I have been interested in learning languages ever since high school and until now, I have been finding various ways to acquire different languages. Kids of the new generation, who have awakened to the benefits and risks of the digital era and are savvy enough to find ways to use it to their advantage, might gain much from emojis, in a linguistic sense.

When kids use emoji it may seem random—a bunch of silly pictures on a screen. But kids start out learning spoken and signed languages in a similar way: by babbling nonsense syllables, which teaches them the rhythm of conversation and trains them to make fine articulatory movements.

The silly strings of emoji that young kids send could serve a similar purpose. By exposing kids to the rhythm of electronic conversations, emoji may be a useful precursor to reading—a way of acclimating kids to the digital reality of using symbols to communicate with people they care about.

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Although we always find them in Chinese restaurants in America, the fortune cookie doesn't actually have any relation to Chinese traditions. So if it's not Chinese, where did it come from and who started the idea of putting small pieces of paper in cookies?

Follow the story of Jenniefer Lee as she embarked on a journey to find out the origins of the fortune cookie. Article by Soleil Ho and Blue Delliquanti of The Nib.

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The face of Quaker Oats seems like a kind, old man with a nice smile trying to persuade you to live a healthier lifestyle and eat oats for breakfast. Some say that he was based on William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. But there is more to the actual historical figure of William Penn than meets the eye.

Penn was a man of paradoxical qualities. He espoused a radically egalitarian Quaker theology, insisting that something divine resided within each individual, yet he owned slaves on his American estate. He praised representative institutions such as parliament and the jury system, but spent years in hiding for his loyalty to an absolutist king.

‘I am like to be an adopted American,’ he wrote shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania in 1682, but spent only four of his remaining 36 years there. And he was chronically incapable of managing money, spending eight months in an English debtors’ prison in his 60s, even while his colony quickly became a commercial success.

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When you have been engulfed in a crowd, it can be described like a sea of people and that may be an accurate depiction as a new study has found that big crowds tend to flow like water. A previous study explained that crowds exhibited emergent behavior that could help predict the movement of crowds, this time researchers use hydrodynamic theory to explain crowd behavior.

Large human crowds exhibit fluid-like collective behavior that can be predicted based solely on hydrodynamic theory, according to a new study (Bain and Bartolo, 2019) published today in the journal Science. This pioneering research shows, for the first time, how crowds of people flow like water in ways that appear to override so-called “interaction rules” between individuals.

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Children need warmth, love, and attention from parents to grow healthy and emotionally stable. But for the purposes of the Nazi regime, they wanted to create cold, detached soldiers for war, so they raised them without any emotional attachments which researchers say could have long-term psychological effects on children.

In 1934 physician Johanna Haarer published The German Mother and Her First Child. Her advice guided child-rearing in the Third Reich. It ultimately sold some 1.2 million copies, almost half of them after the end of the war.

In that book, Haarer recommended that children be raised with as few attachments as possible. If a child cried, that was not the mother's problem. Excessive tenderness was to be avoided at all cost.

Psychotherapists fear that this kind of upbringing led many children in Germany to develop attachment difficulties and that those problems might have been passed on to subsequent generations.

From the Scientific American.

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Said to be extinct thousands of years ago, scientists who are tracking illegal poaching of elephant ivory in Cambodia have found an unexpected turn of events, they found DNA of woolly mammoths in trinkets.

“It was a surprise for us to find trinkets made from woolly mammoth ivory in circulation, especially so early into our testing and in a tropical country like Cambodia,” said Dr Alex Ball, who runs the WildGenes project.

“It is very hard to say what the implications of this finding are for existing elephant populations; however, we plan to continue our research and will use genetics to work out where it has come from.”

Read more on Independent.

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Even before humans ventured out into the unknown realms of outer space, Charles Bittinger wanted to depict what it looks like, based on how he imagined them from descriptions and current scientific knowledge of planets and other celestial objects. In 1939, he put those visions onto canvas and some are oddly accurate.

In July 1939, National Geographic published a story called “News of the Universe,” for which artist Charles Bittinger was commissioned to create a series of paintings that would help readers visualize outer space. At the time, telescopes were advanced enough to reveal details of the moon, but it would be another 30 years before a human would set foot there. Not even a satellite had been launched at the time the piece was published.

Despite the fact that humans hadn’t yet begun to explore outer space, the paintings illuminate how much scientists already understood. In the painting of Earth as seen from the moon, for example, the ridges on the moon’s craters are raised, which planetary scientist Bethany Ehlmann says is “very technically correct.”

In another painting, Bittinger depicts the way light scatters into a spectrum of colors. It may seem out of place in the series, but “Bittinger felt it important to illustrate that, to make sure that readers understood the importance of the principle and how it related to the other paintings,” says National Geographic senior graphics editor Jason Treat.

(Images credit: Charles Bittinger via Chris Wondra, National Geographic)

When it comes to sleep, I am one to advocate for just a little bit more. Our bodies regenerate and replenish the energy that we have spent throughout the previous day so getting some extra hours in should not hurt, it could probably even work wonders for you.

Almost all of us do it. We get up early to go to the gym. We stay up too late responding to work emails. Or we end up bingeing on Netflix in bed.

Whatever it is, we often cut corners when it comes to sleep.

Yet if you want to kick 2019 off on a stronger, healthier note, you need to make more time for sleep. Because if you can squeeze in even an extra hour, it will almost certainly make you look better, feel better and be better at your job.

Read more on The BBC.

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Most Asian countries, especially east Asian cultures, would often ask their guests to remove their shoes when entering the home. It is not just because they don't want to get their floors dirty but it is a custom that shows a sign of respect for the one receiving you into their home. But are there any scientific evidence that would make things clearer which is more beneficial? Find out more on Live Science.

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If you have ever seen science fiction movies, you have probably wondered what kind of fuel do they use to power those large spacecrafts making them capable of going in speeds greater than the speed of light? Well, if we were to create one today, scientists say that the main source of fuel would be the kugelblitz black holes.

What are these black holes and what makes them capable of powering the future?

As far as we know, most black holes are made from a tremendous amount of matter being concentrated in a very tightly packed space. In theory, though, this doesn't have to be the case. Einstein's formula E = mc2 tells us that energy is equivalent to matter times the speed of light squared. In regard to making black holes, this has three important implications for us: mass and energy are equivalent, mass has a tremendous amount of energy locked away inside of itself, and gravity treats mass and energy the same.

Here's where the kugelblitz comes in. German for "ball lightning," a kugelblitz is a black hole made from light rather than matter. By light, we mean any kind of radiation, really. Although light has no mass, it does have energy. Since gravity treats mass and energy the same, in theory, we can focus enough radiation into a tiny space and produce an event horizon, an area in space so densely packed (with either matter or energy) that nothing can escape.

Read more on Big Think.

(Image credit: NASA via Big Think)

Is there an uncanny connection between the gut and our brain? That's probably a figment of my imagination but it seems that medical research has been making great strides in understanding how different cells in our body could work together to fight off diseases found in other parts. In this case, cells in the gut could produce antibodies that combat brain inflammation.

An incredible new study from researchers at the University of Toronto and UC San Francisco has provided a novel insight into the gut-brain connection, revealing the intestine may be the source of immune cells found to reduce brain inflammation in multiple sclerosis (MS) sufferers.

The new study revealed that plasma cells residing in the intestine can produce antibodies known as Immunoglobulin A (IgA). It was established that these IgA plasma cells have the ability to move from the intestine into the central nervous system, and reduce neuroinflammation associated with MS flare-ups.

This is an exciting new avenue for medicine and it might stave off the drastic, agonizing effects of people suffering from these degenerative neurological diseases.

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If you have read Antoine de Saint-Exupery's most popular work in high school, The Little Prince, you might still remember the big, voracious trees that threatened to consume whole planets if left unattended. They were called baobabs and the Little Prince made sure to watch out for signs that these giants would not get anywhere near his planet or his rose.

But outside the fictional world, baobabs are actually the ones becoming endangered.

In June 2018, a study was published by the scientific journal Nature Plants; it stated simply that the baobabs are dying. The scientists involved do not know why, but they suspect increased drought and climate change. For decades, villagers in Botswana have witnessed the depletion of baobabs because of human encroachment—cattle grazing and farmland have taken over areas once roamed by hunter-gatherers.

The introduction of agriculture and changes to the soil have produced a negative effect on the trees. These trees, which are some of the oldest on the planet, are rooted so solidly into the African horizon, they appear invincible, as if the sun couldn’t set without the silhouettes of their gnarly branches reshaping the line where land meets sky.

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Despite the scientific evidences, myths still persist in our societies because there are times when we just can't accept the empirical data science provides, whether due to bias or habit, it would just be more convenient to stick to long-held beliefs and reject new information. So, in 2007, the Alaskan capital of Juneau voted to stop putting fluoride in their drinking water fearing what it might do to their health.

Now, thanks to a new study led by first author and public health researcher Jennifer Meyer from the University of Alaska Anchorage, we've got new insights into the subsequent effects.

In the study, Meyer assessed Medicaid dental claim billing records for two groups of children and adolescents aged 18 or under.

One of these groups represented what the researchers call "optimal" community water fluoridation (CWF) exposure: 853 non-adult patients on behalf of whom Medicaid dental claims were filed in 2003, years before the fluoride cessation began in 2007.

The other group was made up of 1,052 non-adult patients from families who similarly met Medicaid income requirements, and who made the same kind of dental claims almost a decade later, in 2012.

The results? I guess it wouldn't take too much to figure out what happened.

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Nine months ago in Sydney, authorities found a man who had nothing on him that would indicate his identity except for an electronic transport card, the Opal card, tucked in his pocket. Who he was and what had happened to him was a mystery? Apparently, they ruled it a suicide since there was no other evidence to suggest any other cause of death. But it was known that the man always began and ended at a bus stop called "Dan's Corner".

Read more on The BBC for other details about the mysterious man's life and the investigations conducted on his case.

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When you get and your teeth start falling out, you probably would want to get a set of replacements for them so that you may want to look aesthetically pleasant when posing for pictures. Back in ancient times, people had the same issue. But without the knowledge and technology we have now, how were they able to make their dentures?

According to historian Scott Swank, who curates the National Museum of Dentistry, numerous examples of dental restoration may be found even earlier in history, but they don’t quite qualify as actual dentures. For example, ancient Egyptians developed bridgework to substitute missing teeth, using gold wire affixed to neighboring teeth to hold one or two false teeth in place—usually ones carved from hippopotamus ivory, or donated by another human.

In ancient Italy, the Etruscans used similar methods, as did the Romans who succeeded them. Bridges were formed from metal and ivory, bone, or whole human and animal teeth, Swank said, and archaeological remains show that an implant made out of lead was used in at least one case. “Researchers said there was actually some bone-healing around it, though I can’t imagine what that healing process was like.”

By the 1100s or so, however, humankind was ready to make the leap to full-on dentures; at least, in some corners of the globe. Around this time, Swank said, what historians generally accept as the first-ever dentures began appearing in China and Japan, though few examples from the early Middle Ages survive today.

Read more on Gizmodo.

(Image credit: The Wellcome Collection via Gizmodo)