A student has created a smart glove that can translate gestures made in sign language into speech or text. Hadeel Ayoub, a recent graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, created the glove as part of her final project to receive her Masters in Computational Arts.

The text exchange was unspectacular: a friend explaining a video that had been posted by a classmate to his Snapchat feed. Jordana Narin, my 20-year-old research assistant, was half paying attention, sitting in my living room working on a project, texting between breaks. "Omg literally dying," she typed back, not missing a beat.

A researcher has found what is believed to be the earliest written example of the f-word. (Caution: a certain four-letter word is used ahead, and used repeatedly.) Paul Booth, a historian at Keele University in England, found three examples dating from 1310 and 1311 of a man known in legal documents as...

Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world-to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there's a new candidate for the elusive title of "language universal" according to a paper in this week's issue of PNAS.