The Known Universe

Here are two videos taking you on a journey to the edge of space. The first video is the first in a series of ten, each lasting ten minutes, which visit all sorts of stellar objects along the way. If you're short of time, then you might prefer the second one which takes you from the Himalayas to the edge of our light cone in a physics-defying six minutes:

Piraha - a unique language?

The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky is best known for his thesis that all languages share an underlying common grammatical structure. Languages do of course differ in their 'surface' grammar. When you learn French or Spanish, you have to learn a whole new way of adjusting the new words you learn to make correct sentences. Chomsky claimed that, despite this, all languages were variants on a theme, having in common certain types of grammatical features. For example, one such alleged feature is recursion. A recursive language is one that allows you to embed structures in other structures. For example, you can have "John has a nice house", "John's sister has a nice house", "John's sister has a nice house which she bought recently", and so on.

According to the linguist Daniel Everett, the Piraha language lacks even this basic feature along with words for numbers and colours. In this short video, you can find out more. For those interested, here's a long article from the New Yorker magazine with more details.

Size is everything

Ever wanted to know how much bigger a grain of rice is than a virus? Or an atom? Go here to find out.