Wednesday 17 July 2019

Community size matters when people create a new language

Why are languages so different from each other? After comparing more than 2000 languages, scientists noticed that languages with more speakers are usually simpler than smaller languages. For instance, most English nouns can be turned into plurals by simply adding -s, whereas the German system is notoriously irregular.

source https://www.lifetechnology.com/blogs/life-technology-news-blog/community-size-matters-when-people-create-a-new-language

New measurement of universe's expansion rate is 'stuck in the middle'

A team of collaborators from Carnegie and the University of Chicago used red giant stars that were observed by the Hubble Space Telescope to make an entirely new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding, throwing their hats into the ring of a hotly contested debate. Their result—which falls squarely between the two previous, competing values—will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

* This article was originally published here