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At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear?
The older you get the more difficult it is to learn to speak French like a Parisian. But no one knows exactly what the cutoff point is—at what age it becomes harder, for instance, to pick up noun-verb agreements in a new language. In one of the largest linguistics studies ever conducted—a viral internet survey that drew two thirds of a million respondents—researchers from three Boston-based universities showed children are proficient at learning a second language up until the age of 18, roughly 10 years later than earlier estimates. But the study also showed that it is best to start by age 10 if you want to achieve the grammatical fluency of a native speaker.
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Facebook announces new dating feature because romance isn’t dead
Facebook will soon include a dating feature among its services, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the company’s F8 Developer Conference in San Jose, California on Tuesday. The feature will sling Facebook into a domain in which it has long played a behind-the-scenes role but never entered directly. These days, many digital matchmaking services like Tinder require users to sign up for the app through their Facebook accounts. In this way, Facebook's pivot to online dating makes sense, as it has long served as the critical ingredient for people to begin swiping.
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Mindfulness may have been over-hyped
In late 1971, US Navy veteran Stephen Islas returned from Vietnam, but the war continued to rage in his head. “I came very close to committing suicide when I came home, I was that emotionally and mentally damaged,” Islas remembers. At his college campus in Los Angeles, a friend suggested he check out a meditation class. He was sceptical, but he found that before long “there were moments that started shifting, where I was happy.
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Tackling Gender Inequality in STEM? Consider Culture, A New Study Says
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Aciel Eshky didn’t get the memo that science was for boys. When she was around ten years old, her aunt started to teach her basic computer programming. From there, going on to a degree in computer science seemed like a natural fit. So when a classmate in her master’s program abroad told her that women were weaker than men at math, it came as a shock. “I was really annoyed,” Eshky says. “I felt like I was being bullied.” Despite its dismal reputation for gender equality, Saudi Arabia has a surprising level of female graduates in the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
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“You’re Making Us Look Bad!” Why the Best Cooperators Sometimes Get Punished
The results of this experiment suggest that competitive environments could curtail selflessness or generosity
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Basic scientists still feel pinch of new NIH clinical trial policy
Basic researchers who study the brain and human behavior thought lawmakers had come to their rescue in March by blocking the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from redefining their studies as clinical trials. But NIH officials are still pushing ahead with new requirements that scientists say make no sense and will cripple their research. What some see as NIH’s narrow interpretation of a directive from lawmakers has researchers up in arms as they navigate confusing new rules and paperwork. The clinical trial policies “are not appropriate for fundamental research,” a group of societies wrote in an email to NIH this week.
