Lost in translation: five common English phrases you may be using incorrectly

English is a language rich with imagery, meaning and metaphor – and when we want to express ourselves we can draw upon a canon replete with beautifully turned phrases, drawing from the language’s Latin, French and Germanic roots, through Chaucer and Shakespeare right up to myriad modern wordsmiths – not to mention those apt aphorisms that English has appropriated from other languages.

So why is it we so regularly misuse some of these phrases? Here are five of the most common sayings that have somehow become lost in translation.

The proof is in the pudding

This is a confusion of a proverb first recorded in 1605 in its correct form: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. One of the reasons for the confusion is that the word “proof” is being used in the older sense “test” – preserved today in a proofreader who checks the test pages (or “proof”) of a book before publication. Confusion was further encouraged by the tendency for people to use a shortened version of the proverb – the proof of the pudding.

Since the word “proof” is today more commonly used to mean “evidence”, the phrase was reworded as if it implied that the evidence for some claim can be located in a pudding. The true explanation of this phrase is quite simple – especially for fans of the Great British Bake-Off – it doesn’t matter how fancy the decoration and presentation, the true test of a pudding is in how it tastes. Or, more generally, the success of something can only be judged by putting it to its intended use.

The exception that proves the rule

This phrase is most commonly used to argue that something that doesn’t conform to a rule somehow validates it. This can hardly be the correct use, however, since the claim that all birds can fly is invalidated rather than confirmed by the discovery of penguins or emus. This confusion is often attributed to an incorrect understanding of the word “prove”, which it is claimed is here being used to mean “test”. According to this explanation, the phrase means that an exception is the means by which a rule is tested. If the exception cannot be accounted for, the rule must be discarded.

Not just an ordinary pair of gloves

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech.

The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate students. This year, UW sophomores Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor — who are studying business administration and aeronautics and astronautics engineering, respectively — won the “Use It” undergraduate category that recognizes technology-based inventions to improve consumer devices.

Their invention, “SignAloud,” is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

They honed their prototype in the UW CoMotion MakerSpace — a campus space that offers communal tools and equipment and opportunities for students to tinker, create and innovate. For Azodi and Pryor, that meant finding a way to translate American Sign Language into a verbal form instantaneously and in an ergonomic fashion.

“Many of the sign language translation devices already out there are not practical for everyday use. Some use video input, while others have sensors that cover the user’s entire arm or body,” said Pryor, an undergraduate researcher in the Composite Structures Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics and software lead for the Husky Robotics Team.

“Our gloves are lightweight, compact and worn on the hands, but ergonomic enough to use as an everyday accessory, similar to hearing aids or contact lenses,” said Pryor.

Dollard teen discovers pothole solution

There is a delicious irony in knowing that a 14-year-old from Dollard-des-Ormeaux may have found an amazingly simple remedy to Canada’s perennial pothole problem.

While governments spend millions annually in largely futile attempts to repair our rotting roadways, David Ballas, a Grade 9 student at West Island College, believes he may have come up with a cost-effective solution by mixing chicken feathers with asphalt to form a nearly impermeable surface.

Don’t laugh: The French term for potholes is nids-de-poule, or chicken nests.

Ballas’s discovery took the form of a science project, which recently garnered first prize at his school’s science fair. That honour will allow him to represent WIC next month at the Montreal Regional Science Fair at Concordia University.

Ballas came up with the idea after his mother, Joy Struzer, blew a car tire after hitting a pothole in Dollard. It wasn’t the first time, either.

So Ballas consulted a few chemists, who encouraged him to look for “hydrophobic” materials, a scientific term for water repellent.

Ballas found his answer during an Internet search for waste materials with hydrophobic surfaces.

“The first thing that I found was chicken feathers. Actually, there are 5 million tonnes of them that are wasted every year, just in Quebec. It was a perfect idea.”

Questions Before Answers: What Drives a Great Lesson?

Recently, I was looking through my bookshelves and discovered an entire shelf of instruction books that came with software I had previously purchased. Yes, there was a time when software was bought in stores, not downloaded. Upon closer examination of these instruction books, I noticed that many of them were for computers and software that I no longer use or even own. More importantly, most were still in shrink-wrap, never opened. I recalled that when I bought software, I just put the disk into the computer and never looked at the book.

I realized that I did the same when I bought a new car -- with one exception. I never read the instruction book in the glove compartment. I just turned on the engine and drove off. I already knew how to drive, so I didn't need a book. The exception occurred when I tried to set the clock. I couldn't figure it out, so I finally opened the glove compartment and checked the book.

This pattern was and is true for every device I buy. I never read the book that comes with a toaster, an iPod, or a juicer unless I have a question. There are some people who do read instruction books before using a device, but with no disrespect intended, those people are a small minority. Our minds are set up to not care about answers unless we have a question. The greater the question, the more compelling it is, the more we want the answer. We learn best when questions come before answers.

The Need to Know

Too many classrooms ignore this basic learning model. They spend most of class time providing information and then ask questions in the form of a quiz, test, or discussion. This is backward. Too many students never learn this way. It is simply too hard to understand, organize, interpret, or make sense out of information -- or even to care about it -- unless it answers a question that students care about.

Lessons, units, and topics are more motivating when they begin with a question whose answer students want to know. Not only do great questions generate interest, they also answer the question that so many students wonder about: "Why do I have to learn this?" Finally, great questions increase cognitive organization of the content by framing it into a meaningful answer to the opening question.

There is a catch, though, in using questions to begin your lesson. The question must be connected to the content, so that the following learning activities actually answer the question. The question must fit your students' age, ability, and experiences. In addition, the question needs to provoke both thought and curiosity. In fact, it must be compelling enough to generate so much motivation so that students can't help but want to know the answer.

Why elephants never forget

It’s a common saying that elephants never forget. But the more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth. Alex Gendler takes us into the incredible, unforgettable mind of an elephant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXNqsOoURg

Raindrops break the speed limit

Tiny drops fall faster than expected, and scientists don't know why.

Some of those tiny raindrops that keep falling on your head may be outlaws, of a sort. They have been caught breaking the speed limit.
A falling object reaches what’s known as its terminal velocity when friction — the slowing force of air — cancels the downward pull of gravity. That means the drop stops speeding up and keeps falling at a steady rate. This should be the top speed at which a droplet can move. Yet scientists have observed raindrops plummeting faster than their terminal velocity.

Michael Larsen is an atmospheric physicist at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bigger raindrops have a faster maximum speed than smaller ones. That’s why meteorologists often use terminal velocity to estimate the size of raindrops, he says. These estimates help determine how much rain a storm deposits over an area. So the existence of fast-fallers suggests that rainfall estimates could be distorted, Larsen told Science News.

“If you’re going to understand rain, you need to make guesses,” he says. However, he adds, “If our guesses are wrong as to how fast these drops are falling, that could ultimately affect a whole bunch of other work.”

The puzzle

A raindrop's size grows inside a cloud. A drop’s one-way ride begins when it becomes heavy enough that gravity pulls it toward the ground. But air friction slows it down. Eventually, these upward and downward forces cancel out, and the drop should maintain a constant speed: its terminal velocity. (Velocity is a measurement of how fast and in which direction an object moves.) Every object falling through the atmosphere, from skydivers to hailstones, has a terminal velocity.

What is Ebola?

An unusual type of virus has periodically led to outbreaks of a devastating infection where people may bleed to death.

 

It’s got a long name: Ebola hemorrhagic fever. As infections go, this is a scary one. It kills anywhere from 25 to 88 percent of everyone it infects. And people who do come down with the disease suffer mightily. From 2 to 21 days after exposure, they can develop a fever, headaches, muscle pain, diarrhea, vomiting and loss of appetite. As the disease progresses, it can cause the body to start bleeding internally — and seemingly uncontrollably.

The good news: This disease is not easy to spread. For instance, people do not appear to become infected through the air, as occurs with influenza and many other germs. The virus lives in blood. And that’s the primary means by which people become infected — by getting tainted blood or other bodily fluids into a cut, an eye or the mouth.

The disease takes its name from the region where it was first identified: communities near the Ebola River in what was known as Zaire. (That country is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.) As of 2014, there appear to have been 21 major outbreaks of the disease, mostly in central or East Africa. The first was reported in 1976. At that time, 318 people in Zaire contracted the disease — and 280 died.

The germ responsible is called a filovirus. It’s a threadlike germ that causes only two known diseases: Ebola and a related infection known as Marburg. No one knows where the virus hides between outbreaks in humans. The suspicion is that bats, deerlike creatures, or some other wild animals carry the virus — perhaps without becoming ill themselves. Then, when people pick up an infected animal, or butcher it to eat it, they may encounter the virus.

Bracing sand sculptures with gravity

Gravity keeps giant sandstone arches and pillars from crumbling.

 

 

Gravity keeps things from flying off the planet. It also helps towering pillars and soaring arches of sand stand up to the weather, scientists now report.
Tiny grains of sand stick together to form a type of rock called sandstone. Over time, wind and rain chip away at the edges, carving large natural sculptures that resemble arches and pillars. Scientists have typically credited sandstone's endurance to a chemical glue. It was supposed to hold the grains together. A study published July 21 in Nature Geoscience now challenges that explanation.

The study began when Jiří Bruthans was visiting a quarry. He's a geologist at the Czech Republic’s Charles University in Prague. Bruthans noticed a funny thing about sandstone at the quarry. Workers had to use explosives to break apart big chunks of the stone. But small rocks quickly crumbled in his hand. Something didn't add up.

Bruthans suspected some other force, not glue, was holding the sand together. So he gathered some scientists and started playing with the sand. They built sand cubes 10 centimeters (4 inches) on a side. Then they added 1-kilogram (2.2-pound) weights on top. Those weights simulated the downward force that would come from rocks stacked on top of sandstone. Then they put the cubes in water, allowing it to pick away at the edges, just as the weather might.

Over time, sides of the blocks eroded. Grains there had gradually fallen away. The process left an hourglass-shaped pillar that still held up the weight. And after a few minutes, the scientists found that the remaining pillars were even stronger than the original cube had been.

They concluded that as gravity pulled on those heavy weights, the downward force actually increased the sculpture's resistance to erosion.

“The weight allows these formations to withstand what would be horrendous weathering processes,” such as rain and wind, Alan Mayo told Science News. A geologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, he worked with Bruthans on the project. “These things survive thousands of years in a harsh environment,” he notes.

What are asteroids?

Unless they’re ‘trojans,’ most of these space rocks fly in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

 
The solar system contains millions of asteroids. They may be round or oblong. Some have even stranger shapes, as though molded in play dough and left in space to harden. All are made from the same stuff as the planets. However, unlike rocks on Earth, those that make up asteroids have not been shaped by erosion, heat or intense pressure.

All asteroids are fairly small. Their diameters tend to range from less than a kilometer (a little more than half a mile across) to nearly 1,000 kilometers (621 miles across). Together, all of the asteroids in our solar system have a combined mass that is less than that of Earth’s moon.

Some asteroids resemble small planets. More than 150 of them have their own moon. Some even have two. Still others orbit with a companion asteroid; these pairs race circles around each other as they orbit the sun.

The orbits of most fall in a swath of space between Mars and Jupiter. It’s known, naturally enough, as the asteroid belt. But that's still a lonely neighborhood: An individual asteroid is usually at least a kilometer (0.6 mile) away from its nearest neighbor.

Asteroids called trojans don't inhabit the belt. These rocks may follow a larger planet's orbit around the sun. Scientists have identified nearly 6,000 trojans that follow along in Jupiter's orbit. Earth has only one known trojan.

‘Wannabe scientists’ write about real science

High school students put together their own science writing space.

Brexton Pham, 18, has had a love of science for as long as he can remember. “I find myself reading science articles just for fun,” he says. “There’s nothing I’m more passionate about.” But Brexton, who just graduated from Kennesaw Mountain High School in Georgia, admits that a lot of science concepts are complex. In fact, he notes “I don’t always ‘get’ the material.”

When he went hunting for explanations, he found a lot of science already being written for non-scientists. But he was still disappointed. “The people who write the science literature are professionals targeting higher-education, science-enthused audiences,” he says. “But shouldn’t we be targeting the youth the most — the ones who will be deciding whether or not to pursue a career in STEM? I wanted to expose more of the masses to the awesome world of science.” (Too bad he didn’t check out Science News for Students!)

The teen saw a problem. One bored evening this past January, he decided to solve it. With the help of a few friends, he launched The Wannabe Scientist. This website explores scientific topics that range from cell phones and Stonehenge to the machinery of the heart. What’s behind the name? “I wanted to pick a name that conveyed the sense that, although all of us don’t know much, we’re all here because we genuinely want to learn about science,” Brexton explains.

Its articles are for students, and written by them. The site already gets around 6,000 hits per month and its writers keep a tough schedule. They add new posts roughly twice each day. Editor and fellow Kennesaw student Corey Fog, 18, emails out a weekly assignment. Writers respond, sending their work to editors. Once the pieces are in final form, those editors post them to the site.

Mosquitoes, be gone!

Two teens find an extract from common seeds can kill mosquito larvae and also may repel the biting adult insects.

 

LOS ANGELES — Extracts from the seeds of a common plant can kill mosquito larvae, report two teen researchers. Smoke from a candle made with wax that includes the extracts also repels adult mosquitoes. The natural chemicals therefore show promise as an alternative to synthetic pesticides, the young scientists say.
The teens reported their findings here last week, at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, or Intel ISEF. The competition was created by Society for Science & the Public (which publishes Science News for Students) and is sponsored by Intel. Each year, Intel ISEF showcases some of the best high school science projects from around the globe.
Bixa orellana is a small tree or shrub found in many tropical regions in the Americas. Its bright red seeds already have many uses, says Ester Castro, 17. She’s an 11th-grader at Asuncion Rodriguez de Sala in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico. Extracts from the seeds are a popular food coloring, she notes. Powdered seeds also are part of spice mixtures used in cooking.

Ester and classmate Keren Galarza, 16, wanted to see if chemicals in the seeds might repel mosquitoes. The seeds contain many compounds. Some of the chemicals are smelly, oily substances that float on water. These are called “volatile oils” because they contain aromatic substances that evaporate easily. Others compounds are part of a thick, sticky substance called resin. The red substance used as a food coloring is called bixin, after the plant. The liquid that’s left behind when all of these substances are removed contains a yellow coloring, called orellina.

YOUNG SCIENTISTS: Better than plywood

Two teens made a strong, waterproof building material out of things that are normally thrown away.

Nurul Roslan (left) and Hanis Zaini (right), both 17, invented a new material from a blend of recycled plastic and pineapple leaf fibers. It’s waterproof and stronger than plywood, according to tests by these teens from Melaka, Malaysia.

 

LOS ANGELES — A new material made from plant leaves could be replace plywood for many uses. The material is strong, waterproof, cheap and easy to make. Two teens invented it using a blend of pineapple waste and recycled plastics.
Those raw ingredients are abundant in Malaysia, where the girls live. The largest part of the new material is a type of plastic called high-density polyethylene. It is used to make many things, including milk jugs and shampoo bottles. Known as HDPE, this plastic is often recycled or thrown away, says Nurul Roslan, 17. She attends Mara Junior Science College Terendak in Melaka, Malaysia. But when treated like trash, the plastic doesn’t degrade quickly. Studies show that this plastic can take about 450 years to break down, she says.

The other ingredient in the new material is fiber from pineapple leaves. These leaves are tough because they contain a strong material called lignin. It doesn’t decompose quickly. Farmers often burn the leaves to dispose of them. That causes air pollution, says Nurul’s classmate Hanis Zaini, who is also 17. If farmers don’t burn the leaves, they send them to a landfill. There they join the discarded plastic.

A new grant for young inventors

Inventing something is a great way to learn. Building a wind machine can teach you about engineering. Designing a coffee maker forces you to consider aspects of chemistry. As students try to solve a problem, they begin to understand variables, engineering and design.

The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams Initiative provides grants of up to $10,000 to help high-school student groups invent. InvenTeams go on to work with scientists at local universities, to patent their devices and to make national news for their developments. But while juniors and seniors in high school might take quickly to inventing, younger students may need to get their feet wet before they feel comfortable tackling their own inventions. That’s why the InvenTeams initiative has launched a Junior Varsity division for students in 9th and 10th grades. The program will provide training for groups to come up with their own ideas and, hopefully, later apply for its “varsity” InvenTeam grants.

“We have 10 years of experience with InvenTeams, and even though the program is designed for all high school grades, we found most tended to be juniors and seniors” observes Leigh Estabrooks. She is the invention-education officer for Lemelson-MIT, in Cambridge, Mass. Estabrooks said that when her group looked into why younger grades were not participating, it found that “they were interested but less confident in their abilities to be inventive.”

How do homing pigeons navigate?

Pigeons have extraordinary navigational abilities. Take a pigeon from its loft and let it go somewhere it has never been before and it will, after circling in the sky for while, head home. This remarkable capacity extends to places tens even hundreds of kilometres from its home and is all the more remarkable to humans because we are apparently incapable of it ourselves.

But we have long made use of the pigeon’s homing ability, principally for carrying messages in the past. And for several decades now the pigeon has played centre stage in scientists’ attempts to understand the map and compass mechanisms fundamental to bird navigation.

So what have we learnt?

Out of direct contact with home, and out of the landscape to which birds have become familiar, there must nonetheless be large-scale cues available to the navigating bird with which it can estimate its position relative to home. Many theories have waxed and waned, from reading the sun’s arc to the detection of long-distance infra-sounds. But there is little support for these.

Magnetic misgivings

Most attractive and persistent has been the idea that pigeons can use the predictable gradients of intensity and dip-angle in the earth’s magnetic field to map their position relative to known values at home. The magnetic map hypothesis is attractive and persistent, but largely without support after decades of experimental research. It is also probably false.

Masters of Disguise—Amazing Insect Camouflage

To avoid becoming prey, insects use mimicry to blend into their surroundings.

When it comes to biology, mimicry is everywhere. Lions use camouflage to blend in with the savanna. Frogs use mimicry to match their green environment. Most famously, chameleons will even change color to blend in with their backgrounds. (See "Find the Mimic" in National Geographic magazine.)

For their part, researchers have long been fascinated with mimicry, and for some contemporaries of Darwin like naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, it was mimicry and camouflage that helped convince them of the power of natural selection. Nature selects for successful traits: Insects that can blend in with their environments are less likely to be eaten and are able to pass on their genes-and their natural disguises-to future generations. (Related: "Photo Gallery: Masters of Undersea Camouflage.")

But according to a study released yesterday, it turns out that a certain type of leaf mimicry dates back much further than experts believed, to the time of the dinosaurs. (See "Stick Insects Have Mimicked Plants Since the Age of Dinosaurs.")

The Beginning of Everything - The Big Bang

How did all begin? Find out here, watching this interesting video made by Kurzgesat. Kurzgesagt is a team of designers from Munich who loves science. The team makes fun, short videos trying to explain "serious" stuff such as evolution, climate change and the solar system.

Assessing the acoustics of Stonehenge

Why did the builders of Stonehenge choose to transport giant bluestones hundreds of kilometres from Wales to Salisbury Plain?

Dr George Nash from Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology is involved in research which is taking a novel approach to solving the mystery.

The ‘Landscape and Perception Project’, led by Paul Devereux and Jon Wozencroft from the Royal College of Art, has been assessing the archaeoacoustic value of the bluestones, with Dr Nash and prehistorian Professor Timothy Darvill of Bournemouth University acting as advisors on the project.

The builders of Stonehenge transported thirty or more giant bluestones 260 km from the prehistoric stone quarry of Carn Menyn Ridge in Mynydd Preseli, South-west Wales to Salisbury Plain.

The Royal College of Art team tested over a thousand rocks at points all along the Carn Menyn Ridge and found that on average, between five and ten per cent of the rocks ‘ring’ when hit with a hammer-stone. In some localised areas, the figure rises significantly to between 15 and 20 per cent.

Gladiator School Discovery Reveals Hard Lives of Ancient Warriors

Archaeologists have mapped an ancient gladiator school, where the famed warriors lived, trained, and fought.

This illustration shows the almost-complete remains of a school for gladiators found at Carnuntum in eastern Austria.

Illustration courtesy M. Klein/7reasons

 Ancient Rome's gladiators lived and trained in fortress prisons, according to an international team of archaeologists who mapped a school for the famed fighters.

Discovered at the site of Carnuntum outside Vienna, Austria, the gladiatorial school, or ludus gladiatorius, is the first one discovered outside the city of Rome. Now hidden beneath a pasture, the gladiator school was entirely mapped with noninvasive earth-sensing technologies. (See "Gladiator Training Camp.")

The discovery, reported Tuesday evening by the journal Antiquity, makes clear what sort of lives these famous ancient warriors led during the second century A.D. in the Roman Empire.

"It was a prison; they were prisoners," says University of Vienna archaeologist Wolfgang Neubauer, who led the study team. "They lived in cells, in a fortress with only one gate out." 

Why do we cry? The three types of tears

Whether we cry during a sad movie, while chopping onions, or completely involuntarily, our eyes are constantly producing tears. Alex Gendler tracks a particularly watery day in the life of Iris (the iris) as she cycles through basal, reflex and emotional tears.

Lesson by Alex Gendler, animation by The Moving Company Animation Studio.

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-we-cry-the-three-types-of-tears-alex-gendler 

What is colour?

Alan Alda recently challenged scientists to explain this simple question to 11-year-olds in less than 300 words. 

 

 What is colour?

 

It’s one of our most common experiences, and we all know it when we see it.

 

 
But what, exactly, is colour? Where does it come from, and why does it appear the way it does? Two things are responsible: light and your perceptions.