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Kim Kardashian is reportedly wearing a promise ring from rapper Kanye West as the become more serious. The “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” star was [...]
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Two athletes who have made their mark in other combat sports are making their MMA debut this weekend.
On Friday, Steve Mocco will make his MMA debut at Resurrection Fighting Alliance. Mocco is one of the best-credentialed wrestlers to make the jump to MMA. He represented the U.S. in the Olympics in 2008, won a Division I NCAA title and the Dan Hodge Trophy, which is awarded to the best collegiate wrestler across divisions. His foot sweep confounded opponents as they had a hard time defending against Mocco's speed.
He will fight Tyler Perry -- no, not Madea -- on Friday. Though he knows he'll have high expectations, he told MMA Fighting he is most excited about competing again.
You know, I just want to compete. If it's on the feet, I want to get the better of the feet and if it's on the ground, I want to get the better of him on the ground. Wherever we'll find ourselves on the floor, I want to do better at.
For Spong, he is jumping to MMA after a long career as a kickboxer. Before tomorrow's debut with the World Series of Fighting, he's won several titles in different promotions, and even once defeated Ray Sefo, the president of WSOF.
Spong is making his debut against Travis Bartlett, and admitted to MMA Junkie he has some nerves going into the fight.
"The most important thing is that I'm not overlooking him," he said of Bartlett. "I'm focusing on the fight; I'm not listening to what other people say. I'm an experienced fighter, so I know what's important."
His fight will air on NBC Sports Network on Saturday night.
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2012) ? An Asian elephant named Koshik can imitate human speech, speaking words in Korean that can be readily understood by those who know the language. The elephant accomplishes this in a most unusual way: he vocalizes with his trunk in his mouth.
The elephant's vocabulary consists of exactly five words, researchers report on November 1 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Those include "annyong" ("hello"), "anja" ("sit down"), "aniya" ("no"), "nuo" ("lie down"), and "choah" ("good"). Ultimately, Koshik's language skills may provide important insights into the biology and evolution of complex vocal learning, an ability that is critical for human speech and music, the researchers say.
"Human speech basically has two important aspects, pitch and timbre," says Angela Stoeger of the University of Vienna. "Intriguingly, the elephant Koshik is capable of matching both pitch and timbre patterns: he accurately imitates human formants as well as the voice pitch of his trainers. This is remarkable considering the huge size, the long vocal tract, and other anatomical differences between an elephant and a human."
For one thing, Stoeger says, elephants have a trunk instead of lips. While their large larynx can produce very low-pitched sounds, Koshik's speech mimicry exactly copies the pitch and other characteristics of his human trainers' voices. A structural analysis of Koshik's speech showed not just clear similarities to human voices, but also clear differences from the usual calls of elephants.
There have been some earlier reports of vocal mimicry in both African and Asian elephants. African elephants have been known to imitate the sound of truck engines, and a male Asian elephant living in a zoo in Kazakhstan was said to produce utterances in both Russian and Kazakh, but that case was never scientifically investigated.
In the case of Koshik, Angela Stoeger, Daniel Mietchen, Tecumseh Fitch, and their colleagues confirmed that Koshik was imitating Korean words in several ways. First, they asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard when listening to playbacks of the elephant's sounds.
"We found a high agreement concerning the overall meaning, and even the Korean spelling of Koshik's imitations," Stoeger says. But as far as the scientists can tell, Koshik doesn't actually mean what he says.
It's not completely clear why Koshik adopted his unusual vocal behavior, but the researchers suggest that it might go back to his days as a juvenile. Koshik was the only elephant living at the Everland Zoo in South Korea for about five years, during an important period for elephant bonding and development. Humans were his only social contacts.
"We suggest that Koshik started to adapt his vocalizations to his human companions to strengthen social affiliation, something that is also seen in other vocal-learning species -- and in very special cases, also across species," Stoeger says.
Recording of Koshik imitating human speech: Trainer (first) and Koshik (second) producing "annyong"(hello): http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/49235.php?from=224898
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