considerable institutional and political support as the national language of Ireland

revived as a mother tongue after centuries of being learned and studied only in its ancient written form.

A community that wants to preserve or revive its language has a number of options

Much is lost from a scientific point of view as well when a language disappears.

when the language disappears, it may take with it important information about the early history of the community. The loss of human languages also severely limits what linguists can learn about human cognition.

it always involves pressure of some kind, and it is often felt as a loss of social identity or as a symbol of defeat.

it often loses a great deal of its cultural identity at the same time.

But most of these are threatened as well because their speakers live near other communities where the children speak English. And all native North American groups are under pressure to give up their native languages and use English instead.

33 are spoken by both adults and children; another 34 are spoken by adults, but by few children; 73 are spoken almost entirely by adults over 50; 49 are spoken only by a few people, mostly over 70; and 5 may have already become extinct.

Some linguists believe the number may decrease by half; some say the total could fall to mere hundreds as the majority of the world's languages - most spoken by a few thousand people or less - give way to languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, Swahili, and Hindi. By some estimates, 80% of the world's languages may vanish within the next century.

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, because our information about many languages is scant or outdated, and it is hard to draw the line between languages and dialects.

In other cases, languages have declined much more slowly.

The fate of a language can be changed in a single generation if it is no longer being learned by children

Both

often the community is pressured to give up its language and even its ethnic and cultural identity.

Sometimes the people learn the outsiders' language in addition to their own;

languages become extinct when a community finds itself under pressure to integrate with a larger or more powerful group.

Outright genocide is one cause of language extinction

No. These languages are considered dead because they are no longer spoken in the form in which we find them in ancient writings.

Many other languages are no longer being learned by new generations of children or by new adult speakers

Many languages are failing out of use and being replaced by others that are more widely used in the region or nation

An endangered language is one that is likely to become extinct in the near future.

But, that astronomer argues, the flare can’t account for all the extra light. So he still thinks the dust-ring theory might hold up.

MacGregor’s team took a second look at these data. And it found that all the excess light came from a two-minute period on March 24. A massive flare explains all the extra light, MacGregor now says.

Observations show that over one 10-second period, the star got 1,000 times brighter. Then it dimmed again. This event can best be explained by an enormous stellar flare, explains a team of scientists in the February 26 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A new analysis shows this star — Proxima Centauri — released a gigantic flare in March 2017. And that’s bad news in terms of hopes for finding life on its planet, Proxima b.

For people who can’t avoid lost sleep, scientists still don’t have a nutritional way to help them heal, Smith says. If you want to heal faster, your best bet for now is to get more “vitamin Z.”

Why didn’t nutrition help healing time? Smith can think of a few possibilities. The healthy drinks may have helped a little — just not enough to show up clearly in the relatively small numbers of men and women tested here. There was also a big difference in healing time between individual participants, which could have made it harder to see a small effect due to nutrition.

Sleep expert Clete Kushida didn’t find the results all that surprising.

mixed results

volunteers

And getting better nutrition offered no clear benefit. Scientists sampled fluid from the wounds. The group that drank the nutritional supplement did show a stronger immune response at the wound. But that didn’t speed the healing, Smith reports in the January Journal of Applied Physiology.

Sleep clearly helped. People who slept normally healed in about 4.2 days. The sleep-deprived volunteers took about 5 days to heal.

One group of 16 volunteers got a normal amount of sleep — seven to nine hours a night. The other two groups of 20 people each were kept sleep deprived. They got only two hours of sleep a night, for three nights in a row. To stay awake, the volunteers were asked to do things such as walk, play video games, watch TV, sit on an exercise ball or play ping-pong. Throughout the experiment, one of the sleep-deprived groups got a nutritional drink with extra protein and vitamins. The other group got a placebo drink: It looked and tasted the same but had no extra nutrition.

She and her team studied three groups of healthy people who came to their laboratory to take part in tests. They gave each recruit small skin wounds. Applying gentle suction on their forearms, they created blisters. Then they removed the tops of these blisters. (The procedure doesn’t hurt, although it can be itchy, Smith says.)

Now data show that getting enough Z’s might also get your cuts to heal more promptly. In fact, sleep was more important than good nutrition in speeding wound healing.

“It’s a tour de force of experimental demonstration,” says Oleg Godin.

Still, he says, “I’m less impressed by the suggestions and implications about its uses.” He describes them as mostly “wishful thinking.”

The device is not yet ready for prime time, its developers note. For instance, it doesn’t work on sound that arrives at the device from an angle. On the surface of a lake or ocean, therefore, it would transmit sounds only from the small area directly below it. The device also works for only a small range of sounds. Those with a higher or lower pitch would still reflect off the underside of it instead of passing through the water’s surface.

Bok’s team developed an alternative approach. Even though it is thin and lightweight, their membrane transmits sound as well as the thick layer of material.

At the heart of the new device is a rubber sheet stretched across a metal frame with a weight at its center. That weight helps make sure that when it vibrates, it does so at the right frequency. This whole system floats atop the water. As underwater sound waves hit it, the device begins to vibrate. Its frame and rubber sheet vibrate at just the right frequency to help transmit that subsurface sound into the air.

Researchers have created a device that frees underwater sound to move through the water’s surface and into the air. It lets 30 percent of the sound come through. That’s 160 times more than usual!

Researchers from India now reveal how bonnet macaques communicate without words.