If things keep going like this, it will be as easy to pick up someone’s thoughts as it is their cell-phone conversation. It’s been only a few months since I wrote about scientists who had trained a computer to distinguish thoughts:

“Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University showed people drawings of five tools hammer, drill and the like) and five dwellings (castle, igloo …) and asked them to think about each object’s properties, uses and anything else that came to mind. Meanwhile, fMRI measured activity throughout each volunteer’s brain. As the scientists report this month in the journal PLoS One, the activity pattern evoked by each object was so distinctive that the computer could tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone was thinking about a hammer and not, say, pliers. . . . Remarkably, the activity patterns—from visual areas to movement area to regions that encode abstract ideas like the feudal associations of a castle—were eerily similar from one person to another. 'This establishes, as never before, that there is a commonality in how different people’s brains represent the same object,' said CMU’s Tom Mitchell."

Now the same team, led by computer scientist Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, has taken the next step. As they report in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science, they can now identify the unique brain activation patterns associated with scores of concrete nouns—that is, names for things you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell.

The team started with the fMRI patterns for 60 concrete nouns, including words for animals, body parts, buildings, clothing, insects, vehicles and vegetables. They then had their computer statistically analyze texts totaling more than 1 trillion words. For each noun, it calculated how frequently it occurs in the text with any of 25 verbs that have sensory or movement meanings, such as see, hear, listen, taste, smell, eat, push, drive and lift. The computer model combined the two sets of data to predict the activation patterns for thousands of concrete nouns, and racked up an accuracy of 77 percent.

“We believe we have identified a number of the basic building blocks that the brain uses to represent meaning,” said Mitchell in a statement. “Coupled with computational methods that capture the meaning of a word by how it is used in text files, these building blocks can be assembled to predict neural activation patterns for any concrete noun.”

A big reason this seems to work is that, as Just explained, people “are fundamentally perceivers and actors. So the brain represents the meaning of a concrete noun in areas associated with how people sense it or manipulate it. The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it.”

Besides sensory and motor areas, brain regions that become active when people think of concrete nouns include frontal areas, which plan and also encode long-term memory. Thoughts of apple, it seems, triggers a remembrance of apples past, and also of thoughts about how to get one.

That’s why the model struggles to distinguish apple from pear, for instance, and it also suggests that words other than concrete nouns—by, under, over, around, soon, later, enormous and every other preposition, adjective and adverb, not to mention verbs—will be tough for the computer to read from patterns of brain activity. Yet these words are, needless to say, crucial to determining meaning. The computer can’t tell It’s time to smuggle the bomb into the harbor from It’s criminal how poorly the harbor is defended against bombs. But at the rate scientists are going, it might not be long before it can.

Sad but true: attempts to use the DNA of extinct species to resurrect lost-long creatures—the quagga, the wooly mammoth and of course those Jurassic Park dinosaurs—hasn’t exactly worked (yet?), so I have a proposal. Scientists who study ancient DNA should abandon their current projects and focus on bringing back the one extinct life-form that would spice up modern life without, you know, leading to rampaging velociraptors: Vikings.

Extracting ancient DNA is tricky, what with modern DNA so ubiquitous. You risk contaminating your Neanderthal genes with, say, the genes of your grad student (and we all know how careless grad students are about leaving their genes lying around). But scientists in Denmark say they were really, really careful when they exhumed ten Viking skeletons, dating from about AD 1,000, from a burial site on the Danish island of Funen. Wearing protective suits, they removed teeth from the Vikings’ jaws at the moment the skeletons were unearthed, extracted DNA, and did all their analysis under carefully-controlled conditions to avoid contamination.

According to their report, being posted tonight on the Website of the journal PLoS One, they succeeded: the ancient DNA they extracted shows no evidence of contamination with the modern kind, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen say.

Sure, quaggas are cute and mammoths are majestic, but let’s be frank: think how much more fun it would be to clone Vikings. You know, even hunkier versions of, say, Viggo Mortensen (American mom, Danish dad).

It is the dream of children of any age to fly, and I don’t mean United or Delta. Yet if new research is right, then at least some of the magnificent flying reptiles of the Mesozoic called pterosaurs preferred to walk, thank you very much—at least for mealtime.

Pterosaurs called azhdarchids lived during the Upper Cretaceous (roughly 145 million to 65 million years ago), and include such crowd favorites as the gigantic Quetzalcoatlus northropi, with a wing span of 35 feet. Paleontologists studying azhdarchid fossils have concluded that they were “vulture-like scavengers, sediment probers, swimmers, waders, aerial predators, or stork-like generalists [or, most recently] . . . skim-feeders, trawling their lower jaws through water during flight and seizing aquatic prey from the water’s surface,” write scientists in a paper being posted in the journal PLoS One tonight.

Mark Witton and Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth beg to differ. That model, they continue, “lacks critical support from anatomy and functional morphology.” For instance, these toothless pterosaurs lacked the compressed lower jaw and shock-absorbing apparatus that you need if you’re going to plow into a lake to score chow.

Instead, an analysis of these pterosaurs’ anatomy (weak jaws, ill-suited for crashing into water and snaring prey; poor neck flexibility, forcing the creatures to hold their necks like crocodiles rather than flex it like seagulls; wings better suited to soaring on rising thermals rather than flapping in precision-controlled flight down to the surface of a lake or sea) as well as their footprints (showing they were good walkers and runners, but with small padded feet better for strutting around on land than for wading around lake margins or swimming should they land on water) and the distribution of their fossils (in terrestrial more than marine sediments) adds up to one conclusion, the scientists say: azhdarchids (from the Uzbek word for “dragon”) used their long limbs to stalk, picking up small animals and other prey from the ground.

“All the details of their anatomy, and the environment their fossils are found in, show that they made their living by walking around, reaching down to grab and pick up animals and other prey,” said Naish. Their “bizarrely stiff neck has previously been a problem for other ideas about azhdarchid lifestyle, but it fits with our model, as all a terrestrial stalker needs to do its raise and lower its bill tip to the ground.”

Based on the fossils, Witton has produced images of the 10-foot-tall azhdarchid named Hatzegopteryxwould standing beside a man, a group of Quetzalcoatlus strolling around a prairie picking off baby dinosaurs for lunch, and one of them flying toward you.

Nothing against the ancient and beautiful Italian port city of Genoa, but physicist Brian Greene wasn’t going to stand idly by while it had a world-renowned science festival and New York did not. When Greene spoke at the 2005 Genoa festival, he recalled over a recent breakfast with me, “it was enormously impressive: science was filling the streets, science was taking over. We stood in the square and said, ‘this should be happening in the U.S.’”

“We” are Green and his wife, award-winning news- and documentary-producer Tracy Day, and together they are on the verge of pulling it off. Enlisting Nobel laureates and actors, artists, choreographers, musicians and kids, they have organized the World Science Festival, which kicks off with an invitation-only “world science summit” tomorrow and then opens the doors to all comers for four days of events from May 29 to June 1 throughout New York City.

From the science of sports and of Disney Imagineering (want to know how they engineer those roller coasters at Disney theme parks?) to the brain basis of  morality and the neurobiology underlying the Bourne trilogy, the festival aims to be entertaining and fun, Day said, “communicating real science ideas with integrity. We want kids to see the pyrotechnics and the animated dinosaur [from the Disney Imagineers] and say, ‘huh, so that’s science?’, and see that with a degree in science you can go work for Disney.”

Never quite grasped the probabilistic nature of quantum physics? A dance performance at the Guggenheim Museum, inspired by Green’s best-selling book The Elegant Universe, includes a giant die: to demonstrate the random nature of the physical world, the dance progresses according to which side the die lands on. Puzzled about the parallel/multiworlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by the late physicist Hugh Everett? Hear from his son Mark Everett, an indie rocker, and two physicists to explore whether there are kazillions of you's in parallel universes.

The goal, says Greene, “is to create an excitement and buzz around science that it usually doesn’t have, to change how people talk about science, to change the zeitgeist so that science becomes something people want to engage with.”

Moving science toward the center of the larger cultural landscape is a tall order, especially in a time (now) and place (the U.S.) where what political conservatives call (contemptuously) the “reality-based community” (the earliest reference I find is in this 2004 story about a 2002 conversation with a White House adviser) includes scientists.

You can wow people all you want with gee-whiz science. At the end of the day, and the end of the festival, the challenge that science poses to the world view of millions of people—among whom the Bible and not Einstein or Darwin holds the correct account of the birth of the universe and the history of life on Earth, to name just two—ain’t going away. But if science can be made warm and fuzzy or cool and edgy, maybe the visceral animosity between the two opposed world views will dissipate like the smoke form those Imagineers’ pyrotechnics, at least a little.

You think you have big travel plans for the Memorial Day weekend? I guarantee they're nothing like what the first humans managed as they walked all over the globe after leaving their African homeland.

The human genome project has been a veritable treasure trove for scientists trying to tell the story of humankind’s migrations out of Africa. A couple of terrific books have chronicled this, and the use of genetics to reconstruct human history was a focus of a cover story we did last year. The fun part is when genetics throws a wrench into supposedly settled accounts, and that’s what a paper posted today in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics does.

In it, scientists from the University of Oxford and University College Cork describe a new technique they developed. It analyzes not just the Y chromosome, as many studies using genetics to trace human history do, but parts of chromosomes across the entire human genome. The details are complicated, but the bottom line is an ability to probe further back in time and identify smaller genetic contributions.

The technique confirms the out-of-Africa model, in which all human populations outside that continent today are the descendants of a single pulse of wanderers who left Africa. Hominids who originally lived in the regions of Asia and Europe colonized by the migrants contributed nothing to the modern gene pool, which is a polite way of saying that our ancestors wiped them all out (or at least prevented them from mating). Or, as I wrote in the cover story:

“The first modern humans—and therefore, unlike the earlier wave of Homo erectus into Asia a million years ago, the ancestors of everyone today outside Africa—departed Africa about 66,000 years ago. These pilgrims were strikingly few.... The best estimate: 2,000 men. Assuming an equal number of women, only 4,000 brave souls ventured forth from Africa.”

Now the technique is throwing up surprises about what happened next. Among them:

*The most northerly East Asian population that the scientists analyzed, Siberians called the Yakut, carry genes of the most northerly European population, the Orcadians (whose descendants live in the Orkney Islands), suggesting that northern Europeans walked into north Asia and hooked up with native peoples there.

*Populations in Central Eurasia have genes from the Near East (Bedouins and Palestinians) and even Kenyan Bantus.

*In Europe, the most ancient populations are the French, followed by the Tuscans and then other Italians, all of whom trace their ancestry to north Africans called Mozabites, today called Berbers, and to several Near Eastern and Central Asian populations. Europeans have more genetic ancestors than any non-European population, making Europe the world’s true melting pot.

*The youngest Europeans are the Sardinians, Russians, Orcadians and Basques—which makes sense, since they are all at the geographic extremes of the continent. People arrived there last. All four have big genetic contributions from the Near East and Central Asia, suggesting multiple waves of migrants into Europe.

*In the Americas, the Colombians are the oldest population. They can trace 47 percent of their ancestry to the Hazara of East Asia but, oddly, they also have genetic contributions from the French. That probably reflects intermarriage after Europeans arrived in the New World.

*The Pima are the oldest people of North America. They trace their ancestry to the Colombians but also, surprisingly, to Mongolians, who are not ancestors of the Colombians. That suggests multiple distinct colonizations into North America from Asia.

*The Mayans have Bantu and Tuscan donors, presumably due to intermarriage after the Europeans arrived.

For two cool little movies of all this, scroll to the bottom of the paper and click on Movie 1 and Movie 2.

Two questions: what bids do I hear for Guyana’s rainforest—and why is Harrison Ford having a patch of his chest hair ripped off with what looks like duct tape?

The answer to the second is simpler. In a 30-second video produced for Conservation International, Ford, looking not at all Indiana-y, lies on his back while a woman in white applies goop to his chest and covers it with a cloth. Ford intones that “every year, tropical forest equal to an area the size of England disappears. That’s a jungle the size of Manhattan lost every four hours. Saving forests is more than helping wildlife survive. It combats climate change, and allows people to continue getting the fresh water and food and medicines they need from healthy forest ecosystems.” As the woman secures the cloth, Ford tells us that “every bit of rainforest that gets ripped out over there”—cue the cloth ripping off his chest hair—“really hurts us over here.”

“Save the rainforest!” never went away as an environmental cause, and has been a front-burner issue since at least 1992, when the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in part to highlight the importance of the Amazon rainforest to mitigating climate change. (The Earth Summit was where the first President Bush signed a climate treaty committing the U.S. to reducing greenhouse gases. Oh well.)

But as scientists do the math and despair of countries controlling their emissions of carbon dioxide before it’s too late, the importance of rainforests has grown. Burning and clearing tropical forests emits some 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases every year, more than all the cars, trucks and airplanes combined. But virtually all the money pouring into projects aimed at stabilizing the climate is going into alternative energy; less than 1 percent of the investments in the global carbon market created by the Kyoto Protocol is going to preserve tropical forests.

This is where Guyana comes in. The South American country still has some 80 percent of its original Amazon forest cover. At a press conference organized by Conservation International this week, President Bharrat Jagdeo basically asked the world, “what am I bid to keep it that way?”

Or, to quote him, “we are willing to place almost our entire rainforest, which is larger than England, under the supervision of an international body to ensure compliance” with standards of sustainable forestry, which basically mean preserving the forest’s ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide. (Guyana’s forests store 250 to 400 tons or more of CO2 per hectare, for a total of hundreds of millions of tons. For comparison, energy use in all the homes in the U.S. caused the emission of about 300 million tons of CO2 in 2000.)

How much will it cost? The market will determine that, but economists estimate about $10 per ton of CO2. If the world wants to preserve, say, 500 million tons of CO2 in Guyana’s forests, it will cost $5 billion.

Worth it? That depends on what other methods of carbon sequestration cost, but it’s in the ballpark for other forms of forest sequestration and way cheaper than geologic storage, though cost estimates vary widely, as Figure 6 in this report shows.

As things now stand, the Kyoto Protocol says countries can claim carbon credits (which can be applied toward the amount they have to reduce their CO2 emissions) only if they replant or restore degraded or deforested areas. According to the concept of avoided deforestation, although a mature forest is not absorbing as much carbon from the atmosphere as when it was young, it is still storing a huge amount that we better keep out of the atmosphere. Countries with lots of intact forest could, in theory, blackmail the world: "want to keep rising oceans out of the lobbies of your high-rises and away from the pricey condos along your coasts? Pay up."

Let the bidding begin.

Photo: Jim Steinfeldt / Getty Images

It has a good chance, and new revelations just might have increased those chances.

Yesterday a House committee released documents and testimony showing that career staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency unanimously supported granting California’s request, and so did EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson—until the White House gave him a good talking to.

By law, the decision was supposed to be based on science and the law, and nothing else. So the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Rep. Henry Waxman (another Californian) was keenly interested in why EPA denied the waiver. Over its five-month investigation, the Committee amassed 27,000-plus pages of EPA documents and deposed or interviewed eight EPA officials who, from my reading of the documents, were none too happy about it.

It sure looked as if EPA was headed toward granting the waiver. One staffer told the committee about a September 2007 meeting at which “Administrator Johnson essentially polled the room on what people’s final opinions were about granting or not granting a waiver.” Not a single staffer argued for denying California’s request. A briefing by an EPA lawyer concluded, “After review of the docket and precedent, we don’t believe there are any good arguments against granting the waiver. All of the arguments ... are likely to lose in court if we are sued.” EPA Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett told the Committee that Johnson, too, supported granting California’s petition. But after “White House input into the rationale,” as Burnett put it, the answer to California was no.

Mary Nichols, head of the California environmental agency that applied for the waiver, told reporters that what looked like political tampering from the Bush Administration was “completely illegal, supported by neither law nor science.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said that EPA’s top leadership “has decimated the integrity of the agency, and allowed it to become a total tool of the White House.”

An EPA spokesman told Newsweek that Waxman is looking for a conspiracy that’s not there. White House spokesperson Emily Laramore declined to discuss Johnson’s conversations or how often he met with President Bush or White House staffers on the California waiver. But Bush has long made his position clear: No national mandates for cutting greenhouse emissions. And now, according to the documents, no state is going to do on its own what the White House refuses to do for the country.

--with reporting by Daniel Stone in Washington

There's a reason Americans suddenly started to believe in the reality of climate change starting in late 2005 and early 2006, and it wasn't (only) Al Gore: they saw the devastation that hurricane Katrina wreaked, listened to scientists saying global warming made such storms more likely, and said "oh %^$#!."

So it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to new research saying that hurricanes may not be more frequent after all (though they will be more destructive).

Since at least 1950 scientists have known a warmer tropical Atlantic will increase hurricane activity there—other things being equal. As a result, the sea-surface warming caused by climate change has made some scientists, not to mention regular people, expect that the east and Gulf coasts of the United States will see more intense and more frequent hurricanes. (Those concerns have also raised home-insurance rates.) But while evidence from climate models as well as observations keeps accumulating for the “more intense” part, the “more frequent” bit is decidedly dicier.

So expect a paper published online this afternoon by Nature Geoscience to cause a bit of a storm, so to speak. In it, scientists describe the results of a climate model of the Atlantic basin which simulates hurricanes. The model retro-casts (that is, reproduces past events) the increase in the number of hurricanes that occurred between 1980 and 2006,. That gives the scientists confidence in what the model forecasts: by the end of the 21^st century, they report, “Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm frequencies are reduced,” although the amount of rain each storm brings, as well as storm intensity, will “increase substantially.”

Since the mere mention of climate change scrambles some people’s brains, let’s take a moment to briefly note what’s known and indisputable. First, sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic have risen over the past century. Human activities—the release of greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere—are partly responsible, though natural climate variation has also probably contributed. Second, the number and destructive potential of Atlantic storms have increased markedly since 1980, along with those sea-surface temperatures.

Now for the disagreements. Some scientists, looking at the observational record, conclude that greenhouse warming caused a substantial rise in Atlantic tropical storms during the 20^th century. Others do not.

The new simulation isn’t all that surprising, given that even the scientist most strongly associated with the prediction that hurricanes will get fiercer—Kerry Emanuel of MIT—has already said that “global warming should cause hurricane frequency to fall.”Now, scientists led by Tom Knutson of the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory calculate that there will be 27 percent fewer tropical storms and 18 percent fewer hurricanes by century’s end. The number of major hurricanes should fall by 8 percent.

Although the precise reasons for the reduced storm frequency haven’t been nailed down—the scientists basically built their computer and pressed “go,” but have not scrutinized what physical processes produced their results—one factor is straightforward physics. A warmer world is bringing enhanced vertical wind shear (wind shear means the different speeds of winds at different heights). As a result of greater shear, such as that expected in some regions more than others, a greater number of nascent storms will get ripped apart before they can get organized into a hurricane. But Knutson and his colleagues also suspect that “changes in circulation and/or moisture are more likely the dominant factors.”

So, fewer storms, but those that come will not be pretty. “More than twice as many hurricanes occur with wind speeds exceeding [100 miles an hour],” the new model predicts. Those storms will bring 37 percent more rain within 30 miles of their center.

Silver lining: the number of storms that make landfall should decrease even more than the number of hurricanes—30 percent vs. 18 percent. Oh, except for one little thing: because of uncertainties in the model, “it is plausible that the model’s quantitative projections of increased intensity and increased numbers of the most intense storms . . . are underestimates.” That is, there could be more hurricanes and more-powerful ones after all. Don’t count on home-insurance rates going down anytime soon.

If the mail I get from readers is any indication, the issue of climate change is a dastardly conspiracy to “redistribute global wealth,” as one memorably explained to me. Now greenhouse deniers can imagine another conspiracy: it is all a plot to get rid of fat people.

The link between obesity and climate change has come up before, although subtly. An AP story last year noted that people could combat both of these problems by walking or bicycling rather than driving (so they burn calories, not gasoline). And writing in the Huffington Post, filmmaker Bryan Young (“Killer at Large”) cited a scientist who told him that “for every pound the average American is overweight, we use an additional 938 million gallons of gasoline per year. That's enough to fill 2 million cars with gasoline every year.” It’s straightforward physics: it takes more energy to move a lot of weight than it does to move a little weight (which is also why, everything else being equal, big cars get worse gas mileage than subcompacts).

Now a paper in The Lancet today puts a scientific stamp on this. The logic goes like this: Fat people consume more food than thin people, it takes energy to grow and transport food, ergo fat people are responsible for more global warming than thin people. Or, more precisely, for 18 percent more food energy than normal people, calculate Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The standard definition of “overweight” is having a body mass index of 25 or greater (you can calculate yours here). A population with BMIs of 24.5 consumes, on average, 1550 calories of food per person per day just for basic metabolism and another 950 calories for daily activities. That’s 2500 calories each. A population with BMIs of 29 needs 1680 calories per person for basic metabolism, plus 1280 calories for daily activities, or 2960. That’s 18 percent more food energy.

In addition, it takes more fuel to move an obese person than a slender one, the authors note, something that “will increase further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.” The authors therefore advocate policies that promote walking and bicycling to reduce obesity and, hence, global warming.

But I can’t help reading in their paper the latest pretense for feeling greener-than-thou: it won’t be enough to drive a Prius, air-dry your laundry, become a vegan and ditch your air conditioning to feel smug about your tiny carbon footprint. Not you’ll have to be waif-thin, too.

Here's the curious thing about the head of the Vatican’s astronomical observatory saying there’s a strong likelihood that extraterrestrial beings exist and that they are part of God’s plan: not the “what,” but the “when,” as in “why now?”

In the long interview he gave the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano yesterday, Father José Gabriel Funes, a Jesuit priest from Argentina, called the existence of extraterrestrials a real possibility. “Astronomers contend that the universe is made up of a hundred billion galaxies, each of which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars,” he correctly noted. (The interview was headlined The Extra-terrestrial Is My Brother.) “Many of these, or almost all of them, could have planets. [So] how can you exclude that life has developed somewhere else?”

For all the attention they got, however, Funes’ comments do not exactly break new ground, as my colleague Edward Pentin, who covers the Vatican for Newsweek, points out. In 2005 Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno wrote a 50-page booklet, Intelligent Life in the Universe, published by the Catholic Truth Society, in which he makes the standard astronomical points—lots of galaxies, lots of stars, some with planets, some of which may have conditions conducive to life. (Theological question: can God create life only in places with the right conditions? Or could He create life where there is, for instance, no water, or where the temperatures are too hot or too cold? If not, why not?).

But the Vatican has never denied the findings of contemporary astronomy, which is now up to 288 “extrasolar” planets (that is, those that orbit a star beyond our own solar system), including one whose atmosphere contains organic molecules, the ingredients of life, as I blogged in March. As Consolmagno put it, “There is nothing in Holy Scripture that could confirm, or contradict, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,” which means that telescopes and not the bible will be the only reliable guide to the question.

In his L’Osservatore interview, Fr. Funes echoed that, declaring that “As there exist many creatures on earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God. This doesn’t contradict our faith because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God.”

In asking whether little green men might be guilty of original sin, we are obviously in the realm of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” But the theologian astronomers don’t blink. Fr. Funes said he was sure that, if aliens needed redemption, they “in some way, would have the chance to enjoy God’s mercy.” Consolmagno was more explicit: there’s no problem in getting the Son of God to every planet with ETs because, as Christians accept every Sunday during the Holy Eucharist, “Christ is truly, physically present in a million places, and sacrificed a million times, every day at every sacrifice of the Mass.”

So if the Catholic Church has accepted the possibility of aliens for a while now, why the high-profile interview in the Vatican newspaper? Applying the techniques of Kremlinology to St. Peter’s, Edward Pentin’s sources tell him it might be part of a push to demonstrate the Vatican’s embrace of science (in 1992 it apologized for that whole unfortunate Galileo mess, after all). Toward the end of the interview, Fr. Funes called science and religion “two allies which elevate the human spirit. There can be tensions or conflicts, but we mustn’t be afraid. The Church mustn’t fear science and its discoveries.”

Interestingly, the Vatican has plans to host a conference in Rome next spring to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s seminal work on the theory of evolution. Conference organizers say it will look beyond entrenched ideological positions—including misconstrued creationism. The Vatican says it wants to reconsider the problem of evolution “with a broader perspective” and says an “appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.”

Are you better off today than you were 10 years ago? Some version of that is a favorite question of politicians looking to oust the party in power. As of today, if the “you” refers to American adults with a high-school education or less, and if the “better off” refers to the most basic measure you can think of—whether you are alive or dead—the answer is a shameful “no.”

Last month I blogged about a study that underlined how we truly are Two Americas (though the idea never gained traction for John Edwards this primary season). That study found that, since the early 1980s, death rates in wealthy counties of the United States have fallen—but those in poorer ones have stagnated or risen, despite the huge strides in disease prevention and treatment. Those are just not reaching the poor. Now another study uses a different proxy for “haves” or “have-nots”—education—and reaches another shameful conclusion: the gap in death rates between Americans with less than a high school education and college graduates has soared since 1993, they will report tomorrow in the May 14 issue of PLoS One.

The scientists analyzed death certificates (which indicate the last year of schooling that the person completed, as well as cause of death) for blacks and whites between the ages of 25 and 64. The age cut-off was chosen because, for older generations, education is not as strong a proxy for socioeconomic status—class—as it is for younger ones.

The numbers are shocking. Among white men who did not graduate from high school, there were 837 deaths per 100,000 of them in 1993; that same year, only 285 white men with college degrees died per 100,000 in this age group. But it gets worse. In 2001, those respective rates were 931 and 213—the death rate for less-educated white men had risen, while that for college grads had fallen. Do the math: white men who did not graduate from high school were dying at a rate 2.9 times that of college grads in 1993—and at a rate 4.4 times higher in 2001. For black men, the comparable mortality rates were 2.1 times higher in 1993 and 3.4 times higher in 2001.

For white women who never graduated from high school, the death rate was 422 per 100,000 in 1993, and for white women with a college degree it was 165. In 2001? It rose to 553 per 100,000 in the first group, and dropped to 146 in the highly-educated group. Breaking that down, the death rate from cancer among white women with only 12 years of education rose 1.1 percent per year during the period studied; for heart disease and stroke, it rose 1.8 percent per year among these women. All three of these diseases have become more preventable and more treatable—but, apparently, only for some.

Conclusion: the widening death gap was due to sharp decreases in mortality from all causes—but especially in heart disease, cancer and stroke, all of which have benefited from new forms of prevention and treatment—among the most educated. The less educated have benefited hardly at all from medical progress.

Why are the death rates from the major causes of death falling among the educated but rising among the less educated? Think of lower educational attainment as a marker of social and economic class—which has become a big issue in the presidential campaign, as Clinton grabs the votes of those lower on the socioeconomic ladder and Obama gets the votes of the higher-ups. The have-nots are not only poorer; they also are less likely to have health insurance or stable employment, which means little to no preventive care, and lower health literacy. The last factor means less likelihood of knowing when some small symptom means big trouble, and greater difficulty navigating the medical system. Those with less education are also more likely to smoke, be obese, get little exercise, and suffer from high blood pressure due to the stress of unemployment.

“Risk factors are higher in less well-educated groups, and they have less access to preventive medicine and treatment,” says Ahmedin Jemal of the American Cancer Society, who led the study.

The death gap isn’t going away. In 2005, the most recent year the researchers analyzed, the all-cause mortality rate for those with less than a high-school education was 3.2 times higher than that for people with even some college.

The poor will always be with us, as the saying goes, and so will inequality in education. But other countries have socioeconomic inequality also—with no comparable death gap, says Jemal, because they do not make access to health care (especially non-emergency and preventive care) contingent on having health insurance. Two Americas, indeed.

In the 12 years that I have speaking to him, Robert Zubrin has never disappointed. Whether he was devising a bargain-basement way to mount a manned mission to Mars (rather than taking along the fuel you need for the return trip, produce it from compounds in the Martian atmosphere once you get there, founding Pioneer Astronautics or serving as president of the Mars Society, Zubrin has never let conventional wisdom get in his way.

Amid the avalanche of new books on energy, Zubrin’s—Energy Victor: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil—also goes its own way. Rather than focusing on energy sources that will reduce the world’s emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, he has one goal, and one goal only: breaking the stranglehold that despots from the Middle East to South America to Africa have on the world’s oil supply.

Zubrin was understandably not happy, therefore, when I disparagedthe use of corn ethanol for fuel, pointing out that its greenhouse benefit is somewhere between small and nonexistent. Zubrin is an ethanol booster for one basic reason: it has the potential to wean the U.S. off imported oil. And he doesn’t buy the claim that diverting a large fraction of the corn harvest to ethanol plants is causing world grain prices—and U.S. food prices—to skyrocket. His arguments:

*Diverting corn for ethanol is not cutting in to food production, he says. “Here are the facts,” he told me in an email. “In 2002, the United States grew 9.0 billion bushels of corn, and turned 1.1 billion bushels into . . . 3 billion gallons of ethanol. In 2007, US farmers grew 13.1 billion bushels of corn, turned 3 billion bushels of it . . . into 8 billion gallons of ethanol,” leaving 10.1 billion bushels for food, more than the 7.9 billion bushels in 2002. Do the math: “despite the nearly three-fold growth of the corn ethanol industry,” Zubrin writes, “the net corn food and feed product of the USA increased 34% since 2002. Furthermore, contrary to claims in many articles, this has not been done at the expense of soy or wheat production. In fact, U.S. soy plantings this year are expected to be up 18% to a near record of 75 million acres, wheat plantings are up 6%, and overall, U.S. farm exports are up 23%.”

*The ethanol program pushed the price of a bushel of corn from $2.50 to about $4.50 or $5 in the last five years, or 9 cents per pound at the $5 price. This has induced farmers to plant more corn, from 78.9 million acres in 2002 to 93.6 million acres in 2007, putting “more corn on the market, helping to feed the world.”

*Those price increases? Blame OPEC, for causing fuel prices to rise 60% this year, plus increased demand from China and India. At $5 per bushel, the corn in a $3 box of cornflakes “cost 8 cents when bought from the farmer. So farm commodity prices have almost no effect on the retail consumers. But the effect of oil price hikes can be huge.”

*With oil above $120 per barrel, the U.S. will pay nearly $1 trillion for its oil supply, and the world as a whole will pay almost $4 trillion. “These petroleum costs are both up a factor of ten from what they were in 1999, and represent a huge highly-regressive tax on the world economy,” argues Zubrin, an astronautical engineer by training. “[The dollars going to OPEC are] “equivalent to a 45% increase in income taxes across the board, with 60% of the sum being paid over in tribute to foreign governments. Indeed, it is this massive tax increase – by far the largest in American history – that is now driving the United States into a recession.”

His conclusion: “rather than shut down the biofuel programs, we need to radically augment them, to the point where we can take down the oil cartel." He wants Congress to require that all new cars "be flex-fuel vehicles that can run on any combination of gasoline, ethanol or methanol. The technology is readily available and it only costs about $100 per vehicle. By making America a flex-fuel vehicle market, we will effectively make flex-fuel the international standard, as all significant foreign car makers would be impelled to convert their lines over as well.”

Zubrin doesn't pretend that corn ethanol will do much to avert the greenhouse crisis, but his focus on oil independence and energy prices is likely to resonate with more Americans (and politicians) than climate change does anyway. (As an aside, I have to mention a letter I got today from an angry reader, letting me know that "nobody [in his small town] even knows what a carbon footprint is. . . . Global warming and saving the planet is a bunch of crap. Everyone is concerned [instead] about maing enough money to pay for gasoline to drive to work.") And that will be the challenge for the next Administration, and the next Congress.

Here’s a moral dilemma that seems tragically timely, given the chaos surrounding attempts to deliver aid to Burma’s cyclone victims. There are 60 orphans at the Canaan Children’s Home in Buziika, Uganda, and their meal allotment has to be cut. What do you want to do: take six meals away from each of two kids, or 10 meals away from one? You have eight seconds to decide.

In this and similar moral dilemmas, efficiency (the total number of meals lost) is pitted again against equity (how evenly the burden of lost meals is shared among the children). You have to take away a total of 12 meals if two children share the loss, but only 10 (which would seem better) if a single orphan bears the entire burden. You have to decide whether to sacrifice efficiency (losing fewer meals) to equity (spreading the loss over more children).

Here’s another way to think about it. You are driving a truck to the Burmese cyclone victims. It holds 1,000 pounds of rice. The time it will take to deliver the rice to everyone in the Irrawaddy Delta village you are headed for means that 200 pounds will spoil. If you deliver the rice to people you meet en route, you will be distributing it to only half the population of the village, but only 50 pounds will spoil. Do you deliver the rice to only half the number of victims, maximizing the total amount of food provided (efficiency), or do you sacrifice 150 pounds to distribute it to more people (equity), giving rice to more people but also causing more rice to go to waste?

In a study reported online today in the journal Science, researchers posed the orphan dilemma to people while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Unlike most studies of the brain basis of ethical decision making ("neuroethics"), this one was grounded in reality: the volunteers’ choices would determine how many meals the research team actually donated to the Ugandan orphans. The volunteers knew this, which made the dilemma painful in the extreme. “Quite a few came out saying: ‘This is the worst experiment I’ve ever been in. I never want to do anything like this again!’,” said study co-author Ming Hsu of the University of Illinois’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

So, which is more critical to our sense of justice, equity or efficiency? And how does the brain decide?

In the experiment, the volunteers (26 men and women, ages 28 to 55) first read short bios of the orphans. Then they watched a video on a computer screen, showing a ball rolling toward a lever. By moving the lever, they could steer the ball toward either of two depictions of the moral choices: photographs of the actual orphans who would be affected by that choice, with numbers for the number of meals that would be lost to those children if that option were chosen.

By an overwhelming margin, people chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency—lose a few more meals, but spread the burden among as many children as possible, rather than making one hungry child—whose imploring little face stared back at them from the screen--shoulder the entire loss.

According to the fMRI, different brain regions became active at different points in the decision-making. The insula, which is involved in processing emotions and the awareness of bodily states as well as (in some studies) evaluating fairness, was active when the volunteers wrestled with questions of equity. The putamen, which is activated during learning that brings rewards, lit up when people thought about efficiency.

Since equity won, it suggests that decisions about fairness are rooted in emotion more than in cold-eyed cost-benefit analysis. “That the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity,” Steven Quartz of Caltech and co-author of the study said in a statement. “The emotional response to unfairness pushes people from extreme inequity and drives them to be fair,” suggesting that “our basic impulse to be fair isn’t a complicated thing that we learn,” but an instinctive one.

And whoever said scientists have no heart? After the experiment, and based on the volunteers’ decisions, the team donated $2,279 to the orphanage.

The 1999 comedy Dogma opens with a disclaimer, exhorting the audience to remember that “even God has a sense of humor. Just look at the Platypus. Thank you and enjoy the show. P.S. We sincerely apologize to all Platypus enthusiasts out there who are offended by that thoughtless comment about Platypi. We at View Askew respect the noble Platypus, and it is not our intention to slight these stupid creatures in any way. Thank you again and enjoy the show.”

God expressed his sense of humor, of course, in assembling a creature that is a little bit mammal (the platypus, a native of Australia, produces milk and is furry), a little bit reptile (it lays eggs and has venom, released from spurs in the hind legs) and a little bit bird (eggs again, plus it has a bill like a duck as well as webbed feet). Its cognitive capacity and/or nobility we’ll leave to the guys at Dogma, but one particular platypus—Glennie, from New South Wales, Australia—has made scientists smarter: an international team of researchers from the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and Spain collected her DNA and from it sequenced the platypus genome, they’re announcing today in papers in Nature and Genome Research.

The platypus genome consists of roughly 2.2 billion pairs of chemical “letters,” those As, Ts, Cs and Gs that spell out a species’ genetic code. (Humans have about 3 billion.) Within those letters are some 18,500 genes, compared to maybe 24,000 in humans.

Not surprisingly, the platypus genome is an amalgam of mammal, reptile and bird DNA, too.

Like reptiles, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has genes for egg laying. Its venom comes from genes that are duplicates of genes that evolved in ancestral reptiles, which is also the source of venom in today’s reptiles. Like mammals, it has genes for lactation (though, lacking nipples, it nurses its young through the abdominal skin). Like birds, it has a weird way of determining sex: of its 52 chromosomes, 10 are sex chromosomes (in humans, the X and Y, of 23 chromosomes, are sex chromosomes), and the platypus X resembles the sex chromosome of birds, called Z. A female platypus has five pairs of X chromosomes, while males have five Xs and five Ys. The platypus genome contains both reptilian and mammalian genes involved in the fertilization of eggs. Unlike most mammals, which have a pretty good sense of smell, the platypus doesn’t—and its genome has about half as many odor receptors as the mouse and other mammals.

Just one request, please. In the PR avalanche preceding this announcement, one talked about the medical benefits that would surely come from this feat. ("What does this discovery mean for the public? The very real potential for advances in human disease prevention and a better understanding of mammalian evolution.") Aren't we beyond that yet? There have been virtually no medical benefits from sequencing the human genome (yet), for goodness sake; can't we, just occasionally, celebrate a feat of pure science without raising hopes that it will, you know, cure cancer or something? Sometimes a platypus genome is just a platypus genome.

This has been the enduring mystery: How do events in the outside world get inside your head? That is, how do things that affect whether a child grows up to be contented and well-adjusted or a neurotic mess—things like abuse and neglect—change the gray matter to produce the brain activity and circuitry that corresponds to these psychological states? By turning some genes on and other genes off, according to a study posted this evening in the May 6 edition of the online PLoS ONE.

One of my favorite studies ever done showed how this happens in rats. In the 1990s Michael Meaney of McGill University saw that when a Mother Rat rarely licks and grooms her pups, the pups grow up to be fearful, stressed-out, jumpy and neurotic. If a Mother Rat is attentive and grooms her pups a lot, they grow up to be less neurotic, less fearful, more curious, mellower. The reason isn’t genetic, at least not in the usual sense. That is, it isn’t that mellow moms have mellow pups and neglectful moms have neurotic pups because the pups inherited mom’s mellow or neurotic DNA. (Pups born to attentive moms but reared by neglectful ones grow up to be stressed out, while pups born to neglectful moms but reared by attentive ones grow up to be less fearful, less neurotic. That is, they resemble their adoptive mom, not their biological one.)

Instead, licking and grooming removes the silencer on a gene that makes stress-hormone receptors in the rats’ brains. The more such receptors the brain has in the hippocampus, the fewer stress hormones are released and the mellower the rat is. But in rats reared by neglectful mothers, the silencer stays firmly attached, the brain therefore has a small supply of stress-hormone receptors, and glands pump out a flood of the hormones, producing a rat that is constantly jumpy and on hair-trigger alert. There you have it: Maternal behavior alters whether a gene is on or off.

Now the same core team of scientists has found that something like this happens in people, too. They compared the brains of troubled individuals who committed suicide, and who had been abused or severely neglected when they were children, to a comparison group of people who had no history of childhood abuse and who died suddenly of other causes. What the scientists did not find was any significant differences in the two groups’ gene sequences—that is, the strings of As, Ts, Cs and Gs that make up the double helix were basically the same.

But there were stark differences in the on-off setting of genes that work in the brain’s hippocampus. In the suicides, the genes were turned off like lights during a blackout, the McGill scientists report. In particular, “ribosomal RNA genes,” which humans have about 400 copies of and which make a big chunk of the cellular machinery that produces proteins, were studded with “off” switches. (This was not so in the cerebellum, but only the hippocampus. The former is mostly involved in movement, while the hippocampus encodes memories—and is often shrunk in people who have experienced trauma.)

As you would expect, the suicides—because of the “off” genes—made fewer rRNAs in the hippocampus. That likely means they also made fewer proteins—the workhorses of cells, since they include enzymes.

The next question is what effect the turned-off genes have in the brain, and how that may explain the suicides. But for now, chalk up another advance in understanding how the experiences we have can reach into our very DNA.

Bad enough that antidepressants fail to help an estimated one-third of people suffering from depression. Even worse is that it can take 6 to 8 weeks before that becomes clear: the patient dutifully swallows Zoloft after Zoloft or Paxil after Paxil, only to find after two months that she is no better off—at which point her doctor typically puts her on a different med, and the whole process of trial-and-error starts all over again. There’s got to be a better way—and now there may be.

Last September I wrote about a new use of EEGs—the decades-old technology that measures brain waves—in which psychiatrists compare the EEG of a patient to thousands of EEGs in a huge database that matches it to an effective treatment. (This is different from using EEGs to diagnose a mental illness, something that doesn’t seem to work, perhaps because there are many, many ways for a brain to have an underlying pattern of electrical activity that adds up to “depression” or “bipolar disorder” or other psychiatric disease.) CNS Response, the California company that runs the database, looks for matches between EEG and effective drug. In about 75% of cases, that produces surprising pairings—such as an anticonvulsive drug for a patient with depression—that the physician would never have thought of.

A new study being reported this afternoon at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association finds another use for EEGs: predicting which patients will respond to the antidepressant they have just started. Rather than waiting for months, patients suffering from major depression—as nearly 15 million Americans do—take the drug for a week and then undergo an EEG (which is painless, noninvasive and relatively cheap, on the order of $150).

The study, led by Andrew Leuchter of UCLA and called BRITE (Biomarkers for Rapid Identification of Treatment Effectiveness), had 73 patients take the antidepressant escitalopram, which is sold as Lexapro and belongs to same category—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs—as Prozac and many others. That’s the quandary: all of the drugs supposedly work by targeting the brain’s serotonin system (which is actually a questionable claim, but that’s a story for another day), so which one will help a particular patient? Before starting the drug and again after taking it for 48 hours, for one week, and for two and seven weeks, the patients underwent EEGs. At the one-week visit, doctors assessed how well they were responding to the drug; the researchers also identified genetic markers that have been reported to predict how well patients will respond to SSRIs, and measured how much of the drug was in the patients’ blood, which is thought to be an indication of whether it is likely to work.

The bad news: the docs were terrible at predicting, based on how well the patients were doing after a week on Lexapro, whether the drug would alleviate their depression. The genetic markers fared no better. Neither did the blood levels.

But of the 38 patients who got a little better and the 28 who recovered completely by the end of the seven weeks, the EEG readings—measuring brain-wave changes after one week on the drug—did pretty well, predicting who would get a little better or even recover with 74% accuracy (compared to 51% accuracy for the docs’ evaluation).

“Early changes in frontal EEG signals carry important information about future clinical response,” Leuchter said in a statement, suggesting that EEGs have “the potential to help clinicians improve the care of patients suffering from depression.”

Caveats: the company that sells the EEG system, Aspect Medical Systems, funded the study, and Leuchter has been a paid consultant to Aspect, served on its board and received grant money from Aspect. (I have blogged before on how company-funded studies can be skewed.) And seven weeks is not exactly long-term. Still, anything that moves us beyond the current hit-and-miss approach to treating depression is to be welcomed.