Your dog might seem like a bit of a goof, but they might be capable of more tricks than you think. A new study from researchers in Hungary investigated whether dogs can distinguish between new and familiar languages.

William Faulkner is considered one of America's most remarkable and perplexing writers. He confused his audience intentionally, using complex sentences, unreliable narrators, and outlandish imagery. His body of work is shocking,...

English is a confusing language for many reasons. But the irregular verbs might be the most confusing part. Why is "told" the past tense of "tell" but "smold" isn't the past tense of "smell"? It turns out that the study of irregular...

Many ancient sites had some truly amazing effects on sound waves, suggesting that early cultures may have built spaces to evoke certain sensation. And by studying the acoustics of these structures, we can learn new things...

The secret to winning an argument isn't grand rhetoric or elegant style, says US Supreme Court litigator Neal Katyal -- it takes more than that. With stories of some of the most impactful cases he's argued before the Court, Katyal shows...

The development of agriculture was a huge game changer for human beings and it may have even changed the way we speak.

Spray-painted subway cars, tagged bridges, mural-covered walls -- graffiti pops up boldly throughout our cities. And it turns out: it's nothing new. Graffiti has been around for thousands of years. And across that span of time, it's...

Today we start our unit on language with a discussion of meaning and how we assign and understand meaning. We’ll cover sense and reference, beetles in boxes, and language games. We’re also getting into the meaning-making game ourselves:...

About 10% of the world population is left-handed. But why does handedness exist and what determines which hand is dominant? Scientists have suggested several theories, but the answer may well lie with evolution.

What can mathematics say about history? According to TED Fellow Jean-Baptiste Michel, quite a lot. From changes to language to the deadliness of wars, he shows how digitized history is just starting to reveal deep underlying patterns.

So far in this series, we've mostly focused on how AI can interpret images, but one of the most common ways we interact with computers is through language - we type questions into search engines, use our smart assistants like Siri and...

Did you ever notice how many jokes start with _Did you ever notice?" And what's the deal with "What's the deal?" There's a lot of funny to be found simply by noticing the ordinary, everyday things you don't ordinarily notice every day....

The wildly diverse, thoughtful and hilarious world of fanfiction -- where writers reimagine favorite stories like "Harry Potter," "Pokémon," "My Little Pony" and more -- is ever-growing and becoming a vital social and learning tool....

If you are feeling stuck, you might get benefits to be better at the task by watching cute animal videos.

How many different verb tenses are there in a language like English? At first, the answer seems obvious - there's past, present, and future. But it isn't quite that simple. Anna Ananichuk explains how thanks to something called...

Most scientific literature is written only in English, creating an alarming knowledge gap for the 75 percent of the world who don't speak it. That's a big problem for climate change -- because it's hard to take action on something you...

Beginning in the third century BCE, the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula. This period gave rise to several regional languages in the area that's now Spain, including Castilian, Catalan, and Galician. One of these would become...

Gerard Ryle led the international team that divulged the Panama Papers, the 11.5 million leaked documents from 40 years of activity of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that have offered an unprecedented glimpse into the scope and...

We all feel a compelling need to watch stories, to tell stories ... to discuss the things that tell each one of us that we are not alone in the world, says TV titan Shonda Rhimes. A dominant force in television since "Grey's Anatomy" hit...

Journalism can be much more than reporting. An authentic, human narrative touches audiences and keeps them reading. Learn how to shape a human-centered news story, and the importance of facts, context and heart.

Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.

Only if you are truly open to the possibility of being wrong can you ever learn, says researcher Alex Edmans. In an insightful talk, he explores how confirmation bias -- the tendency to only accept information that supports your personal...

Aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language: the metaphor. Friend of scribes from Aristotle to Elvis, metaphor can subtly influence the decisions we make, Geary says.

Today we’re going to talk about how computers understand speech and speak themselves. As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been an growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly...