A new study of how humans learn modern languages has found that the brains of the most talented linguists hear foreign terms as random noise, not words.

They found that those with higher auditory precision mastered the pronunciation of new languages faster and more accurately than other learners and relied less on the brain’s left sensorimotor system (involved in language processing) when processing foreign-language sounds. Instead, their brain activity patterns were similar to those that occur when the brain processes non-speech sounds.

A 101-year-old great-grandfather in eastern China’s Zhejiang province recently went viral for his love of drinking large amounts of Coca-Cola and Sprite.

These penguins are wearing actual penguin suits, but they're more about the substance than style. Penguins are facing planetary perils, and these special vests are designed to help.

In Chile, injured penguins are swimming, eating, and shimmying in them. The cocoon of red fabric is woven with healing minerals, copper, which helps prevent bacteria and fungi from growing, and zinc, which encourages new blood vessels to form. Together, they can repair damaged tissue more quickly.

Source

Watching an ad would earn players another block of ad-free play time, called a "credit"

..., the airport's centerpiece would be a display aircraft wrapped in Vice City logos, alongside a GTA 6-inspired baggage claim, customized baggage carousels or column wraps, themed luggage carts, limited-edition luggage tags, or coordinated airport signage. Arriving passengers would see "Welcome to Vice City" messages when disembarking their planes.

The officer falsely claimed he contacted missing persons and prematurely closed their cases on the South Korean holiday island of Jeju.

[OC]

::: spoiler Alt. A Mr. Incredible Becoming Uncanny meme.

Smiling Mr. Incredible: Lazarus syndrome

Uncanny Mr. Incredible: Lazarus sign (CW: shows a thumbnail of a brain-dead person right when you open the article) :::

Surge in proposals follows Labour’s lifting of de facto ban, with about 45 plans submitted in the year to March

Forensics revealed that the 'realistic' looking body was in fact not human.

Most mass scrapers, on the other hand, simply grab the raw HTML underneath. ShieldFont exploits this difference through an automated process called OpenType glyph substitution.

That said, because the whole defense rests on scrapers reading code rather than screens, taking a screenshot of a shielded page and running OCR on the image can still recover the real words.

Screen readers used by blind readers also work from the code, so they read the decoys aloud. ShieldFont ships with a beta feature that provides those readers with the real text instead.

Pioneering study linking noise pollution to Parkinson’s finds 3% increase in risk for every 11.5dB rise in noise levels

Existing research has found potential biological pathways that link noise exposure to Parkinson’s disease, largely due to stress responses and disrupted sleep.

The study, published in Jama Neurology, included 3.1 million Danish participants aged 40 and over, and followed them for 18 years.

A crew in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Oakland spotted a pigeon ‘in distress’ after a vehicle fire

Source

Timing of Devon switchoff ‘could not be worse’, says board, as members face an estimated £2m in lost revenue

Interpol says the vast majority of the 2,070 victims or potential victims identified were women being trafficked for sex.

The operation, which took place between 8 and 12 June, was conducted by 40,000 officers across countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.

It found that most of the victims were trafficked for sexual exploitation, while 20% were forced into criminality, 11% were forced into labour and 2% into forced begging.

The prediction market platform said the incident took place on Thursday morning and affected a "small number of users."

A compromised third-party vendor allegedly let attackers inject a malicious frontend script

... Other investigators put the damage at close to $3 million, with Specter claiming that funds were drained from at least 11 victim wallets holding PUSD, Polymarket's stablecoin used for trading on the platform.

Cloudflare is working with the makers of Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on a new way for websites to tell whether incoming traffic is legitimate – without resorting to the usual mix of CAPTCHAs, logins, and extra tracking.

The system is called Private Access Control Tokens, or PACT, and it arrives at a time when bots have surpassed human traffic online.

Researchers say their hunting method - which allows them to prey on dangerous ants - is unprecedented.

The snare's "exceptionally high power" flings the ant into a bigger web at "15 times the most extreme g-forces experienced by jet pilots", said lead researcher Prof Ajay Narendra.

"The snare mechanism seems to have evolved as a highly specialised way of allowing the spider to 'pick off' potentially hazardous prey one at a time and transport them a safe distance away from ant trails and nests," researcher Dr Jonas Wolff said.

Musicians and production team understood to be facing same punishment after livestream of patriotic song

In December 2024, the 29-year-old singer performed the patriotic song Az Khoone Javanane Vatan (From the Blood of the Youth of the Homeland) without a hijab in a livestreamed performance that went viral.

‘Historian’ claims ‘overwhelming difference’ between him and rogues’ gallery of autocrats is that Trump is more powerful

“Historically, powerful people were characterised by brutal conquest and the fear that they instilled in the populations that came under their influence. Common names that would come to mind are Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hunt, Tamburlaine, Napoleon and, more recently, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.

“The overwhelming difference between each of the above when compared with President Trump is their lack of global reach.”

“Sounds good to me!” Trump wrote, naming the author as “presidential historian Dave King”.