Credit: UPF
Prosody is a branch of linguistics that analyses and formally represents the elements of oral expression such as pitch, tones and intonation. A study published in
Cognition on 5 February shows that there are universal prosodic cues that help with learning in humans and in animals.
This study, published by Juan Manuel Toro, ICREA research professor and Paola Crespo-Bojorque, researchers of the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) of the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), is part of the research into language evolution that is being conducted thanks to a European Research Council Starting Grant.
Some of the mechanisms we humans use to learn language are based on general principles we inherited from other species
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World-first echidna, improved platypus genomes mapped An international team of scientists, including from the University of Sydney, have sequenced monotreme genomes, leading to evolutionary and future medical discoveries.
Credit: Echidna CSI.
The first ever echidna genome and a greatly improved, high-quality platypus genome have been sequenced by an international team of researchers.
The findings, published in Nature, were produced by 40 researchers from Australia, China, Japan, the US, and Denmark, including from the University of Sydney.
University of Sydney lead, Professor Katherine Belov from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, said that through this research, she and the team “discovered new peptides” in both the platypus and echidna genomes. These peptides have the potential to be developed into novel drugs for humans and other animals due to their potent antimicrobial activities. “Their potential for biomedical applications is so excit