Oct  05, 2009 -A new study suggests that high mortality rates in small-bodied people, commonly known as pygmies, may be part of the reason for their small stature.

The study, by Jay Stock and Andrea Migliano, both of the University of Cambridge, helps unravel the mystery of how small-bodied people got that way. The article appears in the October issue of Current Anthropology.

Adult males in small-bodied populations found in Africa, Asia and Australia are less than four feet, 11 inches (150 centimeters) tall, which is about one foot shorter than the average adult male in the U.S.

Oct  05, 2009 -Carnivorous but smaller T. rex relative shared environment with larger cousins.

Now, just a few weeks after tiny, early Raptorex kriegsteini was unveiled, a new wrench has been thrown into the family tree of the tyrannosaurs. The new Alioramus altai—a horned, long-snouted, gracile cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex—shared the same environment with larger, predatory relatives.

A paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes this exceptionally well-preserved fossil, shedding light on a previously poorly understood genus of tyrannosaurs and describing a new suite of adaptations for meat eating.

Oct 05, 2009 - The first century BC in Italy was culturally a brilliant age, unequaled by any other period in Roman history. It was a time of Cicero, Caesar, Vergil, Horace and many other major literary figures of the Antiquity.

Yet as much as is known about the great figures of the era, some basic facts - like the approximate population size of the late Roman Republic - remain the subject of intense debate. Depending on who historians believe was counted in the early Imperial censuses (adult males or the entire citizenry including women and children), the Italian population either declined or more than doubled during the first century BC.

Oct  05, 2009 -A new study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) of McGill University reveals that different patterns of training and learning lead to different types of memory formation.

The significance of the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, is that it identifies the molecular differences between spaced training (distributed over time) and massed training (at very short intervals), shedding light on brain function and guiding learning and training principles. In every organism studied, results have shown that memory formation is highly sensitive not only to the total amount of training, but also to the pattern of trials used during training.

Oct  02, 2009 - How to count to a zillion without falling off the end of the number line. Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 1013 dollars.

The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (1015) dollars. The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 10E11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Sep , 2009 - Want to live a more meaningful life? Start by asking questions, suggests psychologist Todd Kashdan.

Our brains are hardwired for worry—and there's good reason why. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to keep an eye out for danger at every turn: If I eat those plants, will I get sick? Is that man with 18-inch biceps who smells of charred human flesh a threat to me?

Yet it was only when our ancestors ventured off beyond the boundaries of what was known that they could add to their knowledge and skills. They had to discover absolutely everything for themselves. In other words, they had to be curious.

Sep 28, 2009 - Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven. History teems with examples of great artists acting in very peculiar ways. Were these artists simply mad or brilliant? According to new research reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, maybe both. In order to examine the link between psychosis and creativity, psychiatrist Szabolcs Kéri of Semmelweis University in Hungary focused his research on neuregulin 1, a gene that normally plays a role in a variety of brain processes, including development and strengthening communication between neurons. However, a variant of this gene (or genotype) is associated with a greater risk of developing mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Sep 27  , 2009 - ...or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics.

Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age – the 'singularity' – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever.

Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

Sep  26, 2009 -He shared his ideas on natural selection with Charles Darwin and studied birds of paradise in the Malay archipelago to prove his case. Alfred Russel Wallace, however, always lived in the shadow of Darwin. This week Sir David Attenborough, Britain’s foremost naturalist broadcaster, attempted to address the injustice. He described Wallace as one of the greatest naturalists to have lived.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Bristol, Sir David outlined Wallace’s contribution to the evolution of the natural selection theory. Over 150 years ago, while Darwin was ensconced in his country manor breeding pigeons, Wallace, wracked with malaria, was living in a primitive hut in Borneo.

Sep  17, 2009 - The greatest science fiction imagines universes wholly unlike anything we have ever seen before . "Like" is the most ubiquitous word of our time. And, in its comparative form, it is probably the most representative.

Teenagers use it to insert facial expressions into sentences, because words just fail: "So I'm like . . ." And it governs our critical response to almost everything we hear and see, allowing us to avoid giving basic factual descriptions. "Well," we say, when we're talking about a book or film, "it's a bit like X." And nowhere is "Well, it's a bit like X" more of a dominant response than in the field of science fiction. All SF, it seems, is now a bit "like" other SF.

A good example is Duncan Jones's recent film Moon, about a man living in total isolation on the lunar surface. Most reviews of it consisted almost entirely of either, "He's David Bowie's son, but let's not go on about that, but did you know he's David Bowie's son?" or, "Well, it's a bit like 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968)", or Solaris (1972), or The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), or Silent Running (1972).

Sep  10, 2009 - We have, it seems, led the planet into the age of ecocide. Can civilisation survive the unavoidable environmental catastrophe? To stand a chance we will need cool heads, not fiery dreams. During the past century empires crashed, new states foundered, utopian projects failed and entire civilisations melted down.

Revolutionary change was the norm, as it has been throughout modern times. Yet today many of us assume our present way of life will last for ever, and any suggestion that it may be facing intractable difficulties is dismissed as doom-mongering. The result is that the precariousness of modern civilisation is underestimated and the impression that things can go on indefinitely, much as they do now is touted as hard-headed realism.