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Although an opinion piece, this New York Times article, written by Arthur C. Brooks, cites several studies talking about how actively practicing gratitude can positively bolster our mood and outlook.

This article highlights the different sounds animals make in different languages. Why can't animal sounds be something that is universal? As of right now there is no formal research done on this topic, but one possibility could be cultural influences on animal sounds, or that people interpret a sound based on their country's phonetic alphabet.

The hallmark of President Trump's Twitter feed is that it sounds like him - grammatical miscues and all. But it's not always Trump tapping out a Tweet, even when it sounds like his voice. West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president's style, according to two people familiar with the process. They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. Trump's staff has become so adept at replicating the President's tone that people who follow his feed closely say it is getting harder to discern which tweets were actually crafted by Trump sitting in his bathrobe and watching "Fox & Friends" and which were concocted by his communications team. Staff-written tweets do go through a West Wing process of sorts. When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process. Those familiar with the process wouldn't fess up to which tweets were staff-written. But an algorithm crafted by a writer at The Atlantic to determine real versus staff-written tweets suggested several were not written by the president, despite the unusual use of the language.

In the age of founding fathers and type writers, typists used to place two spaces after each full stop in a sentence, because letters of uniform width looked cramped without that extra space. However, with modern word processors and computers, which were designed to have the perfect/variable amount of spacing, the majority of people now only place one space after full stops. This article explains a scientific study run by three psychology researchers from Skidmore college, which shows that placing two spaces after a full stop is better. They found out that the extra space does not necessarily allow people to read faster, but spend fewer milliseconds staring at the full stop and making the reading process smoother.

This article observes the affects of trilingualism vs bilingualism. The main idea was that trilingual people experience similar benefits to bilingual people, but it is harder to balance the three languages compared to the two.

This article is about a chinese man who started learning english at the age of 93 despite his age. He says that its never too late and currently he can semi speak the language. I think this article was unique because we have been talking about how one needs to learn a language when they are young but this man is showing that it is never too late to do it!

In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn't sit still. It can't. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber. You may have heard that Icelanders can still read the ancient sagas written almost a thousand years ago in Old Norse.

This article examines the evolution of the work like, and how new usages of the word are still arising.

The article examines some commonly-used colloquial terms that could be construed as racist, and the reasons behind why those terms are not innocent. Author Michael Coard asserts, "Racism is not just lynching, cross-burning, redlining, employment discrimination, educational barriers, or even malicious slurs, and those who manifest the unconscious and passive form of racism are not so easily identifiable."

A new study shows how certain ideas are still deeply ingrained the public's minds as masculine. For example, most of the public associates the president with a man. In fact, the study showed that when articles or people used "her" or feminine pronouns people's reading times increased because of the confusion caused in their brain. Many people don't use "she" when referring to a hypothetical president. The way that language can sometimes gender certain occupations has some important implications. That is why many states and representatives are trying to change the language to make it more inclusive. For example, Kamala Harris, when she was California's attorney general, and changed all the wording of the statutes that referred to the attorney general as a man. This is because gendering occupations can lead to an ingrained bias. However, with more women in politics, biases could change. For example, in UK, where there have been 2 female prime ministers, the study was replicated and it was found that people were comfortable using "she" or "her" when stating the next prospective prime minister.

LONDON - Tens of thousands of London private hire drivers could lose their licenses due to new English reading and writing requirements, taxi app Uber [UBER.UL] said on Tuesday at the start of a court battle to halt the plans.

In this article, it explains how something as simple as a missing hyphen marks the potential danger of texting. It's changing our language. From our punctuation, grammar, or vocabulary, texting has changed the way we perceive language, words, and text.

This article discusses the important issue of capitalization of the I in "Internet" and how it has evolved. According to the New York Times, "In some ways, uppercase "Internet" was always a bit of an anomaly, since it is not really a proper noun comparable to a company name or an official place name."

This article talks about how music is able to affect our mood. It is said that even sad music is able to lift someone's mood. However, sometimes sad music can also make people feel negative feelings. Also people who listened to happy or upbeat music were able to lift their moods in just two weeks

New research suggests that babies perceive sound differently depending on what language they hear growing up compared to what language they hear during the third trimester of birth. Babies prefer to listen to voices that they have heard in the womb, their mothers in particular, and enjoy listening to languages that have similar rhythms. This cancels the previous thinking that babies didn't learn phonemes until the second six months of life.

There is no such thing as "just language." Anne Curzan, associate dean of humanities and Arthur F. Thurnau professor of English at the University of Michigan, uses her knowledge of linguistics to discuss the social power language holds. Curzan is the author of "Gender Shifts in the History of English" and is the subject of a 36-lecture series titled "The Secret Life of Words." In Curzan's lecture, "Politically Correct: Do Our Language Choices Matter?," she discusses everything from sexist language to preferred pronouns in order to dispel the stigma against politically correct speaking. She spoke to students in the Memorial Union Thursday evening. "It is never just language," Curzan said. "As soon as anyone says it's just language, it's because they don't want to deal with the real issue."

The brain interprets irony or sarcasm conveyed by an emoji in the same way that sarcasm is conveyed verbally, according to a new report from researchers at the linguistics department of the University of Illinois Researchers measured brain activity of native English-speaking college students reading sentences using various emoji at the end. They read sentences with positive, negative or ironic emoji at the end.

Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child." People use an array of strategies to make sense of confusing statements. This article reveals the different strategies brains use to create a correct sentence based on semantic expectations.

This guide gives a run-down of tips for greater happiness. Some Words R Us related items: 1. Conquer negative thinking by acknowledging and challenging your thoughts. 2. Rewrite your story: we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world, but sometimes our inner voice doesn't get it right. By (literally) writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of our personal well-being. 3. Practice optimism: thinking positive thoughts and surrounding yourself with positive people really does help. 4. Kindness and compassion towards others and yourself

Here are the research take-aways: 1. Repetition of tasks - reading, or saying words over and over - continues to be the best method for transforming short-term memories into long-term ones. To do that, we have to retrain our minds to focus on one task at a time. 2. Don't cram. When you rehearse knowledge and practice it often, it sticks, research has shown. So if you can incorporate what you're trying to remember into daily life, ideally over time, your chances of retaining it drastically improve. Space out repetition over the course of days. 3. Sit down and stay put. Memory and focus go hand-in-hand. Dr. Cowan suggests rearranging our office setup to minimize distractions. Stop engaging in useless tasks like surfing the web and just tackle whatever it is you need to work on. Then watch your focus soar and your memory improve. 4. Incentivize moments and read cues. Use visual or verbal cues for items like keys - to associate places and things. Set reminders.

This article brings about the topic of how people end their emails differently. In the recent past, it has been deemed "cool" to have an email signature that read "Sent from my iPhone". Now, however, this is seen as generic. People are coming up with new ways to sign their emails that are original. They also aim to include personality and tone. This is proven to be challenging for many people because signatures are generally short. Email signatures can not only help indicate whether a person is professional or not, but also whether the person is irritated, silly, rushed, etc.

This article covers a few of the same things people covered from their recent projects. It is centered around the tone of emails and what makes that tone- words like "hi" vs. "hey", emoji use, punctuation, and response time. It also brings up an interesting point. "Research has found that when parties are getting along, they tend to mimic each other's subtle speech patterns".