EVANSTON, Ill. --- There is a lot that 19-month-old children can't do: They can't tie their shoes or get their mittens on the correct hands. But they can use words they do know to learn new ones.

New research from Northwestern University demonstrates that even before infants begin to talk in sentences, they are paying careful attention to the way a new word is used in conversations, and they learn new words from this information in sentences.

People with type 2 diabetes have epigenetic changes on their DNA that healthy individuals do not have. This has been shown in a major study by researchers at Lund University. The researchers also found epigenetic changes in a large number of genes that contribute to reduced insulin production.

"This shows that the risk of developing type 2 diabetes is not only genetic, but also epigenetic", said Charlotte Ling, who led the study.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts, in collaboration with investigators at the Maastricht University Medical Centre and Maastricht University School of Public Health in the Netherlands and The University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, have published findings strongly suggesting that preterm birth (prior to 37 weeks gestation) increases the risk of asthma and wheezing disorders during childhood and that the risk of developing these conditions increases as the degree of prematurity increases.

While instruments an provide an objective measure of earthquake intensity, the intensity of ground motion is often anecdotal. How accurate and reliable are public perceptions?

A new study in Seismological Research Letters suggests that a person's activity at the time of the quake influences their perception of shaking more than their location. So whether a person is at rest or walking plays a greater role in their perception of ground motion than whether they were asleep on the first or sixth floor of a building.

People in motion had the worst perception.

Flocks of birds manage to navigate through difficult environments by individuals having predispositions to favour the left- or right-hand side, according to research published in PLOS Computational Biology this week.

Scientists at The University of Queensland's Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Vision Science found that budgerigars display individual bias to fly to the left or right. This allows flocks to quickly navigate past obstacles by being able to split and not slow down due to crowding.

Dr Partha Bhagavatula, the study's first author, says:

This news release is available in Portuguese.

Our intestines harbour an astronomical number of bacteria, around 100 times the number of cells in our body, known as the gut microbiota. These bacteria belong to thousands of species that co-exist, interact with each other and are key to our health. While it is clear that species imbalances may result in disease, it is unclear at what pace does each species in the gut evolves, a process that contributes to the chance of a particular innocuous species becoming harmful to the host.

A vast belt of carbon monoxide located at the fringes of the Beta Pictoris system is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and our sun.

The total amount of CO observed exceeds 200 million billion tons, equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth's oceans.

The presence of all this gas is interesting because ultraviolet starlight breaks up CO molecules in about 100 years, much faster than the main cloud can complete a single orbit around the star.

People born unable to see are readily capable of learning to perceive the shape of the human body through soundscapes that translate images into sound, according to a new article in Current Biology.

With a little training, soundscapes representing the outlines and silhouettes of bodies cause the brain's visual cortex—and specifically an area dedicated in normally sighted people to processing body shapes—to light up with activity.

With no more than 70 hours of training on average, study participants could recognize the presence of a human form. What's more, they were able to detect the exact posture of the person in the image and imitate it.

Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate."

A good thing to remember when you read weak observational studies, psychology surveys and, in modern times, a shocking number of epidemiology papers.

For health, you can use a different rule of thumb: Does Joe Mercola sell it?

If he does, it is probably suspect.

Female professors are less cooperative than men, which is exactly what we would expect from watching the behavior of men and women in groups. That is the claim recently published in a letter to Current Biology.