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People who speak multiple languages are less likely to experience accelerated brain ageing.Credit: Prostock-Studio/Getty
The ability to speak more than one language might slow brain ageing and protect against cognitive decline. In a study of more than 80,000 people, researchers found that people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing than are those who just speak one language. The effect was also larger in people that spoke more than one additional language. The researchers hope that their findings will influence policy makers to encourage language learning in education.
Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Nature Aging paper
China has introduced a visa that will allow young foreign researchers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to move there without having to secure a job first. The ‘K visa’ is “a serious bid” by the Chinese government to attract the world’s brightest minds in STEM, says Jeremy Neufeld, director of immigration policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank in Washington DC. Few details about eligibility have been released, except that restrictions will apply on the basis of an applicant’s age, education and work experience.
Nature | 5 min read
The preprint repository arXiv has announced that it will no longer accept review or position papers in computer science amid a flood of low-quality submissions, some of which appear to have been written using artificial intelligence tools. “What we are seeing is many surveys that are just annotated bibliographies without analysis, synthesis or road mapping,” says computer scientist and chair of arXiv’s computer-science section Thomas Dietterich. Such papers have a whiff of paper-mill activity about them, he says, which has prompted the server to make its policy change.
Nature | 4 min read
Canada no longer holds measles elimination status after experiencing a cross-country outbreak that has persisted for more than 12 months. By default, this means that the entire Americas region has also lost its status. Infections took hold in undervaccinated Mennonite communities where the COVID-19 pandemic eroded already-shaky trust in the healthcare system — a shared source of recent measles outbreaks in the United States. The number of new cases is going down, but the loss is “a giant wake-up call that we have gaps in our public health infrastructure”, says physician-scientist Isaac Bogoch.
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