Mars canyon! Tree gold! Boomerang returns! Mouse immunity! Dark matter! Early humans! Old linguistics! And playing god, the fun way! It's your decrepit old Science Watch, where we watch science—with an eyebrow raised!

Quick, what do you call a sweetened carbonated beverage? Really? You call it... that? Wow. Well, you're wrong. Unless you said soda.

It's been happening for a whilllee, texters lengthening their verbage, and linguists are here to analyze. Using nearly 4 million words from students' digital-communications data, a linguist at the University of Toronto has discovered this word elongating practice is a trend most common among female twenty-somethings…

Major Garrett, CBS News' chief White House correspondent, sure is mad at someone! This tweet flickered briefly across our screens this morning before Garrett noticed and deleted it; it was likely intended as a DM for some unfortunate soul—another reporter? A source? National Journal's Jim O'Sullivan, who tweeted this…

Remember vocal fry, the hot new linguistic fad for women? It's this really interesteeeaaaaaaaaang speech pattern in which people draw out and sometimes "croak" the end of a word.

Vocal fry: It's not screaming when you burn yourself while cooking bacon. It's how all the coolest young women are talking! Get on board with the glottal sound of the future.

Science stars! Kraken lair! Saturn rings! Persistent chemist! Envious mind! Foreign insects! Baltimore telescope! Ancient language! And a serious geological epochal debate! It's your Monday Science Watch, where we watch science—perilously!

Ayapaneco is a dying language, once spoken in what is now the Mexican state of Tabasco. There are only two speakers left, both of whom live in the same village. And they refuse to talk to each other.

New York City high school teacher Carlos Garcia was suspended and fined $15,000 for saying "coño" in his class — a Spanish word that can be taken several very different ways. He's suing the city and denies saying it.

To punctuation expert Lynne Truss, The New Yorker is "that famous punctilious periodical." The last grammar mistake to appear in the New Yorker might have been made by a hungover E.B. White. But has this impeccable record finally been broken?

Researchers found that some native English speakers were unable to understand the sentence "The soldier was hit by the sailor," indicating that grammar may not be "universal." FYI: It means the sailor (boats) hit the soldier (tanks). [Science Daily]

Oh, Arizona. First this, then this, and now this: The state is cracking down on school teachers with accents in an effort to secure Anglo dominance in the southwest, because Arizona is a state where we speak English, okay?

New York City, the "capital of language density in the world," may be home to as many as 800 languages—some of which will be extinct in 20 years. And you thought you were impressive for knowing French. [Photo]

Clash of the Titans is finally open! But friends and reviewers told me that the 3D version is a rip off. But what about the "regular" version? Well, I might check it out if it had a better name.

There are some issues people won't shut up about that aren't important. There are some issues people won't shut up about that are important. And then there's this heated issue, which falls squarely in the middle.

Twitter today announced it will prompt users to post by asking "What's happening?" rather than the old "What are you doing?" We asked a prominent linguist if this means anything. Turns out it does: Twitterers are no longer such loners.

Where, exactly, are you supposed to start when the New York Times runs a Page One media piece on the word "douche"?

NY Mag's illustrated Gossipmonger column in the print edition has been running items without credit pulled directly from Page Six, who called up NYM for quote in an awesome item called "Best 'Six' mag has ever had." Their response?

Lexicographer and editor Grant Barrett rips the Wall Street Journal a new one over their horriful trend/scare story today on the devolution of Americanlish and the rise of chat-speak and how the kids are destroying all things and whatevs. The story includes this choice bit: "'There used to be a time when people…