"... one thing is growing increasingly clear to many researchers: The word "cancer" is out of date, and all too often it can be unnecessarily frightening. "Cancer" is used, these experts say, for far too many conditions that are very different in their prognoses ... It is like saying a person has "mental illness" when he or she might have schizophrenia or mild depression or an eating disorder."

"Preschool children who hear their parents describe the size and shape of objects and then use those words themselves perform on average 23 percent better on spatial skill tests later on."

"When Western products are transliterated into Chinese, the results can range from poetic to the metaphysical." Includes 12 Chinese translations of English brand names. (e.g. Nike is "Nai Ke," or "enduring and persevering.")

"More than many nations, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance. Western companies looking to bring their products to China face a problem not unlike that of Chinese parents naming a baby boy... And so the art of picking a brand name that resonates with Chinese consumers is no longer an art. It has become a sort of science, with consultants, computer programs and linguistic analyses to ensure that what tickles a Mandarin ear does not grate on a Cantonese one. ... Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone's guess. But Denise Sabet, the vice general manager at Labbrand, suggests the reasons include cultural differences and the Chinese reliance on characters for words, rather than a phonetic alphabet. "

"Our online survey asking Brits which Americanisms they use has had over 650 responses... It seems that "sidewalk" and "apartment" are the two commonest adoptions, while about half of you use "vacation" and "bug". There's a bit more resistance to "I'm good" over "I'm well", and to saying Z as "zee" instead of "zed". Around two-thirds stick with the British pronunciations of "process" and "progress", which seems to confirm my suspicion that those two are real assimilation watersheds."

A very interesting and amusing presentation. From the abstract (http://nwav40.georgetown.edu/262.docx.pdf): "I use co-occurrences of words and emoticons to (i) develop a taxonomy of the affective stances Twitter users take, and (ii) characterize the meanings and usage of their emoticons. ... It's reasonable to ask what emoticons themselves mean and reversing the direction of analysis shows how emoticons pattern across words. ... Emoticons with noses are historically older. ... this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary ... affect and word choice both create and reflect social characteristics like age and gender."

"... a group of us have been studying ways to make sense of large amounts of language data generated by people on the ground in Libya. ... You won't be surprised when I tell you what event coincides with the most obvious peak in positive emotion as well as in volume of tweet traffic: Gaddafi's death. Specifically, the vertical dashed black line marks the time when news of Gadaffi's capture and death were first made public." Their report, Evolution of Sentiment in the Libyan Revolution, is here (PDF): https://webspace.utexas.edu/dib97/libya-report-10-30-11.pdf

"Over the course of a week last year, the CMU team gathered 380,000 messages from 9,500 users, selecting messages from within the continental United States. ... Those non-standard written forms showed some interesting regional patterning. Spelling cool as coo or koo turns out to be a California thing. ... As research on Twitter dialects progresses, more research tools will likely become publicly available so that everyone can join in on the fun."

"Researchers identified subtle variations caused by differences in the shape of individual whales' heads. It's the first time that sperm whale vocalizations have been linked to specific individuals. ... While the whales tended to possess the same basic repertoire of "codas" - the technical name for each distinctive series of clicks - one female had a completely different set. ... The question of whether it's appropriate to think of sperm whales as having names is a controversial one. Some scientists think that many cetaceans should be considered persons ..." See also "Sperm Whales Really Do Learn From Each Other" (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/sperm-whales/) - "Yes, sperm whale culture really is culture."

"Researchers map thousands of letters exchanged in the 18th century's "Republic of Letters" ... According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others." ... "when you have a rich, dense and geographically expansive correspondence network," what exactly puts you at the hub? In other words, are you the leading light because you are a great thinker with provocative ideas? Or are you a good patron who can bring people together? Or is it that "you have goodies to give?""

"Two scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries say the earlier era prefigured the "information overload," with its own equivalents of Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Social networks have been key to almost all revolutions - from 1789 to the Arab Spring." Also includes an short, interesting video interview with the researchers.

"Individuals perform better and are more confident when they practice motivational tactics focused not on them but on the team they belong to... 80 subjects were randomly assigned to three different groups before completing a team-based dart-throwing activity... performance indicators and confidence in the team were all greatest for individuals who practiced self-talk focusing on the group's capabilities"

"as the number of second- and third-generation Hispanic-Americans skyrockets, the perennial runner-up is embracing a new strategy - English-language subtitles and Spanglish - to attract deep-pocketed viewers and the advertisers who covet them.... Bilingual Hispanics, defined as speaking English more than Spanish or Spanish and English equally, are 82 percent of the United States Hispanic population... Shows that incorporate both languages and cultures can hook multiple generations."

"Pronunciation Book shows you how to say various words [454, to be precise] in American English."

"Even when daydreaming, there is a tremendous amount of communication happening between different areas in the brain... The fact that these areas are synchronized has led many scientists to presume that they are all part of an interconnected network called a resting-state network. ... that these resting-state networks look essentially normal in people missing the corpus callosum link... [it] highlights the brain's remarkable plasticity... the findings are significant when considering the link between brain connections and autism or schizophrenia."

"the emoticon has rather suddenly migrated from the e-mails and texts of teenagers (and perhaps the more frothy adults) to the correspondence of business people who pride themselves on their gravitas. ... recent adoptees like Dr. Bates and Ms. Heller said that emoticons not only signal intention in a medium where it's notoriously hard to read tone, they also denote a special congenial relationship between sender and recipient. ... Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that writers and teachers of writing are among the last emoticon holdouts."

Lists and maps of different English dialects, including pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary differences.

"...people who speak more than one language don't exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer's disease until they have twice as much brain damage as unilingual people. It's the first physical evidence that bilingualism delays the onset of the disease. ... Despite the fact that both groups performed equivalently on all measures of cognitive performance, the scans of the bilingual patients showed twice as much atrophy in areas of the brain known to be affected by Alzheimer's."

"Psychopathic murderers use words that reveal selfishness, detachment, and emotional flatness, according to a new study that used computer analysis to identify speech patterns."

Fun video. "Finding your name in the dictionary as a noun is a sure-fire litmus test for having made a impact on culture and history. Just look at OED-approved fine folks like Charles Boycott, Samuel Maverick, Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, Henry Shrapnel, and Lord Cardigan. But there are unsuspected downsides to being reduced to a noun - just ask suffragette and women's rights pioneer Amelia Bloomer, now equated with a baggy pair of women's underpants."