Can one truly understand what “flower” means without smelling a rose, touching a daisy or walking through a field of wildflowers? This question is at the core of a rich debate in philosophy and cognitive science. While embodied cognition theorists argue that physical, sensory experience is essential to concept formation, studies of the rapidly evolving large language models (LLMs)suggest that language alone can build deep, meaningful representations of the world.

BUFFALO, NY — July 10, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Aging (Aging-US) Volume 17, Issue 6, on June 7, 2025, titled “Spermidine supplementation and protein restriction protect from organismal and brain aging independently.”

Archaeologists from the University of Houston working at Caracol in Belize have uncovered the burial of Te K’ab Chaak, the first ruler of this ancient Maya city and the founder of its royal dynasty, marking the first identifiable ruler's tomb found in over four decades of work in Caracol, the largest Maya archaeological site in Belize and in the Maya lowlands. 

 

While automatized vocabulary knowledge has been shown to strongly predict general listening ability, its role in speech production remains unknown. Now, researchers have compared conscious recognition of simple word meanings (declarative knowledge) with instant, automatic access to contextualized word meanings (automatized knowledge) in Japanese students learning English as a second language. The findings revealed that automatized vocabulary knowledge better predicts fluency, and practicing vocabulary in real-life contexts may help learners speak more smoothly and confidently.

Women and ethnic minority groups are still significantly underrepresented in astronomy and geophysics despite attempts to bring about change over the past decade, research has shown. The survey, carried out by the Royal Astronomical Society and presented at the National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, found that "decades of initiatives to improve representation" have failed. "Practitioners of astronomy and geophysics are still overwhelmingly white men," the survey carried out in 2023 revealed, "and the proportion of women in our sciences remains stubbornly low".