One group member said the "weapons" were actually backpacks modified to carry a homemade stereos and were jailed without reason. None of the six adults and one juvenile arrested have been charged.

"Given the circumstance of them being uncooperative ... why would you have those (bags) if not to intimidate people?" said Inspector Janee Harteau. "It's not a case of (police) overreacting."

Harteau also said police were on high alert because they'd gotten a bulletin about men who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people in other states.

Kate Kibby, one of those arrested, said previous zombie dance parties at the Mall of America and on light-rail trains have occurred without incident. Last fall, nearly 200 people took part in a "zombie pub crawl" in northeast Minneapolis.

Kibby said they were cooperative and followed the two officers to the station where they were questioned and eventually loaded into a van and booked into jail.

"It was clear to us that they were trying to get a rise out of us," KIbby said.

Members of the group could face lesser charges like disorderly conduct, police said.

The new work was carried out by computer scientists Marcus Rogers and Kirti Tidke from Purdue University in Indiana, US, and psychologist Kathryn Seigfried from John Jay College in New York, US.

The researchers surveyed 77 computer science students at Purdue University using an anonymous, web-based questionnaire. Students were asked whether they had indulged in one of several "deviant" computer acts, some of which could be classified as illegal.

These activities were guessing or using another person's password, reading or changing someone else's files, writing or using a computer virus, obtaining credit card numbers and "using a device to obtain free phone calls".
Introversion scale

The number of IT students who admitted to such behaviour was high. "Of 77 students, 68 admitted to engaging in an activity that could be classified as deviant," Rogers told New Scientist. And those who admitted to having indulged in such behaviour also appeared to be markedly more introverted than those who had not. On average, these "deviant" students rated themselves 10 percentage points higher on an "introversion scale".

As the study is small, Rogers cautions against rushing to conclusions. "While the media has portrayed those individuals who are involved in criminal computer behaviour as being socially underdeveloped and introverted, this study does not provide an endorsement for such a sweeping generalisation," he and colleagues write in the journal Digital Investigation.

The study also contradicts the results of an earlier investigation, also carried out by Rogers and colleagues. In 2003, they surveyed arts students at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and found that those who admitted to criminal, or "deviant", computer behaviour were generally more extroverted.

Rogers speculates that the "different focuses" among arts and IT students may explain the contrasting results, with art students possibly more extrovert than the IT crowd.
Drive and ambition

Jon Munsey, an investigator with computer forensics company DataSec, based in Oxford, UK, believes introversion could be linked to particular forms of computer misuse.

"In my experience, the cyber-criminal working from inside their home is indeed an introvert with few friends, who spends a lot of time on their computer," he told New Scientist. "But for cyber-crime within companies it's the opposite. People who stand to gain a lot monetarily need a lot of drive, ambition and basically a lot of front to get away with it."

But Louise Potter, a spokeswoman for the UK IT security firm Information Risk Management says broader research is needed before behavioural profiling could be help investigators track down criminals. "Looking at small numbers of IT students is too limiting," she says.

Aside from arguments over extroversion and introversion, Rogers says he is surprised by the fact that 88% of the computer science students admitted to deviant behaviour. "We should be concerned at this prevalence rate," he says.

Journal reference: Digital Investigation (vol 3, p 116)

The flood of online traffic was so intense it blacked out internet access to thousands of people in many parts of the US, and knocked out servers in scores of companies, including Associated Press and Fedex. What's more, Code Red carried a nasty surprise: each copy of the worm was designed to bombard the White House website with data in an attempt to crash it. To stay online, White House techies had to change the way data was routed to their site. Globally, damage from Code Red and its variants was estimated to have cost $2.6 billion.

Code Red was able to travel so far and so fast because it had an enormous pool of potential carriers. It exploited a vulnerability common to all computers running Microsoft's NT and Windows 2000 operating systems, and since variants of these account for over 90 per cent of all desktop computers, plus a third of all servers, there were an awful lot of suitable targets. The worm used a trick known to all worm-writers: identify a single flaw in the code for Microsoft's operating systems, and exploit it to quickly conquer the world.

For some insight into the problem, think of computers and the global network they form in biological terms. It is as if the internet were a planet inhabited almost exclusively by one species. Without any biodiversity, a single virulent flu virus could kill off all life. It's a well-known risk for "monocultures". This biological metaphor cuts both ways. It explains why our computers are frail, but it also suggests a potential solution. If our computers aren't "biodiverse" enough, why not add some diversity to the mix?

A vanguard of computer scientists is now trying to do precisely that: to take the computer monoculture and imbue it with "software diversity". The goal is to scramble our computers' software such that no two machines are completely alike. Many conventional computer viruses or worms would then find it much harder to spread.

How can you create this diversity? The same way that biology protects life on Earth: with mutations. Diversity within and among species has been driven by genetic mutations, which make it difficult for viruses to jump between species. The bugs that plague dogs and cats, say, don't often hurt humans, and vice versa. If the operating system software in computers also had mutations, the theory goes, our problems with computer viruses would fade away. "Every computer should have its own unique properties," says Stephanie Forrest, a computer scientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who pioneered the idea.
Hack-proof machines

The US military research organisation DARPA is pouring millions of dollars into software-diversity experiments in the hope of creating hack-proof computers that terrorists and criminals cannot penetrate. Early incarnations of the idea are about to make their way out of the lab: Microsoft itself is adding code-scrambling diversity to Vista, its long-awaited upgrade of Windows, which is due for release later this year.

To understand how software diversity works, you have to look at the way that worms, viruses and other intruders take control of computers. The Code Red worm, for instance, invades a computer using a trick known as a "buffer overflow". During an attack, the worm targets software on a computer that accepts data from a network it is connected to, such as a financial database that receives regular updates of share prices via the internet. The software expects incoming data to be in a standard format - eight digits used to describe an account number, for example. Instead, the worm sends the computer an enormous string of gibberish with some malicious computer commands tacked on to the end.

Since the program has only allocated space in the computer's memory for an eight-digit number, the long string of gibberish data fills this space and then overflows into adjoining spaces, leaving the malicious commands stored in the computer's memory. Once inside, the operating system assumes it's a legitimate part of the program and innocently runs the malicious code.

This might sound sophisticated, but buffer-overflow attacks - and "code injection" attacks that similarly sneak malicious coding into a running application - are very easy to mount. About three-quarters of all computer viruses and worms use these techniques. "They are a very large source of the attacks we deal with," says Chad Dougherty, a security analyst with the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Fortunately, buffer-overflow attacks have a weakness: the intruder must know precisely what part of the computer's memory to target. In 1996, Forrest realised that these attacks could be foiled by scrambling the way a program uses a computer's memory. When you launch a program, the operating system normally allocates the same locations in a computer's random access memory (RAM) each time. Forrest wondered whether she could rewrite the operating system to force the program to use different memory locations that are picked randomly every time, thus flummoxing buffer-overflow attacks.

To test her concept, Forrest experimented with a version of the open-source operating system Linux. She altered the system to force programs to assign data to memory locations at random. Then she subjected the computer to several well-known attacks that used the buffer-overflow technique. None could get through. Instead, they targeted the wrong area of memory. Although part of the software would often crash, Linux would quickly restart it, and get rid of the virus in the process. In rare situations it would crash the entire operating system, a short-lived annoyance, certainly, but not bad considering the intruder had failed to take control of the machine.

Linux computer-security experts quickly picked up on Forrest's idea. In 2003 Red Hat, the maker of a popular version of Linux, began including memory-space randomisation in its products. "We had several vulnerabilities which we could downgrade in severity," says Marc J. Cox, a Red Hat security expert.

Still, Linux is used on a small minority of computers worldwide (see Diagram), and most viruses and attacks are aimed at computers using Windows operating systems. That means the true test of memory randomisation will come next year when Microsoft releases Vista. The latest version of this next-generation operating system uses memory randomisation for several key components. "We'd been talking about it for a while, and finally said, 'Let's bite the bullet,'" says Michael Howard, a senior security program manager for Microsoft. He says the fact that the company's top executives approved the step, which has required a significant overhaul of Windows' code, indicates how seriously they are taking security threats. "This isn't just like changing a couple of things. This is moving everything around," Henderson says.

Memory scrambling isn't the only way to add diversity to operating systems. Even more sophisticated techniques are in the works. Forrest has tried altering "instruction sets", commands that programs use to communicate with a computer's hardware, such as its processor chip or memory.

Her trick was to replace the "translator" program that interprets these instruction sets with a specially modified one. Every time the computer boots up, Forrest's software loads into memory and encrypts the instruction sets in the hardware using a randomised encoding key. When a program wants to send a command to the computer, Forrest's translator decrypts the command on the fly so the computer can understand it.

This produces an elegant form of protection. If an attacker manages to insert malicious code into a running program, that code will also be decrypted by the translator when it is passed to the hardware. However, since the attacker's code is not encrypted in the first place, the decryption process turns it into digital gibberish so the computer hardware cannot understand it. Since it exists only in the computer's memory and has not been written to the computer's hard disc, it will vanish upon reboot.

Forrest has tested the process on several versions of Linux while launching buffer-overflow attacks. None were able to penetrate. As with memory randomisation, the failed attacks would, at worst, temporarily crash part of Linux - a small price to pay. Her translator program was a success. "It seemed like a crazy idea at first," says Gabriel Barrantes, who worked with Forrest on the project. "But it turned out to be sound."
Persistent attackers

It is still possible for a hacker to subvert these techniques. The weakness in any form of randomised encryption is that it is vulnerable to a "brute force" attack. Just as few mutations in the natural world will confer any advantage, so in the computing world, virus writers can create a code that mounts repeated attacks, changing the approach each time until it hits on the form of randomisation being used.

In 2004, a group of researchers led by Hovav Shacham at Stanford University in California tried this trick against a copy of the popular web-server application Apache that was running on Linux, protected with memory randomisation. It took them 216 seconds per attack to break into it. They concluded that this protection is not sufficient to stop the most persistent viruses or a single, dedicated attacker.

Last year, a group of researchers at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, performed a similar attack on a copy of Linux whose instruction set was protected by randomised encryption. They used a slightly more complex approach, making a series of guesses about different parts of the randomisation key. This time it took over 6 minutes to force a way in: the system was tougher, but hardly invulnerable.

These attacks set off a vibrant debate in security communities about precisely how secure operating system diversity needs to be. Some shrug off the brute-force experiments. If randomisation can buy even a few extra minutes, that's enough, they say. A computer could be programmed to detect a brute-force attack by noticing, for example, that certain parts of an operating system are repeatedly crashing, and automatically closing off internet access to the attacker while leaving other network connections intact.

As in nature, a computer system might not need perfect immunity to survive. Dan Geer, an epidemiologist who studies computer security, says that even if only a fraction of computers using the internet were made diverse, it could break up the monoculture sufficiently to halt many digital attacks. The internet would have what epidemiologists call "herd immunity". "Maybe you are not immune to a disease, but if enough animals in your herd are, you won't get sick because the disease can't travel," Geer says. DARPA has embraced this idea, and the goal of its project is to develop systems in which no more than 33 per cent of the computers are susceptible to any one vulnerability.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game," says R. Sekar, a computer scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "You develop a defence, and the attackers try to work around it." Memory randomisation, he thinks, will eliminate the vast majority of viruses and worms that use buffer-overflow attacks simply because they are not very sophisticated. They cannot mount brute-force attacks, and if their first assault doesn't work, they expire. Only a more determined hacker would get past.

There are still fundamental limitations hampering the use of memory randomisation, according to John Knight of the University of Virginia. Make the randomisation too complex and it could cause conflicts between programs. Indeed, many real-world examples of memory randomisation, such as the protections in Microsoft's Vista, set a maximum of 256 possible ways to scramble the memory to avoid such conflicts. "That is not enough to be really robust," Knight says. Proponents of the system, however, respond that their techniques raise the bar high enough to defeat all but the most talented attackers.

Knight says that randomising the encryption on the instruction set is a more powerful technique because it can use larger and more complex forms of encryption. The only limitation is that as the encryption becomes more complicated, it takes the computer longer to decrypt each instruction, and this can slow the machine down. Barrantes found that instruction-set randomisation more than doubled the length of time an instruction took to execute. Make the encryption too robust, and computer users could find themselves drumming their fingers as they wait for a web page to load.

So he thinks the best approach is to combine different types of randomisation. Where one fails, another picks up. Last year, he took a variant of Linux and randomised both its memory-space allocation and its instruction sets. In December, he put 100 copies of the software online and hired a computer-security firm to try and penetrate them. The attacks failed. In May, he repeated the experiment but this time he provided the attackers with extra information about the randomised software. Their assault still failed.

The idea was to simulate what would happen if an adversary had a phenomenal amount of money, and secret information from an inside collaborator, says Knight. The results pleased him and, he hopes, will also please DARPA when he presents them to the agency. "We aren't claiming we can do everything, but for broad classes of attack, these techniques appear to work very well. We have no reason to believe that there would be any change if we were to try to apply this to the real world."

Yet the quest for even more secure forms of diversity is continuing. Knight is developing a new concept that promises to be even tougher to crack. Each computer will use two processor chips running separate copies of a program that are randomised in different ways. The two copies work in parallel, so that each time the user enters data, both copies receive the input and respond in the same way. The user, in effect, experiences one seamless application and doesn't know that two copies of the same software are running in parallel.

The advantage of doubling up? It would be hair-pullingly hard for an intruder to break in unnoticed. If a hacker tried a brute-force attack, each attempt would be copied and sent to both processors. Since each processor is randomised in a different way, no single attack could work on both processors at once. Even if an intruder managed to gain control of one processor and forced it to do something illicit, the system would notice that its two processors were out of step, and shut down.

There is a downside: crafting such a system is the hardest thing Knight has ever tried. "I gave it to one of our researchers, and he came back a couple of days later saying, 'Do you have any idea how difficult this is?'" he laughs.

No one ever said that spicing up the monoculture would be easy. When it comes to defeating digital disease, the battle is likely to rage for years, but at least our virtual immune system is starting to look a little healthier.

Clive Thompson is a writer based in New York
From issue 2561 of New Scientist magazine, 22 July 2006, page 46-49

Skeptics may shrug off Hayek's predictions as nothing more than pure chance. But it's not the first time he's been right. Hayek said he gets his visions by tuning in to "the billions and billions of vibrations in the sphere."

In his annual TV appearance on New Year's Eve in 2004, Hayek said a huge attack in the capital would disrupt life in downtown Beirut. Six weeks later, a car bomb killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

He also warned that anti-Syrian lawmaker Gibran Tueni would be targeted for assassination. Tueni was brutally murdered Dec. 12. Hayek says his prognostications cover 18 months.

Magazines later reported more of his predictions from that Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. TV appearance.

The April-May 2005 issue of Al-Hadath Al-Arabi Wal Duwali reported that Hayek predicted a massive Israeli offensive and incursion would occur in Lebanon, and that Beirut's airport would be touched by an incident.

Beirut airport has been a target of Israeli bombardment during the offensive.

The Feb. 7, 2005 issue of Al-Shiraa magazine listed two of Hayek's other predictions:

* We will see piles of garbage in Lebanon.

* Accidents will be reported in Israel's air force.

Garbage is indeed filling Lebanon's streets because the offensive has prevented garbage collectors from doing their jobs. On Monday, an Israeli Apache helicopter crashed near the Lebanese border while last week two Apache attack helicopters collided in northern Israel.

Since that set of predictions, Hayek has kept a low profile, saying he does not want to be the bearer of bad news. Plus, he was getting threatening calls and faced accusations he has privileged access to information because he works for the secret service, a charge he denies.

"My kind of fame is a headache. I need special skills to deal with it," Hayek said.

What does he foresee for Lebanon's future?

Hayek said Lebanon will thrive in the long term and he senses something positive about the economy that he may soon announce.

"While everyone is talking about the destruction of the infrastructure and the economy and while everyone is taking stock of the losses, I see progress instead of decline and I see the glory of the economy preparing to shine over all of Lebanon," Hayek said.

* __

Some Lebanese are working out their war tensions at the gym. Others are venting by spending money.

At a fancy boutique in a popular mall, saleswomen attend to customers as a Christian Mass blares from speakers instead of the usual Western pop music. Prayers, one saleswoman said, were more appropriate than music while fighting rages in the south between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

Business is brisk, said 34-year-old Gigi Gibran, who works at the boutique, because the store has slashed prices by 70 percent.

"Plus, people are fed up with watching the news on TV," she said.

Many Beirut stores have been sending cell phone text messages to their clients, wishing them well and informing them of bargain sales that normally take place at the end of summer.

Gibran said that while some stores are doing well, the mall's cafes have been largely empty.

"People are so nervous they don't want to loiter," she said. "They come, snap up bargains and then go home to eat."

But not everything is on sale.

There were no "for sale" tags on a row of fancy suitcases and carry-on bags that stood in the middle of a department store.

"This is the stuff that's going fast," said one saleswoman. "We're not reducing their price."

The 1950s were a thrilling time for science-minded teenagers like Stanford. Researchers had succeeded in generating electricity through nuclear fission. The U.S. formed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, precursor to NASA. Science was ascendant, and young Stanford spent hours devouring books about physics.

While in high school, Stanford presented papers at meetings of the Texas Junior Academy of Science. At one of these meetings he heard another high school student present a paper on research into "extrasensory perception" (ESP).

The paper stirred Stanford's interest. "If ESP is real," he recalls thinking, "it has interesting implications about the nature of our world, so scientific study of the claim seems really important."

Highlights in a Distinguished Career

Today, Professor Stanford, who teaches psychology at St. John's University, applies the principles of cognitive psychology to the scientific study of ESP, one form of what researchers call psi - currently unexplained interactions with one's environment. The scientists who research these events usually are referred to as "parapsychologists."

"The purpose of science is to solve mysteries, to understand how to explain a given phenomenon," says Professor Stanford. "With psi, there are things people - and possibly some other organisms - seem able to do that we currently don't know how to explain. One of them involves acquiring information in ways that science does not yet understand."

"Parapsychologists assume," he adds, "that these phenomena can be investigated scientifically and will ultimately prove to be scientifically understandable."

The author of more than 100 scholarly publications, Professor Stanford continues to win international recognition for his work. This August, at its 49th annual convention in Stockholm, the Parapsychological Association will install him as president. Established in 1957, the association has an international membership of more than 200 scientists and scholars from various disciplines.

In Portugal this spring, Professor Stanford was an invited speaker at the 6th Symposium of the Bial Foundation. Founded in 1994 by Bial Laboratories, a leading European pharmaceutical firm, the foundation supports and showcases international research in health and medicine.

"Being invited to speak there was definitely a career highlight," says Professor Stanford, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in cognitive and social psychology at St. John's. "The Bial Foundation's invitation to eminent brain researchers and parapsychologists seems to me a tribute to the quality of work that is done in both fields."

Making Sense of the Unexplained

Entitled "Making Sense of the 'Extrasensory': Modeling Receptive Psi Using Memory-Related Concepts," Professor Stanford's presentation reflected his long-held conviction that so-called "paranormal" experiences like ESP are rooted in the natural world. "I don't accept the term 'paranormal,'" he says. "This is because that term would seem to suggest that the event under discussion is not part of the natural world."

Professor Stanford, whose research now combines cognitive, social and personality psychology, earned his B.A. in psychology at the University of Texas-Austin, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Psi Chi and Phi Eta Sigma. He remained at the university to earn his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology with a focus on psycholinguistics. Professor Stanford devoted five years to research at the University of Virginia's School of Medicine.

By applying the methods and theories of cognitive psychology, says Professor Stanford, researchers may well discover that psi is no more mysterious than other once-unexplained phenomena.

These insights swim to the surface of our attention and ask us to do something. Some are big decisions: See the doctor now; marry this man; don't get on that plane. Others are barely perceptible: There's something off about that new guy in accounting -- be careful.

"People treat intuition like it's a dirty word, but it's actually one of the body's survival mechanisms," says Antoine Bechara, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa. "It's a means of taking you away from danger and steering you toward what is good for you."

Gradually, the science of intuition is shaking off its woo-woo connotations, as experts become more sophisticated in understanding where it comes from and how to measure it. They're also increasingly confident that most of us have substantial talent for intuition, and that it influences us more than we realize.

"Assuming everything in your emotional world is stable," says Oliver Turnbull, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and a researcher at the University of Wales Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in the United Kingdom, "you shouldn't have to force yourself to 'listen' to your intuition. It's already there."

Yet many of us ignore this tool -- or worse, respond to urges that are misguided or the product of a fevered imagination. Fine-tuning your intuition will help you make better decisions whether you're buying a car, making new acquaintances, or solving problems at work. It could even save your life.

Understand Your Urges

Experts say intuition probably evolved as a skill that saved time.

"Intuition is fast, based on pattern matching," explains John Allman, Ph.D., head of a laboratory at the California Institute of Technology that focuses on brain evolution. "Our brains are constantly comparing current experience with the past, trying to find a fit so that we can make a quick decision. When we find a match, often in a fraction of a second, our intuition boils down a lot of experience into a simple, visceral metric: I feel good about this or not," Allman says.

Take Amanda Brumfield, 32, a disability-claims representative in Hattiesburg, Miss., who remembers having the kind of visceral feeling Allman describes -- and is alive because of it. She was 19, riding shotgun with friends on a winding country road. There were no obvious warning signs: It was raining, but her friend was a good driver. No one was drinking.

"Something told me to put on my seat-belt. I got this sense -- part spiritual, I guess, but part physical. The best way I can describe it is just a really strong feeling in my body. It wasn't scary, just matter-of-fact. So I buckled up."

Moments later, the driver lost control of the car and slammed into a tree. Emergency workers told Brumfield, who was unharmed, that without the seat-belt she would have been crushed. Her friends had minor injuries.

Without any conscious effort, Brumfield's brain was acting like an automotive-safety computer, running facts, previous information, and sensory input at lightning speed.

"This kind of intuition isn't mystical," Myers says. "It's an automatic, intelligent response to situations we've previously learned about or experienced."

And the more experience we gain, he says, the more we recognize patterns and associations, "just like a chess master can glance at a board and immediately know the next move."

Psychologists never really doubted the reality of intuition -- in fact, Carl Jung, a pioneer in the field, believed it was one of the most important abilities humans have. A leading personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which flourished in the 1950s and then became widely popular in the 1980s, even gave people a way to measure how heavily they rely on some of their intuitive skills.

But it took until the early 1990s for Bechara to develop a test for those hunches and figure out where they originate. The Iowa Gambling Task requires participants to play with four decks of cards that allow them to win or lose varying amounts of money. The decks are stacked in a complicated pattern: One deck has more losing cards, but grants larger wins, for example; another deck has more winning cards but doles out smaller amounts.

At first, people think the decks are random. But, Bechara says, usually by the 40th card or so, the average participant can intuitively "feel" which deck is luckiest. "Knowledge accrues slowly, so you never discover all of a sudden which decks are good or bad," he says. But by the 70th or 80th card, most participants feel confident in their assessment. Working with that test, researchers soon proved that people with brain injuries and illnesses that damage the prefrontal cortex of the brain do far worse on the card game than people without injuries.

Brain experts are even gaining ground on the type of cells used in intuition. Cal Tech scientists have linked Von Economo neurons, found in humans and, to a lesser degree, in apes, to intuitive assessment of complex situations. These cells start to emerge a month before birth and keep forming until age 4 or so, Allman says. In people with lesions in the prefrontal cortex, intuitive abilities diminish until patients can no longer "read" social situations. "Often, they're the victims of scams because they lack the radar most people have," he says.

Perhaps the most important realm for intuition is the nuances of interpersonal relationships. These are the barely perceptible signs that alert us to changes in those close to us, the tiny cues that make us ask, "Are you sure you're OK?" Myers points out that when it comes to decoding emotions, there's plenty of evidence that women have a bit of an edge: For example, when people viewed a silent 2-second film clip of an upset woman, female viewers were more able to accurately say whether she was angry with someone or discussing her divorce. When shown pictures of couples, women are better at predicting which are phony and which are real. And in photos of co-workers, women are more likely to discern which one is the other's supervisor.

"Some researchers think evolutionary pressures may have favored women who were able to read their children's and mate's nonverbal expressions," says Myers.

We also use intuitive skills in quickly sizing up new acquaintances or information. A 2002 Harvard study found that psychologists can predict which surgeons are most likely to be sued by analyzing four 10-second snippets of doctor-patient conversations. Surgeons whose tone of voice conveyed dominance were much more likely to be sued than those whose voices showed warmth, concern, or anxiety for the patient. And researchers at the University of Washington can analyze facial expressions and tone of voice when newlyweds discuss conflict and accurately predict whether couples will divorce after watching them interact for just 3 minutes.

For some professions, that ability to read nonverbal cues is essential; doctors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists, for example, begin developing that clinical intuition early in their careers. When Ellen Sweeris, 24, was finishing her training in neonatal intensive care nursing last year in northern California, she was working with an older nurse.

"The nurse was caring for a premature infant who had been doing just fine all night, and his clinical picture was good. Suddenly, she said to me, 'Something is wrong. He seems irritable, and I don't like his color.' She called the doctor in, and he ordered some tests, and sure enough, the baby had developed an intestinal infection that's very common in the NICU. Within the hour he had turned gray and his belly was bloated."

After treatment, the baby was fine, and the experience made a believer out of Sweeris.

"I'd always pooh-poohed what instructors called nursing intuition, because it just sounds so ... unscientific. But as soon as that nurse said what she did, I realized that I thought there was something funny about the baby, too. Because his vital signs weren't registering any change yet, I wasn't letting myself acknowledge it. But it's not like we pulled it out of the air -- there were clinical signs that we both detected. We just couldn't fully articulate them yet."

Whether you're trying to save lives or simply deciding on a new car, you can benefit from intuition. You may even find that intuitive-based decisions feel more satisfying than purely rational ones. Dutch intuition researchers recently overloaded car shoppers with automotive minutiae. One group was left to stew over anti-lock brakes and rear-wheel suspension; the others distracted themselves from the analytical process by working on puzzles. When it came time to buy the car, the group that had done the puzzles said they made more satisfying purchases than the group who kept spinning their wheels in purely rational thought.

"We get this intuitive information whether or not we are aware of it," says Mona Lisa Schulz, MD, Ph.D., a medical intuitive -- she helps people recognize their symptoms through intuition -- based in Yarmouth, Maine, and author of "The New Feminine Brain: How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius and Intuition." She adds: "The challenge is learning to access it better, then opening your mouth and talking about it."

Here are five ways to sharpen that sixth sense:

Play with it -- Ask yourself which line will move fastest at the supermarket, what the person ahead of you will order at Starbucks, or what your friend will wear to dinner, suggests Philip Goldberg, Ph.D., author of "Roadsigns: Navigating Your Path to Spiritual Happiness," who coaches people on trusting their hunches. "Try watching movies with the sound off and speculate what's happening. Or cover up captions in the newspaper and decipher the content, or guess about the background of a person you're meeting for the first time."

By tracking your success, you can get a better handle on what intuition feels like.

Laugh at your intuitive screwups -- People make intuitive blunders all the time, mismatching the current situation to a past experience.

"Humor, which activates the prefrontal cortex, as does intuition, seems to be one of the main ways the brain recalibrates these faulty assumptions," Allman says. "If you can't laugh at the intuitive errors you make, you'll continue making them."

Settle down -- People have believed for thousands of years that calm periods of contemplation, whether it's Zen meditation, yoga breathing, or Judeo-Christian prayer, make us more open to our intuition, says Goldberg. "It may be a cliche, but you can see much more in a still pond than in one that's turbulent," he says. Pay especially close attention to feelings that resurface over and over. "One of the hallmarks of intuition is that it feels persistent," he says.

Get a second opinion -- When faced with a decision at work, consult your intuition for the best answer. But then run it by a colleague with comparable or greater experience in that area. That person's intuition may confirm your own or offer a deeper insight, Schulz says.

Add a shot of intuition to your daily analysis -- Some people thrive on data. That's fine, but give yourself a definite cutoff point for analysis and then try a trick psychologists call incubation: Give yourself a fun distraction such as doing a puzzle or reading before making your final decision. This will allow your intuition to play a role.

Finally, remember that the best choices almost always hang in the balance.

"Decisions involve taking in plenty of facts the rational way, from books, the Web, or our doctors," Schulz says. "But then we can also use our intuition -- a feeling, an image, a dream, whatever that little bit of inside information is, to make the choice that's best for us."

Self To Gut: Please Shut Up

People love to tell stories about their inner wisdom, but most are pretty quiet about all the times they've been bamboozled by intuition. Everyday, millions of us buy lousy stocks, hire careless baby sitters, and marry Mr. Wrong -- all because our gut told us it "felt right." Here are five lies your intuition tells you:

"My first guess is my best guess." -- A recent study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that when we switch answers on tests, we're actually more likely to make the right choice. The researchers examined the introductory psychology midterm exams of more than 1,500 students for eraser marks, counting the number of times students changed answers. In 51 percent of those changes, students went from the wrong answer to the right one; 25% went from right to wrong; and 23 percent, from wrong to wrong.

"I'm so worried about ------------------. Something must be wrong." -- People who worry excessively often confuse general anxiety with a specific fear. Researchers say that such fretting may feel like intuition but is just anxiety in disguise.

"A bad thing is about to happen. I can feel it." -- Intuitive insights come from here-and-now assessment, not psychic predictions. Although nearly half of Americans believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP, and we spend about $1 billion a year on telephone psychics alone, the profession has a miserable track record. David G. Myers, Ph.D., author of "Intuition: Its Powers and Perils," likes to point to the countless wrong predictions that flood police stations after major crimes. "Chance alone predicts that more than a thousand times a day someone on Earth will think of someone and within 5 minutes, learn they've died," Myers says. "With enough time or people, the improbable becomes inevitable."

"I should quit!" -- "No matter how intuitive an action feels, when people are upset they are more likely to make irrational, unverified choices and believe they are true," says Oliver Turnbull, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Wales in the United Kingdom. "Whether you're inclined to send a nasty e-mail to a colleague or end a relationship, it's better to sleep on that gut reaction and see if it still feels right the next day."

"I don't care what the statistics say. I'm going with my gut on this one."

"Intuition is most useful in ambiguous, complex decisions," says Antoine Bechara, Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa and of psychology at the University of Southern California. "It's least useful in areas where the outcomes are predictable."

So if you're deciding if you should marry or whether to take that job in Boston, use your gut. Buying real estate or deciding whether to go through with that knee surgery? Check your intuition at the door, and listen to the numbers.

Why It's Called A 'Gut Feeling' -- The brain may not be our only source of intuitive wisdom. Doctors are now paying more attention to the way nerve cells in the gut interact with the brain, says G. Richard Locke, Md., a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and vice president of the Functional Brain-Gut Research Group. "The gut has more nerve cells than the spinal cord. And although researchers don't yet know why, there do seem to be people who experience emotions and insights more at the gut level than others."

Those intestinal nerve cells contain most of the body's serotonin, a neurotransmitter that influences the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems, as well as our emotional and psychological well-being. What's fascinating, says John Allman, Ph.D., a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, is that the particular receptor these gut cells use to process serotonin is identical to the receptor used in the portions of the brain where intuitive thinking occurs. Though no one knows yet how that helps us, Allman believes that learning more about the continual interaction between the brain and the belly may lead us to more balanced decisions.

Part of my columnist duties involve scanning the wire services for interesting stories to share with readers, but you wouldn't have wanted to venture into AP or the Internet in the past few weeks without a whip and a chair.

Even the nightly news featured the cute little two-faced kitten born in Ohio. This kitten actually looks like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, had Janus had fur and whiskers. Scientists say two-faced cats are rare but that this one might live normally, although you never want to trust it. The boy who owns the kitten, in a fit of creativity, named it Tiger because Kkiittttyy apparently was taken.

Not to be outdone by American animal ingenuity, the Chinese dredged up a four-legged duck. The duck, curiously named Tiger, does everything other ducks in China do, which is to say, resolving itself to a future of hanging upside down in a street market. (I was kidding about it being named Tiger. It's actually named Ddoonnaalldd.) The four-legged duck reportedly likes to swim, but the farmer doesn't let it do that because it's fast and hard to catch.

The next entree, er, entry into our creature freak show is a lobster caught off the coast of Maine that is two-toned. The right half is dark green, and the other is orange-red, making it look half-cooked. The Bangor Daily News says the odds of this kind of mutation occurring are one in 100 million. (Do you realize how much lemon butter you'd have to go through to find another two-toned lobster?) The lobster, named Tiger, is on display at an oceanarium where kids have described him as "awesome," "weird" and "tasty-looking." (The lobster's name actually is Tiger. Really. I'm not kidding. He was named by a visiting Ohio kid who wanted to introduce him to his cat.)

In San Luis Obispo, Calif., blackbirds have gone crazy and are attacking pedestrians about 15 times a day. Customers have been seen screaming and running through Laguna Village Shopping Center, flailing their hands in the air and demanding royalties from the Alfred Hitchcock Estate. Wildlife experts think the birds are either protecting their nests or upset with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's lax border security policies.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, a 3-foot-tall circus kangaroo has escaped and is roaming the countryside. Ireland is the last place you want a performing kangaroo to be running loose. Police in Dublin have already received numerous reports from drunken pub patrons reporting seeing a "large, juggling rat." The weird thing is that the kangaroo escaped in Kinsale, 200 miles to the south. In Kinsale, residents have reported no strange animal sightings, although a "large, unshaved Protestant with a long tail" was seen demanding a pint of Guinness at the Lucky Charms Arms.

Back in the U.S., an 8-foot python swallowed an entire queen-size electric blanket, including the electrical cord and control box. The python, named Tiger, said he had been feeling a little chilly. Just kidding. He didn't say anything. How could he? He had an electric blanket in this throat.

Actually, the snake's name is Houdini, which makes about as much sense as Tiger. The blanket and assorted accouterment were removed during surgery. The Idaho man who owns the 18-year-old pet snake was happy to get his blanket back, not to mention his CD player, wristwatch and toaster oven.

Houdini actually was lucky. Last year in Miami, a 13-foot python tried to swallow a 6-foot alligator whole and burst open. (After the python exploded, the alligator reportedly said, "It was good for me. Was it good for you?")

But our top "Animals Gone Wild -- End of World Near" award goes to Ranger, a German Shepherd police dog who managed to put a pickup truck into gear and run over a woman walking to her mailbox in Ogden, Utah.

Mary Stone suffered a broken pelvis after the dog ran her over. Police Lt. Loring Draper said he left the engine running so Ranger could have air conditioning and that the dog accidentally put the car into gear. Yeah. Right. Tell it to Rodney King.

Ranger is on paid leave while he undergoes psychological counseling and a driver-refresher course. He said he's looking forward to meeting Tiger (the kitten) for lunch.