Newborn babies arrive as strangers in a strange land. They know nothing of the customs or language of their new mysterious world. Yet astonishingly, with almost no obvious effort, babies learn an entirely new language. Some babies even learn several.

They manage this feat, in part, by tons of behind-the-scenes practice, a new study finds. Babies mentally rehearse the movements required for speech long before they utter a word, scientists reported July 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Christmas could bring with it a new hazard as you wrap your gifts – X-ray-emitting sticky tape. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that simply peeling ordinary sticky tape in a vacuum can generate enough X-rays to take an image — of one of the scientists' own fingers.