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13 year old Trisha Prabhu of Naperville, IL, is a finalist in Google Science Fair 2014. Prabhu's project focuses on preventing cyber-bullying. Excerpted from her project summary statement: "Cyberbullying may result in depression, low self-esteem and in rare cases suicides in adolescent victims(12-18). Research shows that, over 50% of adolescents and teens have been bullied online and 10 to 20% experience it regularly. Research also shows that adolescents that post mean/hurtful messages may not understand the potential consequences of their actions because the pre-frontal cortex, the area of brain that controls reasoning and decision-making isn't developed until age 25. I hypothesized that if adolescents(ages 12-18) were provided an alert mechanism that suggested them to re-think their decision if they expressed willingness to post a mean/hurtful message on social media, the number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents will be willing to post would be lesser than adolescents that are not provided with such an alert mechanism. In order to check if my hypothesis was true, I created two Software systems: 1) Baseline 2) Rethink. "Rethink" system measured number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents were willing to post after being alerted to rethink, while the "Baseline" system measured the same without the alert. Results proved that adolescents were 93.43% less willing to post mean/hurtful messages using a "Rethink" system compared with "Baseline" system without alert."

Similar to `ōlelo Hawai`i in Hawaii, the indigenous Maori language [te reo Maori] was banned in New Zealand schools for much of the 20th century. At the same time, many rural Maori were moving into the cities where they had to speak English. That meant that by the 1980s, only 20 percent of indigenous New Zealanders were fluent in the Maori language.That number was virtually unchanged by 2013. Government data that year showed that just 21.3 percent of the Maori population could have a conversation in te reo. An official government report published in 2010 warned the language was nearing extinction. Fortunately, in 2018, Maori is enjoying increased popularity among New Zealanders, Maori or otherwise, taking pride in their South Pacific nation's indigenous culture. Te reo Maori courses are booked out at community colleges, while bands, poets and rappers perform using the language. Te reo Maori words have entered people's everyday language. Examples include "kai" meaning food, "ka pai" meaning congratulations, and "whanau" meaning family. Even the way New Zealanders define themselves has taken on a te reo tone. An increasing number prefer to call their country "Aotearoa" rather than New Zealand.

Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance. Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much. Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks." The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages. "Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.

The Yaaku tribe, of Kenya's Rift Valley, number only around 4,000 people. And only seven people, all over the age of 70, can speak the tribe's native language, Yakunte, fluently. As the number of Yakunte speakers has dwindled, various efforts have been made to save the language.

Like the title, this article talks about the future of language, but more specifically it focuses on the future of language through economics. It shares statistics showing each language and the number of native speakers. To know surprise, Chinese leads with 1.39 billion speakers. Yet, the most vastly spoken language is English. English is abundant in 101 countries around the world, almost double of the next leading language Hindu, which is spoken in a respectable 60 countries. English is the most universal language, but researchers have noticed that Hindu and Chinese are two rapidly emerging economies. So, it wouldn't be unwise to learn either of these languages to give yourself a helpful advantage in your career. For example, if you have a business meeting with foreigners who speak Chinese and know Mandarin, you are likely to be successful in your endeavors.

A Johns Hopkins study found that damage to a key structure in the brain may explain why some stroke patients can't perceive sarcasm. Researchers looked at 24 people who had experienced a stroke in the right hemispheres of their brains. Those with damage to the right sagittal stratum tended to have trouble recognizing sarcasm, the researchers found. This bundle of neural fibers connects a number of brain regions, including those that process auditory and visual information. Sarcasm can be hard to interpret; it's a complex way to communicate. First, the person has to 1. understand the literal meaning of what someone says 2. detect the components of sarcasm: a wider range of pitch, greater emphatic stress, briefer pauses, lengthened syllables and intensified loudness relative to sincere speech "There're a number of cues people use, and it's both facial cues and tone of voice," noted Dr. Argye Hillis, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. Prof Ilija Casule's discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world's top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world.

This article talks about a study of the effect of language used during debates and its effect on the polls. It was written right before the last of the 2016 presidential debates. "Linguist style matching" is a trick that linguists have studied, and it focuses on how candidates state their points, not what their points are.

What can you recite by heart? Your times tables? German verb formations? The Lord's Prayer? Novelist Salman Rushdie thinks it should be poetry. Speaking at the Hay Festival, the writer described memorising poems as a "lost art" that "enriches your relationship with language". David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University, Whitely, whose Poetry and Memory project surveyed almost 500 people, says: "Those who memorised poems had a more personal relationship [with the poem] - they loved it for the sound and meaning, but it also connected with their life currents - people they loved, or a time that was important to them. "For people who memorise a poem, it becomes a living thing that they connect with - more so than when it is on a page. Learning by heart is often positioned as the opposite of analysis. But for many people who know a number of poems, their understanding grows over time and changes." Psychotherapist Philippa Perry agrees. She points out that memorising anything, from poems to music, means you always have it with you. She thinks that memorising poems can also be good for the health of our brains. "The way we 'grow' our brains is that we make connections between our brain cells - neural pathways. The more you exercise that network, the more you strengthen it. If you learn things by heart, you get better at it."

With texting, we tend to play this ridiculous game that revolves around who has the power in the conversation. The person who has yet to respond leaves the other person on tenterhooks, wondering if that was a dumb thing to say, if they were just scared off, if they're really on a date with someone much more interesting right now - any number of possibilities, really.

A recent study suggests that our use of positive language has been on the decline for the past 200 years. The study measured the language positivity bias by analyzing the ratio of positive words to negative words. Language mirrors our psychological state, so this finding may suggest that happiness is also declining among the population.

Although recent election coverage may suggest otherwise, research shows that people are more likely to use positive words than negative words on the whole in their communications. Behavioral scientists have extensively documented this phenomenon, known as language positivity bias, in a number of different languages.

An anonymous self-styled 'grammar vigilante' has revealed that he has spent years changing offending shop signs in the dead of night. Wielding an 'apostrophiser' - a broom handle laden with two sponges and a number of stickers - the man has corrected tens of missing and misplaced apostrophes on shop banners across Bristol, England over the past 13 years.

Our brains are set up to do two things at once, but not three, a French team reports in the journal Science. Their experiment examined an area of the brain involved in goals and rewards and tested people's abilities to accomplish up to three mental tasks at the same time. When volunteers were doing just one task, there was activity in goal-oriented areas of both frontal lobes, suggesting that the two sides of the brain were working together to get the job done. But when people took on a second task, the lobes divided their responsibilities. Since the brain has only two frontal lobes, researchers surmised there might be a limit to the number of goals and rewards it can handle. Indeed, when people started a third task, one of the original goals disappeared from their brains. Also people slowed down and made many more mistakes.

I found this really interesting while researching for my field research project. It talks about how humans have the ability to read words that are spelled incorrectly.

"But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. ... Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you're adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you're likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery. ... Although people with dyslexia are found in every profession, including law, medicine and science, observers have long noted that they populate fields like art and design in unusually high numbers. ... in some situations, it turns out, those with dyslexia are actually the superior learners."

This article focuses on "tricolon", or list of threes. It's a powerful tool to use in papers and speeches because it's catchy and rhythmic. Resource for my research paper.

"The researchers first looked at hot spots-locations with an exceptionally high number of unique species that also has a loss of habitat of 70 percent or more. ... In these 35 hotspots-spread throughout the world's continents with the exception of Antarctica-the researchers found 3,202 languages-nearly half of all languages spoken on Earth. ... It's unclear why areas of endangered species concentration and endangered languages coexist. ... The study is a starting point to explore the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity."

A brief history of puns and reasons why they shouldn't be seen as the lowest form of humor. Puns are actually very complex and allow people to convey messages with fewer words. There are so many ideas to convey, but a limited number of sounds to describe them. Punning is inevitable.

I was surprised by this article and by the fact that sometimes, our seemingly boring moments in life has the potential to transform into a great college essay. This article made me change my views of college essays and reexamine what topics I want to write about.

I liked the ideas this essay shared because I realized that if I were to have written my college essay prior to reading this article, my essay would've been similar to the majority of students who submit college essays. This site stresses the importance of being different and that having humility, humor, and personal stories in college essays are attractive. But the article did imply that there are limits and that some things such as torturing animals and showing inconsideration to other people, are inappropriate.

It seems more common now for counselors and advisors to recommend writing about everyday things, but with our own personal "flair." So it was helpful to read in this article about how there are some negative everyday experiences that are important to leave out.