. . . if you want to get the most cancer-fighting nutrition out of your carrots, zucchini and broccoli. Despite the conventional culinary wisdom that raw is best in terms of preserving veggies’ nutritional value, scientists in Italy—where they know a little about food—find that the right kind of cooking actually preserves or even boosts their nutritional value, the researchers will report December 26 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

In the new study, the researchers at the University of Parma measured how boiling, steaming, and frying affected the nutritional contents of carrots, zucchini and broccoli, especially such anti-cancer compounds as antioxidants and polyphenols. For those of you planning to serve any or all of these three during the holiday season, here’s the bottom line:

I’ve never understood all those anti-evolution kooks who think that being related to apes and monkeys—sharing an ancestor with them—is an unspeakable insult. After all, chimps alone have been found to use tools, logic and semantics, and to demonstrate compassion and empathy greater than what some humans have shown themselves capable of. Now scientists have shown that rhesus monkeys can add.

Even a monkey can look at arrays of dots and determine which of two sets has more dots, which is not surprising: being able to take a quick scan of two bunches of bananas and decide which is worth climbing a tree for comes in handy in the jungle. But scientists didn’t know whether monkeys or other nonhuman animals can do mental arithmetic, although there had been hints. In 2005 scientists reported that when rhesus monkeys watched as two groups of four lemons were placed behind a screen, they looked longer when the screen was lowered to reveal an incorrect four lemons (“but wait!”, you could imagine them thinking; “4 + 4 = 8, not 4”) than when there were eight lemons. (Long looking time means the monkeys detected something amiss.) The most intriguing test of arithmetic in an animal was one conducted in 1989 on a chimpanzee who had been trained to recognize Arabic numerals; he could choose the right one when he had to add up sets of oranges, as long as the total was less than 4.

In the current study, Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University and graduate student Jessica F. Cantlon had two female rhesus monkeys (as well as 14 college students, which we’ll get to in a minute) look at two sets of dots on a touch screen monitor. The sets appeared half a second apart. Once the monkeys had had a good look at the sets, they saw two choices: an array with a number of dots equal to the sum of the sets and an array whose dots did not equal that sum. The arithmetic problems went up to sums of 16, and the questions used every permutation for that sum (for 8, for instance, the questions were 1 +7, 2 + 6, 3 + 5, 4 + 4, 5 + 3, 6 + 2 and 7 + 1).

As the scientists report tonight in the online journal PLoS Biology, “monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a manner comparable to college students tested on the same addition task.” To wit: the monkeys got about 76 percent of the questions right, compared to 94 percent for the students.

You may be sneering that this isn’t addition at all; it’s just memorizing the look of two arrays and mentally combining them. So to see whether the monkeys were not really adding but instead merging the spatial extent of the two sets of dots, the scientists varied that spatial extent. About one-quarter of the time, the area covered by the wrong answer more closely matched the total area of the dots in the two addends than the right answer did—that is, the dots were crowded together or spread apart in the right answer but had spacing comparable to that in the two addends in the wrong answer. The monkeys weren’t fooled, still answering correctly most of the time, “indicating that they based their choices on the numerical sum of the objects, not their surface area,” say the Duke scientists.

Okay, so it's not calculus. But as scientists probe for the evolutionary roots of human abilities, both cognitive and moral, expect more such discoveries that challenge many claims of human uniqueness.

The universe can be a cruel place, but astronomers never knew it could be downright homicidal—at least for galaxies that have the bad luck to be in the crosshairs of a black hole.

For the first time, astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole blasting away at a nearby galaxy (which also contains a supermassive black hole at its center, though this one isn’t firing). “We’ve seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we’ve seen one punch into another galaxy,” said astronomer Dan Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the study. “This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling.”

Black holes are collapsed stars that are so dense, nothing that wanders within their gravitational sphere of influence, even light, can escape them. But black holes produce their own radiation, especially high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays, which shoot out from the star in the form of tightly collimated jets whose constituent particles travel at nearly the speed of light. When it hits another galaxy, as the jet of this “death star” is, the result is likely to be devastating for any planets lying in its line of fire, reacting kind of like an ant in a beam of sunlight focused by a lens, as this animation shows. As it happens, the target galaxy in this system lies 20,000 light years from the black hole—approximately the same distance as Earth lies from the center of the Milky Way. And yes, Virginia, our Milky Way does harbor a black hole, with 2 million times the mass of the Sun.

The two-galaxy system, named 3C321, lies 1.4 billion light years away from us in the constellation Serpens and was captured by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the ground-based Very Large Array and MERLIN radio telescopes. The jet from the black hole began pounding the galaxy about 1 million years ago, the astronomers will report in The Astrophysical Journal.

For the galaxy being sprayed with lethal fire by the black hole’s jet, the consequences may not be all bad, however. The energy and radiation from the jet might trigger the formation of myriads of stars and planets, through the collapse of dust-and-gas clouds. In other words—and seasonally appropriate—out with the old, in with the new.

Yeah, you’ve probably heard that before, since Newsweek  and other publications have chronicled the Bush Administration’s efforts to squelch scientists who conclude that climate change is real, caused by human activities and not a good thing, to put it mildly. Still, there’s something about having it all tied up in a neat congressional report, as Rep. Henry Waxman is releasing this morning, that really hits you in the face.

Unlike mere journalists, to whom sources can lie with impunity, congressional investigators have the power to put people under oath, holding over them the prospect of a perjury indictment if they lie. Funny how that leads to all sorts of revelations. Media requests to interview climate scientists were routinely punted to the White House environment office, says one career official. Asked by Waxman’s staffers, “Did the White House and the Department of Commerce not want scientists who believed that climate change was increasing hurricane activity talking with the press?” he said, “There was a consistent approach that might have indicated that.”

The White House also knew better than scientists what the research showed, apparently, for when Thomas Karl, director of National Climatic Data Center, appeared before Waxman’s House Oversight Committee last year, his testimony was edited by White House officials and the Commerce Department. According to Waxman’s investigators, “He was not allowed to say in his written testimony that ‘modern climate change is dominated by human influences,’ that ‘we are venturing into the unknown territory with changes in climate,’ or that ‘it is very likely (>95 percent probability) that humans are largely responsible for many of the observed changes in climate.’ His assertion that global warming ‘is playing’ a role in increased hurricane intensity became ‘may play’.” There are plenty more where that came from.

And people still wonder why so many Americans do not understand climate change?

If your favorite “Grand Theft Auto” fan has not yet turned into a raging violent madman, you may be tempted to dismiss the huge pile of evidence linking exposure to media violence to an increase in aggressive and violent behavior. Not so fast.

In a clever study tracking how the brain responds to violent film scenes, scientists at Columbia University found a very specific effect: diminished activity in the region of the brain that controls reactive aggression. In other words, watching gruesomely violent images might not incite violence in someone who lives peacefully in a Buddhist monastery. But in real life--where drivers cut you off, colleagues undermine you, friends tease you and countless other provocations ensue--the loss of control over a reflexively aggressive reaction can have dangerous consequences.

The scientists showed seven men and seven women, mostly in their 20s, two dozen movie clips. Among them: a teenager breaking a bottle over someone’s head in “The Basketball Diaries,” a man getting shot in the head in “The Patriot,” a man slashing another with a sword in “Pulp Fiction,” one man hitting another with a meat cleaver in “Gangs of New York,” and similar edifying footage. The 14 also saw some neutral clips, as well as those of people being frightened (though not meat-cleavered). During the mini-screenings, the volunteers’ brains were scanned by functional MRI, which observes which regions are more or less active during different activities.

The most striking change as the volunteers watched more and more slashings, shootings and stabbings was in what’s called the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, the researchers report today in the journal PloS One. The right ltOFC is a cluster of neurons nestled just behind the right side of the forehead. A number of earlier studies have linked it to control over reactive aggression. And although the scientists did not see how aggressively their volunteers would react to someone cutting them off in line, they did ask them so engage in some introspection by, for instance, answering whether they agreed that, “given enough provocation, I may hit another person.” The lower the activity in the region controlling reactive aggression, the more likely the volunteers were to answer with the equivalent of “hell yes.”

No wonder the scientists conclude that “even short-term exposure to violent media can result in diminished responsiveness of a network associated with behaviors such as reactive aggression.” Be careful not to jostle a fellow audience member at “American Gangster,” or he might deck you.
More seriously, the work goes some way toward getting beyond the generalities of the effects of media violence--increasing aggression--to pinpointing what kind of aggression is increased. Watching beheadings and the like won’t send you into an unprovoked violent rampage, but it lowers the threshold of provocation needed to do so.

Scientists are sticklers for not really believing what until someone explains how. That is, they’ll see that something happens, but until research reveals how it happens the phenomenon remains a bit dodgy.

So it is with the power of exercise to spur the production of new neurons in the brain, improve learning and lift depression. Fred Gage and colleagues at the Salk Institute showed in 2005 that it does happen—even elderly rats have a spurt of this “neurogenesis” after a few sessions in the exercise wheel. And researchers led by Arthur Kramer at the University of Illinois showed in 2006 that the effect occurs in people, too, so that even a hour a day of mall-walking increases the amount of gray matter in the brains of the elderly. It also makes you feel better.

Maybe now more scientists, not to mention the rest of us, will take the findings to heart. Researchers led by Ronald Duman of Yale have discovered that exercise causes the brains of mice to produce a molecule that acts as a natural antidepressant, they write this afternoon in the online edition of Nature Medicine. The molecule is a growth factor called VGF, which is active in the brain.

That nearly ties up three loose ends: exercise, neurogenesis and anti-depressants. That's because, over the last few years, scientists have been challenging the idea that antidepressants such as Prozac work by increasing the brain’s production of serotonin. Instead, the drugs' real mechanism is to spur neurogenesis. With the new work, there’s at least the possibility that the drugs do so through VGF. The current study shows that “VGF is required for the antidepressant effects of exercise,” the scientists say. Interesting, the most effective treatment for depression, electroconvulsive shock, also increases the brain’s supply of many of the molecules that exercise does, including VGF.

The next step is to confirm that exercise also raises levels of VGF in people's brains, not just mice's. But as anyone who has experienced a glow or even a euphoria from working out can attest, exercise has a profound positive effect on mood--and now we know how.