For all those who’ve had the pleasure of going through peer review – this video shows us that it affects even the worst of us:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY]
One way to help protect dying languages – SpecGram—Call For Proposals—The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme:
It is well known that a “language” is just a dialect with an army. Furthermore, it is well-known that endangered languages today are endangered because they are being replaced by encroaching majority languages.
The Endangered Languages Armamentation Programme [...]
‘Dr Granville's mummy’ was described to the Royal Society of London in 1825 and was the first ancient Egyptian mummy to be subjected to a scientific autopsy. The remains are those [...]
World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity:
We analyzed the color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS), a large color-naming database obtained from informants of mostly unwritten languages spoken in preindustrialized cultures that have had limited contact with modern, industrialized society. The color naming idiolects of 2,367 [...]
An interesting paper on the origin of dogs in the forthcoming issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution – mtDNA Data Indicate a Single Origin for Dogs South of Yangtze River, Less Than 16,300 Years Ago, from Numerous Wolves:
There is no generally accepted picture of where, when, and how the domestic dog originated. Previous [...]
Predicting the direction of ornament evolution in Trinidadian guppies Poecilia reticulata:
Sexual selection is thought to be opposed by natural selection such that ornamental traits express a balance between these two antagonistic influences. Phenotypic variation among populations may indicate local shifts in this balance, or that different stable ‘solutions’ are possible, but testing these [...]
“Can you see any clippy bits?” my son asked his friend. The friend was flummoxed. “Do you mean handy bits?” he asked, pointing.
“Yes,” replied my boy. “Clippy bits.”
Of course! This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they [...]
