A few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of "flexibly adaptive" ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They "suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions." (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004).

In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.

For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of "mental maps," and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, "go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left." He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me.

In late March, NASA's Swift satellite picked up a blast of gamma rays screaming past Earth.

Astronomers rushed to take a closer look, using powerful telescopes from Hawaii to the Canary Islands to check out the high-energy jet coming from a distant galaxy in the constellation Draco.

They initially speculated a collapsing star created the blast. Now they report that it appears a star the size of the sun was shredded by a massive black hole. Its "death rattle" was a high-energy flash or jet pointed straight at the Earth.

"This is a very strange one," says Nicholas Law, at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, a member of the international team that describes the cosmic drama in two reports published Thursday by the journal Science.

Humans might be evolving slower than scientists had thought, according to a new analysis of the genomes of two families, but there is a huge variance between people.

The researchers, reporting their findings June 12 in the journal Nature Genetics, based their measurement of evolution speed on the number of new mutations that occur during one generation in each of the families. A slower mutation rate means we probably separated from chimpanzees evolutionarily longer ago than previously thought, the researchers say, adding that the finding may have medical implications, if some groups of people are more mutation-prone than others.

"This makes us think about what are the underlying mechanisms of these mutations, other than just a random process," said study researcher Philip Awadalla, of the University of Montreal in Canada. "Why are there differences in the rate or accumulation of mutations in individuals?"

The mutations rate seems to be highly variable, Awadalla said, and could be affected by aging and environmental exposure to toxins, among other factors.

Genetic engineers are deliberately breeding transgender goats to see if their milk is similar to that produced by humans.

The goats being created are effectively a female trapped in a male's body, complete with the full male anatomy.

The company behind them wants to see if their milk contains the same proteins as human breast milk - with a view to one day possibly selling it in stores.

The goats have been christened 'goys', a mixture of 'girl' and 'boy' and 15 have been bred at the research facility in New Zealand.

Critics have however already called for the breeding programme to be closed down amid concerns the scientists are 'playing God'.

On Wednesday night, June 15th, there's going to be a total lunar eclipse visible from every continent except North America. The Moon will spend 100 minutes fully engulfed in Earth's shadow, making this the longest lunar eclipse in nearly 11 years. Maximum coverage occurs on Wednesday night at 20:12 UT. [details] [animated map] [webcasts: #1, #2]

Exhaust from the erupting volcano in Chile could affect the appearance of the eclipse. For discussion, scroll past this picture of a similar eclipse in 2010:

Click here to listen to the interview with Chris Herd.

A meteorite found in B.C. contains evidence that asteroids are production sites for molecules such as amino acids that form the building blocks of life, a new study says.

"What we're saying is that amino acids are actually the result of the geology happening on the asteroid," said Chris Herd, the planetary geologist at the University of Alberta who led the study published Thursday in Science.

"It's like a little factory. It's taking even more primitive molecules that are coming in from space and doing them up a bit."

He added that the warmer temperatures in the asteroid and the presence of water and possibly certain minerals provide a better environment than interstellar space for certain chemical reactions. Those reactions are needed to produce organic molecules, a class of carbon-based chemicals that living things are largely made of.

Scientists say they're close to producing new "super varieties" of wheat that will resist a virulent fungus while boosting yields up to 15 percent, potentially easing a deadly threat to the world's food supply.

The research is part of a global drive to protect wheat crops from the Ug99 strain of stem rust. It will be presented next week at a conference in St. Paul that's part of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., organizers said Thursday.

Scientists will also report that Ug99 variants are becoming increasingly virulent and are being carried by the winds beyond Uganda and other East African countries where they were first identified in 1999. Once infected with the deadly fungus, wheat plants become covered in reddish-brown blisters.

According to a news release issued by the initiative ahead of the symposium, the fungus has now spread across all of eastern and southern Africa, and it might just be a matter of time before it reaches India or Pakistan, and even Australia and the Americas.

"We are facing the prospect of a biological firestorm, but it's also clear that the research community has responded to the threat at top speed, and we are getting results in the form of new varieties that are resistant to rust and appealing to farmers," Ronnie Coffman, who heads the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project at Cornell, said in the release.

Scientists in Argentina have created the world's first cow to boast two human genes that will enable it to produce human-like milk.

Genetic engineering was used to introduce the "mothers' milk" genes into the animal before birth, according to the National Institute of Agribusiness Technology in Buenos Aires.

As an adult the cloned cow "will produce milk that is similar to humans" in what will prove "a development of great importance for the nutrition of infants", it said in a statement.

"The cloned cow, named Rosita ISA, is the first bovine born in the world that incorporates two human genes that contain the proteins present in human milk," the statement said.

In April scientists in China published details of research showing that they had created GM Holstein dairy cows which produced milk containing proteins found in human breast milk.

The Scientific Establishment recently turned up the heat on scientist Allen West and the rest of the Younger Dryas Impact Event researchers by unleashing their attack dog, Rex Dalton, whose hitpiece is being used to smear West's good name and the Younger Dryas Impact Theory by proxy. While this is an unfortunate turn of events, we are not entirely surprised here given what we've seen of psychopaths in other quarters of society. If there is one overarching point that we wish SOTT readers to understand, it's that psychopaths do control our world - all of it. While this should be plainly obvious when it comes to corrupt governments, corporations and religious institutions, the world of science and academia is no exception to this fact.

The assumption of Uniformitarianism underpins many if not all scientific disciplines. Its proponents argue that the "present is the key to understanding the past," that the slow gradual processes we see in nature today have been constant throughout history. An enormous number of scientists across many fields have staked their careers (whether they're aware of it or not) on this fundamental assumption. This Uniformitarianist, or gradualist, approach is used to explain things like geological features, celestial events, species evolution, civilization advancement, technological progress and so on. When it comes to catastrophic events, the Uniformitarian-dominated sciences permit only consideration of those which may have happened on a timescale of millions of years, like the Cretaceous - Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. To admit that catastrophic impact events occur on the timescale of human history would mean surrendering the comfortable notion we live in a safe and stable world that has evolved in splendid isolation, shielded from cosmic intervention. Few people, even scientists, are prepared to examine the overwhelming data indicating the reality of cyclic catastrophism. The elite of our world have gone to enormous lengths to prevent the masses from knowing this, so it's not difficult to see how today's Uniformitarianist approach serves a lot of interests.

The writer formerly employed by Nature, Rex Dalton, recently implied in a Miller-McCune blog that Allen West is a criminal charlatan. That is untrue. I have spoke over the last month to Allen, as well as a number of his collaborators, and determined the true story to the satisfaction of the Tusk. I have also assembled and shared a number of primary documents linked below, not identified or referenced by Dalton, et. al.

The true story is consistent with my experience that Allen West is an honest-to-goodness, if imperfectly credentialed, key contributor to the hypothesis and the papers.

I am very biased in this matter. For instance, Allen is my most frequent (if only) house guest. My wife Pam and I have allowed Allen to stay with our young family on several occasions. The little guy has been a close friend for over five years. I know Allen West as well as anyone on the Younger Dryas team or its collaborators.

I suppose Allen West could appear to readers of Dalton's article to be a liar salting his samples at his own expense to get on TV. But I have reason to believe this is untrue.

For one, I have spoken regularly over the last decade with the laboratory techs, supervising scientists and co-authors dealing with the hundreds of samples from dozens of locations around the world and it would simply be impossible for Allen to direct from his "laboratory" in Arizona a fraud of this complexity, scale and nature.