<p>I love busting out a French subjunctive in pursuit of better restaurant service, so it’s a joy to discover there’s a neuroscientific upside to being multilingual</p><p>It’s hard to pick a favourite PG Wodehouse line, but the one I’m perhaps most fond of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/332816-into-the-face-of-the-young-man-who-sat-on">is this</a>: “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”</p><p>It’s funny, but it also succinctly captures something that I have long felt about language acquisition, which is that in order to truly embrace learning another tongue, you have to be prepared to look foolish and vulnerable. (Why that can be so difficult for the English – a monoglot minority on a largely bilingual planet – is another article entirely.) More people will perhaps be prepared to endure that humbling process now, as new research has found that learning another language can <a href="https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/speaking-another-language-could-slow-ageing-in-the-brain">slow ageing in the brain by up to 13 years</a>. Multilingualism, it is thought, promotes brain connectivity and slows its decline with age.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/12/learn-another-language-french-restaurant-service-multilingual">Continue reading...</a>
Vetenskapsnyheter
A 67 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex will go on sale in New York with a pre-sale value of $30m.
<p>A brown huntsman<em> </em>is the quickest of more than 250 species analysed by scientists in the UK and Germany</p><p>If arachnophobes were not frightened enough by the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/oct/24/australia-giant-spider-mouse-carry-horrifying-impressive">horrific ability of Australia’s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice up the sides of fridges</a>, they now have another reason.</p><p>They might be the fastest spiders on the planet.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/09/fastest-spider-on-the-planet-brown-huntsman">Continue reading...</a>
<p>An ancient sample shows calcite threading through the material’s cracks and pores, with possible lessons for making modern concrete last longer</p>
Endangered rodents, birds and butterflies will be among the species benefitting from the investment.
<p>New Trump administration rules would undermine longstanding research practices. It’s death by a thousand cuts</p><p>A politician who aims to gradually privatize and ultimately destroy an institution funded by tax dollars – say, a public school system or public transportation network – may choose to do so by strategically disinvesting resources from that institution until it becomes barely functional, leading users to look elsewhere to meet their needs. Eventually, the user-base of the public system gets so low or frustrated that it seems reasonable to scrap the thing entirely, or re-direct public funds to private companies as contractors to provide the needed “service”. We’ve seen this strategy play out many times in states and city councils across America.</p><p>It appears that the endgame of the Trump administration’s attacks on science and the research funding ecosystem is similar: grant freezes and administrative disarray at federal funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), new layers of project review by political appointees hunting for forbidden keywords such as “disparity” and “marginalized”, and proposed new restrictions to make international collaboration difficult or impossible all point towards a world where it’s just too onerous to do federally-funded scientific research. Is the goal to make scientists simply give up on the endeavor?</p><p>Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/health">Health</a> at Columbia University</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/11/trump-administration-scientists-rules">Continue reading...</a>
Hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated from eastern Zhejiang province, with the city of Wenzhou close to the path of the storm.
The move will help conservationists in Gallt-y-bere to protect internationally important habitats.
It's unclear how the planet avoided its star's bloated red giant stage.
For the first time since 1995, the Bureau of Land Management is rewriting its grazing regulations.
<p>Tennis players can return high-speed balls using a combination of reaction and predicting the future</p>
The Manx Shark Foundation hopes to learn more about basking sharks often spotted around the island.
Hewing is the ancient art of cutting logs into beams or planks for timber frames.
<p>Reports of falling sperm counts and testosterone levels have fuelled fears over chemicals, pollution and modern lifestyles. But how much do scientists agree on what is affecting male fertility?</p><p>The world is unwittingly walking into a male reproductive crisis, scientists warned this week as they presented data that revealed an apparent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/07/mens-average-testosterone-levels-have-halved-in-last-50-years-say-scientists">halving of average male testosterone levels</a> over the past 50 years.</p><p>“It<em> </em>is mind-blowing that testosterone has declined by 50%,” Prof Hagai Levine, who led the work, told the Guardian. “This is a lot. Wake up people. Wake up.”</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2026/jul/11/spermageddon-world-facing-male-reproductive-crisis">Continue reading...</a>
I havet utanför kusten till amerikanska Florida Keys gömmer sig en ny forskningsanläggning. Här ska forskare kunna bo i en hel veckas tid, och studera havet – dygnet runt.
The sizzling heat continues into next week despite a drop in temperatures over the weekend.
Reinforcement learning uses error information to adjust control algorithms.
The plant-eating dinosaur, named Uragasaurus kalasinensis, is thought to have lived about 150 million years ago.
For more than 30 years, Paul Dunn has been working to revive the fortunes of the high brown fritillary.
The <em>Quest</em> shipwreck is in worse shape than expected, but it has turned into a thriving marine ecosystem.
<p>The inaugural launch and first-stage booster recovery of China’s Long March 10B rocket intensifies the nation’s spaceflight rivalry with the U.S.</p>
New Horizons data reveal Pluto’s first six confirmed landslides along steep crater rims.
<p>The climate system is tied to more powerful typhoons, as well as famine and wildfires.</p>
<p>A proposed rule change could expose more Americans to higher doses of radiation from nuclear facilities</p>
The Earth may not be that massive, but it still distorts space-time.