An estimated 7,099 languages are spoken throughout the world today. Almost a third of them are endangered - spoken by dwindling numbers - while just 23 languages represent more than half of the global population.

For years, researchers have been interested in the similarities seen across human languages. A new study led by University of Arizona researcher Masha Fedzechkina suggests that some of those similarities may be based on the human brain's preference for efficient information processing.

"If we look at languages of the world, they are very different on the surface, but they also share a lot of underlying commonalities, often called linguistic universals or cross-linguistic generalizations," said Fedzechkina, an assistant professor in the UA Department of Linguistics and lead author of the study, published in the journal Psychological Science.

"Most theories assume the reasons why languages have these cross-linguistic universals is because they're in some way constrained by the human brain," Fedzechkina said. "If these linguistic universals are indeed real, and if we understand their causes, then it can tell us something about how language is acquired or processed by the human brain, which is one of the central questions in language sciences."

It seems like even black holes can't resist the temptation to insert themselves unannounced into photographs. A cosmic photobomb found as a background object in images of the nearby Andromeda galaxy has revealed what could be the most tightly coupled pair of supermassive black holes ever seen.

Astronomers made this remarkable discovery using X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from ground-based telescopes, Gemini-North in Hawaii and the Caltech's Palomar Transient Factory in California.

This unusual source, called LGGS J004527.30+413254.3 (J0045+41 for short), was seen in optical and X-ray images of Andromeda, also known as M31. Until recently, scientists thought J0045+41 was an object within M31, a large spiral galaxy located relatively nearby at a distance of about 2.5 million light years from Earth. The new data, however, revealed that J0045+41 was actually at a much greater distance, around 2.6 billion light years from Earth.

"We were looking for a special type of star in M31 and thought we had found one," said Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein of the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, who led the paper describing this discovery. "We were surprised and excited to find something far stranger!"

Even more intriguing than the large distance of J0045+41 is that it likely contains a pair of giant black holes in close orbit around each other. The estimated total mass for these two supermassive black holes is about two hundred million times the mass of our Sun.

Brainiacs happen to have thinking organs that are physically designed to outperform, a new study finds.

Researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany looked at brain scans of more than 300 participants, while simultaneously consulting graph theoretical network analysis methods, to try to determine what helps form human intelligence.

Explaining how the brain's many regions interact with others to varying degrees - think of smaller social groups within broader society - the researchers more specifically sought to understand whether the wiring of certain regions was different among people depending on their level of intelligence.

Women in Europe's ancient civilizations had stronger arms than elite female sports stars do today thanks to the grind of farming life, scientists say. The research shows women were a driving force behind the socio-cultural development of agrarian communities.

A study of bones belonging to women who lived in central Europe between 5300 BC to around 100 AD reveals manual agricultural work had a profound effect on their bodies. Their strong arms reveal women engaged in hard work like harvesting, tilling the soil and grinding grain using their hands.

If you spend any time on the internet, it seems every few months humanity is faced with a looming existential threat from the depths of space. Planet X/Nibiru, the rapture or a wayward comet are, according to conspiracy theorists, destined to destroy us.

However, there is one particular conspiracy, treasured by theorists, that our impending doom will come from within planet Earth - that lurking beneath America's Yellowstone National Park is a supervolcano that will kill us all.

Yellowstone, in the midwestern US, is - they claim - about to erupt and send unfathomable amounts of matter into the sky, covering anyone in the vicinity in a pyroclastic flow of ash and rock, and blocking out the sun, wiping out almost all life on Earth in the process.

Conspiracy theories tend to draw on some grain of truth. The super volcano really has erupted before, three times in fact, over the last 2 billion years or so, but the theory goes that it's bound to do so again soon, right? RT.com caught up with Michael Poland, Scientist-in-Charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, to find out the full extent of this lurking supervolcanic 'threat.'

Physicists have experimentally demonstrated quantum entanglement with 10 qubits on a superconducting circuit, surpassing the previous record of nine entangled superconducting qubits. The 10-qubit state is the largest multiqubit entangled state created in any solid-state system and represents a step toward realizing large-scale quantum computing.

Lead researcher Jian-Wei Pan and co-workers at the University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University, Fuzhou University, and the Institute of Physics, China, have published a paper on their results in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

In general, one of the biggest challenges to scaling up multiqubit entanglement is addressing the catastrophic effects of decoherence. One strategy is to use superconducting circuits, which operate at very cold temperatures and consequently have longer qubit coherence times.

In the new set-up, the researchers used qubits made of tiny pieces of aluminum, which they connected to each other and arranged in a circle around a central bus resonator. The bus is a key component of the system, as it controls the interactions between qubits, and these interactions generate the entanglement.

Rockets will take humans to Mars but rocket (of the leafy variety) could help them stay there. Simulating its growth in deep space, scientists made a key discovery that could yield Red Planet farming - worms can reproduce in Martian-like soil.

The finding, announced by Wageningen University in the Netherlands on Monday, came as researchers attempted to grow arugula, also known as rocket, in Mars soil simulant provided by NASA.

The humble text message has reached its 25th birthday, and it sure has come a long way. The first ever SMS (Short Message Service) was sent by British engineer Neil Papworth on 3 December, 1992. He wrote "Merry Christmas" to his colleague Richard Jarvis.

Jarvis was at a Christmas party at the time, and Papworth didn't even send the message on a phone as handsets were only able to receive them at that point. Instead, he typed it up on his computer, little realising that he had taken the first step down a road that would completely change our relationship with phones.

In the science-fiction movie Gattaca, visitors only clear security if a blood test and readout of their genetic profile matches the sample on file. Now, cheap DNA sequencers and custom software could make real-time DNA-authentication a reality.

Researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center have developed a method to quickly and accurately identify people and cell lines from their DNA. The technology could have multiple applications, from identifying victims in a mass disaster to analyzing crime scenes. But its most immediate use could be to flag mislabeled or contaminated cell lines in cancer experiments, a major reason that studies are later invalidated. The discovery is described in the latest issue of the journal eLife.

"Our method opens up new ways to use off-the-shelf technology to benefit society," said the study's senior author Yaniv Erlich, a computer science professor at Columbia Engineering, an adjunct core member at NYGC, and a member of Columbia's Data Science Institute. "We're especially excited about the potential to improve cell-authentication in cancer research and potentially speed up the discovery of new treatments."

The software is designed to run on the MinION, an instrument the size of a credit card that pulls in strands of DNA through its microscopic pores and reads out sequences of nucleotides, or the DNA letters A, T, C, G.

The device has made it possible for researchers to study bacteria and viruses in the field, but its high error-rate and large sequencing gaps have, until now, limited its use on human cells with their billions of nucleotides.

In an innovative two-step process, the researchers outline a new way to use the $1,000 MinION and the abundance of human genetic data now online to validate the identity of people and cells by their DNA with near-perfect accuracy. First, they use the MinION to sequence random strings of DNA, from which they select individual variants, which are nucleotides that vary from person to person and make them unique. Then, they use a Bayesian algorithm to randomly compare this mix of variants with corresponding variants in other genetic profiles on file. With each cross-check, the algorithm updates the likelihood of finding a match, rapidly narrowing the search.

Even when we're teenagers, our brains still have a lot of developing to do. New research suggests that teenage brains haven't matured enough to be able to properly recognise and react to the importance of tasks - maybe one excuse to be late with homework.

In a study involving a simple reaction game, older participants proved to be better than younger ones at changing their approach and applying more time and effort as the stakes got higher.