Science News

A team of scientists led by anthropologist Tim D White of the University of California, Berkeley recently found 31 fossils of Australopithecus anamensis, our 4.1 million year old ancestor, while digging in Ethiopia's Middle Awash valley. The fossils, which come from at least 8 individuals, are anatomically similar to an earlier hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, which lived 4.4 to 4.1 million years ago.

"There may have been times when one early hominid species evolved into another one without branching off into multiple species," White says. His view contrasts with that of researchers who suspect that hominids branched into many species over the past 6 million to 7 million years. Read the rest

Our unofficial 10th planet Xena is unvealing itself in mysterious ways. New Hubble Space Telescope images released this week show that Xena's smaller than originally thought - with a diameter of 2384 km, or about 5% larger than Pluto. Read the rest

Here's an interesting study linking the act of participating in a ritual with how effective treatment is.

Medical researcher Ted Kaptchuk wanted to see if it was possible to manipulate the placebo effect, so in a study sponsored by teh National Institutes of Health, he recruited 266 volunteers suffering from chronic arm pain which they rated at least a 3 on a 10-point scale. Read the rest

In 1871, Darwin published his controversial Descent of Man which described how man and apes had evolved from a common ancestor and opened the floodgates on the debate for human evolution.

One of the biggest questions raised against the theory was how the human mind could have evolved from a more primitive animal brain. Humans make complex decisions, are driven by emotions, impose social and moral constructs, and participate in religious activities. Surely, there was a distinction between the human mind and the animal mind. In addition, since at least the Greeks, philosophers had been arguing for a mind/body dualism, meaning the two were fundamentally other and separate. Read the rest

As neurologists learn more about the brain, there's been renewed interest in merging psychiatry with neurology - and that means renewed interest in many of Sigmund Freud's ideas. A recent Scientific American Mind (subscription required) article discusses how modern neuroscience supports many of the ideas Freud proposed and is creating a 'new intellectual framework for psychiatry.' Some of the ideas include: Read the rest

If you ask the religious right, they'll tell you that homosexuality is a choice. If you ask the Gay and Lesbian community, they'll say that sexuality is something we're born with. But what do Americans think? To find out, Scientific American Mind conducted an online poll of over 4200 Americans. The results showed that only a small minority believe that sexual orientation is a conscious choice. Read the rest

Astronomy has come a long way since 1995. Since then, we've discvered two more planets - Sedna (discovered in 2004), which is slightly smaller than Pluto, and Xena (discovered in 2005), slightly larger than Pluto - and have detected planets revolving around another star like our sun. Before that, we only knew of planets that revolved around our own sun. Discover Magazine asks So why isn't anyone excited?. Perhaps because no one's ever seen those planets, it answers. Read the rest

One of the most extraordinary transitional fossils has been found - a 383 million year old ‘Fishapod.’ Transitional fossils are the remains of two different kinds of organisms mixed together. This one is called Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) and means ‘large shallow water fish.’

Fossils of the recently discovered creature are approximately 9ft long and were dub out of rock formations on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. It’s been dubbed ‘fishapod’ because it has the scales, teeth and gills of a fish but also a neck, bones in its pectoral fins that look like a primitive wrist and fingers, a big rib cage, which suggests the creature had lungs.

The discovery adds to the growing number of transitional fossils that evolution advocates cite as proof. In particular, it’s a great example of the fish-tetrapod transition.

For coverage, see Time, Nature, and the NY Times.

Source: Boing Boing

Columbia University Professor, Peter Woit, is interviewed in Discover Magazine’s Feb 2006 edition about his criticisms of string theory and his blog, Not Even Wrong, which gets 5000 hits a day. Calling string theory ’science fiction in mathematical form’, Woit explains why string theory became such a big phenomenon Read the rest

A quick blurb in the Februay 2006 edition of Discover Magazine explains why many women don’t find Adam Sandler funny.

To understand how the brain reacts to humor, Reiss and his team had test subjects rate the hilarity of cartoons while undergoing fMRI brain scans. Although men and women described the cartoons as equally funny, the areas of their brains that lit up as a result differed. Women activated the left prefrontal cortex more than men, indicating that their processing of humor is rooted more heavily in language. This explains why women are more likely to appreciate wordplay over, say, the slapstick antics of a dim-witted water boy. Reiss also found that women showed a stronger response in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, suggesting that they ultimately derived bigger pleasure hits from punch lines.

I wonder where I fit in. I happen to -like- most Adam Sandler films.