Professor Shigeru Watanabe, presently Project Leader for Keio University’s Centre for Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility has extended the study of avian art appreciation with his participation in a project probing pictorial preferences of Padda oryzivora – a.k.a. the Java Sparrow.  The birds used in the study were all complete artistic novices – enabling the following question to be experimentally tested : Do Java sparrows naturally prefer Cubism, Impressionism or traditional Japanese-style artworks? -->

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A new paper in the Journal of Pediatrics
says low-birth-weight babies with a particular brain abnormality are at greater risk for autism, and it could provide a signpost for early detection of the poorly understood disorder.

The authors found that low-birth-weight newborns were seven times more likely to be diagnosed with autism later in life if an ultrasound taken just after birth showed they had enlarged ventricles, cavities in the brain that store spinal fluid.  

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Activists love wind power the way they once loved ethanol and natural gas - it is good until scientists show them it is not. 

Claims that there is no upper bound for wind power, that it is scalable because gusts and breezes don't seem likely to "run out" on a global scale, are not based on reality.  And neither are claims that the generating capacity of large-scale wind farms is unlimited. 

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Climate change causing every weather event enjoyed the kind of fallacious media coverage in late 2012 it hadn't gotten since 2006 - it remains bad science. While short-term weather is notoriously volatile, climate is more of an average weather pattern over a long period of time. This dichotomy provides the analytical framework for scientific thinking about atmospheric variability, including climate change.

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Researchers have reported the results of a 10-year, double-blind randomized controlled trial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and  found that the infants of mothers who were given 600 milligrams of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA during pregnancy weighed more at birth and were less likely to be very low birth weight and born before 34 weeks gestation than infants of mothers who were given a placebo.

This result greatly strengthens the case for using the dietary supplement during pregnancy. A follow-up of this sample of infants is ongoing to determine whether prenatal DHA nutritional supplementation will benefit children's intelligence and school readiness.

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Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the gender gap in math skills tests disappeared for the first time in history.  But a new paper says the issue might never have been there if the format for math competitions was different - rather than one-shot events, switch to rounds.

Twenty-four local elementary schools in a 
Journal of Economic Behavior&Organization article changed the math format to go across five different rounds. Once the first round was over, girls performed as well or better than boys for the rest of the contest.

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International publisher Elsevier has announced the launch of InOrder, a cloud-based order sets solution that enables clinicians to author, review and publish orders in a collaborative environment that quickly translates evidence-based knowledge into better patient care. 

The tool has evidence-based content and the capability to make updates rapidly as regulations and medications change, so Elsevier says InOrder can help hospitals and clinicians increase patient safety and prevent medical errors. 

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Because I signed a petition asking for increased open access of studies, I got an email from White House Science Czar Dr. John Holdren today - don't get excited, after all of the mean things I have said about him he is not suddenly writing me personally, it was a mass email - saying they had 'listened' and were making some changes, a letter we all knew was coming.

It reads, in part:    -->

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CMS is one of the two huge detectors built to study the high-energy collisions of protons produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. As all previous collider detectors, CMS is a redundant multi-purpose collection of dozens sub-detector components, which use different physics mechanisms to detect everything that comes out of the collision point, from protons to muons to photons, neutrinos (using the energy imbalance in the calorimeters), neutral hadrons.
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SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) discuss new augmented reality applications which trigger information by eye gaze. Eye tracking technology by SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) was used by researchers from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) to develop a vision of new augmented reality applications in mobile environments.

These applications use eye tracking data from SMI's mobile eye tracking glasses to analyze a user's eye gaze on objects, buildings or persons. A special DFKI information processing technology detects patterns of attention and presents additional information on objects of interest to the person wearing the glasses.  

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Researchers analyzed strains of mold fermented in sourdough bread and were able to isolate natural compounds that can help keep bread fresh without changing its flavor, resulting in a tastier loaf.

Michael Ganzle, professor and Canada Research Chair in the University of Alberta Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science and fellow researchers say the natural compounds can replace preservatives added to store-bought bread which are safe to eat and extend shelf life, but alter the taste.

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What are the functions of smiling, specifically, the functions of smiling in relation to laughter? Dr. Markku Haakana [pictured here, not smiling], from the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, at the University of Helsinki, Finland, explains:

“(i) Smiling can be used as a pre-laughing device: laughing together can be entered step-wise, and smiling is a common device for paving the way to the laughter. (ii) Smiling can be used as a response to laughter in the previous turn.”

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Psychologist Lera Boroditsky says she's "interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think" [1].

This statement seems so innocent, and yet it implies that language definitely does shape thought1. It also leads us to use a metaphor with "shape."
Causes and DependenciesDoes language cause thought? Or at least in part? Or is it the other direction--thought causes language?

Is language even capable of being a cause of thought, even if it isn't in practice?

Or in an architectural sense, is one dependent on the other? Is thought built on top of language?

Or is language built on top of thought?

Does language influence thought at all, even if one is not dependent on the other?
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Dear Squid of the World,

Excuse me. What is this? I have been your friend and advocate for years. No, DECADES. (Two, to be specific.) I have championed your cause to family and friends, students and total strangers. I wore the shirts. I read the books. I even got a PEE AITCH DEE in the science of baby squid. I think I've earned a modicum of consideration. A smidgeon of thoughtfulness.

But no. I go on maternity leave to care for my firstborn and what do you do? Everything. 
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Researchers with National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), one of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) labs, say that the United States can double its energy productivity by 2030 — and do so in ways that bolster the nation's economy.

Unveiling their recommendations at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.,  NREL Director Dan Arvizu and a blue-ribbon panel of 20 energy experts drove that message home, declaring that the United States and other members of the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy said that doubling energy productivity could create a million new jobs, while saving the average household $1,000 a year and reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by one-third.

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The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were part of life from the very beginning and that RNA was one of the first polymers of life. But there is a problem. The RNA bases don't form base pairs in water unless they are connected to a polymer backbone, a trait that has baffled origin-of-life scientists for decades. If the bases don't pair before they are part of polymers, how would the bases have been selected out from the many molecules in the "prebiotic soup" so that RNA polymers could be formed?

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Evidence from Siberian caves suggests that a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius could see permanently frozen ground thaw over a large area of Siberia, which would threaten to release carbon from soils and damage to natural and human environments.

A thaw in Siberia's permafrost (ground frozen throughout the year) could release over 1,000 giga-tons of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, potentially enhancing global warming.

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Studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)  Agroecosystems Management Research Unit in Lincoln, Nebraska  are shedding some light on the microbes that dwell in cattle manure—what they are, where they thrive, where they struggle, and where they can end up.  

In one project, ARS microbiologist Lisa Durso used fecal samples from six beef cattle to identify a core set of bovine gastrointestinal bacterial groups common to both beef and dairy cattle. She also observed a number of bacteria in the beef cattle that had not been reported in dairy cows, and identified a diverse assortment of bacteria from the six individual animals, even though all six consumed the same diet and were the same breed, gender and age.

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In "The Descent of Man" (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak, Charles Darwin speculated that language might have had its origins in singing, which "might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions."

Since then, numerous researchers have believed that that Darwin was on the right path and a new group says the balance of evidence now suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.

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Every year in Germany, approximately 280,000 people suffer a myocardial infarction; more than 52,000 die as a result. Due to an occluded vessel, parts of the heart muscle no longer have sufficient circulation and the tissue dies off. These regions are not replaced by new heart muscle cells but instead by scar tissue – this generally causes the pump function of the heart to decrease following an infarction.  

Scientists have tested a method in mice allowing the morphological and functional sequelae of a myocardial infarction to be reduced and
with which scar tissue can be reduced and cardiac output increased.
 

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