Prosodic variation between contexts in infant-directed speech.

Speakers consider their listeners and adjust the way they communicate. One well-studied example is the register of infant-directed speech (IDS), which differs acoustically from speech directed to adults. However, little work has explored how parents adjust speech to infants across different contexts.

Contraception Update: A Focus on Safety and Efficacy.

This clinical update serves as a brief summary of recently published and potentially practice changing journal articles. We review recent publications related to contraceptive safety and efficacy. The article discusses updated medical eligibility recommendations, effectiveness of progestin-only pills (including the newly approved over-the-counter pill), safety of estrogen containing contraceptives in those with migraine, topiramate interactions with hormonal contraception, and the use of nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) with oral emergency contraception to improve efficacy.

The crone and the hydra: Figuring temporal relations to aging code.

Managing older software code, often referred to as legacy code, entails a great deal of complexity, as the longer a software system has been around, the more likely it has been subjected to revisions and has grown in its interdependencies to other components written at different times by different people. This can lead to software being seen as aging and in decline as it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. At the same time, writing new lines of code or updating to new platforms, languages, and software tools, can also be positioned as a means to rejuvenate organizational work, acting as a salve to overcome hardware limitations, or other forms of stagnation.

Marking prosodic prominence for voice assistant and human addressees.

Prosodic prominence (realized with phonetic features such as increased intensity, duration, and pitch, among others) is thought to guide listeners' attention by focusing new information. This study investigates production and perception of prosodic prominence toward two types of addressees: a human and a voice assistant interlocutor. We examine how the language system adapts to this increasingly common technology, by testing whether prosodic prominence is subject to when addressing an interlocutor that is consistently rated as having less communicative ability.

PP2A licenses the FANCD2/FANCI complex for chromosome loading.

The Fanconi anemia (FA) pathway removes interstrand crosslinks (ICLs) between the Watson-Crick strands of the DNA double helix in humans. Central to the pathway is the FANCD2/FANCI complex, which must be loaded onto chromosomes. Here, we report the identification of a PP2A phosphatase complex, which specifically dephosphorylates an inhibitory cluster in FANCD2, thereby licensing its loading in response to DNA damage.