Given that China condemned He's research almost immediately after he announced the births of the twin babies, it's not particularly surprising to hear that the researcher is being punished for his controversial experiment.But included in Xinhua's latest report was a bit of news we thought we might never hear: a third gene-edited baby has officially been born.

The report doesn't include any additional information on the baby. We don't know its sex, its health status, whether the birth involved any complications - or if the baby is even still alive.But we do know this baby was born, meaning that at some point last year, there were not two, but three genetically engineered humans walking - or, more likely, crawling - the Earth

The cultural practices and locales that define the hundreds of Native communities dotting the North American landscape are grounded in languages. Each is unique, with distinct dialects, accents, and slang. There are words, phrases, and concepts that do not exist in the American English lexicon, that confounding colonizer speech that Native Americans were forced to adopt and master. And nearly all of them are in danger of going extinct. In 1998, there were 175 Indigenous languages still in use within the United States. Today, there are 115. With each passing year, as elders are laid to rest and new babies are born, Native people lose their tongue.

Learning a Native language is not only about knowledge or authenticity; it extends a symbol of a thriving and unique culture to the rising generation. It’s the cadence of survival. And if it goes silent, a great tradition is broken.

The latest version of the bill, coming at the tail end of what the United Nations has dubbed the Year of Indigenous Language, will seek to lower the bill’s previous class-size restrictions, which were preventing tribes from obtaining federal grants to establish their own language programs because many smaller tribes had lower enrollment numbers than what the grant applications required.

Earlier this month, a Chinese tech giant quietly dethroned Microsoft and Google in an ongoing competition in AI. The company was Baidu, China’s closest equivalent to Google, and the competition was the General Language Understanding Evaluation, otherwise known as GLUE.

GLUE is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. It consists of nine different tests for things like picking out the names of people and organizations in a sentence and figuring out what a pronoun like “it” refers to when there are multiple potential antecedents. A language model that scores highly on GLUE, therefore, can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of a full score of 100, the average person scores around 87 points. Baidu is now the first team to surpass 90 with its model, ERNIE.

BERT, by contrast, considers the context before and after a word all at once, making it bidirectional. It does this using a technique known as “masking.” In a given passage of text, BERT randomly hides 15% of the words and then tries to predict them from the remaining ones. This allows it to make more accurate predictions because it has twice as many cues to work from.

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster made news by designating “they” as its “Word of the Year.” It seemed a fitting cap to a year in which the very structures of language itself were the subject of debate and scrutiny over its real effects on how we live, especially where it concerns the advancement of human rights. Across the globe, people are posing questions about how we use language to describe people and situations, and whether the words we use are inclusive enough of all genders and orientations.

This intense debate is epitomized in the Spanish-speaking world, where a teenage-led movement to eliminate gender from the language has made strides this past year, forcing different generations to have a conversation about what is acceptable in 2019.

“the language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words.”

Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers not only look at words that share sounds in one language but also at words that share sounds across their two languages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word marker, they also look at a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp is marka.

Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movements when no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find a previously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on what languages they knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because the Spanish names for clock and present—reloj and regalo—overlap at their onset.

Because of the way our brain organizes and processess linguistic and nonlinguistic information, a single word can set off a domino effect that cascades throughout the cognitive system.

Psychological research comparing women and men on measures of anger find that they are more alike than different. Men and women are equally likely to experience anger and the intensity of their anger is remarkably similar. Regardless of gender, we get angry when frustrated, criticized, betrayed, rejected, or disrespected. When someone behaves immorally or unethically it can also lead to our anger and outrage.

But anger is “gendered.” It’s perceived through gendered (and racial) lenses. While most emotion is identified as feminine, anger is considered more of a masculine emotion. Anger and its expression are contrary to traditional beliefs about women’s essential “nature” as compassionate, passive, and other-centered. Meanwhile, anger and its expression as aggression and violence, is viewed as naturally male, and masculine. “Boys will be boys,” so many people say.

Their apologies likely reflect an awareness that anger and assertiveness are generally more acceptable for men than they are for women, and that they must be careful not to appear “too emotional” as this is sometimes used to justify the exclusion of women from political leadership roles.

In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it. If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she’ll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this “marshmallow test,” the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel demonstrated that children who could resist immediate gratification and wait for a second marshmallow went on to greater achievements in life. They did better in school, had better SAT scores, and even managed their stress more skillfully.

The other challenge concerns whom psychologists have been studying for the past century. While scholars know a fair amount about how traits develop, that knowledge derives from research on a very specific and peculiar subset of humans: those living in industrialized societies.

People reasoned from these studies of the 1970s and ’80s that there must be some deep individual characteristic, some personality feature, that set kids up for higher achievements throughout life. But what if that wasn’t the right conclusion to draw from these studies? What if patience, and maybe other personality features too, are more a product of where we are than who we are?

This time of year, we always hear people say “New year, new me.”We create new resolutions to eat healthier, work out or break other bad habits. Psychologically, we need time to step back and reflect.

“I believe everybody takes this week to reflect on their lives and the years past, where they would like to be in the next year or 5-10 years down the road,” said Robby Dennis.

The deeper, more internal problems like how you treat others or react to things will take a LOT more work than just saying you can do it.“Making sure you understand why that’s a vulnerability to you and why your feelings sort of got hurt and you got defensive,” said Leonard. “That’s important in terms of personal growth and evolution

Dymond began by assessing empathy with the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)—a set of cards depicting images of archetypal personalities and dramatic scenes created by psychologist Henry Murray and artist Christiana Morgan. Subjects scrutinized the images and told stories about the figures in the pictures. These stories were frequently drawn from the subject’s own experiences.

Empathy was no longer a matter of making up intricate stories but of correctly predicting another’s response. Dymond's revised definition of empathy appeared in her 1952 paper as: “the imaginative and accurate transposing of oneself into the thinking, feeling and acting of another”

The finding that many undergraduates had little empathic accuracy prompted psychologists to propose that empathy should be trained. In 1952, Dartmouth offered a new course, “Introduction in Human Relations,” aimed at increasing students’ sensitivity to the attitudes and feelings of others. The Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport expressed concern that the social sciences had fallen far behind the rapid developments made in the natural sciences. He viewed the failure to understand social relationships as an existential threat: the chances for the survival of humanity were poor, he mused, “unless we can improve mankind’s understanding and control of social and personal factors” [6].

Chief Justice John Roberts — who’s on the verge of an extraordinarily high-profile balancing act presiding over the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump — issued a warning on Tuesday about the dangers of misinformation in the internet era.

“In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital,” Roberts declared

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

The number of teenagers setting up businesses has increased eightfold in the past decade, a study has found. The rise from 500 in 2009 to more than 4,000 has been driven by technology startups, according to the Brighton-based financial services provider OneFamily, which commissioned the research.

“Generation Z were born after Google and have grown up with social media, so it’s no surprise that these teens are already using their networks to help build their career. We also know that many are already making money from it.

At FPDN we say we are the thought leaders on inclusion. We know this because in traditional language there was and is no word for disability. This is a wonderful thing in our communities – we have always been “come as you are”

This is compelling evidence that shows we have always known that disability is part of the human experience. However, we are continuing to butt up against a system that requires people with disability to accept labels that we say are fundamentally about deficit.

Now financially secure, he decided to retire, escape the rat race, manage his own capital, and enjoy life. Within months, however, he reached out to me for psychological guidance. His new life was anything but bliss. No longer “in the game”, he felt rudderless. Free time became a source of boredom. To his dismay, he was feeling less physically healthy than when he was working crazy hour

We are wired as meaning-makers. If we cannot find positive sources of meaning, we often gravitate to negative ones, amplifying our social, emotional, and physical concerns. When Terence retired, he left the arena that sometimes pushed him to exhaustion, but that also provided his success and challenge.

Perhaps it is this overarching sense of purpose that enables money managers to weather the ups and downs of markets and invest renewed energy in their craft. Like any entrepreneur, these managers are driven, not just by sound business plans, but by a meaningful vision that allows them to pursue their plans with uncommon zeal.

Unlike previous editions of intergenerational conflict, the phrase isn’t about older generations not being “cool” or appreciating a counter-culture aesthetic. It refers instead to a perception that the older generation is unrealistic about the way the world works now, out of touch with the kitchen table issues of climate change, shrinking opportunities for economic advancement, and the suffering caused by wars that never should have been started.

Imagine that instead of members of a couple, we have two generations talking to each other. Each has its own distinct interests and style, but ultimately they are tied together in a relationship. What would it mean if one member of the couple was willing to just off-handedly dismiss the entire worldview of another?

Being dismissive of someone’s entire world view is rude behavior, and so the phrase “OK, Boomer” is just an instance of bad behavior by people in one generation. The problem would appear to be that Generation Z and Millenials are rude and behaving badly. But when you listen to why people use the phrase, it’s pretty clear it’s because they are frustrated, fed up. Just telling people who are fed up “don’t be rude to people” without also trying to address why they are fed up also feels dismissive.

This was the moment Dr. Wermke, a biologist and medical anthropologist who studies babies’ first sounds, had been waiting for. She made a recording for later analysis in her lab, Würzburg University Clinic’s Center for Pre-Speech Development and Developmental Disorders. But even without the aid of computerized tools, Dr. Wermke could make out a distinctive pattern in Joris’s wail.“He really cried in German just now, right?” she said, smiling as she packed up her equipment.

In 2009, Dr. Wermke’s and her colleagues made headlines with a study showing that French and German newborns produce distinctly different “cry melodies,” reflecting the languages they heard in utero: German newborns produce more cries that fall from a higher to a lower pitch, mimicking the falling intonation of the German language, while French infants tend to cry with the rising intonation of French. At this age, babies experiment with a wide variety of sounds, and can learn any language. But they are already influenced by their mother tongue.

After they are born, young babies mimic many different sounds. But they are especially shaped by the prosody they heard in the womb, which becomes a handy guide to the strange sounds coming from the people around them. Through stress, pauses and other cues, prosody cuts up the stream of sound into words and phrases – that is, into speech.

Deciphering how the brain processes sight and hearing could have implications for how we understand and treat conditions such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia.

schizophrenia

Through a project called SENSOCOM, she is exploring how sensory perception affects communication, focusing on the brain’s deep subcortical structures.By doing this, she and her team are exploring a part of the brain traditionally excluded by research trying to understand communication impairments found in autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia, conditions which affect around 53 million people in Europe.

Based on analysis of newly released Census Bureau data for 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies finds that 67.3 million residents in the United States now speak a language other than English at home, a number equal to the entire population of France

As a share of the population, 21.9 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home — more than double the 11 percent in 1980.

In America's five largest cities, just under half (48 percent) of residents now speak a language other than English at home.

It makes sense; we all have a natural tendency to grow, transform, and live life as fully as we can. It is an internal drive to experience deeper fulfillment.

This “lack of self-worth” deeply buried idea about myself is just an example, there are numerous potential judgments, ideas, perceptions, assumptions, and feelings that I could be carrying in my own personal shadow.

The pain is due to the fact that there might be a reason behind the piece’s location in shadow of your psyche—it might be a threatening dimension of yourself, or a scary one, or one that is linked with some trauma or difficult past events—and you have pushed it into the unconscious so that you won't have to “meet” it as part of conscious awareness of yourself.

“Race as we thought of it in the 17th and 18th centuries is wrong,” he said. “Yet in high school and college texts, race is still taught as if it were real.” -- Joseph Graves

“That message has never gotten to the American public,” said Graves, who noted he is the first African-American to hold a tenured position in the field of evolutionary biology.

“People are conflating ancestry with race, and they’re not equivalent,” said Duke geneticist and bioethicist Charmaine Royal.

Texts arrived with the tones of a French horn and were similarly dispatched. Soon, I was reaching for the device every time it made a sound, like Pavlov’s dog salivating when it heard a bell. This started to interfere with work and conversations. The machine had seemed like a miraculous servant, but gradually I became its slave.

Habits, good and bad, have long fascinated philosophers and policymakers. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, surveyed existing notions of virtue and offered this summary: “Some thinkers hold that it is by nature that people become good, others that it is by habit, and others that it is by instruction.” He concluded that habits were responsible. Cicero called habit “second nature,” a phrase that we still use.

Our minds, Wood explains, have “multiple separate but interconnected mechanisms that guide behavior.” But we are aware only of our decision-making ability—a phenomenon known as the “introspection illusion”—and that may be why we overestimate its power.