Quirky Science

Human language's deep origins appear to have come directly from birds, primates

photo courtesy: MIT

Human language builds on birdsong and speech forms of other primates, researchers hypothesize in new research. From birds, the researchers say, we derived the melodic part of our language, and from other primates, the pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech. Sometime within the last 100,000 years, those capacities fused into roughly the form of human language that we know today, according to a research by two MIT professors.
“Yes, human language is unique, but if you take it apart in the right way, the two parts we identify are in fact of a finite state," Professor Miyagawa, the study's co-author  writes. "Those two components have antecedents in the animal world. According to our hypothesis, they came together uniquely in human language."

Being in a group makes some people lose touch with their personal moral beliefs

photo courtesy: science daily

When people get together in groups, unusual things can happen -- both good and bad. Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances: Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group."Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts, people's priorities change when there is an 'us' and a 'them,'" writes Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. "A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into 'mobs' that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality."
Several factors play into this transformation. When people are in a group, they feel more anonymous, and less likely to be caught doing something wrong. They may also feel a diminished sense of personal responsibility for collective actions.

Weight bias plagues US elections, study finds

Photo: wikipedia

Overweight political candidates tend to receive fewer votes than their thinner opponents, finds a new study co-authored by a Michigan State University weight bias expert.
While past research has found weight discrimination in schools, businesses, entertainment and other facets of American society, this is the first scientific investigation into whether that bias extends to election outcomes, writes Mark Roehling, professor of human resources.
"We found weight had a significant effect on voting behavior," Roehling writes. "Additionally, the greater size disparity between candidates, the greater the vote share of the more slender candidate."
The study was published online in May in the research journal Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

Photo courtesy: university of washington

New computer programme aims to teach itself everything about any visual concept

In today's digitally driven world, access to information appears limitless.
But when you have something specific in mind that you don't know, like the name of that niche kitchen tool you saw at a friend's house, it can be surprisingly hard to sift through the volume of information online and know how to search for it. Or, the opposite problem can occur – we can look up anything on the Internet, but how can we be sure we are finding everything about the topic without spending hours in front of the computer?
Computer scientists from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle have created the first fully automated computer programme that teaches everything there is to know about any visual concept. Called Learning Everything about Anything, or LEVAN, the program searches millions of books and images on the Web to learn all possible variations of a concept, then displays the results to users as a comprehensive, browsable list of images, helping them explore and understand topics quickly in great detail.