Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to design future research. We present design goals, a formal specification, and an implementation for this database. Source code is freely available for other fields to take advantage of this tool. Some initial results are presented, including identifying conflicts in theories about gossip and ritual, comparing hypotheses relating population size and morphological complexity, and an author relation network.

Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well known is the relationship between verbal and nominal coding within and across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages are equally complex overall, which entails trade-offs between coding in different domains. From a diachronic point of view, this hypothesis implies that the loss and gain of coding in different domains can be expected to balance each other out. In this study, we test to what extent such inverse coevolution can be observed in a sample of 244 languages, using data from a comprehensive cross-linguistic database (Grambank) and applying computational phylogenetic modelling to control for genealogical relatedness. We find evidence for coevolutionary relationships between specific features within nominal and verbal domains on a global scale, but not for overall degrees of grammatical coding between languages. Instead, these amounts of nominal and verbal coding are positively correlated in Sino-Tibetan languages and inversely correlated in Indo-European languages. Our findings indicate that accretion and loss of grammatical information in nominal words and verbs are lineage-specific.

Важной проблемой при работе в ПЦР-лаборатории является возникновение перекрестного загрязнения, которое приводит к появлению ложноположительных результатов. Существует множество способов решения данной проблемы, однако ни один из них не является универсальным. Для деконтаминации сложных поверхностей большой площади предпочтительнее использовать аэрозольный метод обработки. Цель данного исследования заключалась в определении эффективных режимов применения дезинфицирующих средств для деконтаминации от нуклеиновых кислот аэрозольным методом. Анализ деконтаминирующей активности хлорактивных и кислородактивных соединений проводили, моделируя контаминацию поверхностей нуклеиновыми кислотами и бактериями. В процессе работы установлены эффективные режимы проведения аэрозольной деконтаминации. Показаны различия при удалении нуклеиновых кислот и бактериального загрязнения с лабораторных поверхностей.