Science News

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has filed a massive petition to protect 404 freshwater species in the southeastern U.S. The list includes 48 fish, 92 mussels and snails, 92 crayfish and other crustaceans, 82 plants, 13 reptiles (including five map turtles), four mammals, 15 amphibians, 55 insects, and three birds. The species live in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Why seek protection for so many species at once? The CBD says they all form a cohesive ecosystem, and they depend upon each other for their survival. According to the CBD's Web site about what it refers to as the southeastern freshwater extinction crisis , "All these species are intricately interconnected: For example, the map turtles' survival depends on the abundance of snails and mussels, which they eat, while mussels depend on fish to host their larvae--and the fish, in turn, depend on the abundance of flies, whose larvae they consume."

MONTREAL--A good night's sleep, or even just a nap, can be an aid to memory. Psychologists have known for years that sleep solidifies what we've learned during the day, transforming tenuous associations into stable ones. Learning while you snooze seems supremely efficient, and so people have long dreamed of co-opting this process so that their dozing brain shores up what matters to them--say, material they've studied for a test or a talk, or verbiage in a foreign language they want to master. But until now there has been little support for the notion that studying in your sleep is useful. Psychology graduate student John Rudoy at Northwestern University in Illinois reported findings here on Monday at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting that hint at a way to do that. [More]

Is it possible to see something without knowing you can see it? Maybe that's not so hard to imagine if you think of subliminal images flashed for a frame or two on a movie screen--too quickly for you to see consciously but perhaps long enough to add a frisson of fear. (Those frames in The Exorcist don't count--if you can notice them, they're not subliminal.) [More]

I used to scoff at the idea of Minute Rice. I mean, are we really in such a rush that we can’t wait, like, 10 minutes for a regular old bowl of rice? Well, yes, yes we are. And fast food may be making matters worse. Because a study in the journal Psychological Science shows that even a glimpse of those golden arches makes us act impatiently. [More]

When we learn something, for it to become a memory, the event must be imprinted on our brain, a phenomenon known as consolidation. In turn, every time we retrieve a memory, it can be reconsolidated--that is, more infor­mation can be added to it. Now psychologist Liz Phelps of New York University and her team report using this “reconsolidation window” as a drug-free way to erase fearful memories in humans.

Although techniques for over­coming fearful memories have existed for some time, these methods do not erase the initial, fearful memory. Rather they leave participants with [More]

What is human uniqueness, and how did it contribute to what we could now call behavioral modernity? How did it develop? And what implications does it have for understanding our present and future? This past February the Origins Project that I direct at Arizona State University helped to convene an interesting meeting of paleontologists, anthropologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, archaeologists and psychologists to attempt to address such questions, among others.

I began the meeting by pointing out that when some people heard about its subject, they had asked me what was so unique about humans? Surely all animals are unique in their own way, and although we have special traits, so do bees and giraffes. But as my A.S.U. colleague Kim Hill has put it, “Even before the invention of agriculture, human communities may have eventually numbered around 70 million individuals ... as Homo sapiens spread over the planet more broadly than any other large vertebrate. No creature on earth lives in cohesive social units that rival this complexity or biomass.”

By Patrick Lannin

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - Iceland's volcanic eruption was still causing strong tremors on Thursday, though far less ash and smoke was pouring out into the air.