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Our brains start soaking in details from the languages around us from the moment we can hear them. One of the first things infants learn of their native languages is the system of consonants and vowels, as well as other speech sound characteristics, like pitch. In the first year of life, a baby’s ear tunes in to the particular set of sounds being spoken in its environment, and the brain starts developing the ability to tell subtle differences among them—a foundation that will make a difference in meaning down the line, allowing the child to learn words and grammar.

But what happens if that child gets shifted into a different culture after laying the foundations of its first native language? Does it forget everything about that first language, or are there some remnants that remain buried in the brain?

According to a recent PNAS paper, the effects of very early language learning are permanently etched into the brain, even if input from that language stops and it’s replaced by another language. To identify this lasting influence, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on children who had been adopted to see what neural patterns could be identified years after adoption.

Earlier this week, Bill Cosby made clear he “does not intend to dignify” the many allegations against him—a promise he has so far fulfilled by hiring attorney Marty Singer, whose response had so far ensured that complete lack of dignity. After sending one of his trademark threatening letters to BuzzFeed, suggesting that the site and anyone else publishing stories from Cosby’s alleged accusers was placing themselves in peril of legal prosecution, Singer has now released another, much lengthier statement blasting those women and the media. Like so many of Singer’s missives, it’s grating, confusing in parts, and no one is looking forward to seeing it. He is quickly becoming the Leonard Part 6 of lawyers.

Singer’s letter specifically blasts Linda Joy Traitz—who claimed Cosby drove her to the beach, offered her pills, and attempted to force himself on her—by referencing her criminal history ...

The ongoing “Monty Python vs. God” debate has taken a new turn as The Independent reports that “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life,” the Eric Idle-penned ode to life being a joke and death an even bigger joke, is now the most popular song played at funerals in the U.K. This means that it must have been played in a church at some point, a deeply ironic development considering the film the song comes from, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, was widely censored for blasphemy upon its initial release. This also means that it is more popular than traditional religious funeral songs like Abide With Me and The Lord Is My Shepherd among recently-deceased British people.

“Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” also knocked Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” from the top spot for the first time in a decade, which makes sense because ...

It looks like we’re getting our wish: Idris Elba is going to continue his habit of recording albums inspired by characters he’s played. In an interview on the BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Elba announced plans to create an album of music inspired by his detective character, John Luther. He believes that the tortured investigator, whom Elba has played for three seasons and a just-announced upcoming miniseries, is rich source material:

“Detectives carry a lot of stuff. They meet someone who’s done something heinous, but they have to have an objective perspective on them until proven... That could create some really good songs... and definitely an interesting mood, musically .”

Whereas Elba’s first foray into character-based music, Mi Mandela (due on November 24), was recorded during three weeks of improvising and jamming in Johannesburg with South African musicians, he says that this music would be very ...

In what may be the coup de grâce of his decade-long quest to gain the love of the entire Internet, The Hobbit star Martin Freeman is now in talks to play Tina Fey’s boyfriend in the upcoming Afghan war comedy The Taliban Shuffle, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He’s already launched a thousand ships with his appearances in The Hobbit trilogy and Sherlock, but a Freeman-Fey screen romance would be on another level entirely.

Freeman, currently on a hot streak that precisely no one is calling the Freemanaissance, would play a Scottish photojournalist working alongside Fey’s character in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the main thrust of Operation Enduring Freedom, where the pair become emotionally entwined. Based on journalist Kim Barker’s memoir of her time spent covering the war for the Chicago Tribune, The Taliban Shuffle will show the dangerous and often absurd world that war correspondents ...

Using Photoshop usually requires lugging a typically cumbersome, expensive computer around, and changing that experience has been the dream of many creatives for years. As we found out back in September, it's a problem that Adobe has been actively working with Google to solve. The two companies have been working together for almost two years to bring Photoshop to the browser, and they finally have a working version called Photoshop Streaming that they're letting educational institutions apply to test over the next six months. Yesterday, I got a look at it in action when Adobe's director of engineering, Kirk Gould, remotely ran me through a brief demo of the program.

Adobe will test it for about six months in the education sector

The way it works is pretty simple. The application is downloaded via the Chrome Web Store, and when you open it up you're actually connecting to a server which is running the desktop version of Photoshop CC 2014. The UI of the desktop version is captured as a video and sent to your browser, where javascript relays your actions back to the server, completing the interactive loop. It's not much different from how a virtual machine setup works, but it means that the application could be run in the browser on any computer — even on Chromebooks. Adobe essentially wants to let you stream a pound-for-pound copy of Photoshop, and Gould said the company is about 90-percent there.

It does, however, have its limits. Right now, Photoshop Streaming works exclusively with files hosted on Google Drive, but Gould said Adobe hopes to add the ability to work with other cloud storage services down the road. There are core functions that don't work in the program at the moment, such as printing, or processes that require a GPU like Photoshop's 3D functions. Otherwise, everything from making layer masks to using the Camera Raw editor works, though it was difficult to judge the amount of lag over the screen sharing software. Gould was able to quickly open a 30mb PSD file and make some quick edits to it.

Adobe will use the trial period to build out functionality and troubleshoot the overall experience from the feedback it gets. Many educational institutions are full of people working with low-end hardware — which is what Adobe wants to optimize the program for. Gould says that once Adobe feels comfortable with the experience it will open up the trial to a broader audience and — someday — a commercial release.

In early 2013, researchers exposed some unsettling risks stemming from Android-based password managers. In a paper titled "Hey, You, Get Off of My Clipboard," they documented how passwords managed by 21 of the most popular such apps could be accessed by any other app on an Android device, even those with extremely low-level privileges. They suggested several measures to help fix the problem.

Almost two years later, the threat remains viable in at least some, if not all, of the apps originally analyzed. An app recently made available on Google Play, for instance, has no trouble divining the passwords managed by LastPass, one of the leading managers on the market, as well as the lesser-known KeePassDroid. With additional work, it's likely that the proof-of-concept ClipCaster app would work seamlessly against many other managers, too, said Xiao Bao Clark, the Australia-based programmer who developed it. While ClipCaster does nothing more than display the plaintext of passwords that LastPass and KeePassDroid funnel through Android handsets, a malicious app with only network privileges could send the credentials to an attacker without the user having any idea what was happening.

"Besides the insecurity of it, what annoyed me was that I was never told any of this while I was signing up or setting up the LastPass app," Clark wrote in an e-mail. "Instead, I got the strong impression from LastPass that everything was very secure, and I needn't worry about any of it. If they at least told users the security issues using these features brings, then the users themselves could decide on their own trade-off between usability and security. Not mentioning it at all strikes me as disingenuous."