Weak laser can ignite nanoparticles, with exciting possibilities

Engineering researchers have found they can ignite certain nanoparticles using a low-power laser, a development they say opens the door to a wave of new technologies in health care, computing and automotive design.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Could a pill increase learning ability post-puberty?

New research shows that a novel brain receptor, alpha4-beta-delta, emerges at puberty in the hippocampus, part of the brain that controls learning and memory.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Urban CO₂ domes increase deaths, poke hole in cap-and-trade proposal

In the first study ever done on the local health effects of the domes of carbon dioxide that develop above cities, researchers found that the domes increase the local death rate. The result provides a scientific basis for regulating CO₂ emissions at the local level and points out a significant oversight in the carbon dioxide "cap-and-trade" proposal that was passed by the House of Representatives in June 2009.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

'Glow-in-the-dark' sperm sheds light on reproductive biology, sexual selection and speciation

By genetically altering fruit flies so that the heads of their sperm were fluorescent green or red, biologists were able to observe in striking detail what happens to live sperm inside the female. The findings may have huge implications for the fields of reproductive biology, sexual selection and speciation.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Shutting out soft tissue cancers in the cold

Cryotherapy, an interventional radiology treatment to freeze cancer tumors, may become the treatment of the future for cancer that has metastasized in soft tissues (such as ovarian cancer) and in bone tumors. Such patients are often not candidates for surgery and would benefit from minimally invasive treatment, say researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Vitamin A: Key mechanism that guides cells to form heart tissue

Researchers have identified a key cellular mechanism that guides embryonic heart tissue formation -- a process which, if disrupted, can lead to a number of common congenital heart defects.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Earlier butterfly emergence linked to climate change

Butterflies are emerging in spring over 10 days earlier than they did 65 years ago, a shift that has been linked to regional human-induced climate change in an Australian-led study. The work reveals a causal link between increasing greenhouse gases, regional warming and the change in timing of a natural event.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Layered graphene sheets could solve hydrogen storage issues

Stacked sheets of graphene may be a promising material for capturing and storing hydrogen for future fuel-cell systems according to recent research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Targeting blood vessels, immune system may offer way to stop infection-caused inflammation

Treating virulent influenza, sepsis, and other potentially deadly infections long has focused on looking for ways to kill viruses and bacteria. But new research shows that modulating the body's own overeager inflammatory response to infection may help save more lives.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

New TB booster shows promise

A booster shot appears to improve tuberculosis (TB) resistance in previously vaccinated adults, according to new research in South Africa.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 6:00 am

Rio Tinto signs China mines deal

Rio Tinto says it has signed a deal with China to develop a massive iron ore project in Guinea.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Mar 2010 | 4:19 am

New date set for European climate satellite launch (AFP)

AFP - The European Space Agency (ESA) on Friday said it had set the date of April 8 for the delayed launch of CryoSat-2, a satellite designed to see how Earth's ice sheets react to climate change.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 4:09 am

The nation's weather (AP)

AP - Most of the nation will see generally pleasant conditions on Friday, but there are some clouds, rain and snow in store for the western Plains and the Rockies.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 19 Mar 2010 | 3:39 am

Spaceman

Riding the strangest rocket in the world
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Mar 2010 | 3:31 am

Is There Water On The Moon? Bucketloads.

A huge quantity of water has been discovered in craters at the north lunar pole, enough water to supply a large US city for three years. Also, there also appears to be evidence for a lunar "hydrosphere".
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Mar 2010 | 3:20 am

Ice mission given lift-off date

Europe's Cryosat spacecraft is set to launch on 8 April on a mission to map the world's ice fields.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 19 Mar 2010 | 2:54 am

Pay attention, Radford!

Tim Radford discovers an effervescent enthusiasm and humour in Ian Stewart's mathematical curiosities and treasures that was absent from the morose maths lessons of his schooldays

Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, and Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures

In his quiet way, Ian Stewart may have done more for his subject in these two books than he or his colleagues have done in perhaps the previous 10 or 15 books about mathematics I have read. One has to allow for that warmth towards a book just finished, but I might still feel the same a week or a fortnight from now.

There is no story in these books, no moral, no parable, no implied rebuke for my failure to master the calculus or to remember the difference between a prime and a Mersenne prime. There is only delight and amazement, and of course a tiny bit of entirely self-induced guilt at my own sluggard response to mathematical challenge.

For those who haven't yet looked at them, they are ragbags: almost random jottings of little puzzles, jokes, oddities, anecdotes, commonplaces and calculator curiosities collected over a lifetime. Did I read every word? Probably not. Dippers like me do tend to miss the occasional treasure. And no, I didn't try to solve all the puzzles, but yes, I did get some of them right.

I kept dipping into these books when I was supposed to be reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. I dare say I shall still be picking them up when I get around to finishing Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The entries are short, comprehensible, delightfully distracting and deceptively frivolous.

When I first opened Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, the first thing I saw was the story about how the Indiana state legislature had passed a law fixing the value of pi. Why not? My school had in effect implemented a law fixing it at 22/7 or perhaps 3.14 (actually I think the first value was at primary school, the other at secondary school, as we went from fractions to decimals). Given that at some point you have to tell an examiner the area of a circle, you need to settle on a value.

But as Stewart points out, firstly it's a myth – also told about Iowa and Idaho – and secondly, the consequences of a "legal truth" (a legal limit on pi) that isn't in fact a "true truth" would be judicially absurd (turn to Cabinet page 25 for the consequences in theorem form).

Stewart can say this with conviction because, as his entertainments confirm, mathematics exposes the reality beneath the semblance of reality that most of us are happy with. There are hundreds of these confections and all of them are presented with an effervescent enthusiasm and good humour missing from the morose maths lessons of my own schooldays.

Some of the charm comes from the telling. I don't know why those recurring postulants the Great Whodunni and Grumpelina are more palatable starting points than A and B; and why Farmer Hogswill and Pigasus, his prize pig on a rope (Cabinet, page 143) seem more easy to manipulate than a blackboard theorem involving an equilateral triangle, but they are.

The other enticing thing about these books is that they are not just an alternative to the cryptic crossword or sudoku. They contain, in snack-sized servings, nourishing bits of intellectual history: Fibonacci series, Fermat's last theorem, chaos theory, the four colour problem, what Byron wrote about Newton, Euler's conjecture, public key cryptography, the inventor of the equals sign, Zeno's paradox, how the Babylonians handled number, the probability theory of monkeys and typewriters, the square root of minus one, celestial resonance and how the Egyptians did fractions with hieroglyphs (not a problem that I'd ever thought about before).

The entries are not all brief: Stewart's discussion of global warming (Hoard, page 164) goes on for pages, just after what Stewart claims is the shortest mathematical joke ever (but you might quarrel with the word "joke").

And how nice to be in a world where e is a Napierian exponent and not a recreational drug, where sliced bread comes in perfectly spherical loaves, and where proverbs become "tautoverbs". Example: If pigs had wings, they'd have wings; they still wouldn't be able to fly, because aerodynamics has laws to stop that sort of thing, but since this is Ian Stewart, the non-flying pig has to become an "unfeasible porcithopter".

My argument (am I the only one to think this?) is that while a little learning may be a dangerous thing, bite-sized ingestion might help some of us chew gratefully on such provocations. Instead of making a three-course meal of one theme in mathematics, Stewart has served up the instructive equivalent of a Michelin-starred tasting menu, or perhaps a smorgasbord of appetisers. And of course, appetisers are designed to give you an appetite for more.

Sometimes the most arcane dish is spiced with even more arcane flavours: a preposterous anecdote from Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (Hoard, page 223) is accompanied by two footnotes on the identities of Olaf, Olof the Treasurer, and Sigrid the Haughty.

I had, of course, come across Fibonacci and Fermat and quite a few other mathematical stars before, often in Stewart's earlier books, but these bits of semi-detached instruction seem a lot more reader-friendly when surrounded by unexpected titbits and not-so-silly jokes. For instance, in Hoard page 139 – between a short history of the square root symbol and a description of the ham sandwich theorem – is a tiny little squib headed "Please bear with me.

Q. What's a polar bear?

A. A Cartesian bear after a change of co-ordinates."

Yes, I'm still thinking about that one.

This is a book club and the February choice was suggested by a member with the cyber-identity EndPseudoscience, and a terrific choice it was too. More suggestions, please.

Some general rules: how about we agree on science, not pseudoscience, science fact rather than science fiction, still in print, available both sides of the Atlantic, ideally in paperback. Of course it should also meet somebody's criteria for a good read. And in the meantime, since it ticks all these boxes, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins will be our book for April.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 19 Mar 2010 | 2:30 am

Is everything we've been told about evolution wrong?

What if Darwin's theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution . . .

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There's a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . "about a full day!" Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the "myth" of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he'd recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!

Inevitably, those of us who aren't professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn't waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin's theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin's theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or "intelligent design", and it's true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts. But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, "This is big, big stuff – perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene."

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks' "gene expression" – the way certain genes are turned "on" or "off", bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature's traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn't news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what's news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn't, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country's northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man's grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren's lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody's eye.

It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it's generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called "modern synthesis" of Darwin's theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes cause random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism's abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we've come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn't the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn't right about how giraffes' necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. "Today," notes David Shenk, "any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . ."

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it's not the only one. We've learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that's introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? "It's natural to wonder," Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, "if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level." In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can't establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

It is a decade since the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published The Natural History of Rape. In the book, they made an argument that – however obnoxious at first glance – seemed, to many, to follow straightforwardly from the logic of natural selection. Evolution tells us that the traits that flourish down the generations are the ones that help organisms reproduce. Evolutionary psychology argues that there's no reason to exclude psychological traits. And since rape is indeed a trait that occurs all too frequently in human society, it follows that a desire to commit rape must be adaptive. There must be a genetic basis for it – a "rape gene", in the words of some media stories following the book's publication – because, in prehistoric times, those men who possessed the tendency would reproduce more successfully than those who didn't. Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was – to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin – "natural".

Understandably, the book was hugely controversial. But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations. If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection. It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices (because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah). Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable. But that was how many such findings – often better described as speculations – came to be believed. We're not exactly saying it's right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but . . . well, good luck trying to change millennia of evolved behaviour.

Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what's really been going on. They were always prone to telling "just-so stories" – spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was – and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was. (That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn't seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research.) And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate – of nature versus nurture – suddenly become shaky. It's not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a "mixture" of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of "nature" and "nurture" seem to be growing meaningless. What does "nature" even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants?

This is one central argument of Shenk's new book, subheaded Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong. All our popular notions about talent and "genetic gifts", he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods's ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods's golfing abilities. (Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable.)

"What all this evidence shows is that we need a much more subtle and nuanced understanding of Darwinism and natural selection," Shenk says. "I think that's inevitably going to happen among scientists. The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere . . . it's really funny how difficult it is to have this conversation, even with a lot of people who understand the science. We're stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms" – such as nature and nurture – "that we have."

Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk's disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems. As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.

"If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now," writes Shenk, "that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall." Not so now.

And then there is Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher. I started reading What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, one morning, along with that day's first coffee. A few pages later, as the coffee kicked in, I grasped with astonishment what Fodor had done. He hadn't just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought – he'd uncovered a glaring flaw in the whole notion! Natural selection, he explains, simply "cannot be the primary engine of evolution". I got up and refilled my cup. But by the time I returned, his argument had slipped from my grasp. Suddenly, he seemed obviously wrong, tied up in philosophical knots of his own creation. I alternated between these two convictions. Was Fodor's critique so devastatingly correct that his critics – Dawkins, Dennett, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and many others – simply couldn't see it? Had he actually managed to . . . but then it slipped away again, vanishing into mental fog.

I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. "Can't be done," he shot back. "These issues really are complicated. If we're right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we've been making for 150 years, that's not because it's a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It's a really complicated issue."

Fodor's objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn't "survival of the fittest" just mean "survival of those that survive", since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce? The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. "Through the process of natural selection, the 'fittest' survive, [but] who are the 'fittest'? The ones who survive!" she sneers. "Why, look – it happens every time! The 'survival of the fittest' would be a joke if it weren't part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community."

This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism. In fact, though, it's entirely possible for scientists to measure fitness using criteria other than survival, and thus to avoid circular logic. For example, you might hypothesise that speed is a helpful thing to have if you're an antelope, then hypothesise the kind of leg structure you'd want to have, as an antelope, in order to run fast; then you'd examine antelopes to see if they do indeed have something approximating this kind of leg structure, and you'd examine the fossil record, to see if other kinds of leg died out.

Fodor's point is more complex than this, although it's also possible that it is not really a point at all: several reviews of the book by professional evolutionary theorists and philosophers have concluded that it is, indeed, nonsense. As far as I can make out, it can be summarised in three steps. Step one: Fodor notes – undeniably correctly – that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive. Some just come along for the ride: for example, genes that express as tameness in domesticated foxes and dogs also seem to express as floppy ears, for no evident reason. Other traits are, as logicians say, "coextensive": a polar bear, for example, has the trait of "whiteness" and also the trait of "being the same colour as its environment". (Yes, that's a brain-stretching, possibly insanity-inducing statement. Take a deep breath.) Step two: natural selection, according to its theorists, is a force that "selects for" certain traits. (Floppy ears appear to serve no purpose, so while they may have been "selected", as a matter of fact, they weren't "selected for". And polar bears, we'd surely all agree, were "selected for" being the same colour as their environment, not for being white per se: being white is no use as camouflage if snow is, say, orange.)

Step three is Fodor's coup de grace: how, he says, can that possibly be? The whole point of Darwinian evolution is that it has no mind, no intelligence. But to "select for" certain traits – as opposed to just "selecting" them by not having them die out – wouldn't natural selection have to have some kind of mind? It might be obvious to you that being the same colour as your environment is more important than being white, if you're a polar bear, but that's because you just ran a thought-experiment about a hypothetical situation involving orange snow. Evolution can't run thought experiments, because it can't think. "Darwin has a theory that centrally turns on the notion of 'selection-for'," says Fodor. "And yet he can't give an account – nobody could give an account – of how natural selection could distinguish between correlated traits. He waffles."

Those of us baffled by this argument can take solace in the fact that we're not alone. The general response to Fodor among evolutionary thinkers has been a mixture of derision and awkwardness, as if one of their previously esteemed colleagues had entered the senior common room naked. Says Dennett, via email: "Jerry Fodor's book is a stunning demonstration of how abhorrence of an idea (Jerry's visceral dislike of evolutionary thinking) can derange an otherwise clever thinker . . . a responsible academic is supposed to be able to control irrational impulses, [but] Fodor has simply collapsed in the face of his dread and composed some dreadfully bad arguments." What Darwin Got Wrong, Dennett concludes, is "a book that so transparently misconstrues its target that it would be laughable were it not such dangerous mischief".

It would be jawdroppingly surprising, to say the least, were Fodor to be right. A safer, if mealy-mouthed, conclusion to draw is that his work acts as an important warning to those of us who think we understand natural selection. It's probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it's self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he'd been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we've come to think.

Further reading
• From Time magazine, an excellent piece on epigenetics: http://bit.ly/5Kyj5q
• The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, by David Shenk, is published by Doubleday. What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is published by Profile, price £20
• For more on "horizontal evolution" see New Scientist: http://bit.ly/4zzAsr
• Also from New Scientist, more on the role of viruses in evolution: http://bit.ly/bD4NLC

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 19 Mar 2010 | 2:00 am

Watching the Seismic Dragon Sleep

Monitoring the periodic twitches in North America's most dangerous fault has got to be a nerve-wracking occupation.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 19 Mar 2010 | 12:00 am

Feds: Brakes weren't applied on crashed NY Prius (AP)

AP - Computer data from a Toyota Prius that crashed in suburban New York City show that at the time of the accident the throttle was open and the driver was not applying the brakes, U.S. safety officials said Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 11:35 pm

Fears winter harmed UK wildlife

The harsh winter may have had a devastating impact on UK wildlife, British Waterways warns as it launches its annual survey.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 7:47 pm

Glowing fly sperm yields results

US researchers using genetically engineered fruit flies with glowing sperm track the seed's progress inside the female in real time.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 7:40 pm

Bid in for 132-turbine wind farm

Plans for a major wind farm development in Dumfries and Galloway are submitted to the Scottish government.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 7:34 pm

Scientists hide gold with 3D "invisibility cloak"

LONDON (Reuters) - German scientists have created a three-dimensional "invisibility cloak" that can hide objects by bending light waves.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 7:16 pm

What Is the Organic Liaison Diet? (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - "Fat Actress" star Kirstie Alley - following a well-publicized failure as spokeswoman for weight loss company Jenny Craig - has developed a new diet system called Organic Liaison. So if you want to look like Kirstie Alley, here's your chance. But Organic Liaison is not just a diet, since diets per se cannot be trademarked or copyrighted. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 7:00 pm

Velociraptor's cousin discovered

Researchers discover a new species of dinosaur that was very closely related to the Velociraptor.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 6:26 pm

Letters: Different angles on drugs debates

The deaths of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith (Drug experts will urge ban on legal high mephedrone after link to teenage deaths, 18 March) are a reminder that drugs – both legal and illegal – are among the most pressing public health issues in this country. Every week millions take prohibited drugs that are subjected to no controls, no safety checks and no regulation. Meanwhile the public debate on drugs is sensationalist, ill-informed, and often serves to increase dangerous behaviour, advertising new substances, rather than decreasing it.

This has been particularly clear this week as the government has begun moving towards banning mephedrone, before we know whether it caused these tragic deaths, or what other drugs these boys had taken that night. Why is it so difficult to wait for the postmortem before drawing conclusions about these deaths? Why is it so hard to wait a whole week before making kneejerk pronouncements?

Jim Jepps

London

• The discovery of the plant genes for producing codeine and morphine "opens the door" to alternative ways of making these two drugs – at some non-specified time in the future (Painkiller gene discovery ends need for opium poppy fields, 15 March). Meanwhile 2,500 hectares of British fields have been turned into opium poppy farms to meet NHS demand for morphine, and Tasmania has become the world's largest producer of legal opium, raising concerns about the impact on wildlife. Is there a stronger argument for buying the produce of Afghan poppy fields at a fair market price, providing a legitimate cash crop for poor Afghan farmers, instead of costly and hopeless attempts to eradicate it? At the same time diverting whatever is bought away from the warlords whose operations it funds – and the whole chain of highly lucrative and violent criminal endeavour that delivers it to the streets of cities the world over? Or is that just too simple?

John Saddington

London

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Mar 2010 | 6:05 pm

How dangerous is mephedrone?

Today we focus on mephedrone, the drug Lincolnshire police have linked with the tragic deaths earlier this week of two teenage boys in Scunthorpe. Reporter Robert Booth recounts what happened to Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19.

We also hear from an (anonymous) man who's used mephedrone. He describes its effects.

Joining our studio panel is Martin Barnes, chief executive of Drugscope, and a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which meets on 29 March to discuss a recommendation that mephedrone be banned.

Niamh Eastwood, deputy director of Release, says the sacking of Professor David Nutt from the council led to a delay in the assessment of mephedrone's dangers.

Alan Travis, the Guardian's home affairs editor, explains how the drug is made and the dangers that if it's banned it will simply be replaced by a similar compound.

Reporter Adam Gabbatt looks at how internet users are discussing the drug and its possible prohibition.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Mar 2010 | 6:01 pm

Catching Evolution in the Act: Mating Choices Matter

Harvard University researchers are watching a new species of Ecuadorian Heliconius butterflies split off from the main population, as males choose mates based on wing colors.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 5:30 pm

A Major Blow to Bluefin Tuna

A proposed global ban on trading the fish failed today, leaving their future in jeopardy.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 5:25 pm

It's a wrap for bacteria

Atomically thin carbon sheets offer bacteria a protective shell in electron microscopes.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/news/rss/today/~4/fCG445JNxJY" height="1" width="1"/>
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 18 Mar 2010 | 4:22 pm

What Is the Organic Liaison Diet?

Organic Liaison is a paid membership online program.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 4:03 pm

Sperm wars illuminated

Insect sperm fight one another with brute force and chemical weapons.
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 18 Mar 2010 | 4:00 pm

NOAA head details reforms of fishery enforcement (AP)

AP - The nation's oceans chief on Thursday detailed reforms on the ways fishermen are policed, including a proposal to force her agency to better justify penalties against them.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 3:54 pm

F-35 fighter makes first vertical landing

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter aircraft landed vertically for the first time on Thursday, a bright spot in the Pentagon's priciest arms purchase program, troubled by cost increases and delays.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 3:43 pm

Red River Flooding Brings Nostalgia

The flooding in North Dakota brings back one reporter's memories of a community determined to hold back the high waters.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 3:42 pm

Evolution of Fairness Driven by Culture, Not Genes

Human behaviors are often explained as hard-wired evolutionary leftovers of life on the savannah or during the Stone Age. But a study of one very modern behavior, fairness toward total strangers one will never meet again, suggests it evolved recently, and is rooted in culture rather than biology.

In a series of three behavioral tests given to 2,100 people in societies around the world, an innate sense of fairness dovetailed with participation in markets and major religions. Generally speaking, these use social norms and informal institutions to promote fairness, which allow societies to become larger and more complex.

Biologically speaking, people in the study weren’t fundamentally different from their circa-200,000 B.C. ancestors, or from each other. What differed was their cultural DNA.

“You can’t get the effects we’re seeing from genes,” said Joe Henrich, a University of British Columbia evolutionary psychologist and co-author of the study.” These are things you learn as a consequence of growing up in a particular place.” The study was published March 18 in Science.

Kindness towards strangers is a baffling human trait, given that strangers appear to have been treated with suspicion and violence for most of human history. Some analyses of mortality in the Stone Age — those 2.5 million years of living in small groups that ended just 200,000 years ago — estimate that one in seven people died in combat.

But something changed. Small, family-based groups came together, forming hunter-gatherer tribes. With the advent of agriculture, tribes gave way to city-states. After that, came nations. Anthropologists say all this was only possible because people were willing to treat total strangers in a manner once reserved for kin.

Some researchers say that shift was rooted in a glitch in humanity’s primal circuitry, one that caused people to mistakenly treat strangers as relatives. Others think it’s a holdover of Stone Age-style thinking — that deep in our brains we see everyone we meet as part of our tiny family, and can’t imagine encountering someone who won’t ever be seen again.

That’s not what Henrich’s team thinks. To them, fairness between strangers at the individual level is what allows social organisms to thrive, and to out-compete more selfish societies. From that perspective, fairness-promoting social norms and informal institutions — markets and religion — are an inevitable evolutionary step. Fortunately for us, they make life gentler.

“Once you get cultural evolution going with any strength, you get the enforcement of these norms.” Behaviors interlock in a way that rewards fairness and punishes its violation, Henrich said.

To study this dynamic, Henrich’s team had 2,100 people from 15 different societies — hunter-gatherers, marine foragers, pastoralists, horticulturalists and wage laborers — play three variations of a game designed to measure their innate sense of fairness.

In the first, a player is given a sum equivalent to a day’s earnings, and told to share as much or as little as they want with a second player. Both are anonymous, so from a purely self-interested perspective, there’s no reason to share at all.

In the second variation, the second player decides beforehand which offers they would accept and which they’d reject, but rejection means that neither player gets anything. Self-interest dictates that the second player accept any offer, even the lowest.

In the last variation, a third player receives a sum that can either be kept or spent on punishing an unfair offer from the first player to the second. Self-interest dictates that the third player keep their money, and spend nothing on punishment.

The trend in the responses was clear: When people lived in larger communities, and participated more in markets and religion, they were more willing to share, and more willing to punish selfishness.

In smaller communities, lacking the social norms and informal institutions embodied by markets and religion, people have narrow concepts of fairness, “but they’re not for dealing with people outside your sphere. There are no default norms for that. There are norms for fairness, but not the kind that let you build a large, well-running culture,” said Henrich.

“These findings call into question the standard assumption in economics that preferences are innate and stable,” wrote Karla Hoff, a World Bank economist who was not involved in the study, in an accompanying commentary in Science. “We cannot know for certain how fairly our ancestors in foraging bands behaved,” but the findings “bring us a closer understanding,” she wrote.

Henrichs suggests that culture evolved toward fairness for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture, which in turn fostered stable, ever-larger community structures that further accelerated the cultural evolution of fairness. This could have biological effects, favoring the development of linguistic and cognitive abilities, but the fundamental driver was culture.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that there was culture-gene interaction, but all the variation we see could be explained by plain cultural evolution,” Henrich said.

Images: 1) Game playing in the village of Teci, on Yasawa Island, Fiji./Robert Boyd. 2) Graph showing the average offer in the Dictator Game, arranged by the degree of test subjects’ participation in markets./Science.

See Also:

• Religion: Biological Accident, Adaptation — or Both
• Religious Experience Linked to Brain’s Social Regions
• Altruism’s Bloody Roots
• Termite Altruism Might Have Roots in War
• Chimps Follow the Golden Rule
• Immorality a Lot Like Rotten Food

Citation: “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment.” By Joseph Henrich, Jean Ensminger, Richard McElreath, Abigail Barr, Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, Edwins Gwako, NatalieHenrich, Carolyn Lesorogol,Frank Marlowe, David Tracer, John Ziker. Science, Vol. 327 No. 5972, March 18, 2010.

“Fairness in Modern Society.” By Karla Hoff. Science, Vol. 327 No. 5972, March 18, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 18 Mar 2010 | 3:05 pm

Export ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna rejected (AP)

AP - Fishing nations won a victory over environmentalists Thursday when a U.S.-backed proposal to ban export of the Atlantic bluefin tuna was overwhelmingly rejected at a U.N. wildlife meeting.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 3:03 pm

NASA Lunar Orbiter Spots Old Soviet Moon Landers (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - NASA's sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been used to locate vintage space hardware lobbed to the moon in the 1970s by the former Soviet Union.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 2:30 pm

NASA Mission Posters Bring the Cheese

Blasting humans into the unforgiving vacuum of space is cool and all, but do you really expect us to buy into it without snazzy poster art? NASA's thinking exactly.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 2:18 pm

Cloak of invisibility takes a step forward (AP)

AP - From Grimm's fairy tales to Harry Potter, the cloak of invisibility has played a major role in fiction. Now scientists have taken a small but important new step toward making it reality.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 2:05 pm

U.S.-Russian duo returns to Earth from space station

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz space capsule carrying a U.S. astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut from the International Space Station landed safely in Kazakhstan on Thursday.
Source: Reuters: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 2:02 pm

Dinosaurs Did Not Gradually Die Out

Non-avian dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, and now researchers have proven that this die-off didn't happen over a long period of time. A detailed look at dinosaur bones, tracks and eggs located at 29 archaeological sites located in ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:51 pm

'Smart Camera' to Boost Robotic Visual Intelligence

The military has embarked on a new project to develop a "smart camera" that would help robots understand the world around them.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:50 pm

UN body rejects bluefin tuna ban

A US- and EU-backed bid to ban trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna fails, raising fears for the species' future.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:29 pm

Invisibility Cloak Goes 3D

The magical cloak featured in the Harry Potter series just took one step closer to reality.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:26 pm

Invisibility cloak created in 3-D

Scientists create the first cloaking device to render an object invisible in three dimensions.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:13 pm

Ancient Reptile Dined on Dinosaurs (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - An ancient crocodile-like animal, about twice the length of an SUV, probably dined on sea turtles and dinosaurs, suggests bite-mark evidence and dung droppings.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:03 pm

Why We 'Play Nice' With Strangers

The degree of market integration and presence of world religion in a society predicts how fair people will act in bargaining games
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:02 pm

Editor says no to peer review for controversial journal

Move demanded by publisher would 'utterly destroy' .
Source: NatureNews - All articles published today - nature.com science feeds | 18 Mar 2010 | 1:00 pm

Ancient Reptile Dined on Dinosaurs

A giant crocodile-like animal that lived during the Dinosaur Age left bite marks on sea turtle shells and dinosaur bones.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 12:40 pm

Cassini Sees Saturn's Rough and Tumble Rings (SPACE.com)

SPACE.com - The rings of Saturn are the most intricate planetary decorations in our solar system, but are also cosmic gems festooned with unknown red material and some tricky dynamic forces that shape them.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 18 Mar 2010 | 12:30 pm

Honey Bees Disappearing: Still A Problem

The 2010 prognosis for honey bees doesn't look good, according to Jeff Pettis, Research Leader at the USDA Bee Lab. Although hard data won't be available until April, preliminary surveys of our nation's beekeepers suggest that at least as many ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 12:10 pm

Cloaking device makes objects 'invisible'

For now the device only makes objects invisible to infrared light, but it paves the way for a cloaking material that could hide vehicles, high-security facilities or unsightly buildings

Scientists are a step closer to creating a Star Trek-style cloaking device after demonstrating a material that makes objects beneath it appear to vanish.

The material was used to hide a bump on a surface by interfering with the way light bounced off it, making it seem as though neither the cloak nor the bump was there.

The cloak was designed to make objects invisible to infrared light, but the work paves the way for more advanced materials capable of cloaking objects in visible wavelengths.

Some scientists believe cloaking materials could be used to hide unsightly buildings or high-security facilities, and even make vehicles seem to disappear from view.

Tolga Ergin and Nicolas Stenger at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany used a technique called direct laser writing lithography to create a sheet of cloaking material from tiny plastic rods. The spacing of the rods, each of which measured one thousandth of a millimetre wide, alters a property of the material known as the refractive index, which changes the speed of light inside it.

The researchers placed a piece of the material over a dimple in a gold sheet and used infrared cameras to see what happened. When the cloak was in place, it altered the speed of light around the bump in such a way that the gold sheet appeared to be flat. The experiment was equivalent to hiding something under a carpet and having the carpet disappear too.

It is the first time researchers have demonstrated a cloak that works in three dimensions. Previous devices have hidden objects when looked at head-on, but did not work if viewed from the side. "We were surprised that the cloaking effect was still so good, Ergin told the US journal, Science.

Inside the material, the plastic rods are arranged like planks of wood piled up on each other. The high precision of the structure means it is possible to control the refractive index so it varies in just the right way to bend light around whatever object is hidden beneath it.

"The material has a higher refractive index on top of the bump, so light hitting that part is slowed down a little bit compared with light impinging on the rest of the surface," said Stenger. "That compensates for the shape of the bump, and in the end, it is exactly as if there was no bump."

Research into cloaking devices has attracted funding from military organisations, such as the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which backs high-risk science research for the Pentagon. In the near term, cloaking materials are expected to be used to hide aircraft from radar more effectively.

As yet, scientists have not been able to develop cloaking materials that make objects invisible to the eye, because visible light has shorter wavelengths that are more difficult to manipulate in the right way.

Beyond military applications, cloaking devices are drawing interest from telecommunications companies, who see them as a way to send information by light more efficiently. One idea is to use the new materials to build "superantennas" that can concentrate light and other electromagnetic waves to make laser-like beams.

"We are focusing on a new way to control light," said Stenger. "In the future of technology, light is going to have more and more importance."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Mar 2010 | 12:02 pm

China and India called on by scientists to collaborate on conservation

Biodiversity knows no 'national boundaries' and nations must protect species from rising consumption, dams and industry

China and India could together decide the future of the global environment, a team of senior scientists warn today in a call for closer collaboration on conservation by the world's two most populous nations.

Writing in the journal Science, the eight coauthors — including zoologists from both nations — warn of the security and biodiversity threat posed by rising consumption, dam construction and industrial emissions.

The ecological footprint of the two fast-emerging Asian economies has already spread beyond their borders and with future economic growth rates likely to continue at 8% for several years, the experts say the pressure on borders, resources and biodiversity could reach dangerous levels.

"The degree to which China and India consume natural resources within their boundaries and beyond will largely determine future environmental, social and economic outcomes," say the co-authors headed by Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

The report notes that the two countries import 9m of crude oil a year and 64% of all the roundwood pine produced in Asia, adding to the problems of global deforestation and warming.

The impacts are becoming more obvious in the strategically sensitive Himalayan border area, where the authors say large numbers of troops are damaging the environment. Resources in the mountain region are so scarce, they note, that soldiers sometimes eat rare plants.

Melting glaciers that supply meltwater for half the world's population and the constriction of rivers by hundreds of dams are also major problems, they say.

With the demand for energy in both nations growing, they predict a further rise in construction of hydroelectric plants and exploitation of other Himalayan resources, with alarming implications for regional security.

"The synergistic effects of decreasing water resources, loss of biodiversity, increased pollution and climate change may have negative social and economic consequences and, even worse, escalate conflicts within and between the two countries," they warn.

Despite their growing global importance, China and India have conducted little joint research and engaged in only modest collaboration to mitigate the impact of their rapid development. There have been small signs of progress in recent years, including agreements to jointly monitor glaciers and study the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean. But the authors say much more collaboration is necessary.

"More earnest cooperation between the world's two most populous countries will be vital for mitigating biodiversity loss, global warming and deforestation," the authors say.

They suggest turning disputed territory into trans-boundary protected areas, fostering scientific collaboration, working with the United Nations to manage natural resources and encouraging regional forums, such as Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), to focus more on the environment.

One of the authors — Zhang Yaping, the president of the Kunming Institute of Zoology — said it was rare for biodversity protection to span the two nations.

"We should certainly strengthen cooperation in this field," he said. "China and India have done a lot of conservation work inside their own nations. What we need now is a joint effort. There should be no national boundaries in biodiversity protection."

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Mar 2010 | 12:00 pm

Op-Ed: Why the Internet Should Win the Nobel Peace Prize

This year, a Chinese dissident and a Russian human rights advocate — recent nominees for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize — are joined by an unlikely, nonhuman contender: the internet.

A campaign to nominate the web, first put forth by the editors of Wired Italy, proclaims that the internet has “laid the foundations for a new kind of society,” in which massive interpersonal contact fosters consensus and understanding.

Predictably, the internet’s nomination was met with a wave of skepticism. After all, isn’t it ridiculous to give one of the world’s greatest honors to an inanimate technology? A friend of mine asked, “How about we give [the Nobel] to paper, since that’s what all peace agreements have been written on?”

The nomination seems especially ill-advised when we consider how un-Nobel-like online life tends to be. The primary use of social networking sites is “meforming,” or frequent updates about the minutia of people’s lives that one research group duly categorized as “pointless babble.” And if the internet’s most common asset is keeping us posted on what old high school classmates are having for brunch, then its risks may be more important.

Following a tragic case in which a couple allowed their baby to starve while raising a virtual child online, William Saletan warned that the internet lures us away from the real, grassy, human-populated world, toward a Terminator-esque dystopia in which digital life “gains the upper hand,” presumably leaving us all ignoring each other in favor of compulsive button pressing.

A lot of this bad press is misdirected. What it critically misses is that the internet is simply an enormous amplifier of human social behaviors, and that many of these behaviors are worth amplifying. Take the case of altruism. Countless demonstrations suggest that helping others comes naturally to us. Toddlers aid people in need without prompting, and even 6-month old infants prefer watching prosocial, as opposed to antisocial behavior.

Altruism is likely driven by empathy — our tendency to “resonate” with the emotional and physical states of other people. For example, if you’ve ever had a friend who’s both clumsy and culinary, chances are you’ve seen that friend burn himself on a hot stove accidentally. Watching this, you likely felt a pang of discomfort, and maybe even pulled your hand back, as if you, and not your friend, had been burned. My research and that of others has demonstrated that when we watch others in pain, we activate some of the same brain regions that are also active when we experience pain ourselves, suggesting that we really do “feel their pain.” I like to call this the Bill Clinton effect.

Empathy and altruism are powerful instincts that define our species, but they can also be shut off or amplified by a number of situational factors. A newly explored way to “turn up” altruism is especially relevant to the internet. People are much more likely to be generous when they are following the example set by others. Recent research has demonstrated that people can “catch” everything from happiness to obesity from each other. Moods and behaviors propagate through our social networks like strains of the flu.

In a paper published last week, researchers demonstrated that this contagion applies to altruism as well. After seeing others acting generously towards a “public good,” individuals were more likely to follow suit, and these influences spread through several degrees of separation in a social network, forming “cascades of cooperative behavior.”

The internet can spread positive cascades further than we could have previously imagined. Recently, the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile provided a dramatic example of this effectiveness. Following both tragedies, social media played a key role in creating an outpouring of private aid. Instead of updating about their own lives, people posted requests for text message donations to the Red Cross, a message that rippled through social networks quickly and broadly.

Similar altruistic cascades followed the South Asian Tsunami in 2004. Mathematically, altruism in response to these tragedies spreads in ways similar to epidemics. And like epidemics, contagion of altruistic behavior is most effective when it is distributed and fast-moving. The internet provides, by far, the most effective vehicle for us to “catch” positive social behaviors from each other.

When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrase, “the medium is the message,” he was describing how radio and television changed our lives by allowing us to share experiences on a grand scale. McLuhan believed that people were largely oblivious to the impact of media on culture, and that IBM was only then discovering “that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information.”

Four decades later, it would be hard to accuse Google (or us) of similar ignorance. We are hyper-aware of the extent to which the internet has altered our world. But what is the result of this change? Has it rendered us a bunch of pale, empathy-drained automatons? I think this opinion is too easy and too reactionary. Internet culture can amplify and spread our best and most human characteristics: empathy, altruism and communication. If this is the case, there may be reasons to seriously consider giving this year’s Nobel medal to an unlikely, interpersonal laureate.

Image: Dia™/flickr

See Also:

• Kindness Breeds More Kindness, Study Shows
• Loneliness May Be Contagious
• Tracking Internet Chatter Helps Spot Swine Flu Outbreak
• Could Life Evolve on the Internet?
• Op-Ed: Microbes May Be More Networked Than You Are
• Op-Ed: Tornado Scientist Risks Life for Ph.D.
• Op-Ed: Why the Elevator Floor Is So Interesting

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 18 Mar 2010 | 11:45 am

Wild Horses Respond to Native American Drumming

Wild horses appear to possess an instinctual response to Native American drumming, as evidenced by a recent event at Red Horse Nation.
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 11:44 am

Cosmic Dust Gives Milky Way a Fiery Mane

The Planck space telescope, which is surveying the entire sky in four massive sweeps, has nearly finished its first scan.

Rotating in orbit, Planck takes data of the sky in strips, almost the reverse of a chef peeling an apple in one long, thin strip.

This image, taken from the scan, shows the structure and form of dust clouds within about 500 light-years of the sun. The bright band in this far-infrared image is the Milky Way’s spiral disk. Above that, you can see the cold dust arching upwards. The color palette here is a bit unusual: Reddish tones are colder, while white tones are warmer.

The Planck mission, launched in May 2009 by the European Space Agency, is creating the best-ever map of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

Image: ESA and the HFI Consortium, IRAS

See Also:

• New Look at Big Bang Radiation Refines Age of Universe
• Wired 10.12: The New Convergence
• 70 Years of Telescopes Tuned to Cosmic Radio

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 18 Mar 2010 | 11:30 am

Don't Reset Facebook Password

If you get a message in Facebook saying that your password needs to be reset, don't do it. Virus-tainted spam targeting 400 million Facebook has run amok. You could be at risk for giving out personal information that could put ...
Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 18 Mar 2010 | 10:59 am

Antarctic Ice Creature Opens Window to Extreme Life

A shrimp-like creature and jellyfish tentacles discovered in the darkness under 600 feet of Antarctic ice, are further evidence of how life can thrive in surprising places.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 10:24 am

Life Beneath the Antarctic Ice

A small shrimp-like creature was found swimming hundreds of feet beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up toward the ice when they spotted the amphipod.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 10:23 am

Giant Redwood Trees Endured Frequent Fires Centuries Ago

The world's oldest trees show that the region was once plagued by drought and fire.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 9:50 am

Controversy Erupts Over Captive Endangered Bat Colony

A bitter controversy is brewing over a captive colony of endangered Virginia big-eared bats, founded in November as a hedge against disease driving the species to extinction in the wild.

Of 40 bats put in the colony, only 10 have survived. According to environmental activists and a consultant to the project, their demise wasn’t just an unfortunate consequence of the animals’ sensitivity, but a result of avoidable human negligence.

If the colony’s keepers had not “ignored the advice of experts, these bats would still be alive today,” said Christine Erickson, a staff attorney Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a government watchdog group.

On March 9, PEER filed a complaint (.pdf) with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the project’s overseers. The complaint was based on a critique of the bats’ care (.pdf) at the Smithsonian National Zoo written by Missy Singleton, a bat care consultant retained by the Zoo during the colony’s first few weeks.

USFWS officials decided to start the colony after white nose syndrome, a highly virulent disease that threatens many cave-dwelling eastern bat species with extinction, was found in one of the few caves where Virginia big-eared bats live.

The responsibility for keeping the bats was given to the Smithsonian National Zoo. Federal and zoo officials described the colony as an ark, a hedge against the suddenly realistic possibility of the species’ demise.

According to PEER and Singleton, the zoo disregarded the advice of experts in setting up the colony. Among the allegations are improper feeding, exposure to fluctuating temperatures and careless handling, leading to the fatal infections that have killed most of the bats. In a letter to the USFWS, Singleton described “a repeated and ongoing disregard for the welfare of the bats.”

“Even under the most challenging conditions, no more than a 20 percent death rate is considered acceptable for insectivorous bats,” wrote Singleton.

In a public statement, the National Zoo said (.pdf) that many of Singleton’s claims, “which form the bulk of the complaint, are unsubstantiated and untrue.”

“The care plan was based on existing bat protocols, but they had to very quickly adapt and change some of those protocols,” said Pamela Baker Masson, a communications officer at the National Zoo. “Nobody has ever worked with this subspecies of bat.”

Baker Masson said that Singleton was only present during the first few weeks of the colony’s founding, and was not familiar with the full story. Some of her advice was followed but proved ineffective, said Baker Masson.

“She said the bats needed to be fed juicier mealworms, but we found that when the bats ate them, liquid dripped off their chins, matted their fur, and created skin ulcers that led to infections. So we had to reverse that,” said Baker Masson.

According to Barbara Douglas, a USFWS biologist who oversaw the project, the department is now reviewing the colony’s care. Some of the allegations are untrue, “and some I don’t have enough information on yet. Obviously, we take any of those allegations very seriously,” she said.

As to charges that expert advice was ignored, Douglas said that “before any bats were brought into captivity, they consulted with a number of experts.” The full plan is available (.pdf) from the USFWS.

The USFWS has not decided what will be done with the remaining captive bats, which PEER wants transferred to professional bat rehabilitators. According to Jeremy Douglas, the USFWS’s white nose syndrome coordinator, captive colonies remain an option for bat species threatened by the disease.

Peter Youngbaer, the White Nose Syndrome liaison for the National Speleological Society, said he only recently became aware of PEER’s allegations, but does consider them troubling. The goal of raising Virginia big eared bats in captivity, however, he considers noble.

With just a few thousand bats left, “and a fatal, highly infectious disease knocking at the door, I can’t fault the idea as illegitimate. The particulars of the project, however, are another story,” said Youngbaer.

Image: Jeff Hajenja, West Virginia Department of Natural Resources/Flickr

See Also:

• Desperate Efforts to Save Endangered Bats May Fail
• Video: Moth Blocks Bat Attack by Jamming Sonar
• Infrared Video: 500000 Bats Emerge From Cave
• Video: How Bats Land Upside Down

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 18 Mar 2010 | 9:41 am

Congress to Address U.S. Rare Earth Shortage

U.S. Congress holds hearings and introduces a bill on the looming supply shortage of tech-crucial rare earth minerals.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 9:07 am

Cat With Flat Head and Webbed Feet Losing Habitat

An elusive cat is losing its habitat to plantations in Southeast Asia, a new study finds.
Source: Livescience.com | 18 Mar 2010 | 9:00 am

Airbus gets a crafty upgrade by flying the flag for biodiversity | Fred Pearce

A380 airliner to feature official logo for UN, despite aviation being a major source of emissions that threaten biodiversity

Who do you think might just have been granted the right to display the official logo of the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity? A conservation body, perhaps. Or a new brand of organic food?

Well, no. It's an aircraft manufacturer, actually. The world's largest aircraft manufacturer: Airbus Industries. The European company that is doing more than anyone else, Boeing included, to increase the number of flights we take, and thus the airline industry's contribution to climate change.

During 2010, the logo will appear on the side of Airbus's latest airliner, the A380, on scheduled services with the world's airlines. The largest passenger aircraft is specially designed for those long-haul flights across oceans and from Europe to the far east, where a single flight can more than double your annual CO2 emissions.

Airbus has won this green accolade by dint of hard cash. Airbus is helping fund a cherished project of the secretariat of the UN Convention on Biodiversity to educate young people across the world about the virtues of biodiversity, called the Green Wave Initiative. Airbus did not respond to questions from the Guardian about how much money is involved in the partnership, but the UN Environment Programme has described it as a "huge gesture of support".

The Green Wave is a neat idea. To mark the International Day of Biodiversity on 22 May, young people will be asked to plant a tree at 10am local time wherever they are in the world. Thus they will create a "green wave" that will spread from east to west round the planet.

But it is an even neater idea for Airbus, the current trailblazer for an industry whose year-on-year carbon dioxide emissions are rising faster than any other. At a time when climate change is widely recognised by ecologists as a leading cause of species loss around the world, Airbus's adoption of a green mantle courtesy of a major UN conservation organisation might seem, well, ironic.

Airbus has increased its cuddlability quotient by partnering with National Geographic on the green wave project. National Geographic is an organisation with a sky-high green image. The duo got a special thank you from UN secretary-general Ban ki-Moon when they announceed the partnership last June.

Airbus has an answer to those who accuse it of greenwash. The company says that it is "pioneering greener flight". And it is undoubtedly true that the Airbus A380 superjumbo has got its emissions down, thanks to lighter materials and smarter flying technology.

Airbus says it will reduce emissions to less than 75 grams of CO2 for every passenger kilometre. But that will not apply if its wide open spaces are filled with extra business and first-class seats as many purchasing airlines promise. Look out for Singapore Airline's super-first class on the A380, with private suites, double beds and wardrobes and wide-screen TVs.

But even if Airbus achieves those low figures per passenger-kilometre in real operation, the big problem is that passenger-kilometres are going up far faster than aircraft efficiency is improving.

Emissions from the airline industry continue to rise by about 3% a year, taking up an ever greater share of total global man-made emissions. So a little humility might be in order from the world's most prolific manufacturer of new planes. But, no.

Announcing the adoption of the logo this month, Airbus's senior vice-president for public affairs and communications, Rainer Ohler baldly claimed that the aviation industry had "already reduced aircraft emissions by 70% in the last 40 years."

You don't need to be a statistician to spot the trick here. Not so much "hide the decline" as "hide the increase". Ohler meant airlines had cut emissions per passenger-kilometre by 70% since the days before jumbo jets. But, to be clear, aircraft emissions are soaring. In Britain, for instance, they have risen since 1970 by between four- and five-fold.

They will continue to soar, while the likes of Airbus continues to fill the skies with chunks of flying metal the size of a football pitch. And whatever logo they put on the side of their planes, species will continue to go extinct as a result.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Mar 2010 | 8:51 am

Guess who's a sucker for high-definition television? The octopus

Octopuses respond to high-definition television (HDTV), but seem to ignore normal standard television, scientists discover.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 18 Mar 2010 | 5:48 am

Morality, with limits

We can't expect people to be either as self-denying as conservatives or as altruistic as liberals seem to want

The question: What can Darwin teach us about morality?

At least to some extent, we are a species with an evolved psychology. Like other animals, we have inherited behavioural tendencies from our ancestors, since these were adaptive for them in the sense that they tended to lead to reproductive success in past environments.

But what follows from this? It does not follow that we should now do whatever maximises our ability to reproduce and pass down our genes. For example, evolution may have honed us to desire and enjoy sex, through a process in which creatures that did so reproduced more often than their evolutionary competitors. But evolution has not equipped us with an abstract desire to pass down our genes. Knowing all this, what should we do? Well, we are not evolution's slaves. All other things being equal, we should act in accordance with the desires that we actually have, in this case the desire for sex. We may also desire to have children, but perhaps only one or two: in that case, we should act in such a way as to have as much sex as possible while also producing children in this small number.

By all means, then, let's use contraceptive technologies for family planning. This may be "unnatural", in a sense, but so what?

Generally speaking, it is rational for us to act in ways that accord with our reflectively-endorsed desires or values, rather than in ways that maximise our reproductive chances or in whatever ways we tend to respond without thinking. If we value the benefits of social living, this may require that we support and conform to socially-developed norms of conduct that constrain individuals from acting in ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Admittedly, our evolved nature may affect this, in the sense that any workable system of moral norms must be practical for the needs of beings like us, who are, it seems, naturally inclined to be neither angelically selfless nor utterly uncaring about others. Thus, our evolved psychology may impose limits on what real-world moral systems can realistically demand of human beings, perhaps defeating some of the more extreme ambitions of both conservatives and liberals. It may not be realistic to expect each other to be either as self-denying as moral conservatives seem to want or as altruistic as some liberals seem to want.

On this picture, realistic moral systems will allow considerable scope for individuals to act in accordance with whatever they actually value. However, they will also impose constraints, since truly ruthless competition among individuals would lead to widespread insecurity, suffering, and disorder. Allowing it would be inconsistent with many values that most of us adhere to, on reflection, such as the values of loving and trusting relationships, social survival, and the amelioration of suffering in the world. If, however, we are social animals that already have an evolved sympathetic responsiveness to each other, the yoke of a realistic moral system may be relatively light for most of us most of the time.

Is this way of looking at things shocking? A rational and realistic approach to morality, based on our actual, reflectively-endorsed desires and values, and how they are best realised in current circumstances, might deflate some expectations. It might also diverge from familiar moral teachings, handed down through religious and cultural traditions. Much that is found in traditional Christian morality, with its shame about the body and guilt about sexual pleasure, and its glorification of piety, self-abnegation, and asceticism, might have to be abandoned if viewed rationally. But realising all this need not be shocking. If it leads to some deflation of extreme political expectations and to some reason-based correction of traditional morality, we should welcome it.

Source: Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk | 18 Mar 2010 | 3:00 am