On Friday, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a mandatory moratorium on so-called gain-of-function research. This includes work that creates new "enhanced" pathogens, agents that are more readily transmissible or infectious or otherwise better than their counterparts in the non-laboratory world.

The moratorium includes the complete withdrawal of funding for such research, as well as strong words encouraging scientists, federally funded or otherwise, "to voluntarily pause their research while risks and benefits are being reassessed." The White House so far doesn't have the power to just straight-up shutter research it doesn't like.

The ban on gain-of-function studies, a much more wide-reaching and rigid version of a ban enacted in 2012, is being presented as temporary, as policymakers and hopefully a few actual scientists attempt to craft a unified federal policy on GOF research. Said research, as defined by NIH director Francis Collins, is anything "that increases the ability of any of these infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets."

In particular, the ban will affect GOF studies on influenza, MERS, and SARS. "NIH has funded such studies because they help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, enable the assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, and inform public health and preparedness efforts," Collins said.

"These studies, however, also entail biosafety and biosecurity risks, which need to be understood better," she continued, echoing a statement from the US Department of Health and Human Services's Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response:

Gain-of-function studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, help define the fundamental nature of human-pathogen interactions, thereby enabling assessment of the pandemic potential of emerging infectious agents, informing public health and preparedness efforts, and furthering medical countermeasure development. Gain-of-function studies may entail biosafety and biosecurity risks; therefore, the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research must be evaluated, both in the context of recent U.S. biosafety incidents ...

Said incidents were indeed some pretty severe fuckups, one involving the the sloppy handling of anthrax by workers at the CDC, and another not long after in which a dangerous strain of avian influenza was shipped to a Department of Agriculture poultry lab on accident. Both lapses occurred within the CDC's high-containment facilities.

The 2012 moratorium, prompted by a widespread outcry following the release of two papers describing the creation of an influenza superstrain, was eventually relaxed after the WHO introduced new guidelines for GOF research. So, there is some reason to hope that this is indeed temporary and researchers at the CDC and elsewhere can get back to work helping us avoid the sorts of plagues that might make the current Ebola outbreak look like a rougher than usual flu season.

The slow-motion disaster that is the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository is poised to bounce back into the realm of viability. Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a new 781-page report on the long-delayed project, finding that the repository is sufficiently sealed off from the environment to store nuclear waste.

"Yucca Mountain is dead. It'll never happen." Those are the words of Harry Reid, spoken shortly after the Nevada senator became the Senate Majority Leader in 2006. A year later, the United States Department of Energy, still under the control of then-president George HW Bush, announced plans to double the size of the facility. In 2008, Barack Obama made a campaign promise to end the project, but congress beat him to it, passing an Omnibus Spending Bill that slashed Yucca Mountain's budget to nil.

Yucca Mountain has been in the works now for 27 years. The facility or would-be facility is the product of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, which mandated the construction of a single facility to store the country's nuclear and radioactive waste. In 1987, Congress enacted a law designating Yucca Mountain as the preferred location. It wasn't until 2002 that the Department of Energy (DOE) got the go-ahead to build the thing. In 2006, the DOE announced that the site would begin accepting waste by 2017.

By 2011, however, Yucca Mountain was without a budget. Shutting the facility down wasn't quite as easy as it might seem though: Part of the deal made between the Department of Energy and the various utility companies producing waste from their nuclear power plants meant that each were paying into a federally-managed fund backing development of the Yucca Mountain site. Without a repository, the feds have been on the hook for $300 to $500 million per year in compensation.

Fuel rods, Image: Aaron Frank/Flickr

Last year, a coalition of nuclear waste-producing states, led by nuclear energy big guns South Carolina and Washington, won a key lawsuit against the feds, essentially forcing the NRC to continue pursuing the site. "Unless and until Congress authoritatively says otherwise, or there are no appropriated funds remaining, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must promptly continue with the legally mandated licensing process, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found.

The new report is the result of that victory, but the project's future still depends on money. Without congressional allocations, Yucca Mountain will remain an empty hole.

In addition to finding that the facility has the property barriers in place to isolate the waste from the surrounding environment, "The staff also found the proposed repository design meets the NRCs limits or standards for individual protection, human intrusion and groundwater protection," according to an NRC statement.

The project still has a long way to go, with several more volumes of research due from the NRC, an approval vote from the NRC commissioners, and, of course, the allocation of more money. Not to worry though: the United States' nuclear waste isn't going anywhere, at least for another 24,000 years.

A team of German astrophysicists is at work repurposing a large metallic mirror, originally constructed as a cosmic ray detector prototype, for use in the hunt for dark matter. Compared to the exotic supercooled xenon reservoirs currently at work at various laboratories deep underground, a regular-looking sort of mirror might not seem terribly exciting, but it's after a very different sort of dark matter prey: hidden photons.

Most dark matter detection experiments have a certain kind of dark matter in mind: WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. These are particles that would have originated in the very early universe when everything existed in a state of thermal equilibrium, e.g. everything was about the same temperature and all particles had the same limited properties. Cooling brought the universe definition and differentiation.

WIMPs got shorted in the whole cosmic cooling process, however, and while the universe's "normal" matter wound up with a whole suite suite of different sorts of interactions—electromagnetism, the strong and weak forces, and gravity—these dark matter particles only feel the weak force and gravity. Without the strong force or electromagnetism, they can't form into nuclei and atoms (via the strong force), nor can they repel/attract each other via the electromagnetic force.

We see the effects of dark matter gravity in abundance, and we can make estimations based on those effects as to how much dark matter there actually is out there: somewhere around 85 percent of all mass in the universe. Far from being exotic, dark matter is what holds galaxies together, allowing things like solar systems and life-harboring planets to form.

WIMPs aren't something astrophysicists just dreamed up. There's an extraordinary correspondence between the observed strength of the weak force, which governs radioactive decay, and the observed amount of dark matter in the universe.

Image: Ralph Engle/physicsworld.com

This is known as the "WIMP miracle." "From a particle physics perspective, the early universe was a high energy place where energy and mass could switch from one form to the other freely as enshrined in Einstein's E = mc2," writes Stacy McGaugh, a University of Maryland astrophysicist and reluctant dark matter naysayer. "Pairs of particles and their antiparticles could come and go. However, as the universe expands, it cools. As it cools, it loses the energy necessary to create particle pairs."

"When this happens for a particular particle depends on the mass of the particle," McGaugh continues, "the more mass, the more energy is required, and the earlier that particle-antiparticle pair 'freeze out.' After freeze-out, the remaining particle-antiparticle pairs can mutually annihilate, leaving only energy. To avoid this fate, there must either be some asymmetry or the 'cross section'—the probability for interacting—must be so low that particles and their antiparticles go their separate ways without meeting often enough to annihilate completely."

The WIMP particles that don't meet their antiparticles and, thus, aren't annihilated continue on, leaving what's known as a "relic density." The cross-section McGaugh mentions must be roughly equal to the probability of particle interaction according to the weak force (the weak force's cross-section) to result in the dark matter distributions we observe in the universe. A powerful coincidence.

It takes more than a coincidence to prove the existence of WIMPs, however: We also need to actually see them. So far, after a quarter-century of hunting, we haven't registered a single WIMP. Perhaps then we should look elsewhere for dark matter possibilities as well, which is where the German's mirror scheme, aka the FUNK experiment, comes in.

The mirror, which is based at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is being retrofitted to hunt for a different theorized form of dark matter particle known as WISPs, a form of which is hidden photons. These are photons similar to those that we experience everyday as carriers of the electromagnetic force (so: light, electricity, heat), but they interact via this force only very weakly. A WISP might interact with an electron just like a normal photon, but only the tiniest bit. It would be very easy to miss.

WISPs have some strange properties (or would have some strange properties), one of which is the possibility of suddenly changing into a regular old photon in the presence of a strong magnetic field. In the German group's dish-mirror scheme, the idea is that WISPy hidden photons will smack the mirror, exciting the electrons within it just enough such that they will emit regular photons. These regular photons will be be fired off as the tiniest bits of light at right angles to the incoming WISPs.

These emitted photons would then be concentrated toward a central detector, which itself would be tuned such that background light/photons would be filtered out. 

"To detect photons induced by this process, the advantage of using a spherical mirror is imminent," the German team writes in a paper posted to the arVix preprint server. "Photons from far away background sources impinging on the mirror will be focused in the focal point ... whilst the Dark-Matter-induced photons will propagate to the center of the mirror sphere. There, a detector can be mounted."

Image: University of Leicester

The group's WISP-focused effort should gain a new weight given the release last week of a paper describing mysterious x-ray signals apparently traceable back to the Sun. It's possible that these x-rays are WISPy particles known as axions being converted to regular photons upon meeting the strong magnetic field of Earth.

"It appears plausible that axions—dark matter particle candidates—are indeed produced in the core of the sun and do indeed convert to x-rays in the magnetic field of the Earth, George Fraser, the new x-ray paper's senior author, concluded.

Is that the dark matter answer then? Hardly. The new x-ray results will take years more analysis, while the new mirror detection scheme is only the second of its kind, with the other being the United States' ADMX experiment. At the very least, it's always nice to see contrarian science get a leg up: What's more exciting than being wrong?

If we want to understand the physical world deeply there's really no getting around understanding it mathematically. As Pythagoras put it, "Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons." There is nothing else.

If we want to understand the physical world mathematically, there's really no getting around the Fourier transform. The transform is what allows us to look at really any mathematical function (likely representing a physical phenomenon) and change it to a function that is periodic, e.g. repeats itself through time. Number is the ruler, and it has a spectrum—a wave, like light or sound. We are waves, cycles in a cyclical world.

"The Fourier transform decomposes a function exactly into many components," explains UCLA's Terrence Tao, "each of which has a precise frequency. In some applications it is more useful to adopt a 'fuzzier' approach, in which a function is decomposed into fewer components, and each component has a range of frequencies rather than consisting purely of a single frequency."

Unfortunately, the single big waves describing you and I aren't very good descriptions of us. A better view would be if we had instead a bunch of really tiny waves each describing a different feature of us. Maybe we could just dump ourselves (our waves) through some filters, each one picking out waves with different characteristics. We are waves, but waves are just sums of other waves, smaller cycles within cycles.

That's probably not very satisfying. Fortunately, the Fourier transform happens to be the subject of this week's 100 Second Science video, in which the University of Cambridge's Carola-Bibiane Schnlieb lays out Fourier much more neatly.

Astronauts have used virtual reality as a training tool for some time now, but future astronauts on long-duration spaceflights could well find VR to be just as indispensable a tool once in actual space.

For more than a decade, researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, and other institutions have been working on an initiative known as the Virtual Space Station, which aims to provide a means of averting interpersonal conflicts and treating astronauts mental health issues conflicts when theyre far from Earth.

Now, Dartmouth's Digital Arts Leadership and Innovation lab (otherwise known as DALI) has received a $1.6 million grant from NASA to further build out the VR component of the program and effectively let astronauts take a bit of home with them on that next trip to Mars.

DALI is going to use that funding to develop more elaborate VR programs that can "trick the brain and make people feel as if they are in a variety of beautiful and calm settings, such as with their family at home or strolling on the beach, Lorie Loeb, DALI's lab director, explained in a news release. That, she says, could even be topped off with scents of saltwater and suntan lotion, and a fan to simulate an ocean breeze, creating a fully immersive experience. The ultimate goal is to help make people feel at ease, at home, happy, comfortable, and calm.

NASA's Virtual Reality Laboratory Image: NASA

Not surprisingly, the researchers have turned to the Oculus Rift for their current tests. In an email to Motherboard, Loeb noted that OR has been a particularly welcome development in the 10-plus years of the program—not only reducing cost, but making it easier to develop content and provide a more realistic environment than earlier VR setups.

Thats echoed by former astronaut Dr. Jay Buckey, whos one of the creators of the Virtual Space Station program and actually used an earlier VR device on his Space Shuttle mission in 1998 (which focused on the effects of space on the nervous system), although he said that back then the sense of immersion was weak. In comparison, he told us that the Rift has really advanced the sense of immersion and presence compared to earlier VR systems.

Its that sense of presence and immediacy you get from the new generation of VR, he said, that he hopes will make it useful for a variety of behavioral health applications, like relaxation and stress relief.

Loeb further added that she can imagine an astronaut spending a fair bit of time with virtual reality and augmented reality headset. It could easily be incorporated into their suits, she said, and would be a good way to provide distractions, stress reduction, and training.

Before it gets put to use in space, though, the researchers will be conducting some extensive tests here on Earth, and theyre taking advantage of a different type of simulation to fine tune it.

While the Rift-based system wasnt ready to be shipped off to them, Dartmouth has recruited a six-person team that just this week began an eight-month Mars simulation mission in Hawaii to further test the current Virtual Space Station program and help upgrade the existing content. The researchers then plan to follow it up with a similar test in Antarctica.

As with many NASA-funded projects, though, the researchers arent focused solely on space travel. They say the programs could well be adapted to help treat people here on Earth, who can just as easily find themselves in a remote location that leaves them feeling isolated, be it simply a rural area or somewhere like an oil rig or underwater research station. 

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler declared on Friday that he is in agreement with President Obamas opposition to internet fast lanes, but critics aren't buying it. They say Wheelers controversial net neutrality proposal opens the door to that very thing.

New York City police didn't know what to charge two drone pilots with earlier this summer and, it turns out, they still don't know what to charge them with: Charges were dropped today in a legal saga that never should have happened in the first place.

To recap: Earlier this summer, Wilkins Mendoza and Remy Castro were flying their DJI Phantom 2 drone near New York City's George Washington Bridge. An NYPD helicopter saw it and chased it down. Mendoza and Castro were arrested for felony reckless endangerment charges because, according to the police, the drone flew "very close" to the chopper, which was a lie.

Not sure exactly what we got

The media ran with the NYPD's version of the story, and what was definitely a kind of stupid but not illegal flight by two people screwing around with their drone quickly turned into a rallying cry for the Federal Aviation Administration and others about how dangerous it is when people fly drones at aircraft.

Except, that's not what happened. The air traffic control recording confirmed that the police flew at the drone, not the other way around; beyond that, the officer on the recording noted that he wasn't sure a crime had been committed.

"We really don't know exactly what we have, maybe a reckless [endangerment]," he said. "Not sure exactly what we got."

Today's decision to drop the charges confirms what we've known for a while: Flying a drone, even stupidly, is not a crime.

Mendoza and Castro didn't hurt anyone, and "close calls" aren't inherently a crime: You don't get arrested for almost crashing into someone else in your car, as long as you're following the general rules of the road.

Now's an appropriate time to remind everyone that there are no rules of the skies for drones. The fault there lies with the FAA (and to a lesser extent, state and local lawmakers), not with two random dudes from New York.

All over Canada's vast northern expanse, caribou herds are disappearing at alarming rates. From British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec, to Baffin Island, the ancient species, known for feeding Canada's indigenous populations for centuries, is on the ropes.

In Nunavut, the situation is dire with populations reportedly plummeting from mere decades earlier. But in a recent move, the Harper government is actually taking steps to mitigate the at-risk species.

A government tender issued this week is actually asking for help from the private sector in facilitating a national strategy to save the Peary caribou—a  smaller, most northerly species known for their almost pure white coats of fur in the winter. 

The Peary caribou searching for vegetation. Image: Wikimedia Commons

"Environment Canada plans to hold consultations to facilitate the development of the national recovery strategy for Peary caribou," said the release. 

Under the terms of the Species At Risk Act, the federal government is required to "prepare a recovery strategy for the species and to engage jurisdictions, Aboriginal Peoples, and stakeholders through meaningful consultations." 

That means the government will actually consult Invialuit and Inuit peoples on the future of the game they've eaten for a millennia—on what to do next. The feds hope the private sector will help facilitate that dialogue with a long list of Inuit organizations, among them several hunting and trapping collectives. 

It's a rich turn of events considering the government itself admits in an online profile of the endangered species that the reasons for its rapid population decline are, "oil and gas exploration and hunting." Those are areas the feds have presided over for years, which directly led to the decline of the species.

A woodland caribou. Image: Denali National Park and Preserve/Flickr

But, like in other cases of Arctic animals, climate change is partially to blame for the disappearance of Peary caribou. A report from the Northwest Territories shows the warming winters mean fewer windswept Arctic plains revealing the vegetation the Peary caribous rely on. Instead, the wetter winters bury the vegetation under layers of snow or ice, preventing the caribou from digging it up to eat. 

Overhunting is also to blame, with reports some hunters have gone too far exercising their right to cull the animal. The Nunavut government has even advised against the sale of caribou meat, a right of the Inuit. 

Nationally, as Canadian Geographic reports, other caribou species are suffering from numerous threats. Everything from human influence on traditional feeding territories, overhunting, to wolves, has helped decimate herds across the country.

It's no help the current Harper government isn't known for its climate change or animal protection record, especially in light of reports it offered up tracts of land set aside for reindeer grazing to oil and gas exploration. But, there's no denying the latest study and national management plan is a step in the right direction when it comes to the fate of the caribou.

The Best YouTube Video is an occasional series where Motherboard searches for the best YouTube video ever made, usually on Friday afternoons right before the margarita alarm rings. Previously The Best YouTube Video: A Dad Discovers Two Motion Detector Trash Cans.

Humans aren't always very good at understanding the scale of the universe, but what we're worst at envisioning isn't how big our solar system is or just how far away the second Earth is, but how big we are.

The truly bonkers thing about the fact that there are more than 7 billion of us on this planet is that we're all still us. Even as the human population has exploded all over the planet, we still have a fundamental connection to each other. Drop yourself anywhere in the world and you'd connect with, emote with, and (well, theoretically at least) mate with the random folks you come across. You can't say the same for an ant, or a bird, or a rock, unless you're an insane person.

That's not to say that we should view the whole world as if it's a lovey-dovey pro-human cheer session, because saying so would make me an idiot. We're still very good at killing each other for no good reason, and we all have that person, like that guy in my soccer game last night, who we probably wouldn't care much about if he or she got run over by a bus. Regardless, we once numbered in the millions, now there are billions of us, and yet we're all still humans doing our human things.

'HUH?' IS FOUND EVERYWHERE BECAUSE IT'S PRETTY HARD TO TALK WITH EACH OTHER (AND BUILD A SOCIETY) WITHOUT A WORD LIKE THIS

What's remarkable about this is that we still share that fundamental understanding despite having an incredible cultural diaspora that evolves at a rapid pace. You could take a chicken from China and drop it in a coop in Canada and expect it to do chicken things. No one would bat an eye. But the fact that you or I could parachute into Poland and share a laugh at a fart joke with some Joe off the street, despite language and culture difference, is pretty amazing.

This scenario hints at something rather profound for a hypothetical fart joke: Could our innate ability to connect with each other be evidence that we share some sort of universal language?

While scientists might question the rambling way in which we've arrived at their work, this question of how we share language is a popular area of research. To be fair to said researchers, the term "universal language"—the idea that we somehow share an innate language that could be unlocked if we peered deep within ourselves—sounds a bit like something you'd drop while soaking in a mineral bath with old hippies in New Mexico, and it is. What I should actually be talking about is the universality of words.

A great example of this is the word "huh?", which is shared across a wide variety of languages worldwide. But why? A 2013 paper in PLOS One delves into exactly that, and argues two important points: "that Huh? is universal, and that it is a word."

The first is relatively straightforward to argue: Huh?, used as a phrase to express confusion, perhaps because you misheard what someone said, is used in a similar fashion across a broad range of global languages. In the case of this paper, the trio of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands found the use of Huh? in "naturally occurring conversations" in 10 languages, and it's surely used in even more.

Even the intonation of "huh?" interjections is pretty similar across a wide variety of languages. Image: PLOS One

But the second point is the kicker: Humans all sneeze, grunt, and fart in fashions similar enough to be identifiable by anyone, anywhere, but language—words—represent higher-level development, not simply biological function. So if Huh? is an actual word, one shared by many languages, it would be evidence that language can evolve convergently.

This is a key distinction. The least-convincing argument for a universal language revolves around the idea that, through a collective consciousness or midichlorians or whatever, we have somehow come to share a language across human civilizations. As we've become more cross-culturally connected, we see this with slang, technical terms, and brand names, but Huh? suggests that languages have some universal similarities because we, as humans, have to deal with similar situations no matter what language we speak.

"If you say that 'huh?' 'spread,' it sounds like it goes from language to language, like loanwords. This is not how we think about it," Mark Dingemanse, the lead author of the PLOS One study, told me in an email. "This word is found everywhere because it's pretty hard to talk with each other (and build a society) without a word like this; and we argue that it is so similar across all these languages because it fits the same tight niche in our conversations everywhere. Because the pressures of high-speed conversations are such that they squeeze this word into the same shape everywhere."

The need for a quick interjection to interrupt someone when they say something unclear is a universal necessity in language—we're not robots after all, and sometimes we mumble—and this basic, well-defined need has produced a strikingly similar result across a number of languages: Huh?

A word like Huh? thus seems to suggest that similarities in language are less the result of some universal language—something that arose as the one true language before it diversified with the spread of humans—and more the product of true convergent evolution. But then there's the flip side: Despite how diverse we all are, we still have to deal with a lot of the same shit. So why are so many of our words different?

"If we put it like this, your question becomes: why are most other words not like this?" Dingemanse wrote. "The answer is twofold: (1) because they are less tightly tied to a particular 'niche' in conversation, and (2) because the need for them is less universal. For instance, see our FAQ on language contact and 'Coke'."

It's a fine distinction, and Dingemanse is far better equipped to explain it than I am. (I chalk this up to the fact that he studies words for a living, rather than attempting to write them.) I asked him if the universality of Huh? hints at an underlying structure to language that is more universal than words, and he said that "indeed it does."

"The way in which we take turns, talk together, and 'repair' communicative problems are all part of an infrastructure for language use that is more fundamental—and, it turns out, more universal—than the particular sounds, words and grammatical rules of languages." he wrote. "Think of it as the plumbing for conversation. If it doesn't work at this level, we're going to be in deep trouble; that's probably why all languages end up with the same kind of system. You can find more about this (including better metaphors than 'plumbing') in the article we wrote for Scientific American MIND recently."

This is a nice explainer on convergent evolution if you're interested.

This evolutionary view of language really does make a lot of sense. Think of how biological evolution works, at least in a simplified view: Organisms face a natural set of challenges and opportunities, and through natural selection, evolve traits that best equip them to exploit a particular niche. And when species evolve under similar conditions, their evolution tends to converge, the most common example being creature that live deep in caves with no sunlight evolving to lose their eyes.

Human language displaying traits of convergent evolution would seem a bit straightforward: We use language to communicate similar needs and emotions, so of course some of the solutions to those specific communication challenges would be the same. While researchers like Dingemanse have developed a lot of objective evidence about the evolutionary aspect of language in recent years, it's been a sticky idea for centuries.

In an illuminating 1965 essay titled "The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries," James R. Knowlson discusses cross-cultural communication from another perspective: how humans work to communicate across language barriers.

Think about the exploration and cultural cross-sharing in the 17th and 18th centuries (and before that, of course): Today, we have guide books and Wikipedia and Rosetta Stone and Google Translate to prepare us for a visit to a new country, but there was a time when people pretty much just showed up and figured things out.

Look at all these historical people gesturing. You can totally tell what's going on, and they didn't even use words. Image: Library of Congress

How do you initiate trade with someone you can't understand? Well, you wave your hand and point at things, and Knowlson writes that scholar in the pre-Victorian colonial era were obsessed with this idea, and argued that gesture more than anything else points to the root of a universal language evolved to solve the simplest of human communication issues. Naturally, it involves mimes:

And here we come to the genesis of evolved similarities in human language—and the root of language itself: Words are just a tool of expression, and in situations where they are used for highly-specific tasks—expressing a quick emotion, or a very well-defined one—humans tend to develop similar solutions, regardless of the rest of their language. And so we get Huh?

Now I suppose it's time to address the elephant in the room: What the hell does any of this have to do with a man meowing at an egg? Well, what struck me as amazing about the above video is the fact that an allegedly Turkish man (a claim I cannot verify, and will not attempt to) meows at an egg in the same way that I do. If there is a root of universality in all of our human language, can it apply to the way we speak with animals (and eggs) as well?

Image: University of Adelaide

It would certainly seem that way. Check out this table of cross-lingual animal sounds collected, for reasons unknown, by the University of Adelaide electrical engineering school. (Hat tip to the Grammar Party blog.) Not only do we humans tend to meow in similar fashion, but we reference tons of animal expressions in the same way.

Is this the result of an inter-species universal language? We're getting pretty far into the weeds here, but there's some affirmative evidence if you don't mind really stretching the definition of language into innate-emotional-response territory.

For example, take a 2009 paper in Current Biology titled "The cry embedded within the purr." In it, a team of researchers led by Prof. Karen McComb of the University of Sussex look at how humans interact with cats—and not just when their brains are controlled by cat parasites. What they found is that cats' vocalizations have distinct audio qualities that provoke emotional responses in humans. In essence, cats can communicate their needs to humans just by playing off our own innate emotional responses to certain "feed me, I'm needy" sounds.

"When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food at equal amplitude to purrs recorded in non-solicitation contexts, even individuals with no experience of owning cats judged the solicitation purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant," the authors write. "Embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr, we found a high frequency voiced component, reminiscent of a cry or meow, that was crucial in determining urgency and pleasantness ratings."

This photo has nothing to do with anything but came up when I searched Flickr for "meow." The title is "Apocalypse Meow." Image: Tau Zero/Flickr

The big question, at least for our purposes, is whether or not this even counts as language. Remember, Dingemanse's team was able to define Huh? as an actual word, a learned unit of language, and a cat's purr would appear to be more on the order of a grunt, an instinctual emotional response.

To be fair to McComb's team, they weren't totally looking to answer the question of whether or not our cats can legitimately speak to us, but their work does provide insight. Instinctual or not, it appears that not just humans, but mammals as a whole, may have a predisposition for communication across cultural and species barriers, even if it's extremely simplistic and based on innate emotional cues.

"The structure of solicitation purrs may be exploiting an inherent mammalian sensitivity to acoustic cues relevant in the context of nurturing offspring," they write.

With this in mind, a man yelling a cat's meow at a chicken's egg doesn't seem quite so strange, as knowing that extremely basic communication pathways may exist across species would suggest that said man isn't completely insane.

Of course, there's an obvious flip side to my meow question: Universal language or not, we make the same "meow" sound across languages because all goddamn cats sound the same.

Dingemanse, incredibly generous as he was with his time, indulged me and said that was probably the case.

THIS MEOWING TURK ON THE INTERNET IS FURTHER PROOF THAT HUMANS ARE SMARTER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE

"Animal sounds are always fun, but they are similar across languages for a different (and simpler) reason," he wrote. "Assuming that humans have about the same hearing and speaking abilities, there is not going to be a lot of leeway in how we will imitate the sound of a cat. So the word for the sound of a cat is going to be something that sounds like it, adopted to the specific sounds of our language: meow in English, niau in Chinese, miauw in Dutch."

"Words like that (the technical term is onomatopoeia) are relatively limited in the languages of the world," he added. "What's so special about 'huh?' is that it is similar everywhere for a very different reason: something to do with the very infrastructure that keeps our conversations from getting derailed."

Dingemanse wrote that one reason Huh? is such a fascinating word is that such an word for expressing confusion in conversation doesn't appear elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

"There are loads of animal communication systems (from ants to birds to apes) but none of this that we know of has a 'repair toolbox' like this," he wrote. "So no matter how primitive we may feel this little word is, it actually seems to be something uniquely human!"

"Only we humans have the social-cognitive wherewithal to not just understand each other, but also understand when we don't understand each other, and then ask for clarification so that we can recover from our mistakes!" he continued. "Seen like this, the humble 'huh?' is actually one of the most important words, and it teaches us a deep lesson about human nature."

So we meow at eggs because all cats sound like they say meow when they ask us for food. But it turns out that Huh? is actually proof the humans have highly evolved languages that occasionally converge to solve similar problems faced by the entirety of the human diaspora. And there we have it: This meowing Turk on the internet is further proof that humans are smarter than everything else. Deal with it, cats.

Five months ago, I ordered a week's supply of the future of food. It finally came: two snow-white boxes stamped "Soylent." One box contains the pitcher for mixing your liquid meal. The other says "powdered food."

I havent opened them yet, because I dont want this anymore. I bought my Soylent on May 12, in some weird moment. I was working at The Verge, where an editor was preparing a story about subsisting on Soylent for a month (yeah, the story Motherboards Brian Merchant did a year ago).

Our office was in Midtown, where everything is stressful and every transaction is a battle, and I was sick of fording Broadway so I could wait in line for 20 minutes for something bad and overpriced to eat. I had hacked breakfast with bulk Amazon orders of oatmeal. I would hack lunch with Soylent.

If I had been dependent on Soylent as my primary food source, I would have died waiting for it

This is the prime Soylent victim: someone overwhelmed by the process of finding food. "What if you never had to worry about food again?" the company's website asks, as if food were as difficult to come by as money or health, which it is for some people, but not really for Soylent's target demographic of r/technology.

Their demographic is large enough, however, that Soylent is on backorder. The company told me my Soylent would take 10 to 12 weeks to arrive. It took 20. If I had been dependent on Soylent as my primary food source, I would have died waiting for it. 

Soylent fans are apoplectic about the delays. One user posting on the Soylent forums threatened to burn the founders house down if the shipment were delayed again, writing, "I am extremely serious." Delays are the most-commonly discussed topic on the forums, aside from complaints and solutions for Soylent-induced flatulence.

I figured these delays meant it would be easy to unload my Soylent. I posted an ad on Craigslist, offering my supply at cost, and waited for the offers to roll in.

Unfortunately, there's already a lot of Soylent on Craigslist.

Kansas City, selling a 25-day supply for $150: I tried it for 3 days and it's not for me.

Salt Lake City, selling a months worth for $300: "While I love Soylent I haven't been needing to eat all of what I get each month and as such I have a whole months extra not being used."

Dallas, in the free section: "I did not care for it, so I'm giving away my one-month supply of the stuff."

There are even more listings over on eBay, where the sellers seem to be more savvy about arbitrage. "You want it, I have it," one guy wrote. Another seller is hoping to get $150 for the box he got for $65.

Some of this may be due to the Great Soylent Disillusionment; the slow realization that what was sold as a life-changing, potentially world-changing substance is really nothing more than Ensure with different marketing.

"I have to say it was not life changing as many have suggested," one user wrote. There were none of the miraculous effects people have described, such as greater energy and clear skin. It didnt save much time, because it took longer to drink than it would have taken to prepare and eat breakfast or lunch. The only noticeable benefit was having fewer dirty dishes to clean. "To those people pining for their first shipment of Soylent, I say temper your expectations."

For some, Soylent is working as advertised. I responded to one New Yorker who was selling his excess supply. I use it for 95 percent [of meals] but only eat between 1,000-1,500 calories a day. This leaves me with 1-2 weeks extra a month, he wrote back.

When I responded that that doesnt seem like enough calories, he e-laughed. Haha well I'm losing weight plus I work in an office 9 hours a day so I don't need that much to begin with. I ramp it up when I go hiking or to the gym. What an intense person!

Since no one has responded to my ad, Ive become a Soylent pitchwoman. I think I found a friend who is willing to take it off my hands for a cut rate. Hes curious to see how the promise of ultimate nutrition with minimal hassle pans out.

I actually drank Soylent for a while, mixed with coffee, back when the company was mailing it to journalists in ZipLoc bags. It tasted like cake mix and was not any obviously more satiating than any other breakfast (the oatmeal beats it by a mile). 

I'm clearly not as hardcore as the true Soylenters. Neither, apparently, is Merchant, who still has a bag of 11-month-old Soylent sitting on his desk. Wonder how much that would go for?

***

UPDATE: Soylent CEO Rob Rhinehart has issued the following response: 

"Soylent has clearly struck a chord with people looking for an easy way to eat a healthy meal. The response has been overwhelming, but has created production delays. Once we ramp up to meet demand the practice of reselling will become unnecessary. In the meantime we thank our customers for their patience."