Who Invented the Emoticon and Emoji? (And How They’re Forever Changing Written Language)

Emoticons and emoji are used to bring nuance to short text passages that might be misunderstood otherwise. Of course, some folks use it for decoration, emphasis, and humor, but that wasn’t the original idea. Written language was first used to convey information, but as time passed and technology enabled communication over distances, humanity has struggled […]

Dog Communicates with Soundboard

Christine Hunger is a speech-language pathologist. She has been teaching her dog Stella to communicate in English with a custom soundboard since Stella was a puppy. Stella can press buttons to bring up words she knows (29 words so far), and even more important, has been stringing words together to relay a thought. Those thoughts […]