Sing it loud
Tis the season, the holiday season, for an onslaught of conversation, karaoke and other activities that swell voices – risking injury to vocal cords. A Finnish research team has explored whether water-infused smoke would be an effective healthcare tool for people who vocalise too dryly. They explain, in the Journal of Voice, that “regardless of the reason, vocal fold dehydration impairs the oscillation of the vocal fold tissue”.
The team used a waterpipe (the kind of device sometimes known as a hookah or shisha) to apply “a superficial hydration treatment in voice production in healthy young women”. The treatment, they report, “seems to be efficient”.
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Their analysis centred on phonation, which means making the various sounds that, when combined, become human speech. The women, 36 in number, were all “first-year students in the Degree Programme of Logopedics at Tampere University”, Finland. Logopedics is the study and treatment of speech problems.
This work explicitly builds on insights gained two decades ago by researchers at the University of Hong Kong. They, too, published in the Journal of Voice – a study called .
The team studied “the performance of 20 young amateur singers (10 males and 10 females, aged between 20-25 years)- during continuous karaoke singing”. Half of the singers were given water to drink and were permitted short “vocal rests at regular intervals during singing”. The other half “sang continuously without taking any water or rest”.
The researchers found that while those given water and rests sang for “significantly longer” than their counterparts, “the voice quality, as measured by perceptual and acoustic measures, and vocal function, as measured by phonetogram, did not show any significant changes during singing in the subjects who were given water and rest during the singing”.
One implication from that intensive Hong Kong experiment: most karaoke singers manage to keep the quality of their singing fairly constant, no matter what.
Kinetic excitement
Does the word “kinetics” intrigue you? The term usually pertains to chemistry or physics. Chemists say kinetics when they discuss the rates at which chemical reactions happen (as in the new study ).
Physicists say kinetics when they analyse the motions of physical objects (as in the study ).
But the word “kinetics” recently popped up in a most unexpected context. A medical team deployed that term in a way that seems novel and puzzling.
“The word ‘kinetics’ made me think,” Kees Moeliker – director of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands – tells Feedback. He points us to a report, in The Lancet, called .
The report, from Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, tells of two men who were infected with monkeypox and apparently passed the disease to a companion. First, we are told the context: “The men reported co-sleeping with their dog. They had been careful to prevent their dog from contact with other pets or humans from the onset of their own symptoms (ie, 13 days before the dog started to present cutaneous manifestations).”
Then the word “kinetics” takes centre stage, in this dramatic passage: “To the best of our knowledge, the kinetics of symptom onset in both patients and, subsequently, in their dog suggest human-to-dog transmission of monkeypox virus.”
Greenwashing
Sometimes, the same single word, even if it is dry as lint, can suggest insights about technology. Jennifer Davis writes in about a study called .
An international research team (hailing from Lithuania, Russia, Germany and Egypt) explains that its work is “the first research developed to investigate potential applications of dryer lint in the energy recovery field using a pyrolysis process”. The team asserts that “dryer lint produced while drying clothes is an urban waste”.
The researchers make and – in an exploratory way – test a simple solution: collect the lint from clothes dryers and burn it to produce a hitherto-neglected “sustainable source of renewable energy”.
Perspiration inspiration
Analogous efficiencies are on tap, so to speak, even for the habitually naked. A team based in France and the US explains how this could be in a study called .
This is an idea that works – if it works – not just when excitement is high and the juices are flowing. The researchers assure us that “the wearable device can store energy and deliver high-power pulses long after the perspiration stopped”. (A technical concession for the persnickety reader: Habitually naked except for a wearable biosupercapacitor.)
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