Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how quickly different languages can transmit information.

You'll also learn how you can predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your

Facebook photos with some help from Randall Monroe, creator of the popular Geek Web Comic,

XKCD. What's satisfy some curiosity? You know how some languages sound like they're spoken at very different speeds?

Compared to English, sometimes it feels like Spanish or Italian,

speed along like a drum roll,

while other languages like French or Vietnamese

seem to roll off the tongue at a more leisurely pace.

Well, here's something super interesting.

New research published in the journal Science Advances found that one key element is the same across the board when it comes to language

The rate of information transmitted through speech is the same regardless of how fast the language tends to be spoken.

And you can probably blame the limitations of our brains.

For this study, an international team of scientists measured verbal information in bits.

Yes, like a computer bit, the same unit used for information transmitted by a cell phone or

CPU.

The team looked at written texts that had been translated into 17 different languages,

including all the languages I mentioned earlier. And they found that languages that had more syllables

also generally conveyed more bits per syllable. So for example, Japanese only

has 643 syllables and transmits about five bits of information per syllable, whereas English

...