Posts

Well before “not fair!” becomes a staple phrase of your child’s spoken repertoire, he or she might already have a fundamental grasp of right and wrong. A study published last October in PLoS One found that 15-month-old infants could identify unequal distributions of food and drink and that this sense of fairness was connected to their own willingness to share. To measure these moral sentiments, researchers first had the children watch movies of an actor distributing food, either equally or unequally, between two people....

It all seemed so straightforward at first. Stem cells are renowned for their capacity to develop into a wide range of other cell types, and researchers have spent decades exploring the notion that adult stem cells could be transplanted to form healthy new tissue in diseased or damaged organs. But by the early 2000s, it had become apparent that stem-cell biology was more complicated than initially believed. Michael Chopp, a neuroscientist at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan, was among the first to explore the potential for adult stem cells—most notably a subtype known as either mesenchymal stem or mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs)—to mitigate the effects of spinal-cord injury, stroke and other neurological trauma....

MISLEADING MASS In “Addicted to Food?” Oliver Grimm states that a body mass index (BMI) of a specific value makes a person obese. I disagree: BMI is a simplistic formula based on height and weight that is often inaccurate. Every time I go in for a physical, the nurse starts to lecture me that I’m overweight based on the calculation of a BMI of 25. Then I interrupt the nurse, and she sheepishly admits that my BMI does not mean I am fat....

The common raven may not be so common anymore, according to the results of the largest DNA bar coding effort to date. Despite hundreds of years of observation and examination by countless experts and amateurs, Corvus corax, as the genus and species name goes under the Linnaean taxonomic system, may actually harbor two distinct species, indistinguishable to the eye but not in the makeup of its mitochondrial DNA. “[DNA] barcodes are giving us a direct signal of where species boundaries lie,” says Paul Hebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario and a progenitor of the genetic bar code effort....

Who says only modern-day pro wrestling is fake? Researchers have deciphered a Greek document that shows an ancient wrestling match was fixed. The document, which has a date on it that corresponds to the year A.D. 267, is a contract between two teenagers who had reached the final bout of a prestigious series of games in Egypt. This is the first time that a written contract between two athletes to fix a match has been found from the ancient world....

Thinking in Pictures Temple Grandin HBO Films Airings throughout March DVD available for purchase at www.hbo.com/dvd Temple Grandin doesn’t like to be touched by other people. When sh’s feeling overstimulated, she crawls into a contraption she built that she calls her “squeeze machine.” The machine is designed to mimic the calming effect of a cow’s holding pen by giving her a mechanical hug. Grandin, who suffers from autism, a disorder characterized by the abnormal development of social and communication skills, stunned the crowd with this anecdote at a national autism conference in 1981....

If humans are to live on the moon someday, or simply use it as a way station for the journey to Mars, water will be a critical resource—and having a local supply would be invaluable. That’s why NASA plans to crash some trash into the moon this fall. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), set to launch June 17 with the better-known Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), could help answer the decade-old question of whether there is frozen water on the moon....

For the first time, researchers have proved that the order in which cancer genes mutate affects the type of malignancy that results and its response to treatment. Although the findings are specific to a particular group of preleukemic disorders known as myeloproliferative neoplasms, they suggest that scientists studying other types of tumors should start taking into account the timing of the underlying genetic mutations as a potentially critical factor in establishing an accurate diagnosis as well as in making choices about treatment....

The hundreds of distant worlds, some large and some small, that are known to dot the galaxy provide plenty of intrigue for the scientists who hunt them. But the catalogued planetary population has just gotten a lot larger and more diverse, thanks to word this week of a newly identified planet orbiting two suns, more than a dozen newfound “super-Earths,” and strong indications that the Milky Way Galaxy is home to an almost unfathomable number of planets awaiting discovery....

As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet’s surface for fuel production, habitats and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power. NASA’s technology development branch has been funding a project called Kilopower for three years, with the aim of demonstrating the system at the Nevada National Security Site near Las Vegas....

A couple of miles outside the town of Page, three 775-foot-tall caramel-colored smokestacks tower like sentries on the edge of northern Arizona’s sprawling red sandstone wilderness. At their base, the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest power-generating facility, thrums ceaselessly, like a beating heart. Football-field-length conveyors constantly feed it piles of coal, hauled 78 miles by train from where huge shovels and mining equipment scraped it out of the ground shortly before....

By Philip Ball of Nature magazineYou could have foreseen the Arab Spring if only you’d been paying enough attention to the news. That’s the claim of a new study that shows how data mining of news reportage can reveal the possibility of future crises well before they happen.Computer scientist Kalev Leetaru at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has trawled through a vast collection of news reporting and examined the ’tone’ of the news about Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where long-established dictatorial political leaders have been deposed by public uprisings known collectively as the Arab Spring....

Clotho, one of the Three Fates of Greek mythology, carried the weighty responsibility of spinning the thread of human life. It seems fitting then that a protein linked to reducing and extending life spans should take its name from this mythic figure. Researchers discovered the klotho protein in 1997, when they found that diminished levels seemed to make the animals age faster. Conversely, mice genetically engineered to maintain elevated klotho levels live 30 percent longer than normal mice....

Sir Birnie, a provincial governor in Australia during the colonial period, amassed great wealth while there. Later, back in England, he indulged two great passions: geometry and path building. He also, it seems, considered his children to be incorrigible spendthrifts. Perhaps that was the reason for the rumor that beyond the fine fortune he left them, some of his wealth was hidden out of their reach. Further, he made two stipulations reflecting his concerns, further raising suspicions....

When University of Cambridge neurobiologist Jenny Morton began working with sheep five years ago, she anticipated docile, dull creatures. Instead she discovered that sheep are complex and curious. Morton, who studies neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s, is helping evaluate sheep as new large animal models for human brain diseases. Huntington’s is a fatal, hereditary illness that causes a cascade of cell death in the brain’s basal ganglia region. The idea to use sheep to study this disease arose in 1993 in New Zealand, a country where sheep outnumber humans seven to one....

The famous British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, who inspired a love of science in many through his BBC television program “The Sky At Night,” died at age 89 on Sunday (Dec. 9). Moore “passed away peacefully"at his home in West Sussex, England, according to the BBC. His night-sky program, which began airing in 1957 and ran its last episode the night he died, is the longest-running television show of all time....

William James, the late 19th- through early 20th-century philosopher, once proposed that people do not fear a bear when they see it but, rather, become frightened when running from it. One hundred years later, a new brain-imaging study proves James may have been right. Using a Pac-Man–like video game and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scans, scientists showed that when a fear-provoking stimulus (say, a bear) is detected in the distance, the human brain switches on circuitry that analyzes the threat level and ways to avoid the animal or harm....

Sandy caused many problems during its life. Here are some of the most impressive statistics from the storm. SANDY DEBUNKED: Sandy is not the strongest hurricane north of Cape Hatteras. A near-record low barometric pressure occurred with Sandy offshore Monday afternoon. The pressure bottomed at 27.76 inches. For a storm north of Cape Hatteras, N.C., Hurricane Gladys of 1977 holds the record at 27.73 inches. Gladys was a Category 4 hurricane which remained off the coast of the U....

It’s the kind of tongue-in-cheek concept that might have percolated out of the subversive imagination of R. Crumb, underground cartoon chronicler of the 1960s. Grandma and Grandpa are passing the time in their rockers—and passing a joint back and forth as they recall their youthful marijuana-smoking days in Haight-Ashbury. In fact, according to three investigators at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the image is no joke. Writing in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Gay­athri J....

Here on Earth few people are familiar with the concept of planetary obliquity, but we all feel its effects: Obliquity measures a planet’s orbital tilt with respect to its star, which is what creates Earth’s changing seasons. Now, astronomers are proposing that shifts in obliquity could do even more. According to new research published in Nature Astronomy, when a planet’s rotation and orbit line up just right, they can tip the world sufficiently askew to force it farther out or closer in to its star....