Reading this article while someone else read a piece in People means your brain has already been shaped differently than that of the other person. Each experience sends us off on divergent branches, so imaging of brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers won't reshape how we learn. but it show find that pitch-accent in words pronounced in standard Japanese activates different brain hemispheres depending on whether the listener speaks standard Japanese or one of the regional dialects.

The paper in Brain and Language examined if speakers of a non-standard dialect used the same brain areas while listening to spoken words as native speakers of the standard dialect or as someone who acquired a second language later in life.

Some of the more recent dramatic disasters in world-wide markets have occurred, not because people panicked or an election did not go someone's way, but because financial institutions have taken to hiring physicists who wrote papers on predicting chaos.

If non-linear is just linear in really small steps, then predicting and controlling nonlinearity is manageable. But those extreme chaotic events, the "dragon kings", have not obeyed numerical models yet.

An upcoming paper in Physical Review Letters seeks to tame that savage chaotic breast again, with a simple model of chaos predicting that it is possible not only to predict an extreme event, like a stock market collapse, but to intervene and prevent it from happening.

An important goal in spoken-language-systems research is speaker diarization - computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when.

To date, the best diarization systems have used supervised machine learning; they're trained on sample recordings that a human has indexed, indicating which speaker enters when. In a new paper, MIT researchers show how they can improve speaker diarization so that it can automatically annotate audio or video recordings without supervision: No prior indexing is necessary. 

They also discuss, compact way to represent the differences between individual speakers' voices, which could be of use in other spoken-language computational tasks.

A new paper has found a significant association between low dietary fiber intake and cardiometabolic risks including metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular inflammation, and obesity.

 In the study, investigators used surveillance data from 23,168 subjects in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999-2010  to examine the role dietary fiber plays in heart health, coupled with possible sex, age, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in dietary fiber consumption. They also examined the association between dietary fiber intake and various cardiometabolic risk factors.

A dry spring has meant a rampant wildfire season already for Australia.

Hold those fires back? Arguably the largest volunteer fire department in the world.  New South Wales uses volunteer fire services, even newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a member. 

"The tragedy is that many of them have lost their own homes while they've been out saving those of others," says Kingston University academic Dr. Neil Thomas, an expert in environmental hazards.

Typhoon Francisco passed by Guam today - on its way to becoming a super typhoon.

Francisco developed in the Western Pacific Ocean on October 16th, 2013 and NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite passed over on October 18th, 2013 at 1002 UTC/6:02 a.m. EDT when Typhoon Francisco was located west-northwest of Guam.

Plasmas are a soup of charged particles in an electric field.

While most commonly a part of lightning bolts and stars, the use of high voltage equipment has more practically meant very small plasmas can be used to manipulate fluid flows. Plasma actuators have advanced the promise of controlling flows in new ways that increase lift, reduce drag and improve aerodynamic efficiencies, which may lead to safer, more efficient and more quiet land and air vehicles in the near future.

The fifth skull to be discovered in Dmanisi displays a combination of features unknown to researchers before the find - the largest face, the most massively built jaw and teeth and the smallest brain within the Dmanisi group.

Previously, four equally well-preserved hominid skulls as well as some skeletal parts had been found there. Taken as a whole, the finds show that the first representatives of the genus Homo began to expand from Africa through Eurasia as far back as 1,850,000 years ago.

The 'education is terrible' trope made the rounds again last week, along with the predictable 'abysmal' charge leveled at teachers and students and attempts to keep America ahead in a globalized competitive landscape.

A study in mice has found that the space between brain cells may increase during sleep, allowing the brain to flush out toxins that build up during waking hours. 

Get a good night's sleep - it may literally clear your mind.

For centuries, scientists and philosophers alike have wondered why people sleep and how it affects the brain. It has been determined that sleep is important for storing memories and the researchers in the new paper found that sleep may be also be the period when the brain cleanses itself of toxic molecules.