He is described as one of Napoleon's soldiers, covered in wounds and blindly patriotic. His name gave French, then English, the word 'chauvinism'. But historian Gérard de Puymège, in a 1993 book, concluded that he was a legendary figure, shaped after the Empire by popular songs and vaudeville plays. No reliable trace of this Nicolas Chauvin has ever been found: chauvinism was born of a fiction.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.