Month: October 2022

Enlarge (credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images)

The V-1302 John Mahn has sat at the bottom of the North Sea off Belgium for decades. The ship began its life in Germany as a 48-meter-long fishing vessel. However, during the Second World War, the Nazi Kriegsmarine requisitioned it for use as a patrol boat. On February 12, 1942, a squadron of six British Royal Air Force planes struck it with two bombs. It sank.

It wasn’t just the boat that sank, however. Along with it went its stores of coal and its remaining ammunition, among other chemicals. While the boat’s no longer a Nazi threat, new research suggests that it has been leaking pollution—including various heavy metals—into the North Sea ever since. This, in turn, has changed the surrounding environment at a microbial level. The research is part of the North Sea Wrecks project, an effort to aid in the identification and mitigation of wrecks and their environmental impacts in the region.

“We wanted to see if old shipwrecks in our part of the sea … were still shaping the local microbial communities and if they were still affecting the surrounding sediment. This microbial analysis is unique within the project,” Josefien Van Landuyt, a PhD candidate at Ghent University and one of the paper’s authors, said in a press release.

Enlarge / Is living in a language-rich world enough to teach a child grammatical language? (credit: kate_sept2004 via Getty)

Unlike the carefully scripted dialogue found in most books and movies, the language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, full of false starts, interruptions and people talking over each other. From casual conversations between friends, to bickering between siblings, to formal discussions in a boardroom, authentic conversation is chaotic. It seems miraculous that anyone can learn language at all given the haphazard nature of the linguistic experience.

For this reason, many language scientists—including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics—believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience—or so the thinking goes.

Enlarge / A cluster of sensors atop the roof of the DLIVEREE. (credit: Gregory Leporati)

PAHRUMP, NEVADA—You could hear Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis roaring across the desert—or, more specifically, Spring Mountain Motor Resort, a scorching-hot racetrack about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. I was driving a Porsche GT3 RS with Jamie Wall, a professional racecar driver and McLaren coach, beside me—and it handled a bit differently than the 1997 Toyota Camry I've owned for the past 18 years.

"I bet it's a fair bit faster, too," Wall laughed.

As we set out across the winding road course, our goal, technically, was loftier than just having fun: We were acquiring data that could help fuel and inform autonomous vehicles.