Animals have been submitted as applicants to suspected diploma mills and, on occasion, admitted and granted a degree, as reported in news and magazines. Animals are often used as a device to clearly demonstrate the lax standards of awarding institutions. In one case, a cat's degree helped lead to a successful fraud prosecution against the institution which issued it. == CatsEdit == === Colby NolanEdit === Colby Nolan is a housecat who was awarded an MBA in 2004 by Trinity Southern University, a Dallas-based diploma mill, sparking a fraud lawsuit by the Pennsylvania attorney general's of...

A tin can telephone is a type of acoustic (non-electrical) speech-transmitting device made up of two tin cans, paper cups or similarly shaped items attached to either end of a taut string or wire. It is a form of mechanical telephony, where sound is converted into and then conveyed by vibrations along a liquid or solid medium, and then reconverted back to sound. == History == Before the invention of the electromagnetic telephone, there were mechanical acoustic devices for transmitting spoken words and music over a distance greater than that of normal speech. The very earliest mechanical telephones...