Hello, it's Fern Cotton here. Now, my podcast, Happy Place, is brought to you by Mindful Chef,

where healthy eating is made easy. Mindful Chef at the UK's highest rated recipe box,

having delivered over 30 million meals to more than 383,000 happy customers.

Right, I'll be honest a lot of the time, especially during the working week.

I just don't feel like I've got time to properly prioritize thinking about making lovely healthy meals.

This is why I'm so grateful for Mindful Chef with 20 new recipes to choose from every week,

and with meals on the table in as little as 15 minutes, they're basically doing all the

thinking for me. Sign up now to get 25% off your first four boxes, using the code Happy Place at the checkout.

This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Some words imitate the sounds made by the things they describe, like buzz, or hiss,

or zip. For you, language lovers, that's called Anomatopoeia. But what if the way a word sounds

could evoke some other feature of an object, like its shape? Well, a new study suggests not only

that it can, but that the same word can do so across multiple languages. The findings are in

the journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The researchers were interested

in studying the evolution of language. Both the the ancient origins of language going back

hundreds of thousands of years ago, or maybe even a million to years ago, and also the ongoing

evolution of modern languages. Marcus Proman, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

He says that a century ago, linguists insisted that the words we assign to various objects and

actions are essentially arbitrary, and that words don't necessarily resemble or sound like the

things to which they refer. There's nothing doggy sounding about the word dog or feline sounding

about the word cat. Well, that makes sense, because different languages have different words

for the same thing. One person's pup is another one's perro. But there's a lot of evidence now

...