Brain

After thousands of hours of work, MIT researchers have released the first major database of fully annotated English sentences written by non-native speakers.

The researchers who led the project had already shown that the grammatical quirks of non-native speakers writing in English could be a source of linguistic insight. But they hope that their dataset could also lead to applications that would improve computers' handling of spoken or written language of non-native English speakers.

Epilepsy is an extremely common disorder affecting people of all ages, from infants through teenagers to older adults. One of the most mysterious things about this disorder is that about 6 percent of the people with epilepsy have an unusually high incidence of sudden unexpected death.

Experience in trading changes how the human brain evaluates the sale of goods, muting a well-established economic bias known as the endowment effect, according to researchers at the University of Chicago.

The findings, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from a set of experiments on why traders are less susceptible to the effect -- a phenomenon in which people demand a higher price to sell a good than they're willing to pay for it. Such behavior contradicts standard economic theory, distorting prices and reducing market activity.

FINDINGS

Using the landmark Framingham Heart Study to assess how physical activity affects the size of the brain and one's risk for developing dementia, UCLA researchers found an association between low physical activity and a higher risk for dementia in older individuals. This suggests that regular physical activity for older adults could lead to higher brain volumes and a reduced risk for developing dementia.

Young American adults aren't doing it as often as you'd think. Although Americans are now strikingly more accepting of premarital sex, a new study reveals that more Millennials, born in the 1990s in particular, are nevertheless forgoing sex during young adulthood. The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of this generation than first thought.

A study published in eLife provides new insights on how bats recognise their surroundings to help them build mental maps.

Bats have excellent spatial memory, and navigate with ease to important locations including roosts and foraging grounds. But exactly how these animals recognise such places through echolocation - perception based on soundwaves and their echoes - is largely unknown. New research from the Universities of Bristol and Antwerp suggests the animals observe and remember templates to help form a cognitive map of their environment.