In 1920, writer Karel Čapek published R.U.R., a play about artificial workers who replace humans and then rebel. It was his brother Josef who suggested the word 'robot', from Czech robota, meaning drudgery or forced labour. The word conquered the world within a few years, long before any real robots existed.
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.