All posts tagged: Unfamiliar

Women use a higher-pitched voice when speaking to unfamiliar dogs

Women use a higher-pitched voice when speaking to unfamiliar dogs

Published by José Betancourt

When women talk to dogs they do not know, they use a higher-pitched voice than they do when speaking to their own pets. The tone of voice and facial expressions people use also change depending on a dog’s size and the type of activity they are doing together. These results were recently published in the journal Animal Cognition. To understand this research, it helps to look at the concept of prosody. Prosody refers to the rhythm, tone, and pitch of speech, as well as the facial expressions that accompany spoken words. Acoustic prosody includes vocal features like pitch range, while visual prosody relates to the facial movements a person makes while talking. People often use an exaggerated, high-pitched vocal style when speaking to babies, which helps capture a child’s attention and communicate emotion. Research indicates that humans use a very similar style of communication when talking to their pet dogs. However, scientists are still working to understand exactly how the relationship between a person and an animal changes these speech patterns. In human interactions, emotional …

Scientists Intrigued by Unfamiliar Life Form

Scientists Intrigued by Unfamiliar Life Form

Published by José Betancourt

Matt Humpage, Northern Rogue Studios via Loron / Cooper et al. It’s a plant! It’s a fungus! It’s… an entirely new type of lifeform hitherto unknown to science? That appears to be the case for a puzzling, spire-shaped organism that lived over 400 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. After analyzing its internal structures, the authors argue that the mystifying ancient beings known as prototaxites don’t belong to any of the existing biological kingdoms. “It feels like it doesn’t fit comfortably anywhere,” Matthew Nelsen, a senior research scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History who wasn’t involved in the work, told Scientific American. “People have tried to shoehorn it into these different groups, but there are always things that don’t make sense.” The name Prototaxites means “early yew” or “first yew,” a misnomer that captures the debate that has surrounded its nature for over a century. With its resemblance to a tree trunk, scientists initially suspected it was some kind of extinct tree when its fossils …