Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient. A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as 'Star Trek' and 'Game of Thrones.' To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language. 'We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,' says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study....

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, no longer has to stay in France. A source told AFP that the investigating judge in charge of Durov's case has accepted a request to modify the conditions of his supervision. 'As you may have heard, I've returned to Dubai after spending several months in France due to an investigation related to the activity of criminals on Telegram,' Durov wrote on Monday in a message posted to his Telegram channel. 'The process is ongoing, but it feels great to be home.' Shortly afterward, the Paris criminal court, which is in charge of the investigation, explained the reasons for his arrest. Most of the charges revolve around the Telegram founder allegedly being complicit in facilitating organized fraud, illegal transitions, and the sharing of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) on the messaging and social platform. At the time, Durov agreed to pay a '5 million bail ($5.5 million at current exchange rates) and to check in at a police station twice a week. He was also barred from leaving France during the investigation. But those conditions appear to have been modified now ' enabling him to leave the country legally....

For three years, I was President Barack Obama's Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: 'He's a transactional leader.' I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin's thinking and intentions. I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He's been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don't define the whole of his project....

Consequences of the United States rapidly slashing foreign aid are reverberating across the world, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an unidentified illness with Ebola-like symptoms has ravaged several villages. This sickness has killed over 60 people and sickened more than a thousand, and it is occurring at the same time as an Ebola outbreak in neighboring Uganda, as well as increasing political violence within the DRC. Experts say that Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency's dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has stymied the response to this unidentified disease, delaying further investigations and containment efforts of additional disease outbreaks. 'Medical staff along the Uganda'DRC border have been terminated. Soldiers are everywhere. The laboratory built to deal with zoonotic diseases with US funding is empty,' says Tim Allen, a London School of Economics professor and tropical-disease-control expert on the ground at the border of Uganda and the DRC....