from the Scientific American
... One of the most common misconceptions about brain evolution is that it represents a linear process culminating in the amazing cognitive powers of humans, with the brains of other modern species representing previous stages. Such ideas have even influenced the thinking of neuroscientists and psychologists who compare the brains of different species used in biomedical research.
Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages, or evolutionarily related groups: in mollusks such as octopuses, squid and cuttlefish; in bony fishes such as goldfish and, separately again, in cartilaginous fishes such as sharks and manta rays; and in reptiles and birds.
Nonmammals have demonstrated advanced abilities such as learning by copying the behavior of others, finding their way in complicated spatial environments, manufacturing and using tools, and even conducting mental time travel .... Collectively, these findings are helping scientists to understand how intelligence can arise—and to appreciate the many forms it can take.
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from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)
There aren't many widely told anecdotes about the current financial crisis, at least not yet, but there’s one that made the rounds in 2007, back when the big investment banks were first starting to write down billions of dollars in mortgage-backed derivatives and other so-called toxic securities.
... Before, that is, it became obvious that the risks taken by the largest banks and investment firms in the United States—and, indeed, in much of the Western world—were so excessive and foolhardy that they threatened to bring down the financial system itself. On the contrary: this was back when the major investment firms were still assuring investors that all was well, these little speed bumps notwithstanding—assurances based, in part, on their fantastically complex mathematical models for measuring the risk in their various portfolios.
There are many such models, but by far the most widely used is called VaR—Value at Risk. Built around statistical ideas and probability theories that have been around for centuries, VaR was developed and popularized in the early 1990s by a handful of scientists and mathematicians—"quants," they're called in the business—who went to work for JPMorgan. VaR's great appeal, and its great selling point to people who do not happen to be quants, is that it expresses risk as a single number, a dollar figure, no less.
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from the Economist
..."One great blooming, buzzing confusion" was how William James, a 19th-century psychologist, described the way he thought the world looked to a newborn baby.
But experiments ... have convinced researchers that, on the contrary, babies are born with many ways of making sense of what they see and hear. The trick is to use their love of novelty to work out what is happening inside their brains: when shown the same things repeatedly, babies’ eyes wander; when the scene changes, their gaze returns. That makes visible what to them constitutes a change in the world around them worthy of notice.
One of those ways of understanding the world is by number. People are born with an innate sense of how many items there are in small collections. Experiments in which older children and adults are shown randomly arranged dots and asked to say quickly how many there are show this sense is retained throughout life.
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from Science News
LONG BEACH, Calif.—Astronomers have produced the sharpest infrared portrait of the central 300 light-years of the Milky Way, showing details as small as 20 times the length of the solar system.
Seen in visible light, much of the crowded core is cloaked in dust clouds. But infrared light penetrates the dust, providing a clear view of this turbulent region, which houses a supermassive black hole at its very center and lies 26,000 light-years from Earth.
The false-color composite combines ultrasharp images taken at short infrared wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope with lower-resolution images taken at longer infrared wavelengths by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
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from Smithsonian Magazine
The term “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for "womb" and refers to a disease that was once diagnosed almost exclusively in women. Women's asthma, widow's melancholy, uterine epilepsy—these were all synonyms for a strange complex of symptoms that included unexplained pains, mysterious convulsions, sudden loss of sensation in the limbs and dozens of other complaints without apparent physical cause.
Particularly during the Victorian age, doctors thought hysteria demonstrated the general fragility of the fair sex. The best remedy was a good marriage. But all the while untold numbers of men were suffering from the same illness.
In his new book, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness, Mark Micale, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Illinois, explores the medical tradition of ignoring masculine "hysteria," and its cultural consequences.
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from the BBC News Online
The US space agency's (Nasa) Mars rovers are celebrating a remarkable five years on the Red Planet. The first robot, named Spirit, landed on 3 January, 2004, followed by its twin, Opportunity, 21 days later.
It was hoped the robots would work for at least three months; but their longevity in the freezing Martian conditions has surprised everyone. The rovers' data has revealed much about the history of water at Mars' equator billions of years ago.
These rovers are incredibly resilient considering the extreme environment the hardware experiences every day," said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and Opportunity at Nasa's Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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from the Guardian (UK)
They were made in China, labelled in French and then shipped to Singapore. They ended up in Liverpool and from there were sold straight into the heart of the NHS.
As the criminal investigation continues into how a fake consignment of Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic treatment prescribed for schizophrenia, infiltrated Britain's healthcare system last year, evidence is mounting that sophisticated counterfeiting syndicates are increasingly targeting Britain's network of high-street chemists, hospitals and GP surgeries.
Figures collated for the first time reveal that British border officials seized more than half a million counterfeit pills destined for the NHS and high-street chemists last year, an amount equal to the quantity of counterfeit drugs found in the whole of Europe in 2005.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Could hot rocks miles below the earth's surface be the "killer app" of the energy industry? Google thinks so. It’s investing more than $10 million to develop new technology that would make this subterranean resource a widespread, economically viable competitor to fossil fuels.
Geothermal heat could meet 10 percent of America's energy needs by mid-century, according to the US Department of Energy. What’s more, it would not generate the climate-warming carbon emissions associated with fossil fuels.
Once tapped, a geothermal system would stay online for centuries. Unlike wind and solar, it would be a “base load” energy source, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That all sounds great–but of course there’s a catch. A geothermal well costs millions of dollars to drill and drilling is the only way to determine if a location has the right kind of hot rock. The result: With only a trickle of federal aid allotted to developing the resource, geothermal is growing slowly.
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from the Baltimore Sun
Researchers have identified a gene that appears crucial to the spread of breast cancer while also making the disease resistant to chemotherapy.
The discovery, if confirmed in further studies, could pave the way for new drugs that could save lives by keeping the disease from invading the lungs, liver or other vital organs, the places where it kills.
"What this tells us is we can really focus on this one gene," said Dr. Yibin Kang, a Princeton University molecular biologist and lead author of a study being published today in the journal Cancer Cell. "I will be betting this one will be a major target."
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from National Geographic News
A Texas-size asteroid that hit ancient Mars may have triggered a United States-size landslide—the largest known anywhere—scientists say.
The finding could help solve the origin mystery of Mars's Arabia Terra region, a vast, midlevel plateau between the planet's smooth northern lowlands and rugged southern highlands.
Estimated at about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) wide, the giant asteroid is believed to have struck Mars's northern hemisphere billions of years ago. The cataclysm is thought to have given the planet its topographical split personality—smooth in the north but bumpy down south, generally speaking.
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Medical researchers say that a smoking ban in Pueblo, Colo., led to a 41 percent drop in heart-attack hospitalizations three years after the ban. The new study is considered the best and longest-term research to show such a link.
In other biomedical news, a study has found that common drug interactions may have dangerous consequences for older Americans. University of Chicago Medical Center researchers reported that more than 2 million older adults take medicine in combinations that could cause serious problems.
Elevated blood sugar levels may be to blame for at least some of the normal age-related cognitive decline older people experience, another study suggests. Glucose regulation tends to worsen with age.
Gastric bypass surgery can reverse diabetes in overweight teens, researchers at six U.S. medical centers have found. Eleven obese teens in a study group who had gastric bypass surgery were able to stop taking medication for diabetes within a year of the surgery.
And research has found that teens who live within walking distance of places that sell alcohol are more likely to binge-drink and drive under the influence.
DNA evidence has become a mainstay of forensic science, but it isn't perfect. Among other things, samples can be contaminated and or may languish untested on evidence shelves for years. And some worry that the technology may violate privacy laws.
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In environmental news, state and federal officials warned people living near a massive spill of coal ash in eastern Tennessee, which took place three days before Christmas, that water samples in the area contain high levels of arsenic. And residents are concerned about the long-term health effects of the spill, one of the worst in U.S. history.
In other news, a new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that the country may face the consequences of climate change much sooner than previously estimated.
But there was some good news about coral reefs that were damaged by the Indian Ocean tsunami four years ago. They seem to have recovered faster than anticipated, according to reports. Scientists initially thought it could take a decade for them to rebound.
And writing on the origin of speciation, science writer Scott LaFee notes that no one knows yet just how diverse life is on Earth. "Thousands of new species are identified each year," he says. "In a study of just 19 trees in Panama, 1,000 of the 1,200 beetle species found were not previously known."
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Long before the early inhabitants of North America cultivated such crops as corn and beans, they gathered and roasted the bulbs of wild onions and other plants, according to a Texas archaeologist.
In other news, research suggests that human ancestors in southern Africa made stone hand axes 1.6 million years ago, nearly twice as long ago as such tool-making was previously thought to have occurred.
And, in China, scientists say they may have found the largest collection of dinosaur fossils ever discovered. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they have unearthed more than 7,000 dinosaur bones since last spring in Shandong province. Most date to the late Cretaceous period.
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A NASA report cited a number of design flaws involved in the Columbia space shuttle disaster that happened nearly six years ago. Due to the poor design of their pressure suits, all seven astronauts blacked out almost immediately once the spacecraft started breaking up during re-entry, officials said. All perished in the crash.
The U.S. space agency's future is also in question, with the impending advent of a new presidential administration. The New York Times also looked at the controversy surrounding the Ares I rocket that is designed to replace the nation's aging space shuttles.
Meanwhile, several geologists reported finding evidence of something big and unusual happening in waters near the New York area around 300 B.C. They say a large meteorite may have landed in the Atlantic, generating a tsunami.
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The end of 2008 brought a review of the top science and technology stories of the year by a number of media outlets.