2 . The Voynich manuscript (手稿) is a 234-page book filled with writing in a strange language now called Voynichese. It also features many strange drawings of unknown plants, people and charts. Based on the images alone, it seems to have something to do with medicine.

The language in the manuscript appears nowhere else and has become one of the greatest linguistic riddles of our day, Since its discovery, it has attracted researchers, been called a hoax (骗局), and been the subject of a huge number of articles.

By carbon dating the manuscript, researchers are pretty confident that it was constructed in the early 1400s. And through the magic of linguistic analysis, most people agree that the manuscript is not a hoax. Or, if it is, it’s a very, very complex hoax.

A paper published in 2016 by computer scientist Greg Kondrak and his student Bradley Hauer gained a lot of attention. Their theory was based on the idea that Voynichese was made with a substitution cipher (替代密码). That means it was written in a real language, and then each of the letters in that language was replaced by a specific Voynichese letter.

This is where the computing power comes in. By having a computer compare the text of the Voynich manuscript to 380 languages, Kondrak and Hauer ran the substitution cipher through as many languages as possible and determined if the text would make sense. In the end, they figured out that the original language was Hebrew, and they even translated some of the text. There are a few problems with their results, though: they compared the manuscript to modern Hebrew, not 15th-century Hebrew; they had to make “spelling corrections” for it to make sense; and, possibly most egregious (过分的) of all, they got their results using a translating app.

Despite all the innovations in code-breaking over the last century, the Voynich manuscript still rejects our advances. If Voynichese is indeed ever solved, artificial intelligence could very likely play a role.

5 . Become a Better English Student with These Study Tips

●Study every day.

Learning any new language is a time-consuming process, more than 300 hours by some estimates. Rather than try and cram (临时死记硬背) a few hours of review once or twice a week, most experts say short, regular study sessions are more effective.     1    

●Keep things fresh.

Instead of focusing on one single task for the entire study session, try mixing things up. Study a little grammar, then do a short listening exercise, then perhaps read an article on the same topic. Don’t do too much.     2     The variety will keep you engaged and make studying more fun.

●Read, watch, and listen.

Reading English-language newspapers and books, listening to music, or watching TV can also help you improve your written and verbal comprehension skills. By doing so repeatedly, you’ll begin to unconsciously absorb things like pronunciation, speech patterns, accents, and grammar. Keep pen and paper handy and write down words you read or hear that are unfamiliar.     3     Use them the next time you are role- playing dialogues in class.

●    4    

Even advanced students of English can struggle to learn prepositions (介词), which are used to describe duration, position, direction, and relationships between objects. There are literally dozens of prepositions in the English language (some of the most common include “of” “on” and “for”) and few hard rules for when to use them. Instead, experts say, the best way to learn prepositions is to memorize them and practise using them in sentences. Study lists such as this one are a good place to begin.

●Write it down.

Repetition is the key as you’re learning English, and writing exercises are a great way to practise. Take 30 minutes at the end of class or study to write down what happened during your day.     5     By making a habit of writing, you’ll find your reading and comprehension skills improve over time.

8 . We all know that unpleasant feeling when we’re talking about something interesting and halfway through our sentence we’re interrupted. But was that really an interruption? The answer depends on whom you ask, according to new research led by Katherine Hilton from Stanford University.

Using a set of controlled audio clips (录音片段), Hilton surveyed 5, 000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people’s perceptions of interruptions. She had participants listen to audio clips and then answer questions about whether the speakers seemed to be friendly and engaged, listening to one another, or trying to interrupt.

Hilton found that American English speakers have different conversational styles. She identified two distinct groups: high and low intensity speakers. High intensity speakers are generally uncomfortable with moments of silence in conversation and consider talking at the same time a sign of engagement. Low intensity speakers find it rude to talk at the same time and prefer people speak one after another in conversation.

The differences in conversational styles became evident when participants listened to audio clips in which two people spoke at the same time but were agreeing with each other and stayed on topic, Hilton said. The high intensity group reported that conversations where people spoke at the same time when expressing agreement were not interruptive but engaged and friendlier than the conversations with moments of silence in between speaking turns. In contrast, the low intensity group perceived any amount of simultaneous (同时) chat as a rude interruption, regardless of what the speakers were saying.

“People care about being interrupted, and those small interruptions can have a massive effect on the overall communication,” Hilton said. “Breaking apart what an interruption means is essential if we want to understand how humans interact with each other.”

10 . When learning a foreign language, most people fall back on traditional methods: reading, writing, listening and repeating. But Brian Mathias’ research team found out that if you gesture with your arms while studying, you can remember the vocabulary better, even months later.

As Mathias describes, they had 22 German-speaking adults learn a total of 90 invented artificial words over four days. While the test subjects first heard the new vocabulary, they were shown a video of a person making a gesture that matched the meaning of the word. When the word was repeated, the subjects performed the gesture themselves. Five months later, they were asked to translate the vocabulary they had learned into German. Those who performed better on the task showed a higher level of activity in their motor cortex — the part of the brain that is responsible for our body movements. The researchers concluded that the motor cortex contributed to the translation of the vocabulary learned with gestures. The effect did not occur when the subjects were only presented with matching pictures instead of gestures.

Another research group led by Leipzig had young adults and eight-year-old children listen to new vocabulary for five days, paired with matching pictures or videos of gestures. After two months, the two methods were still tied. But after six months, the adults benefited more from the gestures than the pictures, while the children were helped equally by both.

But it is not only the motor component itself that promotes learning. The meaning conveyed by the gesture also figures in. “I think we underuse gesture in our classrooms,” Goldin-Meadow says. “Good teachers and good listeners use it, but not always in a systematic way. Others don’t necessarily bring it into the class — and it could be used more often and more effectively.”