From English to Chinese, Hungarian and Zulu, people who speak different languages make the same links between sounds and shapes, a new study shows. An international research team has conducted the largest cross-cultural test of the'bouba-kiki effect' – the tendency to associate made-up words'bouba' with a round shape and'kiki' with a spiky shape. The researchers surveyed 917 speakers of 25 different languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. They found the effect exists independently of the language that a person speaks or the writing system that they use, whether it's the Roman alphabet (A, B, C), the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma) or Chinese characters (北, 方, 话). Such universally-meaningful vocalisations may form a global basis for the creation of new words, such as terms that circulate on social media. Bouba and kiki shapes used in the experiment.

One thing nerds like to argue about is what nerds are allowed to argue about. If you agree to stipulate that science fiction is often one of those things--and, hey, we could argue about that--then a problem to solve is the boundaries of that genre, the what-it-is and what-it-isn't. Finding the edges of science fiction is like taking a walk around a hypercube in zero-gee; you keep bumping into walls and falling into other dimensions. Reasonable people don't even agree on when it started-- Frankenstein? A story where a ghost kills people is horror; what if a robot did it?