Don’t believe everything you receive in an email or text message: A new study finds that communication using computers for instant messaging and e-mail increases lying compared to face-to-face conversations.

A study looked at 110 same-sex pairs of college students who engaged in 15 minute conversations either face-to-face, using e-mail, or using instant messaging. The results were then analyzed for inaccuracies. In addition to the distance one person is from the other, e-mail communication has the added component of being asynchronous, not as connected in real time as instant messaging or face-to-face conversation.
read more

Where do languages come from? Many linguists think that all human languages came from a single one that was spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. But how would it have sounded–would it have been mainly grunts? New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda in "Star Wars."

In LiveScience.com, Natalie Wolchover quotes linguist Merritt Ruhlen as saying, "This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else."
read more

Thanksgiving dinner is the time when many of us say the wrong thing to friends and relatives we haven’t seen for a long time. Are you easily embarrassed? People who AREN’T (certain politicians and actors, for instance) have a smaller region in one part of the brain than the rest of us.
read more

In 1998, a mysterious little man that Whitley Strieber calls the Master of the Key burst into his hotel room in Toronto and told him all kinds of things he didn’t know–but when he checked them out later, he found out they were TRUE. (The new, UNCENSORED edition of The Key, with a foreword that talks about how many of his statements later turned out to be true, is in bookstores NOW). However, like so many gurus, MOTKE left Whitley with more questions than answers.
read more