James' World 2

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The Greek-born director Yorgos Lanthimos likes to make movies that trap his characters in confined spaces where a different set of rules applies from those in the outside world. In his early feature Dogtooth, three adult siblings are trapped in an eternal childhood by their brainwashing parents. The Lobster imagines a bizarre dystopia where all newly single people are given 45 days to find a life partner or face being transformed into animals. The Favourite tracks the power struggles between two dueling ladies-in-waiting at the court of a rapidly deteriorating queen. Even the globe-trotting libertines of Poor Things are boxed in by that film’s deliberately artificial soundstage exteriors. Lanthimos enjoys pinning his characters in place and watching them wriggle their way toward escape as best they can.

The director’s latest, the unremittingly grim black comedy Bugonia, takes entrapment as both its explicit theme and its guiding aesthetic principle. This tale of a pharmaceutical-industry CEO who’s kidnapped by a low-wage worker at her company was inspired by the 2003 South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet!, a movie it structurally resembles enough to qualify as a remake. But in our current era of widespread social-media brain rot, the notion of a conspiracy theorist driven by his delusions to commit a violent crime hits different than it did at the turn of the millennium. Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

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Focus Features

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The driver of a semi-truck that slammed into multiple vehicles, killing three people, on a California highway was allegedly under the influence of drugs, authorities said.

The driver — identified by authorities as 21-year-old Jashanpreet Singh — has been charged with gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and driving under the influence of a drug causing injury in connection with Tuesday’s chain-reaction crash on Interstate 10 in Ontario, according to a criminal complaint.

He is in the United States illegally and an immigration detainer has also been placed on him, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Authorities said Singh was driving a Freightliner semi-truck and failed to stop in time when traffic in his lane had slowed or stopped Tuesday afternoon. Three people were killed and at least three others injured in the multi-vehicle crash, according to the complaint.

Dash camera footage of the crash showed the truck slam into multiple vehicles in a fiery crash, then veer off into the shoulder and ram into additional vehicles before coming to a stop.

The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, which filed charges against Singh on Thursday, said eyewitness and dashcam footage showed him “traveling at a high rate of speed into stopped traffic,” resulting in a “massive and chaotic scene.”

A 54-year-old man who was driving a Toyota Tacoma and two occupants in a Kia Sorento were killed in the crash, according to the California Highway Patrol.

A 43-year-old driver of a Dodge Avenger and a 59-year-old individual who was standing outside of a vehicle both suffered major injuries, while a 57-year-old passenger in a Chevrolet 2500 had a minor injury, police said.

Eight vehicles, including four commercial vehicles, were involved in the crash, according to the California Highway Patrol.

San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson called the incident a “heinous tragedy” that was “easily avoidable if the defendant was not driving in a grossly negligent manner and impaired.””Had the rule of law been followed by State and Federal officials, the defendant should have never been in California at all,” he added in a statement.

Singh, of Yuba City, was arrested at the scene under suspicion of DUI, officials said.

“This is sadly a reminder of how precious life is and how fast it could be taken away at the hands of somebody who is driving irresponsibly, somebody who is impaired,” California Highway Patrol Officer Rodrigo Jimenez told Los Angeles ABC station KABC.

The San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office said it filed three counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and one count of DUI causing injury against Singh, noting additional charges may be filed pending further investigation.

He is being held without bail and his arraignment has yet to be scheduled. Prosecutors said they will continue to request no bail “based on the seriousness of the offense and his flight risk.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also lodged an arrest detainer for Singh, according to DHS, which said he is in the U.S. illegally from India, entering through the southern border in 2022.

“This tragedy follows a disturbing pattern of criminal illegal aliens driving commercial vehicles on American roads, directly threatening public safety,” DHS said on X.

The department cited the arrest last week of a man, which it said is in the country illegally, over a deadly crash in Indiana. DHS said the man was driving a semi-truck without a valid commercial license when he swerved into oncoming traffic and collided with a vehicle, killing the driver.

Singh has a valid commercial driver’s license that expires in October 2026, KABC reported, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed in a press briefing Thursday that California issued him the commercial driver’s license.

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The European leaders can also feel some satisfaction that their repeated interventions with Mr. Trump on behalf of Ukraine have finally produced at least some American pressure on Moscow. They insist that they will support Ukraine for as long as required to ensure its survival as an independent state, though any real strategy for ending the war is certain to require serious American pressure on Russia.

After Mr. Trump’s decision to seek no new funding for Ukraine, the Europeans are struggling to find the money to back up their commitment, when their own national budgets are badly stretched

The loan plan that the bloc is trying to effect would use the billions of dollars of frozen Russian assets in Europe in a complicated legal maneuver that doesn’t seize them outright. The result would be a 140-billion euro loan ($163 billion) to Ukraine, interest free, that would only have to be paid back if Russia pays Ukraine reparations at the end of the war.

But Belgium, which hosts most of those assets, wants to ensure that it will not be liable and that the bloc shares the risks. Many details remain to be worked out to satisfy the Belgians and, the Europeans hope, to get the participation of other important players in the Group of 7 industrialized nations. A revised version is expected to be on the agenda at the next E.U. summit in December.

Still, the president of the European Council of member states, António Costa, announced confidently late Thursday night that the bloc “is committed to addressing Ukraine’s pressing financial needs for the next two years, including support for its military and defense efforts,” which are estimated to involve more than $150 billion.

Also on Thursday, the European Union passed another set of sanctions against Russia that hit the energy-dominated Russian economy, as the new American sanctions will do. The bloc advanced a ban on the purchase of Russian liquefied natural gas a year to begin in 2027. It also added another 117 vessels from Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, which have circumvented earlier controls, to a sanctions list.

The Europeans also sanctioned Rosneft, but not Lukoil, which supplies cheap oil to Hungary and Slovakia in comparatively small amounts.

Europe has delivered more aid to Ukraine than the United States and has, in some ways, won the argument that Ukraine must be supported, at least so far, noted Jean-Dominique Giuliani, a French analyst and chairman of the Robert Schuman Foundation, a nonprofit research institution. Europe’s policy requirements had not changed despite Mr. Trump’s vacillation, he said, including an immediate cease-fire, no territorial concessions by Ukraine, reparations, and prosecution of war criminals.

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Soldiers in the Zaporizhzhia region of eastern Ukraine this month.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

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The human immune system is our body’s primary line of defense against harmful microbes, viruses, and other invaders—but that defense line can sometimes run amok and attack healthy cells. This is the basis of many autoimmune diseases, from cancer to rheumatoid arthritis to type 1 diabetes. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the scientists who conducted fundamental research on peripheral immune tolerance, a system that pumps the brakes on the immune system and keeps it from harming the body.

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi jointly won the prize, which was announced on Monday in Stockholm. Sakaguchi is a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan. Brunkow is now a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and Ramsdell is a scientific advisor for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco. The Nobel Committee recognized the awardees’ body of work for spurring clinical trials on potential new treatments, such as therapies that may propagate immune cells called regulatory T cells that can suppress overreactive immune responses in an autoimmune disease or organ transplant.

“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine relates to how we keep our immune system under control so we can fight all imaginable microbes and still avoid autoimmune disease,” said Marie Wahren-Herlenius, a member of the 2025 Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, at a livestreamed press conference today in Stockholm.

“Only three people can be recognized for the Nobel Prize, but there are so many pioneers who worked on this,” says Maria-Luisa Alegre, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. Her lab specializes in T cell responses during organ transplantation. The Nobel recognition “gives us a lot of further momentum in trying to develop therapies for transplantation as well as for autoimmunity. I’m just thrilled, really, that this is the field that has been chosen.”

Around the 1970s, scientists first proposed that there might be a distinct population of T cells that can suppress the immune response. It was thought that such T cells, dubbed suppressor T cells at the time, could potentially unlock a new understanding of the immune system—and of autoimmune disease. Early experiments trying to prove the existence of these cells came up empty handed, however; the theory was ultimately abandoned as being too fringe.

The early research “identified activities without clear molecular understanding,” says immunologist Jeffrey Bluestone, who co-founded Sonoma Biotherapeutics alongside Nobel winner Ramsdell. “Some of the work was hard to replicate, and so by the end of the decade, a lot of people were very skeptical that such a system existed.”

Years later, Sakaguchi, then an immunologist at Aichi Cancer Center Research Institute in Nagoya, Japan, picked up the work on suppressor T cells. “The basic hope was to discover a telltale molecular feature at the surface of such cells—a ‘marker’ by which suppressor T cells could be distinguished from other cells,” Sakaguchi wrote in a 2006 article for Scientific American that was coauthored by immunologist Zoltan Fehervari, now a senior editor at Nature.

Sakaguchi and his colleagues focused on the thymus, an organ located in the chest where T cells mature and are taught to avoid targeting healthy cells. The thymus is supposed to eliminate any faulty T cells—but in certain autoimmune conditions, these bad actors can fly under the radar. In a series of experiments on mice, Sakaguchi found that helper T cells produced in the thymus (identified by the surface protein CD4) didn’t all function the same way. Cells that had an additional novel surface protein, CD25, appeared necessary to prevent the immune system from attacking the body itself. In experiments in which Sakaguchi and his colleagues wiped the mice of T cells with CD25, various organs—thyroid, stomach, gonads, pancreas, and salivary glands—succumbed to white blood cell attacks and resulted in “dramatic inflammation,” Sakaguchi and Fehervari wrote in Scientific American.

The discovery of CD25, first detailed in a key 1995 paper in the Journal of Immunology, helped Sakaguchi establish the new class of T cells, which he dubbed regulatory T cells.

“It wasn’t a high-profile paper at the time. He was just sort of plugging away, publishing paper after paper on this topic to refine his findings,” says Peter Savage, a professor of pathology at the University of Chicago who studies regulatory T cells. “The idea of suppressor cells had fallen out of favor. It was Sakaguchi who really, through a meticulous series of experiments, pursued this idea and was able to define a population of CD4 T cells that had really potent suppressor activity or ‘peacekeeper’ activity.”

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The Treasury Department announced new sanctions targeting Russia’s oil sector Wednesday, the day after President Donald Trump confirmed that a planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Russia’s war with Ukraine was off.

“Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Given President Putin’s refusal to end this senseless war, Treasury is sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. Treasury is prepared to take further action if necessary to support President Trump’s effort to end yet another war. We encourage our allies to join us in and adhere to these sanctions.”

The two companies being sanctioned are Rosneft and Lukoil, along with some of their subsidiaries, the statement said.

Despite the war and the battered Russian economy, Rosneft and Lukoil are worth more than $50 billion each and are two of the biggest companies listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange.

Trump told reporters Wednesday that it was the appropriate time to use sanctions to try to end the war.

“I just felt it was time. Waited a long time,” Trump said.

He added, “These are tremendous sanctions. These are very big; these are against their two big oil companies. And we hope that they won’t be on for long. We hope that the war will be settled.”

Trump also said he hoped both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be “reasonable” and put aside their hatred for each other to resolve the conflict.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Olga Stefanishyna, signaled her strong support for the new sanctions Wednesday. “The decision is fully aligned with Ukraine’s consistent position: peace is possible only through strength and pressure on the aggressor using all available international tools,” she posted on X.

Last week, it appeared that relations between Washington and Moscow were warming after Trump held a call with Putin on Thursday and after Trump did not approve Zelenskyy’s request for long-range Tomahawk missiles in a meeting Friday.

Trump’s latest peace push hit a roadblock during a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to senior figures on both sides.

Lavrov became “exercised” during the call, a Trump administration official told NBC News. He reiterated Russia’s refusal to agree to an immediate ceasefire before talks begin, a key demand of Kyiv and Europe that the United States has backed.

“We canceled the meeting with President Putin. It just, it didn’t feel right to meet. It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get. So I canceled it, but we’ll do it in the future,” Trump said Wednesday.

He added, “Every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere. They just don’t go anywhere.”

Trump has been under pressure from Zelenskyy, European nations, and members of Congress from both parties for months to intensify U.S. sanctions on Russia

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Lawyers for President Donald Trump are asking a federal judge in Florida to deny a request by the Wall Street Journal and its parent companies, Dow Jones and News Corp, to dismiss a $10 billion defamation lawsuit over the paper’s reporting on the bawdy letter allegedly penned by Trump that appeared in a birthday book for disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

In a court filing late Monday, Trump’s lawyers argued that the July article and surrounding coverage were a “deliberate smear campaign designed to damage President Trump’s reputation” and subject the president to “public hatred and ridicule.” They also requested oral arguments over the Journal’s recent motion to dismiss.

“Defendants did not publish the Article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal based on a mere harmless joke between friends,” Monday’s filing said. “Indeed, such an assertion strains credulity beyond repair. The Article, and the surrounding media around it, were all a deliberate smear campaign designed to damage President Trump’s reputation.”

WSJ moves to dismiss Trump’s $10B lawsuit over alleged letter in Epstein birthday book

Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding and participating in Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls, told Justice Department officials in August that Epstein had asked her to coordinate contributions to his 2003 50th birthday book from friends and associates, but said she could not recall if Trump, then a private citizen, was among those who responded.

Last month the House Oversight Committee released records from Epstein’s estate that included a copy of a birthday book with the alleged letter from Trump that the newspaper had described.

Trump, who filed suit against the Journal in July, has continued to argue the letter is fake and that the signature on the letter is not his.

Acknowledging the release of the letter by the House Oversight panel, Trump’s lawyers alleged that the Wall Street Journal was still “deliberate and malicious” because the reporting suggested that the letter was not only authored by Trump but also on-brand for the president. 

“Defendants cannot hide behind a few words buried within the text — words that refer to the letter ‘bearing Trump’s name’ — while simultaneously ignoring their deliberate portrayal of the letter as being authored and sent by President Trump to Epstein in 2003,” the filing said. 

The Wall Street Journal has stood by its reporting.

“Because Plaintiff has publicly admitted that he was Epstein’s friend in the early 2000s, his reputation cannot be harmed by the suggestion that he was friends with Epstein in 2003. Indeed, he was listed in the Birthday Book as a ‘friend’ of Epstein. The fact that his relationship with Epstein may now be a political liability — over 20 years after the Birthday Book was presented to Epstein — does not change this conclusion,” the Journal contended in its request for dismissal.

While the Journal’s reporting included a denial from President Trump, his lawyers argued in Mondays filing that the publication still acted with a “reckless disregard for the truth” because the request for comment was rushed and the reporting allegedly cast doubt on the president’s claim. 

“Although Defendants included Plaintiff’s denial, they did so in a way that made it seem as if Plaintiff’s denial was false. This kind of reckless disregard for the truth by Defendants provides a sufficient basis for an inference of actual malice,” the filing said. 

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@RepRobertGarcia/X – PHOTO: Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia posted a photo on X that Democrats say is the page attributed to Trump in Jeffrey Epstein’s “birthday book.” The White House is denying that the image shared is the president’s signature.

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Scientists have converted the blood type of a donor kidney and transplanted the organ into a person. The procedure — the first of its kind — could improve access to donor organs, specialists say, because the blood type of the donor would no longer matter.

Currently, organs from deceased donors can be transplanted into people only if they have a compatible blood type. This is because the recipient’s immune system can produce antibodies to attack and destroy the donated organ if the donor and recipient have different antigens, which come in two types: A and B. Organs that are blood type O do not have A or B antigens, so anyone can receive them.

Researchers from Canada and China used an enzyme to remove type-A antigens from a donor kidney. The enzyme converts type-A blood into type-O, says study author Stephen Withers, a chemist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The type-O kidney was then transplanted into a 68-year-old brain-dead man in Chongqing, China. The organ remained healthy for two days before showing signs of rejection. It produced urine for six days. The results are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering today.

The enzyme was first identified in 2019 by some members of the same team. In 2022, they showed that a type-A lung could be converted into a type-O one, although the organ wasn’t transplanted into a person.

The results are groundbreaking, says Natasha Rogers, a transplant clinician at Westmead Hospital in Sydney, Australia. They could improve access to donor organs and reduce transplant wait lists. If the blood type of the organ was no longer a barrier for transplantation, physicians could focus on things such as matching other antigens unrelated to blood type, which are important in terms of how long a transplant will last, she adds

What’s next?

Living donors can give their organs to people with different blood types, but the recipient first has to undergo multiple treatments to lower their antibody levels, Rogers says. However, for deceased donors, there is not enough time for the recipient to undergo the treatments before the donor organ becomes unusable, she adds. The treatment also affects the recipient’s immune system, increasing the risk of infection.

Treating the donor organ instead of the recipient is a breakthrough, says Rogers. The study shows that a person could initially receive the same kind of immunosuppression given for transplants between people with matching blood types to reduce the risk of rejection. But more trials in brain-dead and trials in living people will be needed before the enzyme can be used routinely, she adds, including adjusting treatment for the organ or recipient to help the organ function for longer.

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The massive Amazon Web Services outage that took down sites from Reddit to Ring to Roblox has been fixed, the company said. The AWS outage rendered huge portions of the internet unavailable for most of the work day for many people on Monday. As the day rolled along, the breakdown affected more than 2,000 companies and services, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, the PlayStation Network, Amazon itself and critical services such as online banking. 

As of 3:53 p.m. PT, Amazon said that the massive issue was resolved. The company said the outage began at 11:49 p.m. on Sunday, with the company seeing increased error rates for services on the US East Coast. Amazon says its workers identified the source of the error at 12:26 a.m., blaming DNS resolution issues for the regional DynamoDB service endpoints. After that issue was resolved, Amazon faced additional problems, and had to throttle, meaning temporarily limit the power and performance, for certain operations. 

“Over time, we reduced throttling of operations and worked in parallel to resolve network connectivity issues until the services fully recovered,” the latest update said. “By 3:01 p.m., all AWS services returned to normal operations.”

Why were so many sites affected?

AWS, a cloud services provider owned by Amazon, props up huge portions of the internet. So when it went down, it took many of the services we know and love with it. As with the Fastly and Crowdstrike outages over the past few years, the AWS outage shows just how much of the internet relies on the same infrastructure — and how quickly our access to the sites and services we rely on can be revoked when something goes wrong. 

The reliance on a small number of big companies to underpin the web is akin to putting all of our eggs in a tiny handful of baskets. When it works, it’s great, but only one small thing needs to go wrong for the internet to fall to its knees in a matter of minutes.

Outage reports spiked as the West Coast woke up

AWS first registered an issue on its service status page just after midnight PT on Monday, saying it was “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-East-1 Region.” Around 2 a.m. PT, it said it had identified a potential root cause of the issue. Within half an hour, it had started applying mitigations that were resulting in significant signs of recovery. 

“The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now,” AWS said at 3.35 a.m. PT. 

The issues seemed to have been largely resolved as the US East Coast was coming online, but outage reports spiked again dramatically after 8 a.m. PT as work began on the West Coast.

As of 8:43 a.m. PT, the AWS status page showed the severity as “degraded.” In a post at that time, AWS noted: “We are throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations.”  (EC2 is AWS shorthand for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that it says “provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.”)

Amazon didn’t respond to a request for further comment beyond pointing us back to the AWS health dashboard.

Around the time that AWS says it first began noticing error rates, the outage-tracking site Downdetector saw reports begin to spike across many online services, including banks, airlines and phone carriers. As AWS resolved the issue, some of these reports saw a drop-off, whereas others have yet to return to normal. (Downdetector is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Around 4 a.m. PT, Reddit was still down, while services including Ring, Verizon and YouTube were still seeing a significant number of reported issues. Reddit finally came back online around 4.30 a.m. PT, according to its status page, which was then verified by CNET.

n total, Downdetector saw over 9.8 million reports, with 2.7 million coming from the US, over 1.1 million from the UK and the rest largely spread across Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Over 2,000 companies in total have been affected, Downdetector added, without around 280 still experiencing issues around 10 a.m. PT.

“This kind of outage, where a foundational internet service brings down a large swath of online services, only happens a handful of times in a year,” Daniel Ramirez, Downdetector by Ookla’s director of product, told CNET. “They probably are becoming slightly more frequent as companies are encouraged to completely rely on cloud services and their data architectures are designed to make the most out of a particular cloud platform.”

What caused the AWS outage?

AWS didn’t immediately share full details about what caused the internet to fall off a cliff this morning. Then at 8:43 a.m. PT, it offered this brief description: “The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

Earlier in the day, it had attributed the outage to a “DNS issue.” DNS stands for the domain name system and refers to the service that translates human-readable internet addresses (for example, CNET.com) into machine-readable IP addresses that connect browsers with websites.

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An Amazon Web Services outage affected more than 2,000 companies at the start of the work week.  Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET

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European and Arab nations, Canada, and the U.S. appear willing to contribute to the estimated $70 billion needed to rebuild Gaza, a U.N. official said on Tuesday, adding that the two-year war there had produced rubble equal to 13 times the pyramids of Giza.

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Jaco Cilliers, an official at the United Nations Development Program, said Israel’s war against Hamas had generated at least 55 million tons of rubble and that it could take decades for Gaza to fully recover.

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“We’ve heard very positive news from a number of our partners, including European partners… Canada,” regarding their willingness to help, he told a press conference, adding that there were also discussions with the United States.

Since a ceasefire deal came into effect in Gaza, large numbers of Palestinians have returned to the ruins of their homes in the coastal territory.

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Huge swathes of Gaza have been reduced to a wasteland by Israeli bombardment over two years that killed some 68,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.

A large part of the destruction is in Gaza City, scene of some of the fiercest fighting. About 83% of all building structures there have been damaged, according to the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT).

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UNDP said it had already cleared some 81,000 tons of rubble from the Gaza Strip and was continuing to do so.

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas-led militants attacked the country on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

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Hamas freed the last living Israeli hostages from Gaza on Monday under the ceasefire deal, and Israel sent home busloads of Palestinian detainees, as U.S. President Donald Trump declared the end of the two-year-long war.

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[1/2] Heavy machinery drives through a street, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, October 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ebrahim Hajjaj Purchase Licensing Rights

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Babies start processing language before they are born, a new study suggests. A research team in Montreal has found that newborns who had heard short stories in foreign languages while in the womb process those languages similarly to their native tongue.

The study, published in August in Nature Communications Biology, is the first to use brain imaging to show what neuroscientists and psychologists had long suspected. Previous research had shown that fetuses and newborns can recognize familiar voices and rhythms, and even that they prefer their native language soon after birth. But these findings come mostly from behavioral cues—sucking patterns, head turns, or heart rate changes—rather than direct evidence from the brain.

“We cannot say babies ‘learn’ a language prenatally,” says Anne Gallagher, a neuropsychologist at the University of Montreal and senior author of the study. What we can say, she adds, is that neonates develop familiarity with one or more languages during gestation, which shapes their brain networks at birth.

The research team recruited 60 people for the experiment, all of them about 35 weeks into their pregnancy. Of those, 39 exposed their fetuses to 10 minutes of prerecorded stories in French (their native language) and another 10 minutes of the same stories in either Hebrew or German at least once every other day until birth. These languages were chosen because their acoustic and phonological properties are very distinctfrom French and from each other, explains co-lead author Andréanne René, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical neuropsychology at the University of Montreal. The other 21 participants were part of the control group; their fetuses were exposed to French in their natural environments, with no special input.

Between the first 10 hours and three days after birth, the team observed how the newborns’ brains reacted to German, Hebrew and French by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a noninvasive imaging technique that measures changes in blood oxygenation in the brain.

All babies in the cohort had increased activity in the left temporal lobe, the brain’s language processing center, when they heard spoken French. But only those exposed to Hebrew or German before birth showed similar brain activation when listening to those languages. Newborns who had not heard the Hebrew or German stories before birth showed activation in brain regions for processing sounds in general and less activation in language-processing regions.

The study supports the idea that the newborn brain is not a “blank slate,” says Ana Carolina Coan, a pediatric neurology expert and member of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology. Instead, the gestational environment starts shaping fetuses’ brain processing even before birth.

It isn’t clear how much in utero exposure to a given tongue is needed for newborns’ brains to process it as language. Some previous research into the effects of the auditory environment on fetuses used hours-long exposure; other studies used a duration of as little as 15 minutes. Gallagher was concerned that the new study’s exposure time wouldn’t be enough to note any response, but asking for more than that might have been burdensome to the participants. This made the study’s clear results a welcome surprise, she says.

“The study doesn’t suggest mothers should expose their unborn babies to foreign languages to be smarter or multilingual later,” says Coan, who did not take part in the research. But studying how language exposure in utero affects a child’s speech development will be important for understanding speech disorders, which affect around 5 to 10 percent of children in the U.S. “For clinicians, this adds evidence that language development begins much earlier than birth, which matters for how we detect and treat delays,” she says.

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