Author: Shivaank Rana

Researchers have identified the voice of Alexander Graham Bell for the first time in some of the earliest audio recordings ever created.

The National Museum of American History discovered the recording on a wax disc from 1885, which had been donated to the Smithsonian Museum.

The Smithsonian has released the audio recovered from a wax and cardboard disc dated April 15, 1885.

“Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell,” the inventor said.

As the SmithsonianMag reports, from the 1880s on, until his death in 1922, Bell gave an extensive collection of laboratory materials to the Smithsonian Institution, where he was a member of the Board of Regents. The donation included more than 400 discs and cylinders Bell used as he tried his hand at recording sound. The holdings also documented Bell’s research, should patent disputes arise similar to the protracted legal wrangling that attended the invention of the telephone.

Until very recently, these wax recordings were unplayable. We did not have the right tools, and even if we had, playing them would ruin the wax cylinders or fragile records upon which the sounds were stored. 

In late 2011, scientists played back some of Bell’s earliest recordings for the first time with new technology that reads the sound digitally from tiny grooves in the wax disc using light and a 3D camera. 

The breakthrough offered a glimpse at the experiments with sound and recording at the dawn of the information age when inventors were scrambling to secure patents for the first telephones and phonographs.

The recordings were packed away for more than 100 years and were deemed obsolete until new technology allowed them to be replayed.

Fascinating! 

You can here the audio recording below (courtesy Gizmodo) :

 [SmithsonianMag, The Atlantic, Gizmodo]

Iron Man fever is currently sweeping the globe, with fans of the Marvel series naturally stoked about the prospect of Iron Man 3 hitting cinemas very, very soon. If you’re anxiously waiting for the film to reach your local cinema and need your fix this instant, you may want to check out this uber-cool Iron Man mouse. While it doesn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, it does look rather awesome, and although it only ships in certain parts of Asia, we thought some of you die-hard fans would want to check it out.

The Iron Man Mouse has been designed to look like the helmet from Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit and is the first limited edition Iron Man 3 wireless mouse of its kind, complete with an arc reactor display case.

The E-Blue Iron Man mouse is powered by dual AAA batteries and is equipped with a 1000 dpi sensor for tracking and the eyes within the mask light up when in use.

The new Iron Man mouse is now available in Chins for 699 yuan approximately $113, however no information on worldwide availability or pricing has been released as yet.

Sure, ergonomics weren’t really considered paramount in this design, but it’s a small price to pay for this collector’s desktop accessory. Did we mention its eyes illuminate red?

[Redmond Pie, PCPOP]

The idea of using a robot to go where a human wouldn’t has been a popular one in science fiction, and to a lesser degree, in reality as well. Robots capable of performing such feats haven’t been around all that long, but the concept of sending in the robots has just been made a bit more credible thanks to plans to send in a robot to the Teotihuacan archaeological site in Mexico to finish off the exploration, where humans would have a much tougher time reaching.

The tunnel, discovered under the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, or Quetzalcoatl, is believed to lead to a chamber almost 2,000 years old, probably a place where dignitaries of the pre-Columbian city received their investiture or were buried, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.

Experts expected to find just one ancient chamber at the end of a stretch of the 2,000-year-old unexplored tunnel at the site. Instead, the remote-controlled vehicle has beamed back images of three mysterious caverns.

The three-foot-long investigator, named Tlaloc II-TC after the Aztec god of rain, was first lowered into the depths of the pyramid to check it was safe for human entry.

This is only the “third time anywhere in the world that such an automaton [has been] used to design excavation strategies,” adds HispanicallySpeakingNews.com.

The Tlaloc II-TC looks almost like a robotic version of a “rat rod,” except with tracks instead of wheels, sloped downward to almost look like a wedge. That makes it well-suited for operating in small, tight spaces like the last part of a tunnel in the Teotihuacan site.

Tlaloc II-TC is equipped with a video cameras and a mechanical arm to clear obstacles out of its way as it maneuvers through the tight passageway.

Excellent use of drones, we must say!

[Daily Mail, BLDG BLOG]