In 1789, physician and deputy Joseph-Ignace Guillotin called for the death penalty to be the same for everyone and as painless as possible, carried out by a machine. But it was surgeon Antoine Louis who designed it, and German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt who built it; it was first nicknamed the 'louison'. Guillotin's name stuck anyway. Contrary to legend, he died in his bed in 1814.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.