When English speakers say "rose" and Chinese speakers say "玫瑰," do they mean the same thing? A Peking University team led by Professor Bi Yanchao explored this question using word embeddings from 53 languages, behavioral ratings from speakers of eight languages and exploratory multilingual brain imaging data. Published in Nature Communications, the study shows that word meanings are organized along shared neurocognitive dimensions, while differences across languages are associated with climate.

Japan is experiencing historically high numbers of foreigners. Its population is shrinking, and its workforce is aging, driving foreign labor to historic levels.

Humans are the only species known to use fully symbolic language: a system capable of expressing abstract ideas, imaginary worlds and endless combinations of meaning. But how did we get there?

Young people with the most connections to other suspected offenders of any age are almost five times more likely to carry knives than the average youth suspect, according to a new analysis of more than 200,000 U.K. police records. This top 5% of "super-connected" children aged 10–18 are almost three times more likely to commit violent crime, seven times more likely to commit robberies and nine times more likely to be involved in organized crime than the wider youth suspect population.

The number of conflicts between states continued to increase sharply in 2025 and has now reached the highest level since World War II. At the same time, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at Uppsala University registered a record total number of armed conflicts.

The June 2026 National Trends in Disability Employment (nTIDE) report reveals a large increase in job-seeking among people with disabilities, signaling that more individuals are entering the labor force as economic pressure intensifies. This finding aligns with last month's nTIDE forecast that rising prices would push more people with disabilities to seek employment, while progress in employment access continues.

Protected bike lanes increase Citi Bike ridership in New York City, but painted bike lanes and sharrows do not show a statistically significant causal effect on ridership after accounting for confounding factors, according to a new study from researchers at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering published this week in npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport.

Over the last decade, podcasts have become big business, with more than a fifth of UK adults listening to podcasts each week. The format particularly resonates with men, who are more likely than women to identify as podcast fans. Men are also overrepresented as podcast hosts.

From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt, and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft. The landscape of the Llanos de Moxos, northern Bolivia, appears as a disconnected patchwork of open grassland savannahs, forest islands, and lakes.