Hey there all you bright little stars twinkling in the vast dark firmament of science! Time for another edition of your favorite science roundup, the Friday Science Whatever.

I am afraid I might not be shining so bright myself this week. I am feeling under the weather, and so you will have to forgive me if I don’t quite scintillate quite like I usually do.

Still, science marches on, and so do we. On with the show!

First off, I have a bit of science-ish content to share. It is, in fact, one of those marvelous moments when history and technology combine to create a window to the past.

Every schoolkid knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But how many of us know what the man actually sounded like?

Until recently, absolutely nobody alive had heard his voice. But thanks to the discovery of a wax cylinder with his voice on it, and the miracle of lasers that can read the cylinder without harming it, we now have a sample of the great man’s voice.

The quality is, of course, atrocious, and so it is not quite like being there in the room with him. But it is like hearing his recording on the equipment for which it was designed, and that is also good.

As the article says, you can clearly hear the strict elocution in his voice. Makes him sound very prim and fussy, doesn’t it? Bell’s father was an elocution teacher, a job that has disappeared off the face of the planet these days, and good riddance.

All they did was make someone sound like a right git. Evidently, these people thought there was no such thing as OVER-pronouncing a word. Consequently, they pronounced the hell out of every word.

Give me the natural flow of speech every day. There is a happy middle ground between mumbling and elocuting, one where the speech is perfectly understandable but does not make one sound like they are speaking each word as a result of heavy torture.

That aside, well, aside, I absolutely love anything that makes me feel like I am traveling to a previous era. If you are keen on hearing history, there is an extensive collection of historical recordings, including many retrieved from the days of the wax cylinder, on that marvelous repository of manifold wonders, archive.org.

Sticking with amazing audio, let us turn to this fascinating story of a rare breed of monkey that may well give us a vital clue towards understanding how we human beings developed speech.

Most monkeys have a lip-smacking sound as part of their primitive primate vocabulary. Many of the higher monkeys have elaborated that into the ability to make very crude, grunting one or two syllable ‘words’.

But grunts, despite what Tim Allen says, are not speech. So how did we get to where we are today?

Enter the gelada, a monkey species closely related to baboons. They live exclusively in the highlands of Ethiopia, and they have taken lip-smacking vocalizations to a whole new level.

Here is an example. Warning, this is beyond freaky.

Weird, huh? It makes you want to look around for the human being making those silly noises. If it wasn’t for the science backing this up to the hilt, I would be tempted to call shenanigans and say someone just took human vocalizations and overdubbed them onto gelada footage.

You have to admit, that sounds a lot like speech. And tellingly, the geladas use these vocalizations not just as warning sounds or to convey information, but to socialize as well.

It reminds me of the nonsense sounds that human children make when they are at the developmental stage in between merely babbling and actual speech.

Makes me wonder how closely we are related, genetically speaking, to the gelada.

Next up, we have a great example of science fiction becoming reality in this story about the discovery of what might well be “water worlds”. ”

No, not Waterworld… water worlds. Worlds entirely covered by water. No land atoll at all.

That is seriously something that I thought was pure sci fi BS. A world entirely covered in water? Not even a tiny bit of land? Come on. You could never have an ecosystem that simple. And what about geology? How would a planet be warm enough to keep water liquid without heat from the core? And if there is heat from the core, surely there is enough tectonic activity to produce volcanic islands.

But as it turns out, water worlds are a real possibility, and so we can go ahead and imagine a single enormous globe-spanning marine ecosystem producing a variety of sea life that would dwarf what we have here on Earth, with all that land getting in the way.

Remember, where there’s water, there’s life!

And finally, in the pole position, we have this intriguing item about a possible vaccine for autism.

Or rather, against one of the main physiological symptoms of autism, namely the proliferation of a specific kind of gut bacteria found in abundance in autistic people.

Researchers at the University of Guelph (go Canada!) have devised a vaccine to combat the high levels of this gut bacteria, which at the very least should help autistic people with their chronic gastrointestinal
issues such as diarrhea.

But there is a more extraordinary possibility :

Some researchers believe toxins and/or metabolites produced by gut bacteria, including C. bolteae, may be associated with symptoms and severity of autism, especially regressive autism.

Granted, this is only a hypothesis and one far from proven, but it would be quite amazing to discover that this massive increase in cases of autism we are seeing could be stopped with just a simple vaccine.

Imagine a future without autism! No more children and adults trapped in their own cold and lonely worlds.

Well, that;s it for this week folks! Hope you enjoyed reading about these stories at least half as much as I enjoyed writing about them.

See you next week!