Good morning.
Whitewater will have a forty percent chance of drizzle and rain today, with a high of forty-four.
Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
Koalas are small and benign-looking animals that are sometimes ornery and that are capable of making sounds far deeper than tiny animals should be able to make. Mary Bates writes about their vocalization at National Geographic, in a story entitled, Puzzle of Koalas’ Unusually Deep Voices Solved:
Koala bellows have a pitch about 20 times lower than they should be given the animals’ size—it’s actually more typical of an elephant-size animal. Male koala bellows, for instance, are so fearsome that sound designers used recordings of them to create the T. rex roars in the movie Jurassic Park.
For male koalas, this adaptation is essential to their love lives: A deep voice is attractive to female koalas choosing a mate.
So, how do they make such deep sounds? Bates continues:
When scientists looked at the voice boxes of male koalas, they found their vocal cords weren’t large enough to create the animals’ extremely low-pitched mating bellows. But further examination revealed a second, much larger pair of vocal folds located outside of the larynx, where the oral and nasal cavities connect.
Charlton and his colleagues used a combination of physical, video, and acoustic analyses to demonstrate that the newly discovered vocal folds outside of the larynx are capable of producing extremely low-pitched sound as the koala inhales air through its nostrils.
Wisconsin has a first in 1947:
1947 – First TV Station in Wisconsin Established
On this date the first TV station in Wisconsin, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, was established. The seventeenth television station in the country, WTMJ-TV was the first in the Midwest. [Source: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Libraries]
Here’s Puzzability‘s Tuesday puzzle:
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This Week’s Game — December 2-6
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Festival of Lights
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Here’s a bright idea for Hanukkah. The answer to each day’s trivia question this week is a two-word phrase, name, or title in which each word can be followed by the word “light” to make a compound word or phrase.
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Example:
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What was achieved for the first time by the Soviet Union in 1959 with an unmanned craft and by the U.S. 10 years later with a manned craft?
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Answer:
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Moon landing (moonlight, landing light)
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What to Submit:
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Submit the two-word trivia answer (as “Moon landing” in the example) for your answer.
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Tuesday, December 3
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