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.

My favorite story about the Dalai Lama doesn’t concern his activities on behalf of Tibet, which is one unrelieved tragedy, but is about his interest in neuroscience. A few years ago the Dalai Lama was visiting an American medical school and watched a brain operation. Afterwards, he chatted with the surgeon, telling him how his scientist friends had patiently explained to him that all of our thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams and other mental activities are the products of electrical and chemical activity in the brain. But he had always wondered something, the Dalai Lama told the surgeon. If electricity and chemistry can produce thoughts and all the rest, can thoughts act back on the physical stuff of the brain to change its chemical, electrical and other physical properties?

The surgeon dismissed the question with a polite but indulgent no. (The Dalai Lama's English translator, Thupten Jinpa, told me this story in 2005.) The brain produces and shapes mental activity, the brain surgeon said; mental activity does not alter the brain.

That wasn’t a stupid answer 10 years ago, before scientists had fully grasped the potential of the adult brain to change in structure and function—an ability called neuroplasticity. But now researchers have documented a long list of examples of how the brain, once thought to be basically unchangeable after the ripe old age of 3, can indeed change.

The first things that were found to change the brain were sensory inputs. If you spend a lot of years playing violin, say, then the regions of the motor and somatosensory cortexes that correspond to the fingering digits (the fingers on the left hand, if you're right-handed) expand.

But now neuroscientists have documented how “mere” thoughts can also sculpt the brain. Just thinking about playing a piano piece, over and over, can expand the region of motor cortex that controls those fingers; just thinking about depressive thoughts in new ways can dial down activity in one part of the brain that underlies depression and increase it in another, leading to clinical improvement.

The scientist who has worked most closely with the Dalai Lama is Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Davidson first met the Dalai Lama in 1992, and since about 2000 has been investigating a question dear to the heart of the leader of Tibetan Buddhism: can mental training such as meditations change the brain in an enduring way? That “enduring” is key: of course the brain “changes”—in the sense that some areas become more active—when you meditate, just as it changes when you think of pink elephants, watch Obama or try to remember your first kiss. Everything we think has a corresponding brain activity. But once the thought stops, so does the activity. Usually. What Davidson wanted to know was whether meditation left a long-lasting imprint on the brain, some change of function or structure.

Since 2004, Davidson and his colleagues have reported that meditation can alter the brain’s attention capabilities and that it can increase production of brainwaves called gamma, which are associated with consciousness. Now they have found another long-lasting brain change produced by Buddhist meditation: practicing compassion meditation (more on this below) alters regions of the brain that make us empathetic, Davidson and his colleagues are reporting this evening in PLoS ONE.

In compassion meditation, as the French-born Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard explained it to me when we were both visiting the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala for a meeting of neuroscientists and Buddhist scholars, you focus on the wish that all sentient beings be free of suffering. You generate an intense feeling of love for all beings, not fixating on individuals but encompassing all of humanity. It takes practice, since the natural tendency is to focus on one or a few specific suffering people.

Davidson conducted his new study as he has his others on meditation, enlisting expert meditators (the Dalai Lama has asked Buddhist scholars to volunteer their brains to Davidson’s research). Antoine Lutz has the meditators (monks who have 10,000 hours or more of meditation under their belts—er, saffron robes) lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tube. The fMRI detects which regions of the brain are active during meditation and which are quiet. It also detects which are active during periods between meditations. The scientists compare these readings to those on non-meditators, who undergo a quickie course in compassion meditation. In this case, Davidson and Lutz enlisted 16 monks plus 16 age-matched controls, members of the UW-Madison community.

Each of the 32 subjects lay in the fMRI and turned compassion meditation on and off, on Lutz’s command. Throughout, Lutz piped in happy sounds (a baby laughing and cooing), distressed ones (a woman who sounded as if she were in pain) and neutral ones (restaurant noise). Two regions lit up with activity:

If you thought that electricity-generating knee brace thing announced last week in the journal Science by researchers at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia looked like too much work, take heart. With any luck, we may soon be able to get watts out of our waistcoats. Or sweaters. Or shirts, all without moving a muscle. It's the best thing to happen to textiles since wash-‘n-wear.

The knee-mounted generator captures energy from leg muscles. But you still have to walk to generate the five watts of electricity per leg that the scientists calculate as the device’s output, or 13 watts if your get a move on—enough for 30 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone. The inventors, led by Max Donelan, think the device could replace the 30-odd pounds of batteries that U.S. soldiers typically carry to operate their electronic gear. But as I say, you still gotta walk.

Now nanotechnology researchers are announcing fabrics that scavenge mechanical energy from sources as leisurely as heartbeats and ambient noise, and turn it into electricity. Call it the ultimate power suit.

It works like this: start with synthetic Kevlar fibers from DuPont and coat them with tetraethoxysilane and crystals of zinc oxide. Zinc oxide is what’s called piezoelectric: when stressed by moving, it produces a voltage. Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology and colleagues intertwine the fibers into yarn, so that when the fibers rub against one another charge, builds up on the bristles. “The two fibers scrub together just like two bottle brushes with their bristles touching, and the piezoelectric-semiconductor process converts the mechanical motion into electrical energy,” he explains. An output wire carries the resulting current to any device you like, including a battery if you want to store it.

Here’s the beauty part, as Wang and colleagues report today in the journal Nature. Because the fibers are so small (nano, after all), even the slightest oscillation moves them—a heartbeat, a light breeze, reaching out for a poolside drink. The whole thing can be scaled up into power tents or curtains. How much juice are we talking about? Wang estimates the output at up to 80 milliwatts per square meter of fabric, enough to run personal electronics off your shirt.

“The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Wang. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current.” He added, “. . . while walking”—but clearly that much exertion is not necessary. Just position yourself poolside in a light breeze, and you’re good to go.

Biggest challenge LabNotes sees? Washing your power shirt. Zinc oxide doesn’t like to get wet, so the fabric would have to be dry-cleaned.

. . . 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:

Can four little genes (or maybe six) really make the whole bitter debate about human embryonic stem cells go away?

Two separate tems of scientists are announcing this morning that they can create the precious cells, which have the potential to turn into any of the 200-plus kinds of cells in the human body, without producing, let alone destroying, human embryos, which until now have been the only source of embryonic stem cells. If they're right, and if the recipe works reliably, then stem cells could be created from cells no more ethically problematic than human skin.

Every cell of the human body contains the exact same DNA (sperm, eggs and red blood cells being the only exceptions)—that is, the complete human genome. But neither skin cells nor muscle cells nor liver cells nor any other specialized cell follows the whole program. Only fertilized eggs—the union of egg and sperm—do that, using all the genes to produce a complete individual. Because the vast majority of genes in adult cells are silent, no one has been able to take, say, skin cells and make them turn into any chosen kind of cell, such as neurons to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease. Only the cells in very early embryos—stem cells—can transform into whatever cell you want, and you all know the ethical problems that research on stem cells raises in some quarters.

If only it were possible to take one of those specialized, or differentiated, cells and roll back the clock, back to when that skin or kidney or liver or other cell was a stem cell and had that unlimited potential. According to this morning announcement, it is possible, and scientists in the U.S. and Japan have done it.

This morning the journal Nature, citing widespread speculation, confirmed that it will soon publish the first report that scientists have used cloning technology with a primate, producing custom-made stem cells. Scientists at Oregon Health & Science University describe injecting the nucleus, which contains a cell’s DNA, of an adult rhesus monkey’s fibroblast into an egg whose own nucleus was removed. They then manipulated the egg so that it developed into an early-stage embryo called a blastocyst, from which they teased out and grew, in lab dishes, embryonic stem cells.

Their success rate was less than stellar, but that’s not unusual in cloning: the Oregon team generated two embryonic stem cell lines from 304 eggs, a 0.7% efficiency. Still, even this level of success suggests the approach might work in humans, allowing scientists to finally generate stem cells that have the DNA of an individual patient. Those cells would develop into neurons and other cells that would be perfect genetic matches for that patient, eliminating the possibility that transplanting these cells—neurons to treat Parkinson’s disease, for instance—would trigger the immune system to reject them.

In a highly unusual step, and in reaction to the South Korean fraud, an independent team of scientists in Australia verified that the Oregon team had indeed produced stem cells through cloning. Their report is being published by Nature simultaneously with the Oregon paper.

Nature asked the scientist who cloned Dolly, Ian Wilmut, to discuss the potential of such cells. He and a colleague inject a much-needed dose of realism into the stem cell debate, which has led the public to expect these almost magical cells—able to develop into any kind of cell, from pancreatic to muscle to neuronal—to be primarily used for therapy, via transplants. But as Wilmut says, “In our haste to use patient-specific cells in therapy, however, we tend to overlook that they have great value for basic research and drug discovery. . . . Realistically, a careful examination of resources and the time required to produce differentiated cells for treatment purposes suggests that large-scale use of stem cells would be impractical.” It will be interesting to see whether a public torn by the ethics of stem-cell production will support research that is at least one step removed from directly yielding cures for terrible diseases.

If you envy the lab rats with paralyzing spinal-cord injuries that have walked again, the legions of lab mice whose tumors have melted away thanks to experimental drugs, and the mice whose rodent version of Alzheimer’s has been cured—while human Alzheimer’s, paralysis and many cancers remain incurable and sometimes untreatable—join the club. For at least four years even biomedical scientists have been saying what many used to dismiss as the whining of no-nothing laymen who failed to grasp the value of basic biomedical research. Namely, “patients have been too patient with basic research,” as immunologist Ralph Steinman of Rockefeller University put it in 2003.

He meant that the basic discoveries that fill medical journals, reflecting research that has been generously supported by U.S. taxpayers (the National Institutes of Health received just over $28 billion in each of the last three years), do not result in enough new treatments soon enough. After all, there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease, for many cancers, for multiple sclerosis, for cystic fibrosis—or even for baldness, for pete’s sake. That failure threatens to shred the implicit understanding that taxpayers spend billions of dollars on cellular and molecular biology—from the genetics of slime molds to the neurology of the giant squid—for one reason and one reason only: because some of the resulting basic knowledge will lead to medical treatments for human diseases.

Now some big guns are taking aim at what more and more critics see as a broken system. This afternoon Andy Grove, co-founder of computer-chip giant Intel and its former CEO and chairman, is unleashing a no-holds-barred critique of the nation’s biomedical establishment for falling woefully short in its search for disease treatments. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, he issues a wake-up call that should be heeded by every congressman who votes for multi-billion-dollar NIH budgets, by every CEO of a big pharma company who hasn’t had an important new compound approved in ages, by every dean of a biomedical center who bases tenure and promotion and hiring decisions on a scientist’s number of published papers with no regard to whether the research is leading to something that can alleviate the suffering of humankind.

Just to elaborate on that last point. The culture of academic biology is part of the problem. There is little prestige in “translational research,” in which basic discoveries are turned into medical treatments. Look at the very name: who gets more prestige, the author writing a great novel in her native tongue or the translator who produced a version for other audiences? So it is in biology. The basic discoveries bring the glory. Translating them is—and I exaggerate only slightly—considered the work of drones. Also, it’s easier to get an NIH grant for a simple animal experiment that is likely to yield clean results, rather than a human one that’s probably going to be ambiguous because humans—who are genetically diverse—are more complicated than fruit flies.

As Rockefeller’s Steinman told me when I first asked him about his “patients have been too patient” declaration, “Most of our best people work in lab animals, not people. But this has not resulted in cures, or even significantly helped most patients.”

Drug companies are also in Andy Grove’s crosshairs. Drawing a comparison to the semiconductor industry he knows so well, and to high-tech in general, he argues that pharma could learn something from how tech industries learn from their successes and failures. As an example of the latter, Grove notes that when Intel started new production lines, invariably a large fraction of the chips it made were faulty. Rather than throwing them out, he said, engineers scrutinized the manufacturing process to determine the cause of the failure.

Drug companies, in contrast, tend to abandon compounds that fail in clinical trials. As a result, they lose potentially valuable information on, say, whether the drug works in certain patients (those with particular genetic variations, for instance). Those rare successes, which Grove calls "golden nuggets," are washed out by the averaging of results across the whole patient population.

To take just one sorry example of the slow pace of drug discovery, in the 1960s the mainstay of treatment for Parkinson’s disease, from which Grove suffers, was L-dopa. In the 2000s the mainstay of treatment for Parkinson’s disease is . . . L-dopa. Need we contrast to the gains that the computer industry has made in 45 years?

It will be interesting to see whether a shot across biomedicine’s bow by someone of Andy Grove’s stature will give the system the shaking up it needs.

Hot on the heels of a controversial book arguing that voters choose a candidate based on how he or she makes them feel—issues and position papers be damned—comes a study that’s enough to make you yearn for the good old days of monarchy: by measuring people’s unconscious judgments of an unfamiliar face, you can predict the outcome of elections 70 percent of the time.

Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov and his student showed several dozen volunteers pairs of photos of unfamiliar faces, and asked them to choose, based on gut feelings alone, who was probably more competent. His earlier research had shown that people make judgments about someone’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and other traits in a mere one-tenth of a second. Now, in a study published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he goes one depressing step further: these lightning-quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election results.

This time, in a study done two weeks before the 2006 elections, the pairs of photos were (unbeknownst to the participants) of the two frontrunners in either a gubernatorial or a U.S. senate race. (If a participant recognized either of the two faces, that pair didn't count.) “We never told our test subjects they were looking at candidates for political office. We only asked them to make a gut reaction response as to which unfamiliar face appeared more competent,” said Todorov.

When election night '06 arrived, the scientists compared the competency judgments with the results from the ballot box. The judgments predicted the winners in 72 percent of the senate races and 69 percent of the gubernatorial races. “This means that with a quick look at two photos, you have a great chance of predicting who will win,” Todorov said. “Voters are not that rational, after all.”

The assessment of competence doesn’t seem to be culture-specific. Other research, by political scientist Chappell Lawson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finds that Americans can predict the outcome of elections in Mexico based on the same gut reactions. “Our findings surprised us, because Mexican politicians often emphasize very different aspects of their appearance, such as facial hair, which American political figures avoid,” said Lawson. “But Americans could still pick out the Mexican winners.”

What’s not clear is how this works when the faces you’re assessing are not anonymous, but those of pols you know. In that case, the assessment of competence—even when it’s made in one-tenth of a second—is likely (hopefully?) affected by what you know about the candidate. If so, then simply scanning the line of faces at the next presidential debate and deciding who looks most competent might not necessarily serve as a crystal ball for November ’08.

Just in time to think long and hard about your sunscreen options for next summer—or a tropical vacation this winter—comes a study suggesting that, to the truly hip, a dab of blinding white zinc oxide will be so last year. Bring on the green broccoli extract!

Slathering on an extract of broccoli sprouts, find scientists at Johns Hopkins University, can protect against the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation. (Hey, don’t knock broccoli sprout extract. A clinical trial is currently studying whether it can prevent lung cancer in smokers.) Unlike sunscreens, which absorb UV and keep it from getting into the skin where it can damage DNA and thereby trigger skin cancer, a nice coating of broccoli sprout extract works inside cells. The result may be as good for your skin, cancer-wise, as a heaping helping of broccoli is for warding off other forms of cancer.

Skin covered with broccoli sprout extract and exposed to sunlight suffered much less inflammation and cell damage than bare naked skin, scientists led by Hopkins’ Paul Talalay are reporting this evening in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It wasn’t that the goop absorbed UV. Rather, it gets into your skin cells, boosting production of enzymes that protect cells against UV damage. That means the protection lasts for several days, even after the extract is no longer on your skin.

Interestingly, the protective compound in the broccoli sprout extracts is the same one, sulforaphane, that protects against several forms of cancer when you eat it. So if mom puts too much broccoli on your plate, rather than getting into a fight about throwing it away, preserve family peace by offering to smear it on your bod.

Those Geico (and now ABC) cavemen might not be as fictional as you’d think (well, okay, the tennis playing and working on a thesis, maybe). I’m talking about talking.

Language is supposed to be the trait that distinguishes modern humans both from other animals and from our grunting ancestors. But a new study, published online today in Current Biology, suggests that while we might be special, we might not be unique. Contrary to the claim that the only gene known to play a role in speech and language arose in its current form some 20,000 years ago—long after modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged evolutionarily—it looks like Neanderthals had this FOXP2 gene. That raises the possibility that Neanderthals possessed some of the biological machinery necessary for language.

“From the point of view of this gene, there is no reason to think that Neanderthals would not have had the ability for language,” said Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But since FOXP2 is not the only gene that underlies the capacity for language, Neanderthals would presumably have needed them, too, in order to have the gift of gab.

For the new study, Krause and his colleagues extracted DNA from Neanderthal fossils found in a cave in northern Spain, one of the species’ last redoubts before going extinct. They then identified and sequenced the Neanderthal FOXP2 gene. It was identical to the version found in modern humans.

Other studies of Neanderthal genes have turned out to be flawed due to contamination (what was thought to be an ancient gene actually came from DNA lying around the lab, as in sloughed-off skin cells). The scientists say they have taken pains to make sure this didn’t happen, including by sequencing parts of the Neanderthal Y chromosome, which was found to be different from the version in today’s men.

The finding, say the researchers, “establishes that these changes [in FOXP2 that distinguish it from the chimp version and, thus, presumably help confer the capacity for speech and language] were present in the common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals.” Our lineage might have been a much chattier past than anyone suspected.

Hit a wall in your efforts to construct your family tree? Can’t get past the garbled last name that authorities at Ellis Island conferred on great-grandpa Maurizio? It’s DNA to the rescue—or, as critics say, yet another example of questionable “recreational genetics.”

Tomorrow, Ancestry.com, the Website where 15 million people have been accessing census and other records to build their family trees since the company’s founding in 1997, is rolling out its latest genealogy resource. Called DNA Ancestry, it starts by having you take a cheek-swab sample and mail it to the company, which will compare it to DNA samples in its database and tell you if it gets a hit—that is, someone to whom you are even distantly related. If it finds someone, you can contact him or her through an anonymous email and piggy-back on their own genealogy research. “If you don’t know your family history, you can match your DNA profile to one in our database and connect to other people who are related to you and might have broken through the wall” of historical records needed to construct a family tree, says Ancestry.com vice-president Brett Folkman.

Both women and men can have a DNA analysis of their mitochondrial DNA for $179. mtDNA, which is inherited by sons and daughters from their mothers, has become a standard way for a number of online sites to trace ancestry, as Family Tree DNA and Ancestry By DNA, among others, do. Men can also have their Y chromosome, which is inherited by sons (but not daughters) from their fathers virtually unchanged, analyzed for $149 or $199, depending on whether you want 33 or 46 genetic markers included. Unlike other DNA-based ancestry sites, which focus on telling you where in the world—sometimes down to the village—your family roots are sunk and even when your “family” migrated out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, DNA Ancestry aims to link you to specific individuals. It can’t tell you your exact relationship to someone else, only that a relationship exists. For example, a Y-DNA test could verify that you’re related to a co-worker, but not that you both share the same great-grandfather.

This will work as the company says—linking you to someone who has mined federal census data from 1790 to 1930 and the 100 million names in passenger ship records from 1820 to 1960 in Ancestry’s database, among other sources, to piece together a family tree—only if Ancestry.com has lots of DNA profiles in its database. Within six months, that should be about 50,000, says Megan Smolenyak, the company’s chief family historian and co-author of the 2004 book "Trace Your Roots with DNA." “As more people add their results,” she says, “the DNA Ancestry database becomes a powerful asset for users to make connections and discover their family tree.”

The question is whether even 50,000 is enough. The service might tell you that you and another user share a great-great-grandfather—that is, four generations back. Everything more recent than that would diverge, so although genealogical research that this long-lost cousin of yours has done might fill in the distant parts of your family tree, it won’t help much with the branches that include your grandfather’s and father’s generations.

Overselling the value of DNA for ancestry searches is causing more and more scientists to scorn what they are calling “recreational genetics.” Since 2000, a study finds, some 460,000 people have bought DNA tests from some two dozen companies that trace ancestry, and some users are doubtless being misled. One problem is that by testing only a limited number of genetic markers, the services miss many relatives: while they tell you that your family roots are sunk in, say, the Piedmont, they overlook that you have just as many roots in, say, Nova Scotia, or this African village as well as that one. More problematic, in terms of identifying an individual to whom you are related, is that it can make the connection sound more notable than it is. Yes, you and Sam might have the same great-great-great-grandfather but, under standard assumptions about reproduction and survival, so do (on average) 500 other people living today. But hey, you might just get lucky and find that one of them is a demon genealogist who has done all the census-digging and Ellis-Island sleuthing for you.

With the ubiquity of cell-phone and security cameras turning us into YouTube Nation, scientists, too, are putting cameras where no lens has gone before: on bird tails. Mounting little video cameras on New Caledonia crows, which are renowned for their use of tools, the researchers have captured footage that will make you think twice before deploying that old epithet, bird-brained.

Studying tool use is all the rage among animal behaviorists because it promises to shed light on animal minds and the origins of the human one. So far, scientists have seen green herons using bait (twigs, berries, discarded crackers . . . ) to attract fish, Egyptian vultures using stones to crack open ostrich eggs and the woodpecker finch of the Galapagos using a splinter or cactus spine to pry grubs out of holes.

And that’s just the birds. Primates other than humans are no slouches in the tool-using sweepstakes, either. Chimpanzees in the Tai Forest of Cote d'Ivoire and Bossou in Guinea use flat stones as anvils on which to crack rock-hard coula nuts with chunks of wood, chimps at Mahale and Gombe in Tanzania fish for termites with strips of bark, and chimps in Sierra Leone place smooth sticks over the thorns of kapok trees so they don’t get pricked while scampering around the treetops.

New Caledonian crows are tool whizzes in the lab, able, for instance, to bend a straight wire into a hook and use it to fetch a bucket containing food. But since the crows are nearly impossible to observe in their native habitat of forested, mountainous areas on their South Pacific island, the obvious question arises: How clever are the birds in their native state rather than the lab?

Enter the tail camera. It does not interfere with movement, and is shed when the birds molt, scientists at Oxford University report this afternoon in the online edition of the journal Science, so what it captures is probably the birds’ natural behavior and not something out of an avian reality show.

Of the 18 video-equipped crows, two adult males used at least three different sticks to poke around in leaf litter and grass, something never before seen. One male used a tool for more than 18 minutes, put it aside a few times to use his beak, carried it with him during a flight, then used it again. “As sticks are plentiful in forest habitats, these observations indicate that crows may keep particularly ‘good’ tools for future use,” write the scientists. Both male crows made tools from dry stems, also something crows had never been seen to use before. Other crows used sticks to reach into beetle burrows and scoop out beetle larvae. Another window into the animal mind.

The following findings have nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that they come from scientists at New York University, which is situated in what is arguably one of the bluest neighborhoods (Greenwich Village) of the bluest borough (Manhattan) in the bluest city (New York) of one of the country's bluest states (New York). What they've found, basically, is that political conservatives don't, won't and can't change their minds, reverse a decision or revise a judgment no matter how much contradictory evidence stares them in the face. Liberals? They, say the scientists, "report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences." The study appears today in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

In all fairness, the study is rigorous in its design and execution. It is also the next beat in a series of advances in understanding what underlies political beliefs. In round one, psychologists took the lead: they studied the behavior and personalities of self-described liberals and conservatives. (Let me add a cautionary note here: in most of these studies, people place themselves along the political spectrum from right to left, typically from +5 for very conservative to -5 for very liberal. Obviously, how you rate yourself is not only subjective but relative to those around you. Someone in red-state Idaho who considers herself a liberal -3 because she doesn't think gay men should be fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation might be more like a conservative +3 in, say, Greenwich Village because she also regards gay marriage, civil unions and adoptions as abominations.)

Okay, but let's say the self-ratings have some validity. Psychologists repeatedly find that conservatives are "more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision making," and have greater "personal needs for order, structure and closure," as the new paper puts it. Liberals, on the other hand, are more tolerant of "ambiguity and complexity," and more open to new experiences.

Round two is being waged by neuroscientists wielding the latest in brain-imaging toys. For the current study, led by David Amodio of New York University, the scientists used a technique called event-related potentials, which measures electrical activity due to the concerted firing of neurons. They had their 43 subjects play a game of Go/No-Go, in which they have to quickly respond to a stimulus that means "go" (such as seeing a red triangle on the computer monitor, which means "press a button"). The go stimulus appears over and over and over, so you get used to pressing the button. Then, out of the blue, comes a no-go stimulus, such as a green circle. You have to stifle your button-pressing habit.

When their brains needed to recognize the conflict between their habitual response (press button) and the new information (a no-go stimulus), liberals and conservatives looked as different as, well, red and blue. Liberals showed much greater activity in the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which recognizes conflicting information or signals; they were also more accurate at repressing the button presses. The more liberal they were, the more accurate they were. The brains of conservatives, on the other hand, showed less activity in response to a signal (no-go) that conflicted with their expectations (go) and habits of thought.

Liberalism, conclude the scientists, "is associated with greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cognitive conflict" between, say, what they believe and the evidence before their eyes.

The reader is referred to the correlation between political ideology and the belief that, for instance, after the 2003 invasion weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq. A 2004 poll in Britain, for instance, found that "Labour supporters (58%) are more likely than Conservatives (42%) or Liberal Democrats (41%) to believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction"; see also here and here.

The reason the Hubble Space Telescope has its middle name is that getting above Earth’s atmosphere eliminates the distortion that otherwise plagues light waves barrelling down on us from stars, nebulas, galaxies and other denizens of the universe. But a multi-billion-dollar space telescope is no longer the only way to avoid smeared-out images of the heavens. Astronomers have developed a new camera that makes use of what’s called adaptive optics—something that has previously worked only for infrared radiation, not visible light—to produce sharper, more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than the Hubble, from no closer to space that a California mountaintop.

The camera works by taking high-speed images (20 frames per second or higher) that have been partially corrected with adaptive optics. Software then combs through the images, selecting the sharpest and rejecting those smeared by the atmosphere. The clear ones are combined, producing a high-resolution image. It’s called “Lucky Imaging” because it depends on chance fluctuations in the atmosphere occasionally occurring in such a way as to provide images that the adaptive optics system can correct.

When used on the 200-inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, whose images normally have less than one-tenth the detail of those from the Hubble Space Telescope, the result is images twice as sharp—and the sharpest direct images ever taken in visible light from the ground or space. You can see the results, of the globular star cluster M13 and the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), here.