The days of miracles and wonder 

Greg Knauss travels back to 1990 to tell himself two important things about the world of 2010.

An experiment to detect gravitational waves may indicate that our universe is a holographic projection 

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.” […] Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

Schizophrenia isn’t just a mental illness, it’s a skin disorder too. 

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that the effects of schizophrenia appear to extend beyond the brain. And now there’s talk of a blood test to diagnose schizophrenia being rolled out within a year.

Because schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder, it was previously believed that the signs of the illness would be contained only within the brain. However, the team at the Cambridge Institute for Psychiatric Research, led by Sabine Bahn, has identified genetic markers of the disorder in cell division, the immune system, and glucose metabolism. They have found that one of the best peripheral indicators of schizophrenia is a systemic problem in protein expression in the skin cells of the patient’s arms.

How to compete with iPad 

Matt Legend Gemmell writes an open letter to hardware makers who want to compete with the iPad:

I’m a little worried about you, though. Your usual tactic is to simply copy the industrial design of the most successful product, reduce the price, then adopt a pump and dump strategy until your next quarterly financials. That’s fine in itself; that’s how business works. I just think you’re misinterpreting both why people are excited about the iPad (even if they don’t realise it), and what exactly you need to copy. I think you might be on a dead-end track without even realising it.

[…]

Competition is good, but only as long as it’s good competition. A flood of second-rate imitations doesn’t help anyone; not the customer, and not even your bottom line. The better you compete, the more market share you’ll have and the more choice the consumer will have. I’m trying to take a long-term view of this burgeoning market, because it’s the responsible thing to do given that I care about empowering people in general, rather than enriching one specific company (whichever company that might be).

Sir Patrick Stewart loves his iPhone 

Rip Torn thought bank was home: court docs 

Court documents at the arraignment of actor Rip Torn, who was found drunk with a loaded weapon in a Connecticut bank last week, indicate the actor actually thought he was in his home.

A bullet-proof defence if ever I’ve seen one…

More churches promote martial arts to reach young men 

The young man was a member of a fight team at Xtreme Ministries, a small church near Nashville that doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Mr. Renken, who founded the church and academy, doubles as the team’s coach. The school’s motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.”

Mr. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts — a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles — to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009.

Because that’s what we need: evangelical churches training their herd to beat people into bloody pulps. Worst of all, one of them — Canyon Creek Church — is just outside Seattle.

Jack Chick’s “Lisa” 

In Jack Chick’s world, even a family torn apart by a father raping his child can be put back together in moments with a little earnest praying. Not only that, but you never have to deal with the law! Utterly reprehensible.

Students failing because of Twitter, texting 

“Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”

He is floored by some of what he sees.

“I get their essays and I go ‘You obviously don’t know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words’,” said Budra.

Even if it costs me another 15¢ to send two texts instead of one, you’ll never see me write things like “ur” or “cuz”; unless I’m being ironic.

Sci-Fi author Tobias Buckell on the Amazon/Macmillan fight 

If you’re a reader, it’s not your problem. Buy the books you want where you can.

Listen, in the big scheme of things, this hits me in the pocketbook slightly, most likely, and Macmillan in a big way. It’s not a reader’s problem, in as much as, if you believe price fixing most of the market will lead to what Teresa Nielsen Hayden says is a reduced number of non-bestseller kinds of books/new authors and midlist authors. That may concern you. It may not. I don’t know you.

Some of you will just see that books will be price fixed at $9.99, and be happy. Much like many people would be happy to hear that gas was to be price fixed at $2. I understand that.

But if you do like the authors Macmillan puts out, now is a good time to buy one of their books from a non-Amazon source if anything you saw here made you think differently about price fixing. But I wouldn’t even encourage you to buy books that are too highly priced. Heck no. You are the consumer, you need to send the right pricing signals. This is how the free market works.

Go forth and just be your merry selves.

Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties 

Author Cory Doctorow on the real problem behind Amazon’s “take its toys and go home” hissy fit:

But today, we have a much more permanent, and graver risk: contracts and DRM have the power to lock readers and writers into legally unbreakable shackles. There’s no such thing as a proprietary book. There’s no such thing as a license agreement necessary to read a book. Books are governed by a social contract that is older than publishing, older even than printing. The recent innovation of copyright in books recognizes the ancient compact between readers and writers, and protects your rights to own your books, to loan them, to give them away, to resell them, to read them in any nation, in any circumstance. A publisher or bookseller can’t force you to buy Ikea sofas to sit upon while you read your books.

But Amazon can force you to buy Kindles (and Amazon-approved devices) to read your Kindle books on and listen to your Audible audiobooks on.

Forever.

And if one of the five titans that control almost all of publishing gets into a scrap with one of the four or five titans that control almost all ebook publishing, or the one company that rules the audiobook market, the collateral damage is that you will have to choose to eschew a gigantic slice of all the literature ever made in order to hang on to your library, or abandon your library in order to get access to that publisher’s work. Or fill your shoulderbag with a half-dozen tablets and readers, one for each permutation of which corporate elephant is trying to crush another.

Flash, iPad, Standards 

The indomitable Jeffrey Zeldman on — you guessed it — Flash, iPad and web standards:

Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.

Plug-in technology made sense when web browsing was the province of geeks. It was a brilliant solution to the question of how to extend the user experience beyond what HTML allowed. People who were used to extending their PC via third-party hardware, and jacking the capabilities of their operating system via third-party spell checkers, font managers, and more, intuitively grasped how to boost their browser’s prowess by downloading and updating plug-ins.

But tomorrow’s computing systems, heralded by the iPhone, are not for DIYers. You don’t add Default Folder or FontExplorer X Pro to your iPhone, you don’t choose your iPhone’s browser, and you don’t install plug-ins in your iPhone’s browser. This lack of extensibility may not please the Slashdot crowd but it’s the future of computing and browsing. The bulk of humanity doesn’t want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works.

All the many ways Amazon so very failed the weekend 

Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It’s easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And you know how to make them absolutely incandescent with rage? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and keep it a surprise until it happens. Which, as it happens, is exactly what Amazon did. As a result: Angry, angry authors. Oh so very angry.

Chart of the Day: Apple’s Sub-$1,000 Price Points 

Boy Genius Report has an interesting chart of Apple’s price points. The site claims the chart shows that Apple has all the price points covered:

“From $59 to $7,000, if you want an Apple product, there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ll be able to pick something in your price range. Simply brilliant,” says the site.

But note that the chart does not show ALL Apple’s products and price points: there’a lot of products missing. But it does show that although Apple has a reputation as pricey, it does hit a lot of sub-$1,000 price points.

The iPad is the iPrius: your computer consumerized 

The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that’s how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics. The big changes came with the catalytic converter and electronic ignition (and warranty language to match). Now the automobile has reached the point in its development where you don’t even have to know whether it has a motor or an engine to use it, but to tinker at all requires highly specialized skills.

Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight 

Just before Apple announced the iPad and the agency deal for ebooks, Amazon pre-empted by announcing an option for publishing ebooks in which they would graciously reduce their cut from 70% to 30%, “same as Apple”. From a distance this looks competitive, but the devil is in the small print; to get the 30% rate, you have to agree that Amazon is a publisher, license your rights to Amazon to publish through the Kindle platform, guarantee that you will not allow other ebook editions to sell for less than the Kindle price, and let Amazon set that price, with a ceiling of $9.99. In other words, Amazon choose[s] how much to pay you, while using your books to undercut any possible rivals (including the paper editions you still sell). It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the major publishers don’t think very highly of this offer.

Musical predictions 

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty - we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns - that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.)

The Rise of Dog Identity Politics 

There is a long and fascinating thread of research about the health benefits of dogs. It turns out that the dog is a kind of wonder drug, an all-around stress reducer. Pet owners recover at a substantially faster rate from heart problems than do non–dog owners. There are other kinds of benefits, too. A child raised with a pet is more empathetic than one who isn’t. The dog—no secret here—is an excellent wingman. A 2008 study found that a man with a dog had a much better chance of getting a woman’s phone number than one without. And the dog can even tell you whether or not you’re a good person. A 1999 study found that people who strongly dislike dogs score significantly higher on the measure of anal character and lower on the empathy scale of the California Psychological Inventory, indicating “that people who liked dogs have less difficulty relating to people.”

Rip Torn charged with bank break-in 

Rip Torn has been charged with breaking into a Connecticut bank and carrying a loaded firearm while intoxicated, The Associated Press reports. Police say the Emmy-winning actor, 78, was arrested Friday after police found him inside a Litchfield Bancorp in Salisbury, Conn. drunk with a loaded revolver, according to the news agency. Torn was arrested and charges against him include burglary and possession of a fireman without a permit.

I think I’ll file that one under “What the shit?”

Fluctuating blood glucose levels may affect decision making 

Would you choose to receive a small amount of money today or a larger sum next month? We know that it is worth it to wait longer for a larger reward, but sometimes the temptation for the smaller, immediate reward becomes too great and we simply cannot resist it. Selecting the immediate reward is known as “future discounting” and often suggests a lack of self-control.

I need to talk to you about computers 

Steven Frank (of Panic fame) on the iPad announcement:

Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.

In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”

Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it [and] said, “What in the shit is this?”

Go read the full article. Seriously. It’s on the other side of that link at the top of this post. Click it. You know you want to.

Superfast bullet trains are finally coming to the U.S. 

Believe it: Bullet trains are coming. After decades of false starts, planners are finally beginning to make headway on what could become the largest, most complicated infrastructure project ever attempted in the US. The Obama administration got on board with an $8 billion infusion, and more cash is likely en route from Congress. It’s enough for Florida and Texas to dust off some previously abandoned plans and for urban clusters in the Northeast and Midwest to pursue some long-overdue upgrades. The nation’s test bed will almost certainly be California, which already has voter-approved funding and planning under way. But getting up to speed requires more than just seed money. For trains to beat planes and automobiles, the hardware needs to really fly. Officials are pushing to deploy state-of-the-art rail rockets. Next stop: the future.

Doctor behind autism-vaccine scare censured 

A British doctor who claimed links between a common children’s vaccine and autism failed in his duties and acted against the interest of the children in his care, a medical panel ruled Thursday. The General Medical Council ruling against Dr. Andrew Wakefield regarded research that he and other doctors conducted in the late 1990s, purporting to show that the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) injection could put children at risk of autism or bowel disease.

That research, published in The Lancet medical journal in 1998, and media coverage of it that followed, led many parents in the U.K. to refuse to vaccinate their children with the injection, which is administered around the world. Ten of the study’s 13 authors have since renounced its conclusions. The Lancet said it should not have published the study and that Wakefield’s links to litigation against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine were a “fatal conflict of interest.”

‘Altruistic’ robots produced through evolution 

A Swiss team has applied Darwinian selection to robot development, producing robots that can walk, cooperate and even hunt each other.

“Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism,” say the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and University of Lausanne researchers.

Stephen Fry on the iPad 

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: “Hold your judgment until you’ve spent five minutes with it”. No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? always says, “It’s not the same when you’re actually here. So different from when you’re sitting at home watching.”? You know how often you’ve heard that? Well, you’ll hear the same from anyone who’s handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it’s not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic text books, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron like way, might even be trapped in one.

Well worth reading the entire piece.

How screenwriters will use the iPad 

John August:

2. While you probably won’t write write a screenplay on it, you could easily make minor changes to a script right on the iPad. If Pages and Numbers can run on the iPad, a credible screenwriting app should be possible. (There’s already a poky one for the iPhone that can handle Final Draft files.)

Which means Mariner Software needs to get crackin’ on their iPad version of Montage, which kicks the everliving shit out of Final Draft. (And does back-and-forth compatibility with it while doing so.)

What colours were dinosaur feathers? 

The fossils of some small meat-eating dinosaurs were covered in filaments that are widely thought to be the precursors of feathers. And among these filaments, a team of Chinese and British scientists have found the distinctive signs of melanosomes, small structures that are partly responsible for the colours of modern bird feathers.

Obama to seek spending freeze to trim deficits 

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

Methinks this is going to be fairly unpopular, especially given how he repeatedly campaigned against it. But even if he hadn’t, it would still be a bad idea for the reasons that, well, he outlined in his campaign.

If you ask me, the Obama administration needs to take a cue from Apple and learn the fine art of controlled press leaks to gauge public reaction before committing to a plan that might prove unpopular. Not that you should live and die by your poll numbers, but the idiom “look before you leap” still rings true.

Why computers should be more like toasters 

The most revolutionary thing about Apple’s phone wasn’t its sleek case or the multitouch gestures, but the artful way in which it hid nearly every bit of complexity behind a display of easy-to-understand icons. The iPhone contains no visible “directory structure.” Your music is not in a particular place on your phone; it’s just on your phone, and you get to it by launching the music player. Other than charging it, the iPhone requires no maintenance. Backups and OS upgrades occur automatically, and because all programs are approved by Apple (and because even third-party programmers aren’t given deep access to the phone), you never have to worry about malware. And look how easy it is to install a program: Choose one from the store, press “Install,” and type in your password to authorize the purchase—and that’s it. The iPhone doesn’t ask you where you want to put the new program, or how you’d like to launch it, and whether you’d like it to be the default program for doing a particular kind of task. It just puts up a little icon on the screen. To run the program, click the icon. To do something else, hit the home button.

RNC Fundraising: “Of course, duping people is the point” 

Officials of both parties are sharply criticizing a fundraising mailing from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele they say could be confused with official correspondence regarding this year’s Census.

The fundraising letter comes in the form of a “survey,” a frequently used device for partisan fundraising, but this one has a twist: calling itself the “Congressional District Census,” the letter comes in an envelope starkly printed with the words, “DO NOT DESTROY OFFICIAL DOCUMENT” and describes itself, on the outside of the envelope, as a “census document.”

Sounds illegal, doesn’t it? But because it doesn’t “use the full name of the Census Bureau or the seal of any government agency”, it apparently manages to stay just this side of legal.

Being cold boosts healthy hormone 

An Ottawa researcher has found that a little shivering boosts levels of a cholesterol-lowering and cancer-fighting protein.

Pascal Imbault, a professor of human kinetics at the University of Ottawa, has found that a small group of men who were kept at a cool temperature for two hours showed increased levels of adiponectin in their blood. The protein is secreted by fat cells and is known to fight diabetes, cancer and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) as well as reduce cholesterol levels.

‘Piracy isn’t killing music’ Radiohead’s guitarist says 

Last year, Radiohead expressed their growing discomfort with record labels that abuse copyrights for their own benefit, while harassing their fans. In a recent interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said that he doesn’t believe piracy is killing the music industry, but that the industry will kill itself if it doesn’t adapt to the digital age.

In an attempt to take a stand against the labels, several well known artists including Radiohead formed the Featured Artists Coalition last year, a lobby group that aims to end the extortion-like practices of record labels and allow artists to gain more control over their own work.

Radiohead and others are unhappy with the fact that the labels, represented by lobby groups such as the RIAA and IFPI, are pushing for anti-piracy legislation without consulting the artists they claim to represent. Radiohead, who used BitTorrent to leak one of their songs, went as far as being willing to show up as a witness against the RIAA in court.

In a new MIDEM interview, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien stands up for file-sharers once again, stating that piracy is not killing the music industry in his view.

Myths of the American Revolution 

Noted historian John Ferling debunks the most significant myths about America’s War of Independence over seven pages for Smithsonian magazine.

Why can’t the I.R.S. help fill in the blanks? 

In the digital age, filing income tax returns should be a snap. The important data from employers and financial institutions have already been sent to the government’s computers. Yet taxpayers are still required to perform the anachronistic chore of preparing a return from scratch. And, in many cases, they pay a software company for the privilege.

Requiring taxpayers to file returns without being told what the government already knows makes as much sense “as if Visa sent customers a blank piece of paper, requiring that they assemble their receipts, list their purchases — and pay a fine if they forget one,” said Joseph Bankman, a professor at the Stanford Law School.

Many developed countries now offer taxpayers a return containing all information collected by the taxing authority — to “get the ball rolling by telling you what it knows,” Mr. Bankman says.

How art affects the brain 

“At an exhibit opening this weekend at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, visitors will be asked to wear 3-D glasses and walk around with clipboards and pencils while looking at images of sculptures.

“Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics,” enlists the public as participants in a Johns Hopkins University study that looks at why the human brain is attracted to artwork.

Museum-goers will look at 3-D printouts of altered versions of sculptures by abstract artist Jean Arp. One of his works, “The Woman of Delos” (1959), will also be on display at the Walters. While looking at computer-altered versions of the sculptures—some skinnier, others more rotund—participants will be asked which they are most attracted to, and which they like the least.”

I wish I were in Baltimore, so I could take part of that.

63% of internet readers will like this comic 

Scientists to breed the auroch from extinction 

Scientists in Italy are hoping to breed back from extinction the mighty auroch, a bovine species which has been extinct since 1627. The auroch weighed 2,200 pounds (1000kg) and its shoulders stood at 6′6″. The beasts once roamed most of Asia and northern Africa. The animal was depicted in cave paintings and Julius Caesar described it as being a little less in size than an elephant. A member of the Consortium for Experimental Biotechnology suggests that 99% of the auroch’s DNA can be recreated from genetic material found in surviving bone material.

WSJ: Tablet confirmed, Apple to reinvent old media 

With the new tablet device that is debuting next week, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is betting he can reshape businesses like textbooks, newspapers and television much the way his iPod revamped the music industry—and expand Apple’s influence and revenue as a content middleman.

In developing the device, Apple focused on the role the gadget could play in homes and in classrooms, say people familiar with the situation. The company envisions that the tablet can be shared by multiple family members to read news and check email in homes, these people say.

For classrooms, Apple has been exploring electronic-textbook technology, these people add. The people familiar with the matter say Apple has also been looking at how content from newspapers and magazines can be presented differently on the tablet. Other people briefed on the device say the tablet will come with a virtual keyboard.

Apple has recently been in discussions with book, magazine and newspaper publishers about how they can work together. The company has talked with The New York Times Co., Conde Nast Publications Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers and its owner News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal, over content for the tablet, say people familiar with the talks.

Also worth pointing out that Steve Jobs is on the board of directors and is the majority shareholder of Marvel Entertainment’s parent company, The Walt Disney Company.

One Too Many Mornings 

John August:

The mythical Sundance experience — fierce bidding wars to land the next indie smash — are over. Most films don’t sell, and the few that do struggle to reach even a tiny audience.

Some filmmakers like Todd Sklar have opted to self-distribute, essentially taking the indie band approach and touring theaters around the country. That’s great if you enjoy being in a van.

The Mornings team is doing what I would try: skipping theatrical altogether. The day after the premiere, you can download their film or get the DVD. You can even buy a piece of the set, or buy the filmmakers lunch.

Not-so-new atheism 

All the “New” Atheists cringe at the epithet the popular press has given us. Watch this CBC interview with Bertrand Russell and see why.

CBS uncovers rare Jack Benny treasures, puts them back and tosses out the key 

When Jack Benny fans discovered that the CBS vaults contained some 25 original Jack Benny TV show episodes previously thought lost, they rejoiced. They approached the network for release of the public-domain footage, even offering to foot the bill for digital transfer and preservation. CBS balked, insisting that the fan club get approval from the Benny estate. No problem: Jack Benny’s descendants were only too glad to have his original TV shows rescued from obscurity and given to the world.

But CBS balked again, citing unspecified “issues” (presumably potential copyrights in the score or other materials). Basically, CBS has decided that it could cost too much to pay a lawyer to figure out if they can release these films—or even turn them over to Benny’s fans and family for release—and so it has decided to simply abandon them, sealing them back up in the vault forever.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work. In the Constitution’s progress clause, Congress is empowered to “promote the progress of the arts” through copyright. When copyright creates these deadlocks that doom America’s artistic heritage to history’s scrapheap, copyright needs to change.

How to brag 

“No one likes a show-off. But to get ahead in this world, you’re going to need to let at least some people know what you’re capable of. Thankfully Nurit Tal-Or has arrived with a pair of studies that offer some insight into how to brag without coming across as big-headed.

Over a hundred undergrads were presented with the script of a conversation between two people – a ’show-off’ called Avi who boasted about his A-grade in stats exams, and his friend. Crucially, there were four versions of the conversation, with each undergrad participant reading just one version. In two versions, the friend raised the topic of the exam before he either did or did not ask Avi what grade he got; in the other two versions, Avi first raised the topic of the exam, which either did or did not provoke a question from his friend about his grade. In every version Avi ended up boasting that he got an ‘A+’. Afterwards, the students rated Avi’s character based on the version they’d read.

The crux of it: context is everything when it comes to boasting. If Avi’s friend raised the topic of the exams, Avi received favourable ratings in terms of his boastfulness and likeability, regardless of whether he was actually asked what grade he got. By contrast, if Avi raised the topic of the exams, but failed to provoke a question, then his likeability suffered and he was seen as more of a boaster. In other words, to pull off a successful boast, you need it to be appropriate to the conversation.”

Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution 

This change to the Constitution was not the result of, say, a formal amendment, but a procedural rule adopted in 1975: a revision of Senate Rule 22, which was the old cloture rule. Before 1975, it took two-thirds of the Senate to end a filibuster, but it was the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster: if senators wanted to stop a vote, they had to bring in the cots and the coffee and read from Grandma’s recipe for chicken soup until, unshaven, they keeled over from their own rhetorical exhaust.

For the record, nothing like Senate Rule 22 appears in the Constitution, nor was there unlimited debate until Vice President Aaron Burr presided over the Senate in the early 180os. In 1917, after a century of chaos, the Senate put in the old Rule 22 to stop unlimited filibusters. Because it was about stopping real, often distressing, floor debate, one might have been able to defend that rule under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says, “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.”

As revised in 1975, Senate Rule 22 seemed to be an improvement: it required 60 senators, not 67, to stop floor debate. But there also came a significant change in de facto Senate practice: to maintain a filibuster, senators no longer had to keep talking. Nowadays, they don’t even have to start; they just say they will, and that’s enough. Senators need not be on the floor at all. They can be at home watching Jimmy Stewart on cable. Senate Rule 22 now exists to cut off what are ghost filibusters, disembodied debates.

How birth order affects your personality 

“When I tell people I study whether birth order affects personality, I usually get blank looks. It sounds like studying whether the sky is blue. Isn’t it common sense? Popular books invoke birth order for self-discovery, relationship tips, business advice and parenting guidance in titles such as The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are (Revell, 2009). Newspapers and morning news shows debate the importance of the latest findings (“Latter-born children engage in more risky behavior; what should parents do?”) while tossing in savory anecdotes (“Did you know that 21 of the first 23 astronauts into space were firstborns?”).

But when scientists scrutinized the data, they found that the evidence just did not hold up. In fact, until very recently there were no convincing findings that linked birth order to personality or behavior. Our common perception that birth order matters was written off as an example of our well-established tendency to remember and accept evidence that supports our pet theories while readily forgetting or overlooking that which does not. But two studies from the past three years finally found measurable effects: our position in the family does indeed affect both our IQ and our personality. It may be time to reconsider birth order as a real influence over whom we grow up to be.”

Google Earth helps find El Dorado 

Since the time of the conquistadors, the legend of an ancient, lost civilisation deep in the Amazon forest has beguiled hundreds of explorers and led many to their deaths. Some called their dream El Dorado. Others, most notably Colonel Percy Fawcett, the gloriously moustached British explorer (and real-life model for Indiana Jones) named it the City of Z. But no one has ever returned from the Amazon with conclusive proof that such a place existed.

Three scientists have now come close to doing just that. The journal Antiquity has published a report showing more than 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil’s border with Bolivia. From the sky it looks as if a series of geometric figures has been carved into the earth, but the archeologists and historians who published the report believe these shapes are the remains of roads, bridges, moats, avenues and squares that formed the basis for a sophisticated civilisation spanning 155 miles, which could have supported a population of 60,000. The remains date from AD200 to 1283.

Cosmetics testing without animals 

Researchers at Hurel Corporation have reached a major milestone in their quest to create a chip to replace skin allergy testing on animals. Working with cosmetics firm L’Oreal, Hurel has developed a working microfluidic portion of the chip. While there is still much work to be done before they have a whole chip ready for commercial use, the researchers say this is a major step toward eliminating allergy testing on animals.

“One important benefit in moving away from animal testing is the cost savings,” says Robert Freedman, Hurel’s chief executive officer. He said tests on small animals can run as high as $1,000 an animal. Ultimately, these chips should prove to be far less expensive. There’s also increasing political pressure to eliminate animal testing, particularly in Europe, where a complete ban on animal testing for cosmetics sold there will take full effect in 2013.

Solar shingles see the light of day 

Dow Chemical is moving full speed ahead to develop roof shingles embedded with photovoltaic cells. To facilitate the move, the U.S. Department of Energy has backed Dow’s efforts with a $17.8 million tax credit that will help the company launch an initial market test of the product later this year.

In October 2009, the chemical giant unveiled its product, which can be nailed to a roof like ordinary shingles by roofers without the help of specially trained solar installers or electricians. The solar shingles will cost 30 to 40 percent less than other solar-embedded building materials and 10 percent less than the combined costs of conventional roofing materials and rack-mounted solar panels, according to company officials.

Slaughterhouse Five 

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month - February - the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival.

Organ damage In rats from Monsanto GMO corn 

A study published in December 2009 in the International Journal of Biological Sciences found that three varieties of Monsanto genetically-modified corn caused damage to the liver, kidneys, and other organs of rats. One of the corn varieties was designed to tolerate broad-spectrum herbicides, (so-called ‘Roundup-ready’ corn), while the other two contain bacteria-derived proteins that have insecticide properties. The study made use of Monsanto’s own raw data. Quoting from the study’s ‘Conclusions’ section: ‘Our analysis highlights that the kidneys and liver as particularly important on which to focus such research as there was a clear negative impact on the function of these organs in rats consuming GM maize varieties for just 90 days.

Nanoscale: robot arm places atoms and molecules with 100% accuracy 

Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy.

Some social skills may be genetic 

The ability to recognize faces is not just handy for cocktail parties, it’s crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and facilitating social interactions. If face recognition increases our ability to fend off predators and find mates, there is an evolutionary drive to encode this ability in our genes.

To test this, Kanwisher’s team looked at whether the ability to recognize faces runs in the family. They found that identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, were more similar in their face-recognition ability than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. This suggests the ability to recognize faces is heritable.

Tobacco smoke helps cancers grow: researchers 

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine found that the inflammation of lung tissue caused by tobacco smoke caused tumours to grow and to develop more quickly. In their experiment, the researchers caused lung cancer in lab mice by either exposing them to a chemical carcinogen or introducing a mutated gene into their genetic code. Some of the mice were then intermittently exposed to tobacco smoke. The researchers found that mice with early cancer lesions that were exposed to the smoke developed large tumours that grew more quickly than in those mice that were not exposed to the smoke.

Chimp and human Y chromosomes evolving faster than expected 

Contrary to a widely held scientific theory that the mammalian Y chromosome is slowly decaying or stagnating, new evidence suggests that in fact the Y is actually evolving quite rapidly through continuous, wholesale renovation.

By conducting the first comprehensive interspecies comparison of Y chromosomes, Whitehead Institute researchers have found considerable differences in the genetic sequences of the human and chimpanzee Ys—an indication that these chromosomes have evolved more quickly than the rest of their respective genomes over the 6 million years since they emerged from a common ancestor. The findings are published online this week in the journal Nature.

“The region of the Y that is evolving the fastest is the part that plays a role in sperm production,” say Jennifer Hughes, first author on the Nature paper and a postdoctoral researcher in Whitehead Institute Director David Page’s lab. “The rest of the Y is evolving more like the rest of the genome, only a little bit faster.”

Cellphone radiation helps demented mice: study 

Mice exposed to cellphone radiation seem to gain protection from the memory-robbing effects of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published this week.

Lead author Gary Arendash of the University of South Florida and his colleagues said they were expecting cellphone exposure to increase the effects of dementia, but that’s not what they found.

“It surprised us to find that cellphone exposure, begun in early adulthood, protects the memory of mice otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms,” Arendash said in a release.

“It was even more astonishing that the electromagnetic waves generated by cellphones actually reversed memory impairment in old Alzheimer’s mice.”

The study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, looked at 96 mice, most of which had been genetically modified to develop beta-amyloid plaques in their brains, a marker of Alzheimer’s disease. Other mice were not genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s, so the researchers could also test the effects of electromagnetic waves on normal memory.

All of the mice were exposed to the electromagnetic field generated by standard cellphone use for two hour-long periods each day for seven to nine months.

The mice weren’t wearing tiny headsets, but their cages were arranged around an antenna that generated the cellphone signal. Each animal was housed the same distance from the antenna, and was exposed to electromagnetic waves like those emitted by a mobile phone pressed against a human head.

Science denial on the rise 

From evolution to global warming to vaccines, science is under assault from denialists–those who dismiss well-tested scientific knowledge as merely one of many competing ideologies. Science denial goes beyond skeptical questioning to attack the legitimacy of science itself.

It is very concerning indeed. Too much of our meagre time in science classrooms is spent on the knowledge gained through science, compared to the amount of time spent teaching the method of science — how we gain scientific knowledge. Too few people have a solid grasp on the scientific method, what it is and how it works. Our entire global civilisation depends powerfully on science and technology. Transportation, agriculture, communication, medicine, entertainment; the list goes on. If you build your civilisation on the back of science, but you don’t teach science to your civilisation, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Scientists turn wood into bones 

Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue. At the Istec laboratory of bioceramics in Faenza near Bologna, a herd of sheep have already been implanted with the bones.

The process starts by cutting the long tubular rattan wood up into manageable pieces. It is then snipped into even smaller chunks, ready for the complex chemical process to begin. The pieces are put in a furnace and heated. In simple terms, carbon and calcium are added. The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced.

iPhone touchscreen more accurate than Droid, Nexus One 

Bee colony collapse may have several causes 

When suspiciously large numbers of honeybee colonies started collapsing in late 2006, the search began to find the culprit behind the mysterious deaths. Now it seems a whole web of problems may be causing what’s known as colony collapse disorder.

It’s becoming clear that there is no single parasite, virus or chemical to blame, argues Frances Ratnieks, a bee scientist at University of Sussex in Brighton. Instead, honeybees are probably dying for all kinds of different reasons from loss of their foraging grounds to increased exposure to global pathogens, Ratnieks wrote in a review of the issue in the journal Science.

“We may conclude that colonies are dying for different reasons in different parts of the world and I would say that if that is the case, I would not be the least bit surprised,” Ratnieks told Wired.com. A variety of pests, viruses and parasites could all be working together to stress the bees. And in some ways, that’s worse than trying to take on a single culprit: The problems with beekeeping are systemic, Ratnieks said, and can’t be solved with a new pesticide or technique.

Human genome is part bornavirus 

Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.

…

In the new study, researchers led by Keizo Tomonaga of Osaka University found that two human genes are similar to the bornavirus N gene. These two genes, now called EBLN-1 and EBLN-2 for endogenous Borna-like N, are molecular fossils of an ancient bornavirus.

Retroviruses make up about 8 percent of the human genome. When these viruses insert into the genome, the result is usually bad for the host. But not always: Some retrovirus proteins can help fight off infection with other retroviruses. And at least twice in primate evolution retrovirus insertions have added genes to the host genome that aid in making the placenta. Now those proteins are essential for placenta development, says Cédric Feschotte, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Texas at Arlington. It is not clear what role, if any, the EBLN-1 and EBLN-2 genes play in humans.

Right-handers sit to the right of the movie screen to optimise neural processing of the film 

Although our bodies appear largely symmetrical on the outside, the way our brains are organised and wired is rather more lop-sided. This is obvious to us in relation to handedness, whereby the brain is better at controlling one hand than the other. The idea that, for many of us, the left-hemisphere is dominant for language is also widely known. However, functional asymmetry between the brain hemispheres also affects our behaviour in more subtle ways that are still being explored. The latest example of this comes from Japan where Matia Okubo has shown that right-handers have a preference for sitting to the right of the cinema screen, but only when they are motivated to watch the film.

Prions show evolution without DNA: study 

Infectious proteins that cause brain-wasting diseases such as BSE can evolve, even though they contain no genetic information, researchers say.

Prions are proteins that cause brain-wasting diseases such as Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD) and mad cow disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. (CBC) Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida found that prions can undergo mutations in their protein structure and those mutations can lead to changes in the disease, such as drug resistance.

Drug resistance is an evolutionary adaptation previously only seen in bacteria and viruses, organisms that carry genetic information in DNA or a similar nucleic acid molecule, RNA.

‘Jungle woman’ starts speaking again 

Cambodia’s “jungle woman”, whose story gripped the country after she apparently spent 18 years living in a forest, has begun speaking normally instead of making animal-type noises, her father said. Rochom P’ngieng, 28, went missing as a little girl in 1989 while herding water buffalo in Ratanakkiri province around 600 kilometres north-east of the capital Phnom Penh. In early 2007 she was brought from the jungle, naked and dirty, after being caught trying to steal food from a farmer.

U.S. Reaction to Swine Flu: Apt and Lucky 

H1N1 could have been a disaster. But thanks to hard work by the CDC and NIH, private and public health facilities, and the efforts of physician bloggers like the Flu Wiki, vaccine was produced and distributed, perhaps limiting the epidemic and saving tens of thousands of lives. Ironically, the 2009 flu pandemic turning into a non-story was an impressive achievement of medical science.

Uranium is so last century — enter thorium, the new green nuke 

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

What happened to the hominids who were smarter than us? 

In the autumn of 1913, two farmers were arguing about hominid skull fragments they had uncovered while digging a drainage ditch. The location was Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa.

These Afrikaner farmers, to their lasting credit, had the presence of mind to notice that there was something distinctly odd about the bones. They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz Simons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

What would have entered the public domain tomorrow? 

‘Casino Royale, Marilyn Monroe’s Playboy cover, The Adventures of Augie March, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Crick & Watson’s Nature article decoding the double helix, Disney’s Peter Pan, The Crucible’… ‘How ironic that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, with its book burning firemen, was published in 1953 and would once have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2010. To quote James Boyle, “Bradbury’s firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate.”

Copyright law has simply gone out of control. Just as Walt Disney used the works of the Brothers Grimm to produce some of the best of the Disney stories, so too should the next Walt Disney be able to build upon the stories told by Disney.

Patrick Stewart, Peter Jackson knighted 

Actor Patrick Stewart and film writer and director Peter Jackson will now be known as Sir Patrick and Sir Peter, respectively, in their home countries.

Stewart will be awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth in Britain’s New Year Honours List, while Jackson has been made a knight in New Zealand.

Berkeley High School has gone insane 

PZ Myers gives us the skinny:

Berkeley High School has a serious problem: it’s a good, relatively well-funded school, but black and latino students aren’t doing as well as white students. Their solution: kill those expensive science labs and redirect the money to remedial classes. Science classes with no labs? Inconceivable! That’s what a body of earnest, well-meaning, and apparently scientifically illiterate parents and teachers have decided to do.

You cannot learn about science without doing science. It’s like deciding to continue to teach theater and music, but without that troubling and time-consuming business of performing. Or like having a football program that never plays any games (I know, that one is pure fantasy…discontinuing a football team is much, much harder than simply shutting down teaching labs).

I’m also surprised at the casual bigotry in the proposal. Demolishing their science program won’t hurt black and Latino students? Right. When I taught at Temple University, the biology labs were full of ambitious black students scrambling to pick up those essential, basic lab skills that they needed to be doctors and nurses someday…skills that were not taught in the impoverished urban schools of North Philadelphia. Is Berkeley training their minority students to be part of the cutting edge of science and technology and medicine, or are they more interested in turning out service workers for Taco Bell?

Playing video games could be an unlikely cure for psychological trauma 

Researchers at Oxford University hypothesised that playing Tetris after witnessing violence would sap some of the cognitive resources the brain would normally rely on to form memories. A well-structured study in the journal PLoS One confirmed the finding — Tetris acted like a ‘cognitive vaccine’ against traumatic memory. Memory research suggests that there’s about a 6-hour window immediately after witnessing trauma during which memory formation can be disrupted. The results of this study indicate that if you happen to have Tetris or a game like it handy during those six hours, it’s the cure for what ails you.

Disinfectant use could cause superbugs 

Scientists at the University of Ireland in Galway found that when they added the disinfectant benzalkonium chloride to common bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, increasing the amount of the germ-fighting solution over time, the bacteria learned how to survive. They also became able to withstand a commonly prescribed antibiotic, ciproflaxin, even though they had never come in contact with it.

You mean organisms evolve to adapt to their environment? Shocking!

Matching teaching style to learning style may not help students 

Consider an experiment about teaching the structure of complex molecules. The matching hypothesis might predict that kinesthetic learners would absorb the concept best by building ball-and-stick models in the lab, while verbal learners would do better by reading a few pages about the logic of molecular design.

That sounds intuitive. But according to Mr. Pashler and his co-authors, almost every well-designed study of that type has discovered that one instructional style actually works best for both groups.

What happens, Mr. Pashler says, is something like this: Experimenters randomly assign students to a classroom that uses laboratory lessons or to a classroom that uses texts. At the end of the week, students are tested on their knowledge of molecular structures.

Among the students who are taught in a hands-on laboratory setting, it turns out that the kinesthetic learners enjoy their lessons much more than their verbal peers do. They also perform better on the test at the end of the week. Let’s say that the kinesthetic students average a 95 on the test, while the verbal students’ average is 80.

That might seem like strong evidence for the learning-styles hypothesis. Not so fast, Mr. Pashler says.

Look at the second classroom, where students learn about molecules by reading texts. Here, the verbal students enjoy the lessons much more than their kinesthetic peers do. But on the test, both the verbal and kinesthetic students average around 70. The verbal students are actually better off learning this concept in a laboratory, even though they enjoy it less.

In almost every actual well-designed study, Mr. Pashler and his colleagues write in their paper, “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” the pattern is similar: For a given lesson, one instructional technique turns out to be optimal for all groups of students, even though students with certain learning styles may not love that technique.

Space Probe gets halfway to Pluto in record time 

Instead of the plaques attached to the earlier ships, which presumably identify the spacecraft as artifacts of Earthly civilization, New Horizons carries a DVD inscribed with 450,000 names of supporters and some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930.

Nice sentiment with the Tombaugh ashes, but the thought of a DVD seems a bit weird. Does Sony sell DVD players in Alpha Centauri?

Vatican declares Pope a legally protected icon 

The Vatican made a declaration on the protection of the figure of the Pope on Saturday morning. The statement seeks to establish and safeguard the name, image and any symbols of the Pope as being expressly for official use of the Holy See unless otherwise authorized.

The statement cited a “great increase of affection and esteem for the person of the Holy Father” in recent years as contributing to a desire to use the Pontiff’s name for all manner of educational and cultural institutions, civic groups and foundations.

Due to this demand, the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that “it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church.”

The declaration alludes to attempts to use ecclesiastical or pontifical symbols and logos to “attribute credibility and authority to initiatives” as another reason to establish their “copyright” on the Holy Father’s name, picture and coat of arms.

“Consequently, the use of anything referring directly to the person or office of the Supreme Pontiff… and/or the use of the title ‘Pontifical,’ must receive previous and express authorization from the Holy See,” concluded the message released to the press.

Sounds like a challenge to me! Fuck the Pope in his Pontifical Hitler-Youth-member ass!

Alright, Holy See: bring on the lawsuit!

Darth Vader opens Wall Street 

I’m not so sure the NYSE really thought this one through. The leader of the Evil Empire, flanked by rifle-wielding stormtroopers, ringing the opening bell? Can they not read how mad people are at Wall Street? Do they really want that image on top of everything? I guess the only way it could have been worse would be to have Jabba the Hutt, surrounded by slaves, ringing the bell instead.

NASA MMO game 

The mini demo game Moon Base Alpha utilizes actual NASA Constellation program design details developed by NASA for mankind’s return to the Moon in 2020. Timelines in the much anticipated Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond MMO will be set even farther in the exciting future (2035+), but the ability to explore our own near-future moon missions is also planned for in the forthcoming game facilitated by the NASA Learning Technologies and Innovative Partnerships Programs.

50 years of domesticating foxes for science 

In 1959, Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev set out to breed a tamer fox that would be easier for their handlers in the Russian fur industry to work with. Much to the scientist’s shock, changes no one had expected emerged after just 10 generations. The foxes began behaving playfully, were smaller in size, and even changed color — much like dogs. Belyaev died in 1985, but the experiment continued (PDF) in his absence, and to this day provides strong evidence to parts of evolutionary theory. The experiment eventually branched out to involve other species as well.

Think koalas are cute? Thank eucalyptus and evolution 

Modern koalas are known for their cuteness, nearly exclusive eucalyptus-leaf diet, and the unexpectedly weird noises they make. Now, new research into their ancient ancestors shows that the koalas’ odd appeal arose through the evolutionary interplay between an increasing reliance on an odd food supply and the need to maintain distinct ear structures for hearing each others’ bellows.

By studying the skulls of koala predecessors that lived five to 24 million years ago in the Miocene, an Australian team argues that evolution reshaped the animals faces to enable them to eat the tough leaves while maintaining their specialized communication anatomy.

Prince William spends cold night in alley 

A cold alley in central London is a far cry from a palace — but it was the spot Prince William chose to sleep to highlight the plight of homeless British teenagers.

Sign over Auschwitz gate stolen 

The Polish police said Friday that the iron sign over the gate to the Auschwitz memorial with the infamous phrase “arbeit macht frei” — “work sets you free” — has been stolen. Katarzyna Padlo, a police spokeswoman, said the police believe it was taken between 3:30 a.m. and 5 a.m. Friday.

Ms. Padlo, who was quoted by The Associated Press, said the sign over the main entrance to Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland, near Krakow, was removed by being unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other. She said the authorities immediately launched an intensive search.

Utterly despicable.

No more personal web sites allowed in China 

In a drastic move to tighten regulations of the Internet, individuals can no longer register domain names in China, and those who already have personal websites could lose them.

According to a statement on The China Internet Network Information Centre, as of this week, the only people who can register new domains will be businessmen or organizations, and all those new registrants will need to have both written application materials as well as copies of their enterprise’s business license or organization code certificate.

The China Internet Network Information Centre, which supervises domain name registration, says that the measure stemmed from concern over widespread pornographic content on personal websites.

Existing individual domains could also be in trouble. Website owners in Jiangsu, Shanghai, Henan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi said their sites were no longer accessible.

Exactly 

Human blood stem cells engineered to kill HIV 

A proof-of-principle study has demonstrated that it is possible to engineer human blood stem cells into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells. The result is the equivalent of a genetic vaccine which is not only good news in the fight against HIV – the process could also be used against a range of chronic viral diseases.

In the study researchers from the UCLA AIDS Institute and colleagues took the “killer” T cells that help fight infection, known as CD8 cytotoxic T lymphocytes, from an HIV-infected individual. The researchers then identified the molecule known as the T-cell receptor – the molecule that guides the T cell in recognizing and killing HIV-infected cells. Although these cells are able to destroy HIV-infected cells, they do not exist in enough quantities to clear the virus from the body. So the researchers cloned the receptor and genetically engineered human blood stem cells, then placed the stem cells into human thymus tissue that had been implanted in mice, allowing them to study the reaction in a living organism.

Debunking Psychology 

There’s loads of claims out there about popular psychology that we regularly hear. Statements like “You only use 10% of your brain” and “as you get older you forget more and your mind deteriorates” you’ll hear not infrequently. Others might claim “oh I’m one of those left brain people” or that you can learn information whilst asleep — these statements are all regularly claimed without any question.

Possibly the best book at debunking these statements is 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology. It covers plenty of subjects from ESP, subliminal messages through to ideas that men and women communicate differently or your handwriting reveals things about your personality.

The Known Universe, by the American Museum of Natural History 

Kottke:

The Known Universe zooms out from Tibet to the limits of the observable universe. Dim the lights, full-screen it in HD, and you’re in for a treat.

Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium’s Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.

Since 1998, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium have engaged in the three-dimensional mapping of the Universe. This cosmic cartography brings a new perspective to our place in the Universe and will redefine your sense of home. The Digital Universe Atlas is distributed to you via packages that contain our data products, like the Milky Way Atlas and the Extragalactic Atlas, and requires free software allowing you to explore the atlas by flying through it on your computer.

‘Kind of Blue’ hailed as landmark by U.S. Congress 

The U.S. Congress has agreed that Kind of Blue is a landmark achievement. In a rare show of unanimity, Congress voted Tuesday to mark the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s recording, thought by many critics to be a masterpiece.

Scientists crack ‘entire genetic code’ of cancer 

Scientists have unlocked the entire genetic code of two of the most common cancers — skin and lung — a move they say could revolutionise cancer care.

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Not only will the cancer maps pave the way for blood tests to spot tumors far earlier, they will also yield new drug targets, say the Wellcome Trust team. The scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure. The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure. From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke. Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer.

The limits of ideological voting 

Patrick writes:

Unwavering ideological voting, of the sort Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich exhibit, is the exception in politics for good reason.

Unwavering ideological voting is also an exception because it is usually unserious and lazy. It is normally cast as a struggling individual hewing to his/her principles, but the world we live in is not some theoretical construct, and unwavering ideology is simply not a logical method for governing. Problems generally require serious grappling for understanding and solutions, not a pre-existing formula. Paul and Kucinich have difficulty extending their appeal beyond their strong supporters because of this reality, not because of special interests.

Frankly, it is this mindset — that ideologies remain constant and that a chosen ideology can be applied to any problems — that is at the heart of our sorry public discourse. When issues are always presented as a choice between two (and it is always two) competing ideologies, then they can be discussed with almost no knowledge of the issues at hand. Witness our Sunday talk shows, where guests (who are often experts in one field) pontificate on other topics in which they have absolutely no background. They can do this because the debate is framed only in terms of ideology and political gamesmanship, which requires no new investigation or education, only a background in ideology that may have been gained decades ago. As a result, we are often dumber for having watched.

One man’s rumour is another man’s reality 

Dispelling conspiracy theories and untruths can be difficult when people only hear what they already believe.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that someone’s not after you. Over the last few months, a lot of writers have dusted off Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay on the paranoid style in American politics just so they can explain away the loony rumors and conspiracy theories coming from the far right. But no amount of intellectual condescension is going to make those powerful untruths go away.

The real truth is that, as weird as they are, rumors and conspiracy theories can only thrive in the minds of people who are predisposed to believe them. Successful propagators of fringe theories don’t just send random balloons into the atmosphere. Rather, they tap into the preexisting beliefs and biases of their target audiences.

Plenty of studies have shown that people don’t process information in a neutral way — “biased assimilation” they call it. In other words, rather than our opinions being forged by whatever information we have available, they tend to be constructed by our wants and needs. With all their might, our minds try to reduce cognitive dissonance — that queasy feeling you get when you are confronted by contradictory ideas simultaneously. Therefore, we tend to reject theories and rumors — and facts and truths — that challenge our worldview and embrace those that affirm it.

Full story at LA Times

Cohen, Jackson to get Grammy lifetime awards 

Canadian music icon Leonard Cohen, country legend Loretta Lynn and the late Michael Jackson will be honoured with lifetime achievement prizes at the coming Grammy Award celebrations, organizers announced Thursday.

Congratulations to Mr. Cohen! It was an absolute treat getting a chance to see him perform in England last year, and he definitely deserves it. Hell of a performer!

This week in religious barbarism 

Larry Robert Collins, a pastor at the Guildford Church of the Nazarene until last year, was sentenced in provincial court in Surrey Tuesday to 15 months in jail… Collins first surfaced on police radar in June 2008 after B.C. authorities were contacted by police in another province about a disturbing video that originated in B.C. and involved a young teen. The video was a montage of girls in pornographic acts interspersed with photographs of the victim, taken from her Facebook account, with written messages inciting viewers to sexually assault her. “The words were telling people point-blank that this girl wants to be raped,” said Racine. “At the end of the day, it’s a video encouraging the rape of a child.” Collins also created online accounts impersonating the teen and linking to the video, which accumulated 45,000 hits. He also put her in danger by posting her name and hometown.

Racine said Collins knew the girl through a church function.

Huge cosmic explosions fuelled by magnetism 

The death of one star can sometimes outshine a galaxy of billions of stars. That’s because when some very massive stars end their lives in supernova explosions, they release a surge of light known as a gamma ray burst.

Now scientists have found evidence that magnetic fields are behind these rare events. Theorists have predicted that magnetic fields could explain how gamma ray bursts (GRBs) produce jets of bright radiation that shoot out into the universe. But no one has observed the presence of a magnetic field in a gamma ray burst until now.

What East Anglia’s emails really tell us about climate change 

Peter Kelemen, for Popular Science:

In the past two weeks, scientists like myself have been gripped by news of the theft and online release of more than a decade of e-mails from one of the world’s leading centers for climate-change research, the Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia. During these same weeks, world political leaders have been preparing for a climate summit in Copenhagen and a new study has indicated that a major ice sheet in eastern Antarctica, previously thought to be stable, is in fact losing mass. But those developments have been clouded by the stolen e-mails and what they may imply about how research into human-induced global warming is carried out.

Among the hundreds of e-mails, 10 to 20 messages seem to indicate that scientists at CRU and their correspondents considered deleting information requested by critics in the context of British and American freedom of information laws, and in at least two separate cases discussed how to have associate editors of peer-reviewed journals removed from their posts because they accepted critics’ papers for publication. We do not know the detailed context of these messages, nor do we know if ideas discussed in these e-mails were actually implemented. Furthermore, though CRU has confirmed that most of the e-mails are genuine, some of them could have been forged or altered. Nevertheless, I think it is important for scientists to clearly state that if basic data were withheld, or if there was unprofessional tampering with the peer-review process, we do not condone these acts. It is equally essential to emphasize that alleged problems with a few scientists’ behavior do not change the consensus understanding of human-induced, global climate change, which is a robust hypothesis based on well-established observations and inferences.

I am not a climate science specialist and I can’t claim to represent the wider science community. However, I am a geologist with a Ph.D. and 30 years of research experience. As I became personally involved in research on CO2 capture and storage over the past four years, I have taken an increasing interest in the underlying observations that have led the great majority of scientists to conclude that action is necessary to reduce and mitigate CO2 emissions.

Gore on ‘Cimategate’: “What in the hell do they think is causing it?” 

From a Slate.com interview:

His frustration with the hacked-email fallout is palpable. “The basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto!—physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat anymore?” Gore asked, and pressed his point harder: “And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it?”

Indeed. The heat-trapping effects of CO₂ are well known, and the greenhouse effect has also been observed on other planets.

Visualizing unemployment 

A chilling animated map of America showing county by county the unemployment rate throughout the country in the past three years.

Bloody new atheists! 

Hat tip to PZ Myers’ recent post where I found this.

Creating God in one’s own image 

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

Seven answers to climate contrarian nonsense 

Scientific American:

On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Sen. James R. Inhofe (R–Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be “The Year of the Skeptic.” Had the senator’s speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry, a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism.”

Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.

What follows is only a partial list of the contrarians’ bad arguments and some brief rebuttals of them.

Scientists create artificial meat 

The scientists extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig and then put them in a broth of other animal products. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially “exercise” the muscle.

Hepatitis C drug tested in chimps 

An experimental drug to treat hepatitis C has worked in chimpanzees, a study in the journal Science Express reports. Unlike other antiviral drugs that attack the virus, the experimental drug targets a small RNA molecule in the liver that hepatitis C needs to replicate, researchers reported in this week’s online issue of the journal Science Express.

The golden rule 

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