February 7, 2024: Bilingualism pushes languages to evolve, a hidden ocean found around one of Saturn's moons and what our editors are reading this week. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Learning a second language can change how people form abstract concepts in their minds. It may also fuel language evolution. Researchers asked 152 Bolivian people who spoke either Tsimane', Spanish or both to sort colored chips into groups based on color. The Tsimane' language only classifies colors into three groups: blackish, whitish, reddish. That study group sorted the chips accordingly. But Tsimane' speakers who also speak Spanish borrowed concepts of—but not the Spanish words for—new color categories such as blue, green and yellow. Why this is interesting: The study shows how learning a new language can restructure the conceptual organization of one's primary language, and that restructuring fuels how languages evolve over time. The findings do not indicate that either bilingual or monolingual Tsminane' speakers perceive the colors differently, though some evidence from psycholinguistics (the study of language and brain processes) suggests the language we speak can subtly influence how our brains process what we see.
What the experts say: Testing whether bilingual Tsimane' speakers experience color differently—that is, whether their brains react to color differently than those of monolingual people—would be a fascinating follow-up, says Panos Athanasopoulos, a psycholinguist at Lund University in Sweden. | | | Mimas, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn, likely contains a young ocean underneath its icy crust. While oceanic moons have been found throughout the outer solar system (within Saturn's Enceladus, as well as Jupiter's Europa), the data on Mimas perplexed astronomers until now. Its heavily cratered surface (some say it resembles the Death Star) lacks the telltale geysers and rifts associated with other oceanic moons.
What they found: Rather than focus on Mimas's topography, researchers examined its orbit around Saturn. Archival data from the Cassini spacecraft (which observed Mimas until 2017), shows that the moon's orbital drift around Saturn is best explained if the moon hides a liquid-water ocean beneath a slippery shell of ice several miles thick. And a young ocean (as opposed to one that's had hundreds of millions of years to slosh against its own lid) would be capped by a relatively unruffled icy crust, explaining the lack of seawater-spewing fractures.
What the experts say: "The implications for this are just enormous," says Carly Howett, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford: First, don't judge a moon by its cover. Second, the Mimas findings suggest that watery worlds can be young and their oceans can come and go. | | | Mimas, a tiny moon of Saturn, might harbor an exceedingly young ocean beneath its icy crust. Credit: Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio/Observatoire de Paris – PSL, IMCCE | | | • A new kind of transistor, called a moiré synaptic transistor, integrates memory, allowing AI hardware to process information more like the human brain does. | 4 min read | | | • Dogs wag their tails to mean many things, beyond a simple "I'm happy." They also wag to communicate dominance, ambivalence and extreme joy. | 4 min read | | | • Tens of millions of American hunters and anglers are fundamentally affected by climate change. Most of them agree that the climate is changing at an unprecedented pace, and humans are to blame. These voices are critical for implementing any meaningful change, argues Tiffany Turner, the director of climate solutions with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. | 5 min read | | | • The dystopian optimism of the AI tech community. | Rolling Stone | | | • The online masturbation abstinence movement is growing. | NPR | | | • No strong evidence exists that aliens have visited Earth. And yet many prominent individuals are making the case anyway. | New York Magazine | | | These riveting discoveries about our own solar system just keep rolling in: Oceans on another Saturnian moon, the colors of Uranus and Neptune, the rings around Uranus, potential life on Enceladus (another moon of Saturn). And that's all within the last two months! I wonder if historians will look back on this era as a boom time for solar system science, or if the rate of discovery is only in its nascence. |
If you're enjoying Today in Science, consider recommending it to a friend! They can subscribe here. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
One New York Plaza, New York, NY, 10004 | | | | | | Support our mission, subscribe to Scientific American | | | | | | | | | |
