In the Peanut Gallery, you can add intertitles to old black-and-white movies (the ones before any speech support, never mind the web). And you do it, of course, simply by talking to Chrome.

The API uses your computer’s microphone after you give it permission, and Google turns it into written text embedded in an old movie:

Once you’ve made a movie with your own special intertitles, you can then share it to friends. The movies include The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Lost World, and Google suggests you can use them to say happy birthday to a relative, or just hello. I’m wondering when someone will use it to propose marriage.

The experiment is not just for fun, although there’s plenty of that.

“We hope that developers will find many uses for the Web Speech API, both fun and practical—including new ways to navigate, search, enter text, and interact with the web,” Google’s Aaron Koblin posted. “We can’t wait to see how people use it.”

Sound Uncovered is a free iPad app that features 12 experiences about auditory illusions and acoustic phenomena. To test the app, I went to the construction site for the interactive museum’s new home on Pier 15 and indulged my curiosity.

“We are using these tools to help people be more in tune with the real world,” said executive associate director Rob Semper during an interview in his office. “The idea that individuals can be in charge of their own learning was a trend in the 1960s and promoted by the museum’s founder, [particle physicist] Frank Oppenheimer. He wanted to create an environment where individuals could be inspired and inquisitive about the world, through hands-on investigatory experiences. This app is a continuation of that idea.”

The app is, frankly, super-cool. Whether you are a curious kid, a parent or a educator, or a museum-obsessed journalist, Sound Uncovered provides an intuitive, interactive, compelling exploration of auditory sensations. It presents you with experiments to engage with in-app and/or in the real world as well as informative articles and multimedia clips. The primary goal is to stimulate the mind using the unique technological features of the tablet, like motion sensors and touchscreens.

“Sound Uncovered is not a substitution for our physical museum,” said Jean Cheng, the project director of the online engagement group at the Exploratorium. “A tablet is a little black box where you can do anything. It has all these sensors and inputs; it is like a mini-laboratory. We want you to feel with learning that you can dig a little deeper. IPads are inherently social devices, and we want to spark conversation. It stays true to the bread-and-butter of the Exploratorium, which is all about perception and experiences.

First-person experiments include “Find the Highest Note,” which prompts you with a circular keyboard to confuse notions of high and low pitch, and “Eyes vs. Ears,” which shows how the perception of sound changes with and without visual cues. It also has a pretty trippy video of singing sand dunes in Morocco and an unexpected glimpse into how car manufactures engineer engine sounds to suit their customers. Hint: Nissan hybrid vehicles sound identical to vehicles from sci-fi film Blade Runner – and this is not a coincidence.

“Oppenheimer said the way to measure learning is if you enjoy it enough to want to share it with someone else,” Cheng said. “We are simply giving you access to the magic of these existing phenomena.”

The Exploratorium is committed to making its unique educational model as accessible as possible and to help people better understand the world around them. Sound Uncovered is the Exploratorium’s second digital product. The museum released the e-book Color Uncovered in 2011, which readers have been downloaded more than a million times. Its exhibits are on display at more than 1,000 science centers, museums, and public spaces around the world, and its digital consultancy group works with global institutions that want to integrate this type of programming.

It’s a busy time for the Exploratorium right now. The museum recently moved out of its location at the historic Palace of Fine Arts and will officially open at Pier 15 on April 17. The new location will contain 330,000 square feet of space, including 1.5 acres of public outdoor space on the waterfront.

Sound Uncovered was made possible by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, as well as by the team of developers, designers, educators, artists, scientists, and museum staff dedicated to making learning enjoyable.

The insides of computer systems are often portrayed in science fiction movies as vast arcologies of virtual structures, with whizzing electrical impulses flashing through them. As it turns out, our brains might not look very different from our dreams of artificial computing entities.

For the first time, Japanese scientists captured video of a thought being formed, and it looks pretty much like miniature lightning tracing its way through a meshed structure of neurons:

Of course, this is not a human brain that mad scientists exported from a skull and sliced up in the pursuit of scientific information. Rather, this is a the brain of a baby zebrafish — and it wasn’t even harmed in the experiment. Researchers chose this creature because in their embryonic and larval states, zebrafish have the wonderful property of being almost completely transparent.

The adult of the species is not, alas, transparent

The scientists dosed the baby fish with fluorescencing agents that glow when neurons are activated, then induced a paramecium — a tiny protozoa about 200 micrometers in length — to swim by, causing the zebrafish to perk up and think about a snack.

That caused neural impulses to be fired off in the zebrafish’s “optic tectum,” a region of the midbrain. Which the Japanese researchers then captured video of, and, naturally, uploaded to YouTube, solving once and for all the perplexing question: what do fish think of?

Mostly, it appears, lunch. Which is not too different from humans, perhaps.

Image credits: D o m o n k o S via photopin cc, Akira Muto, Masamichi Ohkura, Gembu Abe, Junichi Nakai, and Koichi Kawakami, hat tip: Gizmodo