Apparently Charles Linnaeus not only pioneered the way we classify organisms, but also was the mind behind the index card.

From the Science Daily article:

Linnaeus had to manage a conflict between the need to bring information into a fixed order for purposes of later retrieval, and the need to permanently integrate new information into that order, says Mueller-Wille. “His solution to this dilemma was to keep information on particular subjects on separate sheets, which could be complemented and reshuffled,” he says.

Towards the end of his career, in the mid-1760s, Linnaeus took this further, inventing a paper tool that has since become very common: index cards. While stored in some fixed, conventional order, often alphabetically, index cards could be retrieved and shuffled around at will to update and compare information at any time.

* * *

I never thought something so ubiquitous and seemingly obvious even NEEDED inventing!

Read the full article here.

Anthropologists are using forensic techniques to unravel the mystery of a mass murder of children from 900 B.C.

From the article on TheOpenCase.com

The murder was brutal—and it took place over 3,000 years ago. Archaeologists first found the skulls in the 1920s when they excavated a Neolithic settlement called "Wasserburg". At the time, the Neolithic settlement was a relatively bustling place. The people kept horses that they used to pull wagons and sleds, and even had a metal workshop that was able to cast bronze artifacts.

The scientists found six skulls equally spaced on the outside of the palisade fence surrounding the settlement. Only the skulls of the victims were found. Five of the skulls were children three to sixteen years old. The sixth skull was from a 50 year old woman.

* * *

You can read the full article here.

If you have any information or may have witnessed this crime, please contact local law enforcement officials.

Autism is a disorder that seems to defy any attempts to understand the underlying causes. The symptoms range from mild antisocial behaviors to complete radio silence. Researchers are now using magnetic fields to try and understand at least how an autistic brain works and how it differs from non-autistic brains.

From the article in the Boston Globe:

Okay - this is just incredibly neat:

From the Wired article:

Even by the standards of the Pentagon fringe science arm, this project sounds far-out: “programmable matter” that can be ordered to “self-assemble or alter their shape, perform a function and then disassemble themselves.” But researchers backed by Darpa are actually making progress on this incredible goal, Henry Kenyon at Signal magazine reports.

One day, that could lead to “morphing aircraft and ground vehicles, uniforms that can alter themselves to be comfortable in any climate, and ’soft’ robots that flow like mercury through small openings to enter caves and bunker complexes.” A soldier could even reach into a can of unformed goop, and order up a custom-made tool or a “universal spare part.”

* * *

Read the full article from Wired here.

There's a cool article on Slate from last week about a book by Richard Wrangman (a Harvard-based biological anthropologist) called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

From the article:

Apparently, the idea that cooking was the crucial difference between their diet and ours came to Wrangham as he stared into the fire at home. Though there's no archeological evidence of controlled fire before 800,000 years ago, he realized that a cluster of changes in the human face, brain, and gut 1.8 million years ago could be explained by only one thing—regular cooked meals. His argument begins with the odd spend-money-to-make-money aspect of digestion: You must burn calories in order to release calories from food (a fact deeply cherished by celery-chewing teenage girls). Because raw food is harder to digest, it takes more calories to get the calories out of it, and you get fewer calories from it anyway.

Wrangham illustrates this with an array of observations and experimental evidence. He cites a BBC TV show about an "Evo Diet Experiment" that followed nine volunteers who gave up processed food for 12 days and ate only the kinds of food that humans are supposedly wired to eat, mostly raw nuts, fruits, and vegetables. At the end of the experiment, the volunteers had improved cholesterol and blood pressure, and they also lost a lot of weight, despite the fact that the food was chosen to give them the required amount of calories per day. Wrangham even meets with some modern-day raw foodists, who are all very slim. He finds ample evidence that people who eat mostly raw food "thrive only in rich modern environments," and they usually feel very, very hungry. An actual "evo" diet, Wrangham notes, would deliver even fewer calories; require some actual hunting and gathering; and, being more like the diet of chimps, need to be chewed for hours and hours every day.

Cooked food, by contrast, is easier to digest, gives you more energy, and takes no time to eat

* * *

Read the full article on Slate here.

I spend a lot of my time during the day jumping beween a number of different websites to get my science, entertainment and world news, but many of these sites listed in a post on the Examiner website were new to me. (There are some fluff sites, but also great resources, like EurekAlerts).

From the list:

1. Scopus.com: The Scopus database contains more than 16,500 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers. You will need to go through an institutional website (.edu, .gov, etc,) to access the fully functional version, but the wealth of data found in Scopus surpasses most other research search engines.
2. Grants.net: You need money to conduct research. This clearinghouse of funding opportunities, complied by Science magazine, brings call for proposals together in one convenient place.
3. Science Commons.org: Following the same philosophy of the Creative Commons license for artists, Science Commons is the place to go to find research intended for free sharing, re-using and re-purposing. Science Commons encourages collaboration so that each researcher is not working in isolation. The result should be faster solutions, quicker cures, and more rapid innovations through cooperation among scientists.

You can read the full list here.

It's no secret that the oceans are in bad shape. It's also no secret that next to nothing is done about it. We're over-fishing. We're using them as toxic waste dumps. There's an island of trash in the northern Pacific that is estimated to be twice the size of Texas. Maybe if these problems get a little too close for comfort, people will start paying more attention...

From an Independent article:

"All over the world, from the Bay of Bengal to Lake Victoria to the shores of South America, I have heard fishermen say their catches are shrinking, in size and in number. Industrial-scale fishing only began in the 1950s. By the standards of the news cycle, this is slow – but by the standards of the planet or of settled fishing communities, this is a click of the fingers. The effects of the new industrial fishing are uniform. Professor Ransom Myers found that whenever the vast industrial trawlers are sent in, it takes just 15 years to reduce the fish population to a 10% shadow of its former self.

This process of trawlering is an oceanic weapon of mass destruction, ripping up everything in its path. Charles Clover, who wrote the book on which the documentary is based, has a good analogy for it. Imagine a band of hunters stringing a mile of net between two massive all-terrain vehicles and dragging it at speed across the plains of Africa. Imagine it scooping up everything in its way: lions and cheetahs and hippos and wild dogs. The net has a massive metal roller attached to its leading edge, smashing down every tree that gets in its way. And in the end, when the hunters open up the net, they pick out the choicest creatures and dump the squashed remains in the sun as carrion for the vultures.

But we need fish. Our brains don't form properly without their fatty Omega-3 acids. So why do our governments allow this process of destruction to continue? Why do they actively encourage it, with $14bn of subsidies for fishermen to keep on trawling every year?

* * *

Read the full article here.

Researchers, after what must have been hours and hours of hilarity, have teased out further splits between the human and ape evolutionary trees.

From the BBC News article:

Primate researchers have long guessed that many of the social behaviours that are seen in humans have a basis in our primate lineage.

Studies have noted that vocalisations that some apes make while being tickled are similar to those made when they are playing, and acoustically they share some characteristics with human laughter.

"We have various findings showing that human laughter is deeply rooted in human biology, because, for example, it's present in various cultures, in deaf and blind children," explained Marina Davila-Ross of the University of Portsmouth, the lead author of the study.

"So there have been many claims that these vocalisations have a pre-human basis."

* * *

Read the full BBC News article here (which includes videos of said tickling)

Chinese scientists have reported developing stem cells from pigs that could be used in human ailments.

From the article in the New York Daily News:

This is the first time scientists were able to successfully transform adult cells from animals into stem cells, said Dr. Lei Xiao, who led the research team. Cells taken from a pig's ear and bone marrow "changed and developed in the laboratory into colonies of embryonic-like stem cells," the researchers reported in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. Embryonic stem cells can then develop into any type of cell in the human body.

Roald Dahl, my favorite author from when I was a kid, wrote an essay over 23 years ago about the importance of getting kids vaccinated. I couldn't agree more. Here are his words:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fi ngers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy, ” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunised against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it. It is not yet generally accepted that measles can be a dangerous illness. Believe me, it is. In my opinion parents who now refuse to have their children immunised are putting the lives of those children at risk. In America, where measles immunisation is compulsory, measles like smallpox, has been virtually wiped out. Here in Britain, because so many parents refuse, either out of obstinacy or ignorance or fear, to allow their children to be immunised, we still have a hundred thousand cases of measles every year. Out of those, more than 10,000 will suffer side effects of one kind or another. At least 10,000 will develop ear or chest infections. About 20 will die. LET THAT SINK IN.Every year around 20 children will die in Britain from measles. So what about the risks that your children will run from being immunised? They are almost non-existent. Listen to this. In a district of around 300,000 people, there will be only one child every 250 years who will develop serious side effects from measles immunisation! That is about a million to one chance. I should think there would be more chance of your child choking to death on a chocolate bar than of becoming seriously ill from a measles immunisation. So what on earth are you worrying about? It really is almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised. The ideal time to have it done is at 13 months, but it is never too late. All school-children who have not yet had a measles immunisation should beg their parents to arrange for them to have one as soon as possible. Incidentally, I dedicated two of my books to Olivia, the fi rst was James and the Giant Peach’. That was when she was still alive. The second was ‘The BFG’, dedicated to her memory after she had died from measles. You will see her name at the beginning of each of these books. And I know how happy she would be if only she could know that her death had helped to save a good deal of illness and death among other children.

* * *

Cory Doctorow, from BoinBoing.net had this to say:

Here's Roald Dahl's impassioned plea to get your kids immunized. I live in East London, where we have live measles afflicting otherwise healthy kids who could have been vaccinated against them, but whose parents have been duped by a falsified claim that vaccinations are linked to autism (here's a non-falsified claim: measles leads to permanent disability and even death).

I remember when my daughter got sick and broke out with measle-like spots when she was too young to have had her vaccination against the disease. As I contemplated the possibility that my daughter might be permanently disabled or even killed because gullible people were choosing not to vaccinate their kids, I wanted to start wringing necks.

Dahl had a child die from measles, and he was determined that no other child should die needlessly from fear and ignorance.

* * *

Get your kids vaccinated. It's a no-brainer.

Move over, Pooh. You may think you're clever disguising yourself as a little grey rain cloud to swipe honey from that beehive, but look at what these wild chimps have done to get their sweet fix.

From the article on Discovery News:

The tools consist of pounders, enlargers, collectors, perforators and swabbers. Chimps, suspended in acrobatic positions on branches, might first pull out a thick stick pounder to break open beehive entrances. They then reach for another stick, the enlarger, to perforate and widen different honeybee hive compartments. Next comes the collector, used to dip or scoop out honey.

Different tools and methods are needed to obtain underground bee honey. The chimps wield a perforator to penetrate the ground, locate a honey chamber and dig into the soil. They then pull off strips of bark to "dip and spoon the honey out of the opened beehive."

Obtaining honey from an underground hive isn't easy. Aside from dealing with angry, stinging bees, the chimps must dig narrow sideways tunnels, maintain perfect aim and prevent soil from falling into, and ruining, their desired sweet reward.

* * *

Read the full article from Discovery News here.

Read the research article from the Journal of Human Evolution here (login required).

I'm no physics expert, but from what I remember from college, once you get past the basic laws of physics governing movement and massive bodies and descend into the nitty gritty, logic seems almost to disappear. "What do you mean particles are waves? That can't possibly be true!" But this is why physics is beautiful to me. While the math is entirely over my head, the findings never cease to amaze me.

Here's a really cool attempt at explaining the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics from the Scienceblogs website.

Read that and tell me your brain doesn't hurt.

Scientists at Washington University at St. Louis have engineered insomniac fruit flies. I don't know about you, but I could use a few more hours a day of productivity, even if it does mean falling over more often.

From the article in The Register:

The wakeful insects are the brainchild of Paul Shaw, PhD, of the Washington University in St Louis (WUSTL). According to WUSTL, "Shaw's lab was the first to show that fruit flies enter a state of inactivity comparable to sleep".

"After generations of selective breeding," it says in the WUSTL statement, "Shaw's group had produced a line of flies that naturally spent only an hour a day asleep — less than 10 percent of the 12 hours of sleep normal flies get."

* * *

Read the full Register article here.

Read the research article in the Journal of Neuroscience here (login required).

I just came across an article so gruesome that it put a smile on my face. The ancient Phoenicians would force smiles onto the faces of the dead and researchers have just discovered how it was accomplished:

From the article:

By the eighth century B.C., Homer had coined the term "sardonic grin"—"sardonic" having its roots in "Sardinia"—in writings referring to the island's ritual killings via grimace-inducing potion.

Elderly people who could no longer care for themselves and criminals "were intoxicated with the sardonic herb and then killed by dropping from a high rock or by beating to death," according to the new study.

For centuries the herb's identity has been a mystery, but study leader Giovanni Appendino and colleagues say they have discovered a sardonic grin-inducing compound in a plant called hemlock water-dropwort.

* * *

You can read the full article from National Geographic here.