Confused by logarithms? If so, you’ll be surprised to hear they come naturally to pigeons and possibly, subconsciously, to you. There are asymmetries in the way animals perceive numbers and time, and a recent experiment showed that pigeons underestimate the midpoint between two time intervals.
Read the full article at New Scientist
A study of 120 children with permanent hearing impairment in the south of England shows that their language skills were stronger at eight years of age if their hearing difficulties had been confirmed before they were nine months old than if they had been confirmed later. However, the study also showed that a hearing impaired child’s speech is not greatly benefited by early detection.
Read the full article at University of Southampton
With funding from the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project to create a thoroughly 21st-century brave new world – one populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture.
Read the full article at Cordis
A computerized atlas has brought unprecedented sensitivity to the search for brain structure changes in a genetic condition known as Williams syndrome, revealing 33 abnormalities in the folding of the brain’s surface.
Read the full article at Washington University in St Louis
Most of the science published today is in journals that can only be read by subscribers. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is part of a movement advocating the unrestricted dissemination of scientific information: open-access (OA) publishing. In this issue of the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Gunther Eysenbach provides robust evidence that open-access articles (OA articles) are more immediately recognized and cited than non-OA articles. As such, it adds objective support to the belief that open-access publication speeds up scientific dialog between researchers and, consequently, should be extended to the whole scientific literature as quickly as possible.
Read the full article at BrightSurf
Our human ancestors were still interbreeding with their chimp cousins long after first splitting from the chimpanzee lineage, a genetic study suggests. Early humans and chimps may even have hybridised completely before diverging a second time. If so, some of the earliest fossils of proto-humans might represent an abortive first attempt to diverge from chimps, rather than being our direct ancestors.
Read the full article at New Scientist
Putty-nosed monkeys put two different alarm calls together to create urgent warnings, according to observations recently made of the West African primates. These monkey “sentences” appear to be evidence of what is widely considered to be a uniquely human ability: stringing words together to convey a message, or syntax.
Read the full article at National Geographic
A baby is to be monitored by a network of microphones and video cameras for 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, in an effort to unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language.
Read the full article at New Scientist Tech
An e-mail interview with Stephen R. Anderson, linguist at Yale University and the author of “Dr. Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language”, about the apparent grammar abilities of starlings.
Read the full article at Chicago Tribune
Bottlenose dolphins appear to whistle their “names” to each other, according to a new study. Researchers say that this type of referential communication is extremely rare in nature, and until now had not been clearly shown in a non-human animal.
Read the full article at New Scientist
How do we succeed in putting our ideas into words, so that another person can understand them? A team of scientists that included physicists and language researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science recently investigated this process by applying scientific methods to some of our culture’s most successful models for effective transfer of ideas – classic writings that, by common agreement, get their messages across well. They then created mathematical tools that allowed them to trace the development of ideas throughout a book.
Read the full article at EurekAlert!
No Comments - Add a comment