Sol et al in Proceedings of the Royal Society:
Big brains are hypothesized to enhance survival of animals by facilitating flexible cognitive responses that buffer individuals against environmental stresses. Although this theory receives partial support from the finding that brain size limits the capacity of animals to behaviourally respond to environmental challenges, the hypothesis that [...]
Homo floriensis (the “Hobbit”), may be a distinct species after all, and not a microcephalic infant. More
John Tierney in the New York Times Science Blog:
So these five hundred social psychologists walk into a ballroom. They sit through a symposium entitled Cognitive Dissonance Theory Celebrates 50th Birthday. Afterwards there is birthday cake for everyone – two birthday cakes, actually. One is chocolate; one’s white. Neither looks particularly better than the [...]
A. Dawn Shaikh in Usability News:
Participants were shown the email document in one of three fonts (Calibri, Comic Sans, or Gigi) (…) The participants were instructed to read the document carefully and then fill out a paper-based survey when finished reading (…)
The appropriateness of the typeface also affected the perception of the email [...]
A team of intrepid archaeologists (are there any other kind?) has apparently unearthed Lupercale, the cave where, according to mythology, a she-wolf nursed two young kids by the name of Romulus and Remus. This act of inter-specific altruism would enable them to go on to found the city of Rome.
Nature’s reporting that some science publishers have hired Eric Dezenhall (who did PR for Enron among others) to fight the new Open Science movement:
the consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as ”Public access equals government censorship”. He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer [...]
Grue is my favorite color, but one of the big debates in linguistics concerns color perception. The two major viewpoints are either that colors are defined purely by culture but this viewpoint tends to lead to all sorts of sillyness .The opposing view is that colors are perceived the same everywhere, but we [...]
Mike Love’s got an awesome Geneaology of Influence application which visualizes “the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture”. Very very awesome
A new study by Franks et al in today’s P.N.A.S., demonstrates the rapid evolution of flowering time as a response to climate change. They took stored ancestral seeds from a pre-drought population of Brassica rapa and compared how long it took the ancestral plants, the modern post-drought plants and hybrids of the two to [...]
Steven Pinker in Time:
The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn’t respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. [...]
