There is no permanent good in this world. One minute, everything seems fine. The next minute, the forces of darkness steal away Chantek, the beloved, 39-year-old signing orangutan.
Back in the good ‘ole days before the internet and Yo and Meerkat and Snapchat, we had one way to talk to people in faraway lands: the telephone. But a microphone and speaker aren’t much use if you’re hearing impaired.
A student team working with Google has come up with an ingenious way to translate signing into spoken word: electronic wristbands that measure the wearer’s muscle activity, recognising sign language symbols and speaking them through an Android device. It could quite literally give signers a voice.