Hello darkness, my old friend
A subglacial river has carved out a cavern hundreds of meters beneath the Kamb Ice Stream, a West Antarctic glacier. Inside the dark, water-filled “cathedral,” scientists found signs of life, Douglas Fox reported in “Journey under the ice” (SN: 4/22/23, p. 18).
Reader Bob Masta asked how much sunlight filters down through the ice above the cavern.
“Essentially no light gets through that thickness of ice. These are truly dark environments,” Fox says. “The ice is basically opaque, crammed with bubbles and inclusions. So it scatters light until, after a certain depth, there’s nothing left.” This darkness is consistent with observations of other subglacial environments, Fox says, such as those beneath the Thwaites ice shelf and the Whillans Ice Stream.
Let’s talk language
MRI scans of nearly 100 native speakers of either Arabic or German revealed differences in how the language circuits of the brain are connected, Elise Cutts reported in “Native language shapes the brain” (SN: 4/22/23, p. 8).
Several readers wondered what the finding might mean for people who grew up speaking more than one language.
They may have an advantage in learning new languages, says cognitive neuroscientist Angela Friederici of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. With brain connections influenced by more than one language, the brains of multilingual people would likely have “more structures to cope with the different languages, thereby even providing a good basis to learn additional languages,” she says.
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