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Douglas Quenqua reports on crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, and how those projects standardize signs for commonly used science terms.

An in-depth look into the science of MultiTasking, along with the real-world consequences it can have in business, school, and our daily lives.

Science Daily is one of my favorite resources for finding current news, videos, scholarly articles, images, and books about language and its intersections with the sciences: neurology, psychology, anthropology. Try typing in keywords for your desired topic.

English is now the language we all use to communicate science. But while it may feel inevitable, the domination of English is very recent and may be down to geopolitics and other accidents, argues Michael Gordin's book, _Scientific Babel_.

Swearing has been around for a long time and remains an important part of language. Swearing proves to actually to be cathartic and helps us emphasize our emotions.

The chair squeaked quietly as I fidgeted, swiveling left, right, left. I sat toward the back of a long wooden table flanked by my fellow graduate students, while a pair of eminent biologists led a discussion on how to talk to skeptical non-scientists about evolution.

This article discusses the use of scientific jargon in scientific research, and specifically how it can be a detriment to the effectiveness of a paper. The article argues that although jargon serves the purpose of conveying meaning with precision, for most people, other scientists included, the use of excessive jargon an be an obstacle to communication. In a study focused on the jargon-heavy field of cave science, two researchers found that highly-cited papers did not have jargon in their titles, and used less than 1% jargon in their abstract. This was used as evidence that using less jargon indicates that your paper is likely clearer, meaning more people will understand the information, and ultimately, the paper is more effective.

This editorial explores and details the positives and subsequent draw backs of English being used nearly exclusively as the language of science. Discusses the present prejudices implicated against non native speakers of english, and how those within the science community can minimize these challenges.

Not really linguistics-related, but so interesting that I thought we should share (Mr. Maretzki shared with me).

An article on how many endangered languages are dying out

This MIT Technology Review article notes that while Artificial Intelligence has experienced many sophisticated advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. In addition, humans, unlike machines, have the ability to learn very quickly from a relatively small amount of data and have a built-in ability to model the world in 3-D very efficiently. Programming machines to comprehend and generate language is a complex task, because the machines would need to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology. As MIT cognitive scientist Josh Tenenbaum states, "Language builds on other abilities that are probably more basic, that are present in young infants before they have language: perceiving the world visually, acting on our motor systems, understanding the physics of the world or other agents' goals." ­ If he is right, then it will be difficult to re-create language understanding in machines and AI systems without trying to mimic human learning, mental model building, and psychology.

The article explores how abbreviations, particularly in scientific communication, can be alienating to unfamiliar audiences and are often unnecessary. It argues that many scientific abbreviations are mentally taxing.