A team of psychologists say MIT linguist Noam Chomsky's discredited belief that we possess an "internal grammar" that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases holds up.

Tom Hanks has appeared in many acting roles over the years, playing young and old, smart and simple. Yet we always recognize him as Tom Hanks.

Why? Is it his appearance? His mannerisms? The way he moves?

University of Washington researchers have demonstrated that it's possible for machine learning algorithms to capture the 'persona' and create a digital model of a well-photographed person like Tom Hanks from the vast number of images of them available on the Internet.

With enough visual data to mine, the algorithms can also animate the digital model of Tom Hanks to deliver speeches that the real actor never performed.

Greenland's glaciers are retreating quickly, and a new study shows in historical terms just how quickly: over the past century, at least twice as fast as any other time in the past 9,500 years. The study also provides new evidence for just how sensitive glaciers are to temperature, showing that they responded to past abrupt cooling and warming periods, some of which might have lasted only decades.

To track how glaciers grew and shrank over time, the scientists extracted sediment cores from a glacier-fed lake that provided the first continuous observation of glacier change in southeastern Greenland. They then compared the results to similar rare cores from Iceland and Canada's Baffin Island for a regional view.

Most men who receive penile prostheses are very satisfied with the implants, indicating that the intervention is a valid treatment for erectile dysfunction.

My new book came out on Amazon yesterday, and as I breath a long sigh of relief, I'm reflecting on how I reached that milestone and how technology made it both easier and more difficult to achieve. If you are a writer looking to self-publish an eBook on science or any other complex subject, you might want to consider what I've learned over the last few months.

Some doctors may recommend that patients with the flu take acetaminophen, or paracetemol, to relieve their symptoms; however, a new randomized clinical trial found no benefits to the over-the-counter medication in terms of fighting the influenza virus or reducing patients' temperature or other symptoms.

The trial included adults between 18 and 65 years of age with confirmed influenza infections who were treated with the maximum recommended dose of paracetamol or placebo for five days. Participants were monitored for up to 14 days.

LAWRENCE -- As delegates from 195 nations meet in Paris to debate mankind's response to global climate change, scientists from the University of Kansas and Rothamsted Research in England today issue a study of a major crop pest that underlines how "climate is changing in more ways than just warming."

Their paper, appearing in Nature Climate Change, shows how large-scale climatic changes drive a coordinated rise and fall of numbers of aphids across Great Britain, even when individual aphid populations in that nation are separated by great distance.

Designers of Christmas cards used fine art on their products to divert attention away from concerns that that the festival was becoming too commercialised, a University of Exeter academic has found.

While heart-warming pictures of animals or festive decorations on Christmas cards may bring joy throughout December, few would consider these greetings to have great aesthetic merit. But Victorians were able to send each other Christmas cards created by respected artists, made to counter anxiety that growing consumerism was destroying sentiment.

Young men's interest in babies is associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study showed that young men who reported more interest in babies showed a lower increase in testosterone in response to sexually explicit material than men who weren't as interested in babies.