Extragalactic stars in the Milky Way, more biolinguistic evidence and couples facing COVID

This week we’re looking at migrating stars, communicative kids and how to make the best cup of coffee, plus some of the latest COVID advice.

Identified tourist

The stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way – that’s Sagittarius A* on its tax forms – could not have formed in such an intense gravitational environment; they had to train elsewhere and migrate to Sag A*.

Researchers at Miyagi Education University have proposed that a particular star, S0-6, formed in a now-extinct dwarf galaxy absorbed by the Milky Way, marking the first sighting by a tourist extragalactic stellar in the galaxy.

Dwarf galaxies are small, made up of several billion stars, often orbiting larger, more populated galaxies. The Milky Way has about 20. The researchers estimate that S0-6 is 10 billion years old, and in their study determined that its chemical composition is similar to that of stars found in dwarf galaxies.

Communicative children

Thus, Noam Chomsky’s entire career was dedicated to accumulating evidence that the structure of language is biologically established in the human brain and genetically inherited and that all humans share the same biolinguistic framework regardless of linguistic differences.

Even the die-hard prescriptivists these days say, “Yeah, yeah, biolinguistics is probably right, but stop splitting infinitives anyway.” » Researchers at Georgia State University now propose the existence of a universal, genetically inherited nonverbal communication system. They conducted an experiment with English-speaking and Turkish-speaking children, aged three to 12 years old.

The researchers asked them to use their hands to mime specific actions like “running into a house.” The differences between the two languages ​​mean that a Turkish speaker must use two phrases, one involving running and the other involving entering the house. But English speakers can communicate the action in a single sentence.

When children spoke and gestured at the same time, the gestures followed the distinct conventions of the two languages. But when the children communicated the action nonverbally, their gestures were similar.

Grind wet

Coffee has been around so long that you would think that filtering water through ground beans would have been perfected centuries ago, like finding the area of ​​a triangle. But with the increasing granularity of scientific research, scientists are now interested in coffee grinding at the electron level, especially the coffee grinding process, which produces static electricity, causing the ground coffee to clump together and its adhesion to the walls of the mill.

Researchers at the University of Oregon report that humidity has a direct impact on the amount of charge that builds up during grinding, reducing static electricity and greatly affecting the quality of the resulting coffee.

“Water not only reduces static electricity and therefore damage when grinding, but it can also have a major impact on the intensity of the drink and, potentially, the ability to access higher concentrations of flavors favorable,” says Christopher Hendon, a computational materials chemist. The researchers note that it doesn’t matter whether the moisture is added before grinding or whether it already resides in the beans themselves.

Comfortable resilience

The COVID pandemic and resulting lockdowns and working from home have had unexpected impacts on many couples. Rutgers University researchers examined behaviors that helped couples cope with the effects of the pandemic by recruiting romantic couples across the United States, who responded to weekly surveys on relationship characteristics and impact of the pandemic on their personal lives from March to May 2020.

They found that couples who demonstrated resilient behaviors were most likely to experience positive outcomes. These include increasing levels of partner support, maintaining old routines and creating new ones. The least effective approach for couples was found to be the use of jokes and humor as a method of resilience.

They note that some partners may have felt that the jokes were an inappropriate response to the severity of the pandemic, but also that joking is probably not beneficial for reducing uncertainties in a romantic relationship.

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