#corepaedianews

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Why some people lose their accents but others don’t – linguistic expert

FGC/Shutterstock Jane Setter, University of Reading The way a person speaks is an intrinsic part of their identity. It’s tribal, marking a speaker as being from one social group or another. Accents are a sign of belonging as much as something that separates communities. Yet we can probably all think of examples of people who seem to have “lost” their regional or national accent and of others…

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Four common misconceptions about quantum physics

Shrödinger’s cat is world famous, but what does it really mean? Robert Couse-Baker/Flickr, CC BY-SA Alessandro Fedrizzi, Heriot-Watt University and Mehul Malik, Heriot-Watt University Quantum mechanics, the theory which rules the microworld of atoms and particles, certainly has the X factor. Unlike many other areas of physics, it is bizarre and counter-intuitive, which makes it dazzling and…

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The world’s first Islamic art biennale shines a light on African artists

Marco Cappelletti/OMA/Islamic Arts Biennale Sumayya Vally, UCL The inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (Biennales are large and prestigious international art exhibitions held every two years.) This important new event for the Muslim world features numerous African artists. And the biennale’s artistic director is Sumayya Vally, a South African architecture…

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Sudan’s people toppled a dictator – despite the war they’re still working to bring about democratic change

Civilians protest in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, in December 2022. AFP via Getty Images Linda Bishai, George Washington University While Sudan’s generals have unleashed indiscriminate destruction and occupation on wide swaths of the capital, Khartoum, neighbourhood resistance committees and pro-democracy activists have stepped up to respond to the needs of citizens. They have risked their lives…

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The Nakba: how the Palestinians were expelled from Israel

Evicted: about 750,000 Palestinians were killed or expelled from their land during the Nakba which began on May 15 1948. Anas-Mohammed/Shutterstock Marwan Darweish, Coventry University Until 1948, Lajjun was a small village about ten miles south of Nazareth in one of the most fertile valleys in Palestine. Since 1949, the area has been occupied by Jewish settlers who established Kibbutz Meggido…

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Too many digital distractions are eroding our ability to read deeply, and here’s how we can become aware of what’s happening — podcast

Constant distractions affect our ability to concentrate. (Shutterstock) Nehal El-Hadi, The Conversation and Daniel Merino, The Conversation Staying focused on a single task for a long period of time is a growing concern. We are confronted with and have to process incredible amounts of information daily, and our brains are often functioning in overdrive to manage the processing and…

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Salman Rushdie’s Victory City review: a storyteller at the height of his powers

Florian Stadtler, University of Bristol Victory City is an epic chronicle of the rise and fall of Vijayanagar (the capital city of the historic southern Indian Vijayanagara empire), which acquires the name “Bisnaga” through ill-fated attempts at pronunciation by a Portuguese traveller. The story unfolds as a fictional retelling of Bisnaga’s history, premised on the archaeological discovery of the…

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Death and dying: how different cultures deal with grief and mourning

John Frederick Wilson, York St John University Grief is a universal emotion. It’s something we all feel, no matter where we come from or what we’ve been through. Grief comes for us all and as humans who form close relationships with other people, it’s hard to avoid. Studies of grieving brains – be it scans of the brain regions which process grief, or measures of the stress hormone cortisol that…

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The 2,700-year-old rock carvings from when Nineveh was the most dazzling city in the world

<figure> <img src=”https://images.theconversation.com/files/501245/original/file-20221215-23-zd431c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip&#8221; /> <figcaption> Sennacherib – his face deliberately damaged in antiquity – presides over captives from the Levantine city of Lachish. <span class=”attribution”><a class=”source”…

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COVID vaccines: should people under 50 in the UK be offered a fourth dose?

Studio Romantic/Shutterstock Alessandro Siani, University of Portsmouth It’s been nearly two years since Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world to receive an approved COVID vaccine at a clinic in Coventry on December 8, 2020. Since then, almost 13 billion doses of various COVID vaccines have been administered globally. And they are estimated to have prevented millions of…

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Rosetta Stone: a new museum is reviving calls to return the artefact to Egypt

The Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Ashy Cat Inc, CC BY-NC-SA Claire Gilmour, University of Bristol With the Arab spring of 2011, a downturn in tourism and the devastation of COVID, the odds have been stacked against the opening of Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, work on which began in 2005 and is due to complete 2023. Nevertheless, it will house over 100,000 artefacts and become the largest…

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COP27 will be remembered as a failure – here’s what went wrong

Mark Maslin, UCL; Priti Parikh, UCL; Richard Taylor, UCL, and Simon Chin-Yee, UCL Billed as “Africa’s COP”, the 27th UN climate change summit (otherwise known as COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, was expected to promote climate justice, as this is the continent most affected but least responsible for the climate crisis. Negotiations for a fund that would compensate developing countries for the…

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World Cup 2022: Qatar is accused of ‘sportswashing’ but do the fans really care?

Doha. All clean? Shutterstock/HasanZaidi Argyro Elisavet Manoli, Loughborough University Fifa’s choice of Qatar as host of the 2022 men’s football World Cup has been controversial since day one. Questions continue to be raised about the nation’s attitude to human rights, and its treatment of migrant workers. To some, the entire event exemplifies the concept of “sportswashing” – using sport as a…

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Ukraine war: what are ‘dirty bombs’ and why is Russia suddenly talking about them?

Christoph Bluth, University of Bradford Since the invasion of Ukraine in February, the threat that weapons of mass destruction would be used has been a constant concern. Discussion of this threat has tended to focus on the possibility that Russia might resort to using its nuclear arsenal – something hinted at several times by the Russian president Vladimir Putin and his senior colleagues. On…

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My work investigating the links between viruses and Alzheimer’s disease was dismissed for years – but now the evidence is building

Shutterstock/Jorm S Ruth Itzhaki, University of Oxford This article is part of the Insights Uncharted Brain series. There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer’s disease. Here, Ruth Itzhaki reflects on a career dedicated to one of the more controversial lines of research. Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in…

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Are butter boards bad for you? An expert view on the latest food trend

Butter boards are sort of like a charcuterie board featuring artisanal butters. zarzamora/ Shutterstock Duane Mellor, Aston University In an unexpected twist, butter seems to be back on the menu. After years of being a maligned ingredient that many people shied away from, butter has now become the latest food trend on social media, thanks to the recent popularity of “butter boards”. These are…