Just about every dog owner is convinced their dog is a genius. For a long time scientists did not take such pronouncements particularly seriously, but research now suggests that canines are indeed quite bright and, in some ways, unique. Brian Hare, associate professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, is one of the leading figures in the quest to understand what dogs know....
Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, asked Allan Horwitz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, and Jerome Wakefield, professor of social work at New York University, a few questions about their recent book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Illness. LEHRER: In your book, you take a critical look at major depressive disorder (MDD), a mental illness that will afflict approximately 10 percent of individuals at some point during their life....
Nothing signals the start of spring quite like the emergence of the first fuzzy bumblebees. But as Earth’s temperatures continue to warm, spring is coming earlier and earlier in some places—and scientists are worried about how these changes could affect bees. A new study published Friday in the journal Ecology Letters suggests that earlier springs could be an indirect threat to certain bee populations. It may sound counterintuitive—after all, earlier springs mean longer growing seasons for flowering plants, which should be a boon for the bees that rely on them for food....
Between 240 and 66 million years ago, gigantic reptiles ruled the skies. Pterosaurs—close cousins of dinosaurs—may not have breathed fire, but with their strong limbs and light, hollow-boned skeletons, they were the first vertebrates to fly. Visitors can gauge the size of Dracula via a reconstruction at a new pterosaur exhibit at the Altmühltal Dinosaur Museum in Denkendorf, Germany. The scientists estimate the creature had a wingspan of 12 meters and stood 3....
Of the 21 species of macaque monkeys, pigtailed macaques live in societies that fall somewhere between the despotic and egalitarian extremes. A dominant male and female run the show but conflict among other monkeys is common, though rarely extreme. Most such conflicts end with a third party intervening, usually in favor of one opponent. But sometimes the most powerful monkeys literally stand between the two combatants and, occasionally without even threatening them, impartially resolve the conflict....
Quantum mechanics imposes a limit on what we can know about subatomic particles. If physicists measure a particle’s position, they cannot also measure its momentum, so the theory goes. But a new experiment has managed to circumvent this rule—the so-called uncertainty principle—by ascertaining just a little bit about a particle’s position, thus retaining the ability to measure its momentum, too. The uncertainty principle, formulated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, is a consequence of the fuzziness of the universe at microscopic scales....
The Energy Department is touting a technology that would save 1.5 billion gallons of fuel a year if it were affixed to every long-haul truck in America. That’s no mean feat, but according to those developing the technology, it should have wide appeal in a tight-fisted trucking sector that’s been slow to get more fuel-efficient. DOE said the UnderTray System, a set of plastic fairings that fit in front of the wheels under the trailer of a big rig, cuts a truck’s fuel use 7 to 12 percent....
Half a decade ago a scientist, an engineer and a businessman met in a Dublin backyard to conduct an experiment. They heated water in an electric tea maker, then poured it into a bisected segment of pipe. At the bottom of the half-pipe lay a length of wire, and one of the men held a ruler next to it. As the hot water gushed through the pipe, the wire shortened by several centimeters; when they poured cold water over it, it returned to its original length....
Quantifying things is an overarching goal in science, but recent events have left me pondering just why that is. After all, we’ve long known that numbers can be precise but inaccurate. The textbook exemplar is Lord Kelvin, the 19th-century British physicist who insisted that unless you could quantify a thing, your knowledge of it was of a “meager and unsatisfactory kind.” Yet he was responsible for one of history’s most infamous examples of a fallacious quantitative argument....
Recently a middle-aged patient visited Seattle-based physician Thomas Payne complaining about substantial, unexpected weight loss and foot tingling. The doctor was puzzled—those symptoms could indicate anything from an infection to dozens of more complex ailments, such as diabetes or cancer. So Payne, who also serves as medical director of information technology services at the University of Washington School of Medicine, did something unusual. After performing a standard physical examination and filling in his patient’s medical record, he turned to an online tool—DXplain—for help....
What lurks at the Milky Way’s heart? Astronomers have known most of the answer for decades. Just as in most large galaxies, a supermassive black hole sits at the core of our own island in the universe, enveloped in a swirling maelstrom of molecular clouds and stars. But something seems to be missing from this picture: the stellar-mass black holes that can be produced when the heaviest stars die. Theorists have long predicted that such black holes should exist in abundance in our galaxy’s star-packed center, but evidence for their presence there and in the so-called nuclei of other large nearby galaxies has proved scarce....
Franz Nopcsa was a turn-of-the-century baron of Szacsal in Transylvania who discovered some of the first dinosaurs from central Europe. His ideas about fossil analysis and dinosaur evolution were remarkably prescient, as this article in the October issue describes. Below is a timeline of major events in the dinosaur baron’s life, some of his paleontological discoveries and recent work that has validated his claims. István Fózy of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest provided many of the biographical details....
The runner tethered to the treadmill and the couch potato gripping a bag of chips may seem like polar opposites, but new research suggests that a single alteration in the brain’s reward system could cause both obsessions. More than one third of regular gym-goers show signs of exercise dependence, continuing to exercise even when sick or injured or arranging their lives around working out. Nearly half of all people diagnosed with an eating disorder report excessive levels of exercise to control body shape and weight and to relieve stress and improve mood....
“Your marriage ends in divorce.” “Failure to finish school alters your life course.” “Addiction destroys you.” If a fortune-teller told us that these events were what our future held, we would almost certainly consider an alternate path. While this scenario is a practical impossibility, we can still, with the benefit of hindsight, imagine different life alternatives through counterfactual thinking (“If only I had not married him”; “If only I had finished school”; “If only I had not started drinking”)....
Albert Einstein once commented that “a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” This may have been an accurate reflection of physics in his time, but it is no longer the case—for physics or any other field. Benjamin Jones, an expert in innovation at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes awarded in physics, chemistry and medicine between 1900 and 2008....
Do women remember better than men do? Research shows that females may have an advantage when it comes to episodic memory, a type of long-term memory based on personal experiences. A Swedish team of psychologists showed, for example, that women are better on average than men at remembering faces, particularly female faces. These findings may have an evolutionary explanation that is rooted in female-female competition, says David C. Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri–Columbia who was not involved with the study....
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began his musical training at the tender age of three. By age five, he had already composed his first piece of music. As a child, he mastered the piano, along with several other instruments including the violin, organ and harpsichord. By all accounts, he was a child prodigy. But he was far from the only composer to have a head start: Ludwig van Beethoven, Martha Argerich, Vincenzo Bellini, Claudio Arrau, and many of history’s greatest musicians all began their training in early childhood and went on to wow the world....
In her memoir, Eva Hoffman, a writer and academic, reflects on being a bilingual and bicultural immigrant to North America from Poland. She describes two languages issuing competing commands in her head: —Should you become a pianist? the question comes in English. —No, you mustn’t. You can’t. —Should you become a pianist? the question echoes in Polish. —Yes, you must. At all costs. Typically we regard language as conveying information, not changing it....
During my final semester of undergrad, I made two signs that read, “Feeling stressed about exams? Have a free hug!” Then I recruited a friend and we stood in the entrance of the campus library, held up the signs, and waited. Passerbys had one of two reactions: Either they quickly looked down at their phones and awkwardly shuffled by, or their faces lit up as they embraced us. Most people were enthusiastic....
An aggressive plant pathogen that wipes out olive trees is projected to cost Italy billions of euros over the next 50 years. Xylella fastidiosa—a bacterium named for its pickiness when grown in the laboratory—was detected in southern Italy in 2013. It is now designated a “quarantine organism” in the European Union: infected trees, some hundreds of years old, must be cut down to prevent the disease from spreading in places such as Italy’s Apulia region....
