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Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans , even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the “crime” of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. ( NPR headline : “33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden”; NYT headline : “Prison Term for Helping C.I.A. Find Bin Laden”). Except that’s a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading. What Dr.
The Imperial Mind
Military Snakebot This snakebot is much larger than the ones that'll be swimming around your veins/organs. Courtesy Special Operations Apps We've seen snake robots and, of course, tons of surgery robots (including the weird lamprey-bot ), but Dr. Michael Argenziano, the Chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says we'll soon have fully untethered snake-type robots that will crawl through the human body, assisting with all kinds of fixes and maintenance. There are lots of easily imaginable use cases--a snakebot for heart surgery would require only a small incision, rather than a wildly invasive slice for traditional surgery.
Snake Robots Will Soon Crawl Around Inside Your Body Off-Leash
Environment
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words.
The Neuroscience of Your Brain On Fiction
The Power of Good Intentions - Neil Wagner - Health
A host of new experiments show how good intentions can add to life: Food tastes better, pain hurts less, and pleasure is more pleasant when we see people as benevolent. MnemosyneM/ Shutterstock Everyone seems to know that grandma's cookies taste better because they're made with love and that phone calls to the cable company are less frustrating when there's a human being on the other end of the phone. But are these things really true? A University of Maryland psychologist devised a study that put them to the test.
Another study shows that sitting is really, really, really bad for your health. Please, just get a standup desk! A study of more than 200,000 Australians adds to the growing body of evidence that people who sit the most die the soonest. It also found that you can't exercise this effect away, though exercise does help reduce it greatly. The study's simple message is that spending more time standing and less time sitting prolongs life.
Confirmed: He Who Sits the Most Dies the Soonest - Neil Wagner - Health
Rise in Allergies Linked to War on Bacteria | Wired Science
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-103133" title="salmonella-bacteria-cdc-janice-haney-carr" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/03/salmonella-bacteria-cdc-janice-haney-carr.jpg" alt="" width="660" height="396" /> By Diana Gitig, Ars Technica “Allergic diseases have reached pandemic levels,” begins David Artis’s new paper in Nature Medicine . Artis goes on to say that, while everyone knows allergies are caused by a combination of factors involving both nature and nurture, that knowledge doesn’t help us identify what is culpable — it is not at all clear exactly what is involved, or how the relevant players promote allergic responses. There is some evidence that one of the causes lies within our guts. Epidemiological studies have linked changes in the species present in commensal bacteria — the trillions of microorganisms that reside in our colon — to the development of allergic diseases.
Researchers in Germany find that mental health practitioners tend to diagnose ADHD using their intuition and unclear rules of thumb, not recognized diagnostic criteria. PROBLEM : The rates of ADHD diagnosis in the developed world have become almost inflationary, increasing annually by an average of three percent from 1997 to 2006 and 5.5 percent from 2003 to 2007 in the U.S. But how accurate are these diagnoses?
Study: Why Attention Deficit Disorder Is Over-Diagnosed - Hans Villarica - Health
Feathers may have helped T. rex's relatives ride out a cold climate
Feathers are the defining feature of birds, but that wasn't always the case. For millions of years, various species of dinosaurs sported feathers, some of which have left behind fossilized impressions. But for the most part, the feathers we've found have been attached to smaller dinosaurs, many of them along the lineage that gave rise to birds. That situation was changed dramatically by a species that is described in today's issue of Nature.Small Furry Hyrax Sings in Regional Dialects | Wired Science
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-106761" title="hyrax-mammal-arik-kershenbaum" src="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/04/hyrax-mammal-arik-kershenbaum.jpg" alt="" width="660" height="493" /> Foundations of complex language have been found in colonies of unusual furry animals called hyraxes. Hyraxes, which resemble rodents but are more closely related to elephants or manatees, often cluck, snort, squeak, tweet and wail songs from the perches of their rocky colonies. By recording hundreds of the animals’ songs and applying clever mathematics, researchers discovered that differences in note arrangement, or syntax, in hyrax songs vary as the distance increases between colonies — a surprising occurrence of dialect. “Dialect is usually seen only in animals with sophisticated vocalizations, like primates , bats and cetaceans.
– 21 February 2012 Dolphins deserve to be treated as non-human "persons" whose rights to life and liberty should be respected, scientists meeting in Canada have been told. A small group of experts in philosophy, conservation and dolphin behaviour were canvassing support for a "Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans".
Dolphins are 'people' say scientists - World news, News