The next time you stub your toe, bump your head, or otherwise hurt yourself, don’t feel guilty about belting out those four-letter words. A new study found that swearing when you’re injured actually increases your pain tolerance. This is reportedly the first study to provide evidence for the benefits of swearing, and it may explain why the practice has persisted for hundreds of years.

BBC tells us:

A study by Keele University researchers found volunteers who cursed at will could endure pain nearly 50% longer than civil-tongued peers….

He recruited 64 volunteers to take part and each individual was asked to submerge their hand in a tub of freezing water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice….

On average, the students could tolerate the pain for nearly two minutes when swearing compared with only one minute and 15 seconds when they refrained from using expletives.

Scientists hypothesize that swearing-as-pain-tolerance works by initiating the body’s fight-or-flight response, in which the hypothalamus signals the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. The process increases aggression, dampens pain, and allows us to better deal with stresses like pain or fear.
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From 80Beats:

A noisy Italian disco may not seem like a conducive location for scientific experiments, but for a couple of researchers investigating hearing and language processing it was perfect. The undercover scientists studied clubbers who were trying to talk while the music was pumping, and found that they showed a decided preference for speaking into each other’s right ears. What’s more, when the researchers approached clubbers with a request for a cigarette, they found the unwitting test subjects were much more likely to comply if the petition was made in the right ear.

Previous lab studies have also suggested that “humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out” [Wired.com]. Researchers say this bias holds true for both lefties and righties.

Remember how plants communicated with each other to exact revenge on humans in The Happening? Although the film didn’t exactly thrill critics, the science may have been more accurate than we think. New research indicates that plants that are genetically related can, in fact, distinguish which plants are in their “family,” just like people or animals. In fact, they can even warn relatives of impending danger.

Researchers at UCSD and Kyoto University cut off shoots from sagebrush plants, thereby creating a genetic copy of the parent plant, and re-planted the copies nearby. After damaging the copy the way a natural predator like a grasshopper would, the researchers waited a year, and found that the parent plants suffered 42 percent less herbivore damage than those that grew next to plants that weren’t genetically related. The researchers say this indicates that plants with family members nearby somehow knew to prepare themselves for an herbivore attack, thereby fending off threats more effectively.

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Not only can a computer read lips, but it can tell what language you’re speaking. Researchers in the U.K. have developed lip-reading computers that were successfully able to identify the language spoken into a video camera by 21 volunteers, each of whom was fluent in two or three languages.

French speakers, it seems, tend toward rounder lip movements, while speaking Arabic requires more prominent tongue movements. The computer program uses facial recognition and statistical modeling of lip movements to detect the sequences indicating that a particular language is being spoken. Potentially, the technology could lead to automatic lip-reading systems for deaf people.

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The thought of deciphering alien gossip might sound straight out of sci-fi, but at least one scientist sees it as a reality—that is, if a computer program can translate alien chatter into something we can understand. Researchers know how to tell whether an interstellar message picked up from space was coming from a language, image or music, and now John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University is taking the interpretation a bit further: He says he has the tools to start deciphering alien languages into words and sentences.

Elliott, the academic leader for Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computing, is hoping to use the power of the computer to decode unknown languages (from Earth or beyond) so he can “aid the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.” Elliot developed a computer program that analyzes 60 languages around the world, pulled from raw text samples available on the web. He hopes that finding a trend in human expression will help us understand language structure better. There’s a distinct pattern in the way people talk, determined by how much information our minds can understand at a time.

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Dolphins always seem to find the most bizarre ways to make the headlines. In their most recent adventure, it appears that a dolphin named Moko has come to the rescue of two beached pygmy whales—by “communicating with the whales and leading them to safety,” according to the BBC.

Malcolm Smith, who was at the scene, said “there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.” This extraordinary tale of cetacean correspondence was also covered by CNN, The LA Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and various Australian papers.

So what happened out there between Moko and the whales? Did she really communicate with them? If so, do these animals share a language—dolphinese perhaps?

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We humans are slowly starting to grasp the limits of our intellectual superiority, particularly with respect to chimpanzees. Just in the past year, scientists have caught chimps hunting with spears, passing on cultural traditions, displaying altruism, and beating college students (at least some of whom were sober) at memory games. Now, a new study in Current Biology shows they may actually have the capacity for a communication system far more complex than we thought.

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Infants—to anyone other than their parents—can be a bore. Beyond cooing and crying, babies appear to be all sleep and bodily functions. But deep inside those cute, fuzzy little heads, infants are performing scores of staggering statistical feats. Bombarded with a bewildering range of sounds since birth, they possess mechanisms that scour these signals for statistical regularity, allowing them to emerge with something quite astonishing: an understanding of spoken language.

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Anyone who’s frozen up during a job interview, a grade-school theater performance, or what would otherwise have been an irresistibly suave and witty pick-up line knows how paralyzing it is to truly be “at a loss for words.” Luckily, the experience is a temporary one, and before long the language that has inundated your life since you were little comes flooding back. But what if you grew up without any words at all? It’s pretty much impossible to imagine living in a world without words, but here at AAAS, “Thinking With and Without Language” took a peek at the thoughts of some people who happened to grow up without the privileges of language.

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