, etc., enters so intimately into all our lives today, and we are so much immersed in this science, that we have become rather prone to take new inventions and discoveries for granted. Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations—impossible 100 years ago—are brought about today.”

Gernsback saw the new genre as a way of “imparting knowledge, and even inspiration, without once making us aware that we are being taught,” and that’s exactly how it worked out: many of the children who read Amazing Stories under the covers went on to become scientists, engineers or science fiction writers themselves. Gernsback, as Ray Bradbury put it, “made us fall in love with the future.”

Implicit in science fiction is the realization that the future will not be like today, and in both its “Vernesian” (focused on the science and technology) and “Wellsian” (focused on the effects of science and technology on society) strains, prepares us and excites us for—and sometimes alarms and warns us about—what that future may hold.

Hugo Gernsback died in 1967, not quite living long enough to see humans walk on the moon. Science has honored him by naming a lunar crater after him. Science fiction, meanwhile, hands out awards every year for the best new work in the field.

They’re called Hugos.

(The image:the cover of Amazing Stories, Volume 1, Number 1, April 1926.)

Well, a February 22 news article by Stephanie Hegarty of the BBC World Service claims that both science and history suggest we should quit worrying and embrace our midnight wakefulness: that in fact, sleeping without waking for eight hours is an unnatural artifact of technological advances and something our ancestors would have thought extremely peculiar.

On the science side, Hegarty notes, about 20 years ago psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment that involved keeping a group of people in darkness 14 hours a day for a month. Not surprisingly, this disrupted their sleep: but by the fourth week, they’d settled into a new, stable pattern—not eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, but a four-hour sleep, an hour or two of wakefulness, and then another four-hour sleep.

On the historical side, there’s the research of  Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech university, who in a 2001 paper and a 2005 book (At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past), discusses the more than 500 references he discovered, in everything from diaries to court records to medical books to Homer’s Odyssey, to a segmented sleeping pattern: a “first sleep” beginning about two hours after dusk, a waking period of an hour or two, and then a “second sleep”—exactly what Wehr observed in his subjects.

The references seem to indicate that this kind of sleeping was the norm.

Some people would get up and have a smoke or even visit neighbors during that waking period. Others would stay in bed, reading, writing or praying. (Prayer manuals from the late 1400s offer special prayers for the hours between sleeps.)

But Ekirch found fewer and fewer of these references going forward, until by the 1920s the notion of a first and second sleep seems to have disappeared.

He attributes that to improvements in domestic and street lighting. Better lighting at home made it more attractive to stay up late; street lighting made it more attractive to be out and about in the city. Businesses naturally took advantage of the change: coffee houses began to be open all night. There were simply more thing to do at night, and so the two-sleep pattern condensed into a single sleep.

As Hegarty puts it, “Night became fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.”

That sense of wasting time and losing efficiency became more pronounced as the industrial revolution took hold. Today of course, there are a million things to do no matter what the hour of the day or night…and millions of us are sleep-deprived as a result.

If sleeping the night through in one unbroken stretch is not entirely natural for humans, it could explain “sleep maintenance insomnia,” a condition where people wake up in the middle of the night and then have trouble getting back to sleep—and a condition that only shows up in scientific literature at the end of the 19th century, just as the concept of segmented sleep was beginning to disappear.

Hegerty quotes sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs as saying, “For most of evolution we slept a certain way. Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.” He suggests the segmented sleep pattern we used to enjoy may have played an important role in regulating stress, since that hour or two in the night was spent in rest and relaxation.

So the next time you’re lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, don’t think of it as insomnia. Think of it as getting back to your roots.

If segmented sleep was good enough for your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpappy, it ought to be good enough for you, too! And he didn’t even have the option of browsing the Internet at 3 a.m.

Poor guy.

I am glad, therefore, to see that science has finally tackled the important question of scientifically predicting the shape of a ponytail.

That may sound facetious, but in fact it’s a problem that has perplexed people for at least five centuries: that’s how long ago it was that Leonardo da Vinci considered the question, remarking, in his famous notebooks, of the way that the streamlines of hair resembled the flow of fluid.

Professor Raymond Goldstein from the University of Cambridge and Professor Robin Ball from the University of Warwick led a research effort to develop a mathematical theory that explains the shape of a ponytail—and thus can be used to predict the shape of a ponytail, provided you know the value of a few important variables.

To do so, the researchers took into account the stiffness of the hairs, the effects of gravity, and the presence of random curliness or waviness. Using that information, they derived the Ponytail Shape Equation, the key to which is a new quantity called (naturally) the Rapunzel Number, the ratio necessary to calculate the effects of gravity on hair relative to its length.

“It’s a remarkably simple equation,” according to Goldstein, who is (take a deep breath) the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, which you have to admit sounds way more impressive than “the ponytail prof,” which I suspect he will be known as in some circles henceforth.

Why is predicting the shape of a ponytail important? It actually has a number of real-world applications, from the textile industry to computer animation to, of course, personal care products.

The research provides new understanding of how a bundle of hair swells, due to the outward pressure arising from collisions among the component hairs. Human isn’t the only thing made up of random fibers: animal hair, which we utilize in wool and fur clothing, is obviously similar, and the research adds to our knowledge of their structure and behavior.

The application to computer animation is even more obvious: hair has bedeviled animators for years. It’s very hard to make it look realistic. Having a mathematical equation that can be used to predict its behavior in the real world will make it much easier to recreate it in the virtual world.

But ultimately, the Ponytail Shape Equation is fascinating just…well, just because. “Our findings extend some central paradigms in statistical physics and show how they can be used to solve a problem that has puzzled scientists and artists ever since Leonardo da Vinci,” Goldstein is quoted as saying in a Cambridge press release. “To be able to reduce this problem to a very simple mathematical form which speaks immediately to the way in which the random curliness of hair swells a ponytail is deeply satisfying.

“Physicists aim to find simplicity out of complexity, and this is a case in point.”

He goes on to say that “at least half” of the population has direct experience with the properties of ponytails, “and we have all likely wondered about the fluffiness of hair.”

Which brings me back to my daughter’s ponytail. Perhaps someday we’ll see an app that will, from a photograph of her hair, predict the shape of the resulting ponytail from any position on her head, helping me to make it perfect.

More likely, of course, she’ll start doing her own ponytail before that day arrives.

And you know what? I’ll miss helping her with it.

I guess that’s another way fatherhood changes you.

(The image: From The Project Gutenberg eBook, Grimm’s Fairy Stories, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Illustrated by John B Gruelle and R. Emmett Owen.)

Outside of science fiction and fantasy, no one has ever been able to reach into another person’s mind and extract those unspoken words. But that may change in the future, because modern technology is making it possible to see what happens in the brain when we hear someone talking—and because this activity is thought to be pretty much the same whether we hear someone say a sentence, or think that sentence ourselves, it may not be long before we are able to turn hidden thoughts into spoken words via computer.

(Sound familiar? Back in September, I wrote about similar work that used brain activity to recreate images people saw.)

New Scientist recently ran an article, written by Helen Thomson, on the work of a research team at the University of California, Berkeley. Led by Brian Pasley, the team presented spoken words and sentences to 15 people undergoing surgery for epilepsy or a brain tumor, while recording neural activity from the surface of a portion of the brain near the ear that’s involved in processing sound. Then they tried to associate different aspects of speech to different kinds of brain activity in the recordings.

The brain breaks down speech in terms of frequency (pitch), frequency fluctuation, rhythm and more. And sure enough, the team was able to correlate many of these aspects of speech to the neural activity they recorded in their subjects’ brains.

Next, they trained a computer program to interpret the neural activity and turn it into a spectrogram, a graphical representation of sound that shows how much of what frequency is occurring over a period of time. To test the spectrograms, they compared the ones they created from neural activity with spectrograms they created from the original sounds.

A second computer program converted the reconstructed spectrogram into audible speech. The result? “Coarse similarities” between the real words and the reconstructed words, says Pasley, that human listeners can kind of pick up on, but which computers were able to analyze more accurately.

Recording brain activity and turning it into spoken language via a computer would have one very obvious and very exciting application: helping those who have lost the ability to speak through paralysis or some other physical problem to once more communicate with the outside world.

Nor is Pasley’s team the only one working toward this goal. At Boston University in Massachusetts, Frank Guenther interprets the brain signals that control the shape of the mouth, lips and larynx to try to figure out what a person is trying to say. So far, all they’ve managed to produce are a few vowel sounds; nothing more complex. But it’s a start.

Steven Laureys at the University of Liege, Belgium, is seeking ways to distinguish brain activity corresponding with “yes” and “no” to help those who cannot speak.

Pasley is anxious to try to develop technology to make the thought-patterns-to-speech translation happen. He’d like to develop safe, wireless, implantable devices suitable for long-term use.

Of course, having anything implanted in your brain is going to be a tough sell, and to begin with, at least, only people already undergoing essential brain surgery would be likely candidates. And the words-from-brain-activity software is still in its infancy, anyway.

But the concept certainly seems viable, and exciting…although I don’t think it’s something most of us would want installed, no matter how safe, cheap or effective it might become.

“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt,” goes an old saying

If the day ever comes when our every passing thought is revealed to the world, the number of people revealed to be fools will surely astound.

Although, now that I think about it, hasn’t that already happened with Twitter?

These days, your car may even listen to you, if you have a voice-activated music system or phone. But generally, cars don’t pay much attention to what you say to them.

It could be that you just don’t have anything to say they’re very interested in. Perhaps what cars would really enjoy is conversation with others of their kind…and it may not be too long before they get it.

It’s called “vehicle-to-vehicle communication,” or “V2V” for short.  It is, literally, cars and trucks talking to each other. And starting this August, automakers will take part in a year-long field trial of the technology, a study being undertaken in conjunction with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

For the trial, 3,000 cars will be outfitted with equipment that allows them to broadcast their position, speed of travel and direction to other vehicles, and receive signals from those other vehicles in return, over a Wi-Fi network.

In an article about the “digital car,” Technology Review magazine compares the Wi-Fi signals to an alert passenger able to see in all directions at once. A V2V-equipped car could warn the driver if another V2V-equipped car was about to run a red light, or if there’s a V2V-equipped motorcycle in the blind spot.

A study sponsored by the U.S.’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration looked at the scenarios involved in police-reported crashes involving unimpaired drivers, and found that V2V systems could potentially address a whopping 79 percent of those kinds of crashes: 81 percent of light vehicle crashes and 71 percent of heavy-truck crashes.

Your car might not just talk to other cars, either. There is also something called V2I, which stands for “vehicle-to-infrastructure.” That communication between vehicle and roadway, the study found, potentially dealt with 26 percent of all crashes: 27 percent of light-vehicle, and 15-percent of heavy-truck. Putting the two together raised the potential reduction in (or at least reduction in the severity of) all kinds of crashes to 81 percent.

If this year’s field trial and other studies produce favorable results, the U.S. government could start developing rules as early as next year that would mandate the inclusion of V2V systems in all new vehicles: pretty much a necessity if the technology is to be as effective as possible, since a one-sided conversation between a V2V-equipped car and one that’s effectively deaf and dumb won’t help anyone.

Of course, “talking cars” may talk not only to other cars, but to the entire world, via the Internet. For example, Ford has a made a deal with Google to use the search engine’s prediction algorithms, software that analyzes large data sets to spot trends. The idea, presented by Ryan McGee, a technical expert in Ford’s Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design research group at the annual Google I/O conference in San Francisco last year, is that your car would send data to Google’s data centers, where software would predict where you are headed, based on past trips. Technology Review describes it this way: “Google might predict, say, that there’s a 59.24 percent chance you’re headed over to Bob’s house. A hybrid car might use a map of low-emission zones to determine when to switch to battery power as you drive. Or the algorithm could pick a fuel-efficient path with few hills, no rain, and the least traffic.”

This isn’t coming soon, if it comes at all: it’s probably four to eight years away. But it’s only one example of the possibilities inherent in cars that are no longer big dumb objects, but essentially rolling computers with network connectivity.

K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior leader for open innovation at Ford Motor Company, puts it this way in that Technology Review article. “The first billion vehicles in this world are like [un-networked] desktops—each doing their own little thing. The next billion cars should talk to each other and share intelligence.

“Think of how the World Wide Web changed the world,” he goes on. “The automotive sector is ripe for a similar change.”

(The photo: A Ford Mustang California Special.)