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Just in time to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, a comprehensive listing of lucky foods to eat for Chinese New Year. Generally, these foods fall into two categories: they either physically resemble lucky objects (e.g. dumplings look like gold ingots, carrot rounds look like coins) or are homophonic with auspicious phrases (e.g. "ye zi"= coconut, sounds like the words for "father/son", conveying the idea of harmonious parent-child relations). Food for thought.

"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

"[In] A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley ... Brain scans revealed that people with no symptoms of Alzheimer's who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease. ... While previous research has suggested that engaging in mentally stimulating activities - such as reading, writing and playing games - may help stave off Alzheimer's later in life, this new study identifies the biological target at play. ... Notably, the researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposition and levels of current cognitive activity alone. "What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said Landau. The researchers are careful to point out that the study does not negate the benefits of kicking up brain activity in later years."

"...a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests rumor-mongering can have positive outcomes such as helping us police bad behavior, prevent exploitation and lower stress. ... Overall, the findings indicate that people need not feel bad about revealing the vices of others, especially if it helps save someone from exploitation, the researchers said. ... The study focused on "prosocial" gossip that "has the function of warning others about untrustworthy or dishonest people," said Willer, as opposed to the voyeuristic rumor-mongering about the ups and downs of such tabloid celebrities as Kim Kardashian and Charlie Sheen."

"School-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus ... For the current study, the researchers conducted brain scans on 92 of the children who had had symptoms of depression or were mentally healthy when they were studied as preschoolers. The imaging revealed that children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10 percent larger than children whose mothers were not as nurturing. ... Although 95 percent of the parents whose nurturing skills were evaluated during the earlier study were biological mothers, the researchers say that the effects of nurturing on the brain are likely to be the same for any primary caregiver - whether they are fathers, grandparents or adoptive parents."

"Of the Dickens citations in the OED, 258 citations are the earliest recorded by the dictionary for a particular word, and 1,586 are the earliest for a particular sense of a word. Dickens was certainly an innovative writer, but these examples are not necessarily his own coinages. ... Very often the words that Dickens ushered in were from the earthy slang associated with the working class, the theatre, or the criminal underworld, and Dickens did much to make these once "vulgar" words mainstream. Dickens's very first novel, The Pickwick Papers from 1837, introduced such slang terms as butter-fingers ("a clumsy person"), flummox ("bewilder"), sawbones ("surgeon"), and whizz-bang ("sound of a gunshot"). ... One way that Dickens devised new words was by adding suffixes to old ones. He made good use of the -y suffix to make adjectives (mildewy, bulgy, swishy, soupy, waxy, trembly) and -iness to make nouns (messiness, cheesiness, fluffiness, seediness). ... Finally, no discussion of Dickensian language would be complete without mentioning the richly evocative names of his characters."

According to researchers in New Zealand, robot language may be imminent in the near future.

Linguist Lounge: what we do

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.

"Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. ... people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs. ... Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words."

New research suggests that 3-month-old human babies can use lemur calls as teaching aids. The findings hint at a deep biological connection between language and learning. But not everyone agrees that the new work shows that primate sounds can stimulate a child's linguistic instinct. "This work tells us that sounds that are more like human language are more effective," says , a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. "What is more controversial is why they are effective." She says it's still unclear whether the primate sounds are stimulating some deep linguistic circuit in the brain or just getting the babies to look.

University of Michigan professor Carmel O'Shannessy has discovered a language born just a few decades ago. "Light Warlpiri" is spoken in the aboriginal community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Research by professor Ilija Casule of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia shows that Burushaski, a language spoken by about 90,000 people in a remote area of Pakistan is Indo-European in origin, and not a linguistic isolate, as previously thought. He explains how 20 years of research has tied this isolated group of people to a migration that started in the Balkans and moved East 3,000 years ago.

2006 NPR interactive news special on the social underpinnings of language, containing short sound bites with various language researchers. 5 topics are covered: the importance of context in helping deduce meaning, social connections and language, Theory of Mind (how humans observe each other, gauging the effect that words are having on listeners, in order to assess others' beliefs, intentions and desires), and empathy. The video clip of Kanzi, the bonobo ape, cooking hamburgers with his human friends is a classic!