Calvin Smith / Items
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Three of a kind: Revealing language’s universal essenceOn the surface, English, Japanese, and Kinande, a member of the Bantu family of languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have little in common. It is not just that the vocabularies of these three languages are vastly different; many of their rules of grammar diverge too.
Calvin Smith
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5 days ago
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Into the Uncanny Valley § SEEDMAGAZINE.COMA dead body appears in almost every way to be a normal human. But the pallid skin and empty eyes signal that the person-shaped form we are looking at is, in a way we can’t even fully grasp, strange and disturbing. We feel a similar eeriness when interacting with robots and models that look ...
Calvin Smith
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5 days ago
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Revisiting FOXP2 and the origins of language : Not Exactly Rocket ScienceToday, a new paper published in Nature adds another chapter to the story of FOXP2, a gene with important roles in speech and language. The FOXP2 story is a fascinating tale that I covered in New Scientist last year. It's one of the pieces I'm proudest of so I'm reprinting it here with kind ...
Calvin Smith
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12 days ago
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NASA'S LCROSS Impacts Confirm Water In Lunar CraterNASA'S LCROSS Impacts Confirm Water In Lunar Crater MOFFETT FIELD, Calif., Nov. 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Preliminary data from NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates the mission successfully uncovered water in a permanently shadowed lunar crater. The ...
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12 days ago
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Overcoming Bias : Pretty Pols WinMore evidence suggesting Politics Isn’t About Policy: Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1 ½– 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party ...
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2 weeks ago
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Overcoming Bias : Pride Is About StatusWe used 3 different … [ways] to test whether the nonverbal expression of pride sends a functional, automatically perceived signal about a social group member’s increased social status. Results suggest that the pride expression strongly signals high status, and this association cannot be ...
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2 weeks ago
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Overcoming Bias : Pondering PanspermiaPondering Panspermia Over the last few days I’ve neglected my duties to obsessively browse the last seven years of three journals: Astrobiology, International Journal of Astrobiology , and Origins of Life . In the process I’ve become converted to a more expansive version panspermia – life ...
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2 weeks ago
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Overcoming Bias : A Galactic GardenA Galactic Garden In August I wrote : A few years ago PCW Davies persuasively argued that Earth life more likely started on Mars. Last year, Napier and coauthors argued that comets are an even more likely source: A single comet of radius 10 km and 30% volume fraction of clay contains ...
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2 weeks ago
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Babble Of Baby Reveals Language SkillsChildren have a remarkable ability to learn new languages. As little as five hours of exposure to a second language is enough to help infants incorporate characteristics of that language into their babbling according to a new study. Studies conducted during the last 25 years have shown that ...
Calvin Smith
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3 weeks ago
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Brain maps help guide you through large-scale space, researchers findLost? Not sure how to get home? Trying to find your way through the mall or an airport? Help is on the way, thanks to a stack of cells, or neurons, in your head. They're mostly on the left side of the brain in males, on the right in females. Scientists have long known that a small, ...
Calvin Smith
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3 weeks ago