Study author Anne Mangen, an associate prof of literacy studies at Norway's University of Stavanger, says she discovered that reading online may not be as rewarding – or effective – as the printed word. The reasons: The process involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we're reading; online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness; and multimedia features, such as links to videos and animations, leave little room for imagination, limiting our ability to form our own mental pictures to illustrate what we're reading.

Dec. 20--Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks. More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150 volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person's cries of pain, professor Jerry M. Burger concluded in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist. "In a dramatic way, it illustrates that under certain circumstances people will act in very surprising and disturbing ways," said Burger.

Article about a turkish douchebag that says fossils dont prove evolution and that darwin was lying. he wrote a book called the atlas of creationism. they mention here that it has 10,000 readers worldwide so far, but i read in another blog that this number reflects the book having been given away unsolicited to that many people.

he is offering trillions of turkish lira (how ever much that is) to anyone who can use a fossil to prove evolution.

People commonly assume that our species has evolved very little since prehistoric times. Yet new studies using genetic information from populations around the globe suggest that the pace of human evolution increased with the advent of agriculture and cities. If we are still evolving, what might our species look like in a millennium should we survive whatever environ mental and social surprises are in store for us? Speculation ranges from the hopeful to the dystopian.

Male pipefish, seahorses and their kin are the stay-at-home dads of the fish world, rearing their young in placentalike pouches from the time they are fertilized eggs until they can swim away. New research shows that these involved fathers not only shelter their young but transfer key nutrients to their offspring via their own versions of a placenta, helping to supplement what the embryos received from their mother in the egg yolk.

Peter Ubel is professor of medicine and psychology at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine. He’s the author of the forthcoming book, Free Market Madness (Harvard Business, 2008), which investigates the irrational tics that lead people to overbid on eBay, eat too much ice cream and take our mortgages they can’t afford. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Ubel about his research. Overall he finds that a combination of human attributes are linked to making bad choices such as a lack of understanding of mathematics, hard wired optimism, the need to follow the Jones next store, and limited will power.

In the past few decades evolutionary theorists E. O. Wilson of Harvard University and David Sloan Wilson (no relation) of Binghamton University are trying to give group selection full-fledged respectability. They are rebranding it as multilevel selection theory: selection constantly takes place on multiple levels simultaneously. And how do you figure the sum of those selections in any real-world circumstance? “We simply have to examine situations on a case-by-case basis,” Sloan Wilson says.The Wilsons think evolutionists must embrace multilevel selection to do fruitful research in sociobiology—“the study of social behavior from a biological perspective.” When doing so, other investigators can keep in mind the Wilsons’ handy rule of thumb: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.”

People who had been experiencing intense love for 20 years and people who had been in love for only months showed similar activation in the ventral tegmental area of the brain - a region known to be activated during the intense, burning stages of early love. The same area is activated by the rush of cocaine.

Routing of nerves and fluid pathways in the human body resembles the tangle of wiring and pipes in an aging house, a heritage from fish and amphibian ancestors. The tube through which sperm passes forms a roundabout loop that can lead to hernias, a result of major anatomical changes that occurred as we evolved from fish. Nerves that are inherited from fish and travel from the brain to the diaphragm can become irritated and trigger hiccups, a closing of the entryway to the windpipe, an action that itself is a hand-me-down from amphibians that breathe with both lungs and gills.

British archaeologists have unearthed an ancient skull carrying a startling surprise — an unusually well-preserved brain. Scientists said Friday that the mass of gray matter was more than 2,000 years old — the oldest ever discovered in Britain. One expert unconnected with the find called it "a real freak of preservation."

In a paper published in Genome Research on Nov. 4, scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) report that what was previously believed to be "junk" DNA is one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.

Surgeons have implanted a novel neural prosthesis into a paralyzed patient’s brain. The high-tech device enables the patient to communicate his thoughts to a computer, which translates them into spoken words. Nine people so far have received brain-implanted prostheses. In the past, patients have used these devices to spell words on a computer, pilot a wheelchair or flex a mechanical hand.
One day implants may enable paralyzed people to move robotic arms or even bypass damaged parts of the nervous system to reanimate unresponsive limbs. In the meantime, the quest to develop implanted neural prostheses is revealing details of how the brain orchestrates movement.

What is consciousness? What is this ineffable, subjective stuff—this thing, substance, process, energy, soul, whatever—that you experience as the sounds and sights of life, as pain or as pleasure, as anger or as the nagging feeling at the back of your head that maybe you’re not meant for this job after all. The question of the nature of consciousness is at the heart of the ancient mind-body problem. How does subjective consciousness relate to the objective universe, to matter and energy?

It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.

The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis.

The charred remains of flint from prehistoric firesides suggest our ancient ancestors had learned how to create fire 790,000 years ago. Previous research had shown that early humans – probably Homo erectus or Homo ergaster – from this period could manipulate and use fire, but it wasn't clear whether they had the ability to create the fire themselves, or whether they stole fire from natural occurrences like lightning strikes.The site includes 12 layers of remains from different groups of early humans covering a 100,000 year span, and has been dated back to 790,000 years ago, long before modern Homo sapiens evolved. As each society left the region, water from the lake washed over the site and buried the remains, preserving their tools for archaeologists to analyse.

A new study finds that the typically peaceful bonobo actually hunts and eats other great apes. Their findings, the first direct evidence of hunting by the so-called "hippie" apes, show that such behavior is not linked to male dominance as females rule bonobo society and also go on hunts. Once thought to eat only small mammals, researchers observed several instances over a five year period of bonobo attacks on chimpanzees.

An Atlantic blacktip shark spontaneously reproduced without the company of a mate, scientists report in the second documented case of the phenomenon. Scientists last year wrote about an asexual hammerhead shark that reproduced on its own, a process called parthenogenesis in which unfertilized eggs divide. Bony fish, reptiles, birds, lizards and Komodo dragons also can reproduce asexually.
Five-foot-long Tidbit, the ironically named resident of the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center in Virginia Beach, Va., spawned on her own — no male assistance involved, according to Reuters. Tidbit died in May 2007 during a veterinary checkup, before birthing her until-then unknown 10-inch-long shark pup. The case is published in the new issue of the Journal of Fish Biology.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of space time, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity. Time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny—the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women—was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.

A swath of bedrock in northern Quebec may be the oldest known piece of the Earth’s crust. Scientists report that portions of that bedrock are 4.28 billion years old, formed when the Earth was less than 300 million years old.