Author: BADI' AL-ZAMAN

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is just one of those places that sightseers flock to — “to see it before it’s gone”! It is an example of the concept of ‘Last Chance Tourism’. The key words hovering over a site like GBR are “doom”, “dying”, “endangered” and so on. It is like a species nearing…

Ooh! That is  surprise. We make spontaneous sounds to express everything from elation (Woohoo!) to embarrassment (Oops!). A statistical analysis of responses to more than 2,000 “vocal bursts” (nonverbal exclamations) conveys at least 24 kinds of emotion. An audio map devised by Alan Cowen at UC Berkeley reveals how one can slide one’s cursor across…