This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

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Communication on Twitter is artificially constrained,

just 140 characters per tweet, max. So it turns out the more words in a tweet the

shorter each word tends to be at least according to one analysis.

It sort of makes sense on Twitter right there's a limited amount of space to play with.

But the weird thing is that pattern, longer phrase, shorter words,

it also holds true in our everyday language too.

It's called Menzerith's law. It's this idea of essentially

compression and information. Morgan Gustuson, a psychologist at the University of

Michigan. And so Menzareth's law, the way you define it is the larger the whole the smaller the parts.

Gustacin and her colleagues tested out that rule of human language on the calls of Giladas, relatives of baboons.

They analyze more than a thousand of those call sequences, which are strung together from six

distinct call types, and they found that just as the law would predict in human communication,

the longer the gelata sequence,

the shorter the string, the longer the calls.

And the shorter the string of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gustiston says the meaning of the calls is still a bit of a mystery, but the fact that they obey the rule

could suggest that something important is going on.

The interesting thing about it is that it suggests that there are universal principles that can

underpin complex vocal systems. that there are universal principles that can underpin

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