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Newstrack: U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte Thursday warned terrorism "is the preeminent threat" to the United States and its allies. U.S. President George Bush and rock singer Bono prayed for aid to those less fortunate Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. A British court in London sentenced to nine years 18-year-old twin brothers who left their birthday party to rob and kill their step-grandmother. Rising costs and the insurgency have stalled a major Iraqi reconstruction project -- the completion of 180 medical clinics to revamp healthcare. A Connecticut man charged with a double murder nearly 30 years ago has found love but the honeymoon has to wait -- he's headed back to prison. Muslim anger over European cartoons of Muhammad prompted widespread protest, and led gunmen to briefly surround the EU Gaza office. There were protests by Islamic Jihad and Fatah gunmen in Gaza Thursday over the publication of cartoons of Prophet Muhammed in a Danish newspaper. Three inmates in a maximum-security wing of Chicago's Cook County jail were shot and wounded, leaving investigators puzzled as to the origin of the weapon. Three months after a major earthquake devastated Pakistan, rescue workers are still finding villages where the residents are desperately in need of help. Members of the Massachusetts National Guard filed a lawsuit seeking compensation of out-of-pocket expenses they said they paid after being called to duty.

NewsTrack

Words help determine what we see

BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 31 (UPI) -- Scientists at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Chicago say the language we speak affects half of what we see.

Scholars have long debated whether one's native language affects how reality is perceived. The idea that language affects perception is controversial, and results have conflicted. But research published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports the idea.

The study is the first to propose that language may shape just half of our visual world.

Scientists involved in the research were Terry Regier, associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago; Aubrey Gilbert, a UC-Berkeley graduate student; Paul Kay, professor emeritus of linguistics and a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley; and Richard Ivry, a psychology professor at UC-Berkeley.

They said their finding was suggested by the fact that language function is processed predominantly in the brain's left hemisphere, which receives visual information from the right visual field.

"So it would make sense for the language processes of the left hemisphere to influence perception more in the right half of the visual field than in the left half", said Regier.

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