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Researchers from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute discovered that the first language we are exposed to has a lasting influence on the way the brain processes the other languages even when the first language is no longer spoken. They studied how the children from diverse linguistic backgrounds processed pseudo-French words and used the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe the parts of their brains that got activated. Read more about their research here.

What is exactly happening when a raindrop slides down a glass window? Whenever a fluid comes in contact with a solid, a ‘contact line’ is formed. How the liquid droplets spread out on a solid surface has been difficult for scientists to explain in physical and mathematical models. Weiqing Ren of A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing and his colleagues combined mathematical and computational methods to come up with a 'first-principle' hydrodynamic model that explains how a fluid droplet moves on a solid surface. Read more about their research here.

What could be the similarity between human skin and turtle shell? A group of researchers led by molecular biologist Leopold Eckhart of the University Department of Dermatology at MedUni Vienna studied the genes that help in the formation of the shell in the European terrapin and a North American species of turtle. They discovered that the mutations responsible for the hard shell originate in a group of genes known as the Epidermal Differentiation Complex (EDC). Read more about their research here.

Zebrafish are extensively used as model organism by biologists. Researchers have wondered how their dark blue and bright yellow stripes develop. Alexandria Volkening, a graduate student from Brown University's Division of Applied Mathematics and the lead author, devised a model that treated cells as individual agents and studied their interaction with each other. Read more about their research here.

One of the most conventional ways of creating fusion energy is using high-power lasers to heat material. However, this process is slow because the energy from the laser targets and heats up the electrons, which in turn heat up the ions. Now theoretical physicists from Imperial College London have developed a method by which certain metals can be heated to ten million degrees, which is hotter than the Sun’s core, in less than a million millionth of a second. Read more about their research here.

Researchers from Umeå University in Sweden collaborated with researchers from the Netherlands and the US to discover a new method of detecting and classifying cancer at an early stage through blood test. They took blood samples from 283 individuals of which 228 people had some form of cancer and 55 showed no evidence of cancer. Read more about their research here.

A group of conservation biologists at the University of Exeter have confirmed that the extinction of one species of a carnivore can lead to the extinction of fellow species of predators. The research team placed several species of aphids and parasitoid wasps, which are aphids’ natural enemies, in experimental communities with complex food webs in outdoor field cages. Read more about their research here.

The popularity of 3-D printers is soaring. But how safe are they? Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that parts of materials produced by common commercial 3-D printers – including the one that melts plastic to build a part, and another that uses light to turn a liquid into a solid part – were toxic to zebrafish embryos. Read more about their research here.

Researchers have wondered why so few particles of antimatter are found in the universe despite the fact that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the instant of Big Bang. One explanation was that antimatter probably lacked the same attractive force as matter. However, Kefeng Xin, a graduate student at Rice University, along with a team of researchers, measured the scattering length and the effective range of interaction between two antiprotons. Read on to know more about their research.

Climate scientists have proposed different ways of countering global warming that has warmed the planet – for instance, pumping water-based sulphate spray into the sky to reflect and scatter the Sun's energy – but most have been highly debated. Now a team of researchers from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have suggested that a safer way of dealing with global warming would be to use dusts of solid, nanometre-sized particles of diamond or aluminum oxide as it would be less damaging to the atmosphere. Read more about their research here.