Approximately 1,200 college freshmen (73 percent white) at Pennsylvania State University answered a questionnaire that presented two scenarios. One described “Bill,” a sprinter for his college track team who does not have a lot of time to train before the championship meet and is worried he won’t be able to improve. He gets steroids from a friend and ends up performing better than expected and wins the championship race.

The second scenario presents “Jeff,” a college student facing midterm exams who is worried that his grades in class may be low. He doesn’t have much time to study so he gets some Adderall, a prescription stimulant, from a friend who tells him it will help him focus at exam time. Jeff takes the pills and ends up getting better midterm grades than he expected.

Overall, the students were more likely to consider Jeff’s Adderall use more necessary to succeed than Bill’s steroid use regardless of whether they had misused prescription stimulants in the past or had played a sport. “One reason students may have felt Adderall was more necessary than steroids for success is because people may believe intelligence is less malleable than athletic ability. This view of intelligence might have led the students in this study to believe that taking Adderall would increase intellectual capacity,” said Dodge. “This research can help mold future prevention efforts around off-label prescription stimulant use in the academic world.”

Interesting question, but is this really the question that should be asked at all? Which is worse? Do most people even consider taking stimulants to help with brain efforts to be cheating? I don’t really. I know I’ve used all sorts of stimulants in my life. Mainly caffeine. Never heard anyone complain about that. Adderall isn’t taken by mouth either for this sort of thing that I am aware of. Those are used for ADHD taken orally, but many people snort them.

Maybe the question should be whether the two have more of an impact on long-term health than the other. Be easier to find out what your mesothelioma life expectancy is probably.

Selective hearing in this case isn’t really about that though. It’s more about how people are able to drown out noise and focus in on sounds. Psychologists have known for decades about the so-called “cocktail party effect,”. It is the remarkable human ability to focus on a single speaker in virtually any environment — a classroom, sporting event, houston landscaping speaker — even if that person’s voice is seemingly drowned out by a jabbering crowd.

To understand how selective hearing works in the brain, UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, MD, a faculty member in the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and the Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, and UCSF postdoctoral fellow Nima Mesgarani, PhD, worked with three patients who were undergoing brain surgery for severe epilepsy.

In the experiments, patients listened to two speech samples played to them simultaneously in which different phrases were spoken by different speakers. They were asked to identify the words they heard spoken by one of the two speakers.

The authors then applied new decoding methods to “reconstruct” what the subjects heard from analyzing their brain activity patterns. Strikingly, the authors found that neural responses in the auditory cortex only reflected those of the targeted speaker. They found that their decoding algorithm could predict which speaker and even what specific words the subject was listening to based on those neural patterns. In other words, they could tell when the listener’s attention strayed to another speaker.

“The algorithm worked so well that we could predict not only the correct responses, but also even when they paid attention to the wrong word,” Chang said.

The dolphins may have died from an outbreak of Morbillivirus or Brucella bacteria, said Peruvian Deputy Environment Minister Gabriel Quijandria, according to Peru’s state-run Andina news agency. Speaking to CNN, he said he expects test results to be ready within the week.

“Right now, the most probable hypothesis is that it’s a virus outbreak,” he said.

Quijandria said Thursday that 877 dolphins have washed up in a 220-kilometer (137-mile) area from Punta Aguja to Lambayeque, in the north of the country.

“When you have something this large, my gut would tell me that there’s something traumatic that happened,” Sue Rocca, a marine biologist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, told CNN. She floated a number of number of possibilities as to what could have killed the animals, including acoustic trauma, but concluded that investigators just don’t know yet.
“More investigation needs to be done,” she said to tip the balance scale.

The dolphin deaths in Peru are mark the third set of high-profile strandings in about two months. Not just in Peru, but more have washed up in Florida, U.S.

In February, 179 dolphins –108 of which were dead — washed ashore in Cape Cod, in eastern United States, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Marine biologists are still trying to determine the cause of those deaths.

Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health conducted a study finding that pregnant women in New York City exposed to higher concentrations of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by age 7 compared with women with lower levels of exposure. PAHs, a common urban pollutant, are released into the air from the burning of coal, diesel, oil and gas, or other organic substances such as tobacco. Making the market for a 7 day slimming pill a worthwhile endeavor.

Results are published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“Obesity is a complex disease with multiple risk factors. It isn’t just the result of individual choices like diet and exercise,” says the study’s lead author Andrew G. Rundle, DrPH, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. “For many people who don’t have the resources to buy healthy food or don’t have the time to exercise, prenatal exposure to air pollution may tip the scales, making them even more susceptible to obesity.”

Really what they are trying to show is that reading doesn’t necessarily stem from speech. Knowing that words are spelled incorrectly by pattern well before spoken language was available. It was long thought that this capacity stemmed from spoken language because children learn spelling based on the oral language skills that they have already acquired, for example putting “m” and “a” together to make the sound “ma,” “d” and “a” to make “da,” etc. Understanding of spelling thus seems closely related to speech.

As far as humans are concerned, these results suggest that reading is based, at least in part, on our capacity to perceive and memorize regular patterns in the components (letters) of an object (the written word). This ability, neither specifically human nor specifically linguistic, most certainly predated the advent of spoken language in the history of human evolution.

The sparrows in this study are being watched for changes in cities. The study, “Birdsongs Keep Pace with City Life: Changes in Song Over Time in an Urban Songbird Affects Communication,” compares birdsongs from as far back as 1969 to today. Plus, the researchers detail how San Francisco’s streets have grown noisier based on studies from 1974 and 2008.

“It shows a strong link between the change in song and the change in noise,” says David Luther, term assistant professor in Mason’s undergraduate biology program. “It’s also the first study that I know of to track the songs over time and the responses of birds to historical and current songs.”

Luther wrote the study with Elizabeth Derryberry, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane University and a research assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Museum of Natural Science. “We’ve created this artificial world, although one could say it’s the real world now, with all this noise — traffic, leaf blowers, air conditioners,” Luther says. “A lot of birds are living in these areas, and what, if anything, is this doing to their songs?”

Amazing things. I always find this sort of evolutionary study fascinating. It’s one of those things that not many people think about when they think of evolution. Much like our languages over the course of civilization, bird song must change too right? Not as fast as our class ring from our parents of course, but this is fast evolution either way.

Just as we raise our voices to be heard when a car speeds past, birds making their homes near busy intersections have to tweet a little louder, Luther says. But it’s more than just whistling the same tune and turning up the volume. Most birds stopped singing some old songs because those ditties couldn’t cut through the racket.

The bird they studied is the white-crowned sparrow, a small bird that sports a jaunty white cap with black stripes. Only male birds were studied.

Even birds from the same species don’t sing the same song. “Some bird species sing in different dialects just like the way people talk differently if they are from Texas or California or New York, even different parts of New York,” Luther says.

Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

“The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life,” said U of T anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of the project and director of U of T’s Archaeology Centre.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 2.

MESSENGER’s radio tracking has allowed the scientific team to develop the first precise model of Mercury’s gravity field which, when combined with topographic data and the planet’s spin state, sheds light on the planet’s internal structure, the thickness of its crust, the size and state of its core, and its tectonic and thermal history.

Mercury’s core occupies a large fraction of the planet, about 85% of the planetary radius, even larger than previous estimates. Because of the planet’s small size, at one time many scientists thought the interior should have cooled to the point that the core would be solid. However, subtle dynamical motions measured from Earth-based radar, combined with MESSENGER’s newly measured parameters of the gravity field and the characteristics of Mercury’s internal magnetic field that signify an active core dynamo, indicate that the planet’s core is at least partially liquid. About as hot as fire pits at FirePits.com.

Mercury’s core is different from any other planetary core in the Solar System. Earth has a metallic, liquid outer core sitting above a solid inner core. Mercury appears to have a solid silicate crust and mantle overlying a solid, iron sulfide outer core layer, a deeper liquid core layer, and possibly a solid inner core. These results have implications for how Mercury’s magnetic field is generated and for understanding how the planet evolved thermally.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science, based in Seattle, was established with a 2003 contribution of $100 million from the former Microsoft executive, who then donated another $100 million.

The latest contribution of $300 million will support the first four years of a 10-year plan to address critical questions about how the brain works. Wonder how my brain works after hitting my head on my suv bike rack yesterday.