With languages going extinct at a quickening rate, why not a museum to house them?

Q. The United Nations has declared 2019 the “International Year of Indigenous Languages.” What is its purpose, and what role does technology have here? A. People use language to preserve their history, customs and traditions, memory and more, yet languages are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, says Stephen Iraraki in “Forbes” magazine. Enter artificial intelligence (AI), which is becoming “more important than ever in the fight to save endangered languages.”

Jason Lovell, for example, co-founded a Facebook Messenger chatbox “Reobot” powered by IBM Watson AI that understands “te reo Maori,” New Zealand’s indigenous language, and answers users in both that language and English. Soon, pronunciation help will let learners converse in te reo Maori wherever they are during the day.

Also, a team of researchers has developed Opie, a low-cost, easily transportable robot to teach Australia’s indigenous languages to children living in remote communities. And, working with Google, the team has developed machine-learning technology to transcribe and build AI models for indigenous languages, thereby saving linguists millions of hours of transcription time.

Additionally, First People’s Cultural Council, working to revitalize indigenous languages and culture in British Columbia, has created a First Voices platform with a keyboard app so that users can type in over 100 indigenous languages on any app in their mobile devices.

What’s next? “Futurist Thomas Fey envisions a global language archive as a living museum, ‘The Louvre of Languages,’ where even extinct languages can be learned.” Q. What is the possible link between Arizona’s Grand Canyon and Tasmanian rocks in Australia? And how might it help solve an ancient geological jigsaw puzzle? A. “To peer into the Grand Canyon is to behold, in the rock layers, a record of Earth’s distant past,” says Lucas Joel in “New Scientist” magazine. Of special interest to Australian geologist Jack Mulder are the most ancient layers in the sequence — rocks some 1.2 billion years old that look just like similarly ancient rocks in Tasmania. Further study has shown that these rocks “contain minerals with the same ‘geochemical fingerprint’ as those in the Grand Canyon,” suggesting that Tasmania must have been attached to the western United States at one time in the distant past.

Now more on the puzzle: About a billion years ago, all of Earth’s continental plates formed a single supercontinent called Rodinia, but it’s been difficult to discern how today’s continents would have fit together, given the enormous time lapse. The critical clue: The Tasmanian discovery provides “clear evidence that North America and Australia were linked together at the time.” Q. They loom large in pop culture but were once even physically bigger, with several extinct species the size of a 200-pound human. They reside largely in the Southern Hemisphere — the southern African coastlines, the rocky beaches of Chile and Peru, New Zealand’s South Island — though two species call Antarctica home. Their name may have derived from the Welsh word for “white head.” Can you name those birds? A. They’re penguins, of course, and regardless of size, all of them have the same body features, with wings that have evolved into flippers and dense bones to counter buoyancy, says Gemma Tarlach in “Discover” magazine. Their feathers are uniquely adapted for swimming in chilly water, but unlike other birds that undergo gradual molting, penguins experience “catastrophic” molting in which their old feathers are rapidly lost and replaced. The speed is important because, “during this weekslong transition, the birds’ coats are not waterproof and they must stay on land, going hungry.” (So beforehand, penguins head far out to sea and eat, putting on as much weight as they can.)

As to their name, reportedly a 16th-century Welsh sailor noticed a black-andwhite aquatic bird as his ship was exploring South America’s Strait of Magellan. Thinking it resembled a giant auk, he called it a “pen gwyn,” (“white head”), the Welsh name for the giant bird. But he was mistaken. And although the auk went extinct in the mid-19th century, the name “penguin” now denotes a completely unrelated bird.