Monthly Archive for November, 2011

How Languages are Built

Published on November 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo by juliejordanscott on flickr

From physorg.com

Parents are often amazed by the speed at which children acquire language in early childhood, becoming fluent around three years of age. Compare this with the average adult attempting to acquire a second language, and it’s a quite remarkable achievement.

A five-year research project led by Professor Ian Roberts from the University of Cambridge aims to work out what it is about how a language is built that guides a child’s innate ability to acquire it.

In the late 1950s, the American linguist Noam Chomsky suggested that children are born with an innate ability to acquire language – a ‘blueprint’ for speaking any language on the planet. According to Chomsky, encoded in the human brain is an innate set of linguistic principles he called the ‘universal grammar’ that encompasses all of the properties that any language can have. The language the child then actually speaks is simply determined by exposure to the language (or languages in the case of a multilingual family) they hear as they develop.

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Are We Killing People with Kindness?

Published on November 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Independent

Jenny needed to go to A&E. Now. Martha grabbed her keys and glanced longingly towards the paprika-scented stew. Jenny, her new neighbour from two doors down, had called just as Martha and her husband Jim had begun eating dinner.

Martha chided herself: what was she doing thinking of her own needs in this sort of situation? She remembered Jenny’s moans on the phone. With a whisk of her coat and a bye-bye to her husband, Martha slipped out into the chill.

Seven hours later, utterly exhausted, Martha returned from A&E. Jim smiled ruefully as he welcomed her. “Always the do-gooder,” he said, kissing her on her forehead. “You’ve such a good heart. Sometimes too good.” Martha felt better at the kind words. Still, she would go about exhausted all day tomorrow. But she loved the children she cared for – that’s why she’d chosen nursing as her profession. The thought slipped in unbidden: “All this drama, just because Jenny had a migraine?” Stop that, Martha told herself. Migraines, she knew, could be dangerous. And the medications had reduced Jenny’s pain.

You’re Just One in 7 Billion!

Published on November 14, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From physorg.com

Did you take a deep breath before pushing and shoving your way into a crowded train this morning? Stepped on a few toes or nerves perhaps? Phew, well, if you thought dodging elbows and trying to hop on that crowded morning rush hour train was bad, try thinking about this – the world’s population recently hit 7 billion and in an already crowded planet, that poses quite a problem.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world’s population more than doubled just in the last fifty years. This staggering growth is certainly a cause for alarm and has scientists, economists and sociologists scrambling to find a solution to combat the problems that come with an overcrowded planet.

Though some have hailed this as a milestone for humanity, there are probably many more reasons to fear our population boom than cheer it.

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The Neuroscience of Barbie A fascinating experiment that lets people experience reality as dolls–or giants

Published on November 7, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Travis Riddle from Scientific America

In science fiction and fantasy tales, there is a long running fascination with the idea of dramatically diminishing or growing in stature. In the 1989 classic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis invents a device which accidentally shrinks both his own and the neighbor’s children down to a quarter-of-an-inch tall. Preceding this by more than 100 years, Lewis Carroll wrote about a little girl who, after tumbling down a rabbit hole, nibbles on some cake and then grows to massive proportions. Nearly 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift described the adventures of Gulliver while on the island of Lilliputan, on which he is a giant, and then on the island of Brobdingnag, where everyone else is a giant.

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