Newsdesk Archive
Akita, a 10-year-old Japanese macaque, sits in a glass booth calmly tapping away as colored dots flash on a video touch-screen anchored to a wall in front of him. Red, blue, yellow – he picks the dots in the requisite order, then grabs for his reward: fresh blueberries that pop out of a tube onto the floor next to him.
The bond between man and dog is so strong that their hearts beat in sync, a study has found.
Australian researchers separated three dogs from their owners, strapped heart monitors on the people and animals and then watched what happened when they were reunited.
Doggy and human heart rates quickly fell – and then began to mirror each other.
Labrador dogs are well known for being fond of their food, but new research suggests their greedy nature could be down to genetic mutation.
According to new research, the most effective strategy for influencing such healthy food choices is not calorie counts and reduced prices, but rather more subtle incentives that reward healthy eating behavior.
Related: Bored people reach for the crisps
We all like to think we have free will. It's comforting to know that every day we weigh up options (coffee or tea?), make a choice (coffee), and have some semblance of control over how our lives play out.
But new research suggests that our idea of 'conscience choice' might not play out like we think it does on the short-scale, and hints that free will might be nothing more than a cruel, cruel trick our brains play on us. In other words, we're not actually making decisions, we're just telling ourselves we did.
People are increasingly identifying themselves as global rather than national citizens, according to a BBC World Service poll.
The trend is particularly marked in emerging economies, where people see themselves as outward looking and internationally minded.
Now and then a worthy economic proposal comes along that seems as politically unattainable as it is sensible. Then, on closer inspection, you see that it's more than a policy-wonk's fantasy. And you wonder whether it could actually prevail.
Low wages should be recognized as an occupational health threat, according to a new editorial. The authors believe that low wages should be considered among the psychosocial factors -- such as long work hours and high job strain -- identified as occupational risks to health.
You know that Thomas Edison quote genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration? Well, that's pretty much the basis of our next guest's work. Psychologist Angela Duckworth is best known for her research on grit, and it's become a buzzword in the field of education. Duckworth started her career as a teacher, and she was puzzled by something she repeatedly saw in her classroom.
Women in the Middle Ages often wore better quality clothes than men. This is one of the conclusions drawn by Leiden archaeologist Chrystel Brandenburgh, who studied textile remnants from the period from 400 to 1000 A.D.
The Rök Runestone, erected in the late 800s in the Swedish province of Östergötland, is the world’s most well-known runestone.
Its long inscription has seemed impossible to understand, despite the fact that it is relatively easy to read. A new interpretation of the inscription has now been presented – an interpretation that breaks completely with a century-old interpretative tradition. What has previously been understood as references to heroic feats, kings and wars in fact seems to refer to the monument itself.
Researchers said they believe they have located the wreckage of the Endeavour, a ship sailed by the famous British explorer James Cook, which was sunk off the United States during the Revolutionary War.
Solar Impulse 2, an experimental aircraft flying around the world to draw attention to clean energy technologies, is to take flight again on Monday, organizers said.
Pilot Andre Borschberg will take off at 12:00 GMT (5:00AM PT) taking advantage of a "clear weather window" for him to fly from the Mojave Desert to Phoenix Goodyear Airport in Arizona—an effort that should take about 16 hours, they said.
Your morning pick-me-up could make your drive smoother. Engineers have turned coffee grounds into building materials for roads.
The global coffee industry produces millions of tonnes of used grounds annually, with most ending up in landfill. But Arul Arulrajah at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, believes that this material should not go to waste.
Rare and somewhat esoteric. These are the huge pyramids of ice that stand proud of the surface on some glaciers.
To date, the phenomenon has only really been seen around the Karakoram mountain region of Pakistan.
Researchers have discovered what may be a giant lake buried beneath the East Antarctic ice sheet. Satellite imagery shows linear grooves that are usually a telltale sign of being created from the outflows of a lake. The grooves appear to be spread out over 600 miles toward the east coast of Antarctica on Princess Elizabeth Land, between Vestfold Hills and the West Ice Shelf. It is conveniently located close to the Russian Vostok research station.
With red and yellow lights seeming to glow inside its bulbous body, a newfound jellyfish looks more alien spaceship than deep-sea cnidarian.
Using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), marine scientists dove to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, called the Mariana Trench, east of the Mariana Islands near Guam in the western Pacific Ocean; they were exploring the so-called Enigma Seamount (named for the lack of information scientists have on it) when they came upon this surreal-looking creature.
A study performed at IRB Barcelona offers an explanation as to why the genetic code, the dictionary used by organisms to translate genes into protein, stopped growing 3,000 million years ago.
Earth could contain 1 trillion microbial species, but humans only know about 0.001 percent of them, two biologists from Indiana University suggest in a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Since the first hints of a new subatomic particle cropped up in results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last December, physicists around the world have been scrambling to make sense of it.
Japan's space agency has abandoned its efforts to restore the operations of a multimillion-dollar satellite that was to probe the mysteries of black holes using X-ray telescopes.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced Thursday that it would stop trying to fix the satellite after determining that it was "highly likely" that its two solar arrays had broken off at their bases.
Astronomers have discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting a small red sun, just 40 light-years away.
Researchers say all three worlds are potentially habitable and could represent the best targets yet in the search for life beyond the solar system.
Is our universe unique? From science fiction to science fact, there is a proposal out there that suggests that there could be other universes besides our own, where all the choices you made in this life played out in alternate realities. So, instead of turning down that job offer that took you from the United States to China, the alternate universe would show the outcome if you decided to venture to Asia instead.
An odd, tailless comet that made a fleeting pass into the inner solar system in 2014 before heading back out to the distant Oort cloud actually may have been visiting close to its birthplace.
The comet, called C/2014 S3, is physically more like an inner belt, rocky asteroid than an icy comet forged in the solar system’s deep freeze, a new study shows.
A new study of eight years of radar data collected by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft shows that the planet’s largest moon, Titan — the only other body in the solar system besides Earth where liquids pool on the surface — has a sea of pure methane.
Astronomers revised the half-century old Drake equation, which attempts to calculate the probability of the existence of advanced alien civilizations, to determine whether such civilizations has existed at any point in the history of the universe.
It’s an oft-reported, can-you-even-believe-it fact that many people in Iceland still believe in the possible existence of elves. This myth from the country’s folk traditions has persisted, and the niggling suspicion that the Good Folk may still be out there among the rocks has even led to Icelandic road and housing plans being altered to avoid sites associated with them. Now, there’s an incredibly detailed map that shows you exactly where such sites can be found.
A giant green fireball streaked across the skies of Southern California Tuesday night.
Related: The Weird Tale of the Man Who Discovered “Gravity Shielding” UFO-like Technologies
Related: UFO ‘full of tourists’ is seen flying past Empire State Building
The record-setting burn is meant to send a message to the world that ivory has no value and that its trade should be banned.
As widely reported here, Africa is in the midst of a poaching crisis, driven primarily by demand in Asia for wildlife products. Three-quarters of illegal ivory makes its way to China, while Vietnam is the largest market for rhino horn.
Mathematically speaking, the way a tiger charges a herd of antelope resembles a white blood cell attacking a colony of bacteria. That’s the conclusion of a new paper by an international team of physicists, just published in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical.
Horses snooze in their stalls. Fish take their 40 winks floating in place. Dogs can doze anywhere, anytime. And even the lowly worm nods off now and then.
All animals, most scientists agree, engage in some form of sleep.
Apologies to people keen on reviving extinct dinosaurs, but researchers have never recovered dinosaur DNA, which is necessary for cloning. But, intriguingly, they have found fragments of mystery DNA in dinosaur bone, experts told Live Science.
The Burning Tree mastodon, discovered in 1989 on a Licking County golf course, is known internationally for being the most complete American mastodon skeleton ever found.
The mastodon also had spear marks in its ribs, proving a theory about how Paleo-Indian tribes that hunted across Ohio and the rest of North America fed themselves.
Blombos Cave in South Africa has given us vast knowledge about our early ancestors, realigning scientific notions of the origins of early modern behavior, pushing back the dates of evidence of sophisticated cognitive actions such as flint working, ritual behaviors and personal decoration some 50,000 years earlier than the cave paintings of Upper Paleolithic Europe.
A new study has provided fresh insights into Mound Key, an artificial island constructed by the Calusa people.
The interdisciplinary project, led by University of Georgia anthropologist Victor Thompson, has looked at how the composition of the island changed over the centuries, particularly in relation to environmental and social shifts. The team’s results were published this week in the open access journal, PLOS ONE.
A new genetic study of male ancestry shows there were periods in human prehistory when just a few elite men controlled reproduction.
For example, one man about 190,000 years ago was the ancestor of 1,200 living men from 26 groups around the world whose genes were analyzed for the new study.
Roman rule meant the control of Rome on ports and marine and land trade routes. In fact, Roman maritime commercial traffic was so important that they improved and expanded existing land routes, creating a vast road network in many regions, which was in service until the 18th century. This allowed them to develop and consolidate areas of commercial influence on some ports - transforming them into centers for very important economic activity.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recently visited the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra to assess the damage and destruction done to it when it fell under the control of the Islamic State terrorist group (ISIS).
Though the city, a world heritage site, has been considerably damaged, it still continues to retain its integrity and authenticity, affirmed UNESCO.
Smartphone-toting pilgrims regularly stream into northern Cambodia from all over the world. Their destination: Angkor Wat, a medieval temple that’s famous for massive towers and majestic stone carvings of Hindu gods, spirits and mythological battle scenes. The site, considered the world’s largest religious monument, drew more than 2.3 million visitors in 2014.
Archaeologists excavating the ruins of a city of the Kushan Empire in Pakistan have discovered an ancient shrine with statuary depicting the Buddha’s entry into the world of suffering people. After he saw the pain and misery of the world, from which he had been shielded as a youth, Buddha went on to found a religion based in love, compassion, and mercy.
Experts have discovered a new geoglyph 30 meters (100 feet) long among the Nazca lines on an arid plateau in Peru that experts say depicts an imaginary animal with a long tongue. Archaeologists say the rock carving may date back 2,000 years.
Alt: Over 2000-year old geoglyph found in Nazca desert
Archeologists and conservationists are battling to preserve ancient tombs built in Japan between the fifth and eighth centuries after human intervention and climate change triggered a deterioration in their conditions.
Construction workers have found 600kg (1,300lb) of ancient Roman coins while carrying out routine work on water pipes in southern Spain, local officials have said
“It is a unique collection and there are very few similar cases,” Ana Navarro, head of Seville’s archeology museum, which is looking after the find, told a news conference.
A robot called OceanOne with artificial intelligence and haptic feedback systems gives human pilots an unprecedented ability to explore the depths of the oceans.
Oussama Khatib held his breath as he swam through the wreck of La Lune, over 300 feet below the Mediterranean.
Automated deception detection is said to be one of biggest security challenges of the century.
To overcome this obstacle, researchers have developed an 'automated interview system' - a virtual interrogator.
Police in Paris are looking to buy drones to carry out crowd surveillance, according to a tender released by the prefecture last month. The document shows that police are seeking to acquire hexacopter drones to carry out "low altitude aerial surveillance" on outdoor crowds, presumably in an effort to tighten security ahead of the UEFA Euro 2016 soccer championship, which begins in June, and the Tour de France in July.
Google is working on a computer that can be injected into people’s eyeballs.
A new patent filing shows plans for a device that would stick into people’s eyes and correct their sight, but also provide extra powers.
NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s, but a new technology could help scientists explore the surface of the Red Planet — from its sprawling craters to its enormous volcanoes — from right here on Earth.
Is there life in the universe? If there is, can it communicate — and does it want to talk to us? If such a civilization is out there, how long could it survive? These are some of the fundamental questions astronomers regularly consider when they think about aliens.
Suffice it to say the answers are not as easy as Star Trek or Star Wars would make you believe.
Mars’ atmosphere is thin and cold, composed primarily of carbon dioxide along with other trace gases and some water vapor. Evidence has continued to mount, however, that the rarified atmosphere we see today once used to be much thicker and possibly warmer, making it potentially more life-friendly early on. Just how thick and how warm is still a subject of much debate, but there is also another interesting aspect to all of this: New evidence from the Curiosity rover has shown that the Martian atmosphere also used to have a lot more oxygen in it than it does now.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found a tiny, dark moon circling the dwarf planet Makemake, a Pluto sibling in the solar system’s distant Kuiper Belt.
It is the first satellite to be discovered circling Makemake, an 870-mile wide dwarf planet discovered in 2005.
The discovery of strange halo-like craters on Pluto has raised a new mystery about how the odd scars formed on the icy world.
Pluto’s “halo” craters are clearly visible in a new image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which made the first-ever flyby of the dwarf planet in July 2015.
Astronomers have observed two black holes in nearby galaxies devouring their companion stars at an extremely high rate, and spitting out matter at a quarter the speed of light.
Two black holes in nearby galaxies have been observed devouring their companion stars at a rate exceeding classically understood limits, and in the process, kicking out matter into surrounding space at astonishing speeds of around a quarter the speed of light.
Xenon from deep within the Earth’s mantle has shone a light on the planet’s formation and early evolution. The isotopic signature of this earthly xenon has been shown to resemble that of primitive meteorites and differs markedly from the profile of the gas found in the atmosphere, which is mysteriously missing most of its xenon.
A first-of-its-kind space rock filled with pristine material from the formation of the Earth itself has returned to the inner solar system, after billions of years in the cosmic boondocks. And it could help us piece together our planet’s origin story.
A small mammal has sabotaged the world's most powerful scientific instrument.
The Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile superconducting machine designed to smash protons together at close to the speed of light, went offline overnight. Engineers investigating the mishap found the charred remains of a furry creature near a gnawed-through power cable.
Days after a poacher’s trap killed a young mountain gorilla in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park, researchers have spotted something remarkable: two four-year old gorillas working together to dismantle similar snares in the area.
A study led by researchers at Lund University in Sweden shows that ravens are as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds' brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence.
Echidnas are some of the oddest animals you’ll ever see, more closely related to a platypus than anything else, as the only other mammals that lay eggs. There are four living species: Short-beaked echidnas — about the size of a house cat and covered in spikes — are common throughout Australia and in Papua New Guinea, where three long-beaked species live.
Pausing at a clearing, a sudden streak of black against the carpet of white snow moved in the corner of Madhu Chetri's eye.
It was 2004, and Chetri, now a Ph.D. student at Norway's Hedmark University College, was trekking through the roof of the world: Nepal's Annapurna Conservation Area.
The skull of a Homo erectus has been found in the area near the Bojong River in Manyarejo village, Sragen, Central Java, Indonesia. It is the first discovery of a human fossil in this area in 80 years.
According to The Jakarata Post , the skull was discovered on February 2016 by 56-year-old Manyarejo villager Setu Wiryorejo.
When fluctuating climates in the Ice Age altered habitats, modern humans may have adapted their diets in a different way than Neandertals, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Sireen El Zaatari of the University of Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues.
Ugly fruits and vegetables are today's pocked and scaly, dimpled, misshapen darlings — and there is a growing movement to sell such produce, not dump it into municipal landfills. As The Salt has reported, we toss out enough food to fill 44 skyscrapers each year. Why waste perfectly good food?
Half of the world's farmed fish have hearing loss due to a deformity of the earbone, new research has found for the first time. Like humans, fish have ears which are essential for hearing and balance, so the findings are significant for the welfare of farmed fish as well as the survival of captive-bred fish released into the wild for conservation purposes.
Maggots raised on animal manure could provide a sustainable alternative to much of the feed given to farmed pigs, chickens and fish.
That’s the preliminary conclusion of PROteINSECT, a three-year study of whether feed based on fly larvae could help mitigate environmental problems caused by the rapidly growing global demand for meat and fish.
The meat industry contributes more to greenhouse gas emissions than the combined exhaust from every form of transportation on Earth — a whopping fifth of the total. Beef is the biggest culprit, and it requires almost 30 times as much land and 11 times as much water to produce as pork or chicken.
Cambodia's prime minister has ordered a million hectares of forest be included in protected zones as the country faces one of the world's fastest deforestation rates.
The move, which covers five new areas of forest, will bump Cambodia's conservation zones up by a fifth, bringing more than a quarter of the country's land under protection.
A reduction in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the oceans due to climate change is already discernible in some parts of the world and should be evident across large regions of the oceans between 2030 and 2040, according to a new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Three recent publications by early career researchers at three different institutions across the country provide the first look into the biogeochemistry, geophysics and geology of Subglacial Lake Whillans, which lies 800 meters (2,600 feet) beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Here's another reason to start saving for that beach house: New research suggests that residents with a view of the water are less stressed.
The study, co-authored by Michigan State University's Amber L. Pearson, is the first to find a link between health and the visibility of water, which the researchers call blue space.
Lake Suwa sits in the Kino Mountains of central Japan, in a region sometimes called the Japanese Alps. When the lake freezes over, daily temperature changes cause the ice to expand and contract, cracking the surface and forcing it upward into a ridge.* Legend has it that the ridge, called the omiwatari, is formed by the feet of the Shinto gods as they cross the lake. Every year since at least 1443, the priests who live at the shrine on the edge of Lake Suwa have carefully recorded the date the ridge appears.
The US Army Corps of Engineers decided Wednesday that DNA analysis proved a controversial, 9,000-year-old skeleton is related to native Americans and can be buried by their customs.
Friendship can have a surprising number of positive effects on health, scientists have found—maintaining friendships can decrease your risk for dementia and heart disease, can keep you fit (if they’re fit, too), and can even extend your life. Now researchers might have discovered another positive effect: friends can make pain hurt less, according to a study published today in Scientific Reports.
As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality.
Therapy based on the controversial concept of ‘mindfulness’ works as well as some anti-depressant drugs, according to a major new study.
Inspired in part by Buddhist philosophy, mindfulness involves training the brain to deal with negative emotions using techniques such as meditation, breathing exercises and yoga.
If verified, finding could help understand how people’s faces change with time, and may ultimately lead to ways of slowing the most visible effects of ageing
A genetic therapy has improved the vision of patients who would otherwise have gone blind.
A clinical study by British scientists has shown that the improvement is long-lasting and so the therapy is suitable to be offered as a treatment.
By administering nicotinamide riboside to elderly mice, researchers restored their organs' ability to regenerate and prolonged their lives. This method has potential for treating a number of degenerative diseases.
Scientists in Spain on Wednesday they had created human sperm from skin cells, a medical feat which could eventually lead to a treatment for infertility.
The researchers said they were working to find a solution for the roughly 15 percent of couples worldwide who are unable to have children and whose only option is to use donated sperm or eggs.
Instead of just flushing it away, your pee could one day generate power. Researchers have developed a way to create affordable and renewable electricity with a fuel cell that runs on urine.
The new device relies on natural biological processes of so-called electric bacteria, essentially living cells that eat and breathe electricity.
Belgium is to provide iodine pills to its entire population of around 11 million people to protect against radioactivity in case of a nuclear accident, the health minister was quoted as saying Thursday.
The move comes as Belgium faces growing pressure from neighbouring Germany to shutter two ageing nuclear power plants near their border due to concerns over their safety.
The modern challenge of nuclear waste storage and disposal has researchers at Washington State University looking back at ancient materials from around the world.
They report on their work studying ancient glass and rock defense walls in a paper published in the May issue of American Ceramic Society Bulletin.
There’s nothing quite like the human touch. Nimble-fingered robots that exactly mimic the movements of a human hand could soon be used to help decommission nuclear power stations.
Need some spiritual guidance in these tough economic times? Robot monk to the rescue.
At a Buddhist temple northwest of Beijing, a humble machine has some advise for you. Xian’er, which translates into Worthy Stupid Robot Monk (“stupid,” being a a term of affection in the local dialect), uses a touchpad to respond to questions or statements from visitors, reports the NY Times.
Authoritarianism is an issue of special gravitas this year, given claims of heavy-handedness in US presidential politics and widening conflicts against dictatorships in Syria and elsewhere. But why do we as a people let a single person or small group make decisions for everyone else?
A 3,000-year-old archaeological site in the Andes of Peru may hold the answer, says John Rick, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University.
Half of Western European men are descended from one Bronze Age ‘king’ who sired a dynasty of elite nobles which spread throughout Europe, a new study has shown.
The monarch, who lived around 4,000 years ago, is likely to have been one of the earliest chieftains to take power in the continent.
The internal structure of an ancient Egyptian pyramid was revealed for the first time using cosmic particles, a team of international researchers reports.
The innovative technology was applied to the Bent Pyramid, a 4,500-year-old monument so named because of its sloping upper half.
A rare scarab seal has been found in Tel Dor on the Carmel Coast of Israel, south of Haifa. It is dated back to the 18th - 17th centuries BC and belonged to the period of Egypt’s Thirteenth Dynasty.
Software developed at Bournemouth University has unearthed new information about Laetoli’s lost tracks
Researchers at Bournemouth University have developed a new software technique to uncover ‘lost’ tracks, hidden in plain sight at the world’s oldest human footprint site in Laetoli (Tanzania). The software has revealed new information about the shape of the tracks and has found hints of a previously undiscovered fourth track-maker at the site.
Archaeologists in Taiwan have found a 4,800-year-old human fossil of a mother holding an infant child in her arms.
The 48 sets of remains unearthed in graves in the Taichung area are the earliest trace of human activity found in central Taiwan.
Scientists have discovered Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, a new species of titanosaurian dinosaur, based on an complete skull and partial neck fossil unearthed in Patagonia, Argentina, according to a study published April 26, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rubén Martínez from the Laboratorio de Paleovertebrados of the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB), Argentina, and colleagues.
Researchers have used 'network theory' for the first time to visually depict the movement of dinosaurs around the world during the Mesozoic Era - including a curious exodus from Europe.
The research, published today in the Journal of Biogeography, also reaffirms previous studies that have found that dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after the 'supercontinent' Pangaea split into land masses that are separated by oceans.
Researchers have uncovered dozens of fossilized teeth in Kuwajima, Japan, and identified this as a new species of tritylodontid, an animal family that links the evolution of mammals from reptiles. The finding suggests that tritylodontids co-existed with some of the earliest mammal species for millions of years, overturning beliefs that mammals wiped out mammal-like reptiles soon after they emerged.
The crucibles that bore out building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, not fiery cataclysms, but modest puddles. Researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding the evolutionary mystery of how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed.
Tooth marks on the leg bone of a hominin, an ancient human relative, suggest that the poor soul had a gristly end, a new study finds.
The tooth marks and fractures on the roughly 500,000-year-old femur indicate that a large carnivore, likely an extinct hyena, chewed on the bone, the researchers said.
The ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man is related to modern Native American tribes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday, opening the process for returning to a tribe for burial one of the oldest and most complete set of bones ever found in North America.
Researchers at McMaster have found that a single minute of very intense exercise produces health benefits similar to longer, traditional endurance training.
The findings put to rest the common excuse for not getting in shape: there is not enough time.
Dark chocolate has already been hailed for its positive effects on cardiovascular health – and now a new study has found the tasty treat could help give sports enthusiasts an extra edge in their fitness training.
Related: New research: Obese people can maintain stable weight loss
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” that connoisseur of witticisms, Oscar Wilde, is said to have remarked. But not everyone shares his view. Communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away from this particular form of expression.
Scientists in the US have mapped out how the brain organises language.
Their "semantic atlas" shows how, for example, one region of the brain activates in response to words about clothing and appearance.