#bbc future

An article in BBC Future about linguistic representation on the internet. 

The Kaqchikel Mayan community from Guatemala includes more than half a million speakers. Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Kumez is part of it and was one of the organisers of the first Latin American Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet, held in 2019.

“When I get on the internet I find more than 90% of the content in English and hence a significant percentage in Spanish and other languages,” he says. “So what I have to do is to move to another language, and that favours the displacement of my own language.”

“It discredits my own language, because – as it is not on the internet – then it is not valid, then it does not work, therefore why am I going to continue learning it? Why am I going to teach it to my children if, when I turn on the internet or television, I cannot find it there?”

Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. His dream is to be able to have a “digital life in my own language, and when I decide to move to another language that it will be my decision”.

He is not the only one with that dream. In 2003, Unesco adopted a recommendation to promote the use of multilingualism online. Ever since, the organisation has been pushing for universality on the internet, with a special focus on indigenous languages.

Will we ever be able to freeze time?

Stasis is a way of pausing physical and chemical processes – including those of life. It could be a way for us to save the critically ill, or allow ultra-long space missions.

The American poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote: “Time is the fire in which we burn.”  We are born, we live and we die. Yet throughout history, we have been fascinated with the possibility of sidestepping time, from fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty to stasis fields and suspended animation in science fiction.

In 1971, Joseph Hafele and Richard Keating placed four atomic clocks on aeroplanes, which flew twice around the world, first eastward, then westward. They were then compared with reference atomic clocks, and found to disagree.

As the Hafele–Keating experiment proved, the rate at which time passes is circumstantial and situational. “If you are travelling at super-relativistic speeds, which are close to the speed of light, or near a black hole (and somehow not being destroyed by it) the amount of time you will experience is going to be less than the amount of time of someone else,” says Katie Mack, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

Astronauts onboard the International Space Station experience time-dilation, as they age a little bit slower than people on Earth. “They are moving quickly, so they are affected by special relativity, but they are also further from the Earth, so they get less gravitational effects,” explains Mack.

However, this time dilation is only measured in seconds. In order to obtain significant time dilation, immense gravitational fields or near-lightspeed travel would be required. Both are completely untenable at present.

Quando pensi ai 70 anni, probabilmente immagini qualcuno più lento, magari con qualche acciacco o con difficoltà motorie. E se ti dicessi che molto di quello che ti succederà tra quattro decenni si decide già nei tuoi 30?Secondo un articolo pubblicato dalla BBC, la decade tra i 30 e i 39 anni rappresenta un vero “punto di svolta” per l’invecchiamento sano: in questo periodo infatti cominciano a…

The deep Earth contains vast mountain ranges with peaks up to four times the height of Everest. But no one knows why.

"Hidden 'mountain' ranges – peaks that no explorer has ever set foot on, no sunlight has ever illuminated."

ULVZs (ultra-low velocity zones)

Antarctica

Interior Mountains

deep-Earth mountains