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Word Origins

Gr-words as mushrooms

Some words propagate like mushrooms: no roots but a sizable crowd of upstarts calling themselves relatives. Gr-words are the pet subject of all works on sound imitation and sound symbolism.

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Word Origins

Monosyllabic moping

The Oxford Etymologist the common but etymologically opaque verb “mope”, and other monosyllabic verbs.

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The Age of Interconnection by Jonathan Sperber

Infectious disease in the twentieth century

In the first half of the century, the three great killers among endemic diseases—smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis—raging around the world (we think today of malaria as a tropical malady but in the 1920s there were outbreaks as far north as Siberia) were each responsible for more deaths than the 80 million who died in both world wars. Innovations stemming from the Second World War, an immense hothouse of technological progress, made it possible to contemplate combatting infectious disease on a global scale.

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The Journal of Gerontology

What do we know about the effect of gut microbiome in diet and exercise on brain health?

The gastrointestinal tract is one of the most densely populated microbial habitats on earth, containing more cells than those that make up the human body and 150 times the number of genes than exist within the human genome. An unhealthy gut environment is characterized by a reduction in the diversity of bacteria, leading to gut barrier permeability and the release of endotoxins into the blood stream that negatively impacts the brain.

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