2,745 search results

What makes it hard for migrants to learn the language of their new home?
Languages

What makes it hard for migrants to learn the language of their new home?

...studies; to be ‘fluent’ as a supermarket check-out operator is different from being ‘fluent’ as a university student. Overall, the key point here is that ‘fluency’ means different things to different people and while we are often all too eager to pass judgment on the proficiency of those who have traces of complex language learning trajectories in their...
Different cultures, different childhoods
History & The Arts

Different cultures, different childhoods

...studies of peoples with very different understandings of the world to Western ones. Canadian Arctic: Acquiring understanding Jean Briggs has worked with the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and has described how, within these communities, growing up is largely seen as a process of acquiring thought, reason and understanding (known in Inuit as ihuma). Young children don’t...
Beginners’ Spanish: food and drink
Languages

Beginners’ Spanish: food and drink

...skills and communicate more easily and effectively in Spanish? This free course, Beginners’ Spanish: food and drink, focuses on buying and ordering food and drink at a restaurant or bar. You will be able to use some basic vocabulary relating to food, drinks, meals, quantities and measures. In this OpenLearn course you will listen to Spanish speakers in a variety of...
Indian summer monsoon amplified global warming 130,000 years ago, helping end ice age
Nature & Environment

Indian summer monsoon amplified global warming 130,000 years ago, helping end ice age

...study published in Nature Geoscience showed that the Indian summer monsoon pulled heat and moisture into the northern hemisphere when Earth was entering a warmer climate around 130,000 years ago. This caused tropical wetlands to expand northwards – habitats that act as sources of methane, a greenhouse gas. This amplified global warming further and helped end the ice...
Millennial burnout: building resilience is no answer – we need to overhaul how we work
Health, Sports & Psychology

Millennial burnout: building resilience is no answer – we need to overhaul how we work

...studies on workplace burnout showed that workers who were happier, less anxious and more able to relieve stress were more likely to develop burnout than those in a comparison group without these traits. This largely forgotten study involved air traffic controllers in the US in the 1970s; it followed over 400 of them for three years. Most of the cohort (99%) had served in...
What do volcanoes tell us about the possibility of life on Mars?
Science, Maths & Technology

What do volcanoes tell us about the possibility of life on Mars?

...study by a Czech-German-American team led by Petr Brož presents convincing new evidence convincing new evidence that at least some of these are genuine volcanoes. Brož and his team studied cones in Coprates Chasma, the deepest part of Mars’s Valles Marineris canyon system. This is far removed from any of Mars’s main volcanic provinces, and suggest magma has erupted...
How to find invisible black holes
Science, Maths & Technology

How to find invisible black holes

...study the stars themselves. Changes in the stars are harder to see than the dips in light from exoplanet transits. That means we can’t use automated algorithms to study stars or find black holes. Instead, we must look at the data by eye. But there is far too much data for the scientists to study, so we turned to citizen science for help. Whereas SuperWASP Variable Stars...
Can a space rock from Costa Rica reveal the origin of water on Earth?
Science, Maths & Technology

Can a space rock from Costa Rica reveal the origin of water on Earth?

...study for over half a century. But in 2019, meteorite scientists were once again blessed by the cosmic gods when a fireball crashed into the Aguas Zarcas region of the Alajuela province in Costa Rica, depositing yet another CM2. With a recovered mass in excess of 25kg, it is the largest recorded CM fall since Murchison. Billions of years ago the Earth was pummelled by...