news 2022

Researchers have demonstrated how Apple's use of a widely adopted data protection model could expose individuals to privacy attacks. By investigating Apple's use of the model, called local differential privacy (LDP), the researchers found that individuals' preferred emoji skin tone and political leanings could be inferred from the company's data.

Students who study Virgil's Aeneid at school find it significantly more engaging than other 'high-prestige' literature, even though they only learn tiny fragments of the text, research suggests. Ultimately, if this is high-level poetry that students actually like, perhaps we ought to be finding ways to give them the chance to do it Frances Foster The finding comes from a limited study with three groups of 15 and 16-year-old state school students taking Latin GCSE, and raises the possibility that there may be a case for expanding ancient literature's use in the wider curriculum.

In languages spoken around the world, words describing rough surfaces are highly likely to feature a 'trilled /r/' sound - a linguistic pattern that stretches back over 6,000 years, a new study reveals. Language scientists first analysed words for 'rough' and 'smooth' in a worldwide sample of 332 spoken languages - discovering a strong link between the sounds of speech and the sense of touch, which has influenced the structure of modern languages.