Photo by nicholaslaughlin

We have lots of news from the tropics this week. Elsa brings us news about the history of coconut farming, palm plantations in the Amazon and discovery of a previously unknown indigenous group in Brazil. Then, some news about where beauty resides in the brain. Our Forum discussion with epidemiologist William Foege about conquering deadly diseases continues through July 12th. Click here to join the conversation.

Beauty Perception in the Brain: Beauty may well be in the beholder’s eyes, but it is also in the beholder’s brain. A new study by scientists in the U.K. have identified a region in the brain that is involved in the perception of beauty. The researchers put volunteers in an fMRI machine that measures the activity in people’s brains. Then, the volunteers were showed some paintings and made to listen to musical excerpts and asked to rate them as very beautiful or very ugly. Every time the volunteers felt a painting or a musical piece was beautiful, one particular region of their brain lit up in the brain scans. The region is called medial orbito-frontal cortex, and is part of the brain’s reward and pleasure center.
Guest: Semir Zeki
The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• History of Coconuts: A new genetic analysis of more than 1,000 coconuts reveals that humans invented coconut cultivation twice, independently, in two different parts of the world.
  The study.
• Oil Palms in Brazil: Oil palm plantations have been the cause of environmental destruction and greenhouse gas emission in Southeast Asia. Now Brazil plans to get in on the oil palm action, but a recent article suggests that things may go differently there.
  The full article.
  The Reuters version.
  More environmentally friendly palms.
• Uncontacted Tribes in Brazil The Brazilian government has confirmed that a previously unknown tribe of about 200 people is living in a remote reserve near the Peruvian border. Their conclusion is based on aerial photos of the people, their huts and their gardens.
  See the photos of the settlement in this article from Wired Science.
  Photos of a different uncontacted group were released in February.
  More about uncontacted tribes from Survival International.

If you heard last week’s podcast, you know that species with big brains relative to their bodies are more successful than small-brained ones in new habitats. That holds true for birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles—all of which often land in unfamiliar environments due to human trade and travel.

Now another study finds that a big brain-to-body ratio helps birds thrive in cities. Among 82 songbird species in France and Switzerland, birds such as magpies that flourish in urban centers are bigger-brained than birds like wood warblers that avoid cities.

In a sense, moving to a city is much like moving to a habitat on the other side of the planet. Both require a species to discover new foods, avoid new predators, and cope with different physical surroundings than those with which it evolved.

But how does a big brain help an animal meet such challenges? Certainly there are dozens upon dozens of studies that link relatively large brains to complex traits such as social group size and innovation (creating new tools and new foods). The authors of the newest studies suggest that it’s this behavioral flexibility that also confers success in new environments.

That may be logical, but behavioral biologist Sue Healy finds the argument frustrating. She’s at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. In 2007, Healy co-authored a paper that essentially said, enough already with the brain size correlations! These studies tend to treat the brain as a black box. Rarely does anyone know which specific brain areas control a given trait—and individual brain areas are hard to measure. So, whole-brain volume stands in as a proxy.

It’s also unclear which of the many traits linked to big brains are also correlated to one another, and none of the correlations clearly imply causation. In other words, things are a bit murky.

At the very least, Healy would like to see all the brain-related traits—from bonding with a mate to using unpredictable habitats—go into one big statistical analysis to tease out the most important ones for future study. Ideally, that would be followed by experiments that show in greater detail which brain areas vary in size with with those traits.

In the mean time, whole-brain volume serves as a black box proxy for… something, or maybe for different things in different species. Clearly big brains can be helpful for certain things. Until the underlying biology is worked out, brain size can be duly noted as one predictor of how a species may fare in the face of urbanization, climate change or introduction to a new habitat.

But it’s frustrating to rely on proxies instead of detailed experiments. Perhaps we ourselves need still bigger brains to figure it out.

[Photo: Magpies are among the big-brained birds that do well in cities. Credit: Wikimedia user 4028mdk09.]

Elsa Youngsteadt is a regular contributor to The World Science Podcast. She works for Sigma Xi and American Scientist magazine.

So I was thrilled to learn that the 2011 annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) had a session on bilingualism. It was titled ‘Crossing Borders in Language Science: What Bilinguals Are Telling Us About Mind and Brain.

Recent research by neuroscientists is starting to reveal some surprising facts about the basis of bilingualism in our brains. I’ll have more about these findings in upcoming episodes of my Science Podcast, which you can subscribe to from here. For now, here are the best bits from yesterday’s session.

“Bilinguals are mental jugglers,” says Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn State University and the organizer of the session.

Every time a bilingual person speaks or hears a language, they do more mental math than their monolingual friends. It turns out that a second language is always active in a bilingual’s brain. (more on that here) Even for simple tasks like naming an object, a bilingual’s brain has to choose between two options.  As several researchers described it, this leads to a “conflict” between the two languages in a bilingual’s brain.

That ‘conflict’ has become more apparent in my own life lately. Growing up in urban multilingual India, I switched back and forth between languages, and borrowing words from one language when speaking another. In other words, I often spoke Hinglish (Hindi+English), or Hindali, or Bengdi (Hindi + Bengali) or Benglish (Bengali + English). (Note: My father coined those terms out of frustration that my brother and I didn’t speak Bengali without mixing it up with Hindi and English) But once I moved to the U.S., I was stuck with one language – English. Even though I speak it fluently, I sometimes find myself at a loss for words. And when I do, my brain throws Bengali, or Hindi words at me. Unlike when I lived in India, I now have to ignore those words and continue to look for the right word in English.

So how does the brain of a bilingual or multilingual person resolve these conflicts? Well, that’s something that researchers are starting to figure out. (you can read more in this Science magazine article) But one thing that they do know now is that all this mental juggling comes with some advantages.

As York University’s Ellen Bialystok said during her presentation, bilinguals exercise parts of their brains involved in higher functions, like attention, multitasking and problem solving. As a result, bilinguals are often much better at problem solving than monolingual people. (Phew! At least there are some benefits to the battle of languages inside my brain.)

Bialystok’s more recent work also suggests that being bilingual can protect us against the cognitive decline that comes with ageing. It can even push the onset of dementia by 4-5 years. So, if you are considering learning a new language, remember doing so can come with a lifetime of benefits.

Blogger: Rhitu Chatterjee
More on language in The World’s Science Podcast:
Click Languages in Podcast 100
Clues to Bilingualism in Podcast 29.
Evolutionary Roots of Language in Podcast 88.

Elsa’s Favorite Time Stories:

• Redefining the Second: To most of us, a second is just a fraction of one day. But the official international second is defined in terms of the cesium atom and the frequency of the microwave radiation that it can absorb. This ultra-precise atomic clock is the basis of GPS technology, but physicists such as Patrick Gill say we could do even better. New atomic clocks could measure time with a precision in the trillionths of a second (instead of mere billionths)–but the formal definition of the second won’t change until at least 2019.
  Patrick Gill’s work on new atomic clocks.
  All about the cesium clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado.
  A brief history of timekeeping, from NIST.
• Hugs in the Present Moment: Olympic athletes hug their coaches for three seconds following a performance. That rule applies to Asians, Europeans and Americans alike, says developmental psychologist Emese Nagy. Her discovery fits in with decades’ worth of data that suggest that our perception of the present moment lasts about three seconds.
  The study.
  Related news story from ScienceNOW.
• Tricking Our Internal Clocks: Our natural sense of time is fairly mysterious–and it’s susceptible to illusions. There isn’t a pacemaker in our brains that ticks off seconds, minutes and hours; rather, our timing emerges from a variety of brain functions. And, according to a new study led by neuroscientist Maneesh Sahani* and colleagues, what we see makes a difference too. The researchers could accelerate or brake participants’ perception of a half-second by changing the rate at which random movement played on a computer screen.
  The study.
  Watch the “rolling clouds” clips that fooled peoples’ internal clocks.
  More on our sense of time from the L.A. Times and from Discover.
  *Correction: Maneesh Sahani is at University College London, not King’s College as I said on the podcast. -EY

Chevron in Ecuador: Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with the BBC’s Irene Caselli about the latest turn in a long legal battle over the environmental legacy of oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A court yesterday ordered the U.S. company Chevron to pay damages of roughly $9 billion in the case.
Irene Caselli’s BBC coverage.
New York Times coverage, including background on the case.
Ecuador’s plans to conserve forest by keeping some of its oil in the ground.

Northern Bird Habitat: The Great Backyard Bird Count gets under way this weekend. The idea is to report on what’s on view in your backyard. Miyoko Chu of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explains why counting birds such as the bar-tailed godwit is important.
The Great Backyard Bird Count.

Rethinking Polio Control: In podcast no. 72, we brought you an interview with D.A. Henderson, the man who wiped out smallpox. At the time, Henderson was skeptical of aims to eradicate polio. He has since changed his mind.
Read more in this New York Times article.
‘Gates calls for final push to eradicate polio,’ in the New York Times.

Peruvian Potato Varieties Headed for Doomsday Seed Vault: Indigenous groups in Peru have announced that they’re sending some 1500 varieties of potatoes to the doomsday seed bank in Svalbard, Norway. The potatoes are currently grown in the Cusco Potato Park, located in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Read more here.
More about potatoes from The International Potato Center.
More about potatoes in this slide show by The World’s David Baron.

Why the Vaccine-Autism Link Remains Popular: Seth Mnookin’s new book is The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear tells the story of a powerful anti-vaccine campaign spurred by a fraudulent study published in 1998 in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The study, carried out by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield claimed to have found a link between the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine and regressive autism. The findings were based on Wakefield’s study of 12 children. From the beginning, The Lancet distanced itself from the research by publishing a harsh critique alongside the study.

“We’ve known that it was bad science for a decade,” says Mnookin.

Scientists have tried but failed to replicate Wakefield’s findings. Last year The Lancet retracted the paper and  most recently the British Medical Journal, which carried out its own investigation into Wakefield’s work, called it outright “fraud.”  Amid the controversy, Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the UK.

But the anti-vaccine campaign spurred by Wakefield’s work has hardly lost ground. Thousands of parents in the U.S., the U.K., and other European countries continue to not immunize their children. The movement has had support from parents of autistic children and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy.

Faced with the daunting task of caring for a child with a poorly understood disease, vaccines have become an easy target for the fear and wrath of parents, according to Mnookin. Scientists do know that autism is a complex developmental disorder with a strong genetic basis. But they are only just starting to identify some of the risk factors that increase the likelihood of parents having an autistic child.

As for cures, there are none known and Mnookin acknowledges how incredibly frightening that is for parents . But the success of the anti-vaccination movement is starting to take a toll on public health. Diseases that were considered to be under control, like pertussis (whooping cough) and measles have made an unprecedented comeback in both the U.S. and parts of Europe.

Listen to our interview with journalist Seth Mnookin.  He was the guest in this Science Forum discussion. Mnookin’s new book is The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear. It tells the story of a powerful anti-vaccine campaign that was spurred by a fraudulent study published in 1998 in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The study was carried out by a British doctor, Andrew Wakefield. He claimed to have found a link between the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine and regressive autism. The findings were based on Wakefield’s study of 12 children. From the beginning, The Lancet distanced itself from the research by publishing a harsh critique alongside the study.
“We’ve known that it was bad science for a decade,” says Mnookin.

Scientists have tried but failed to replicate Wakefield’s findings. Last year The Lancet retracted the paper and  most recently the British Medical Journal, which carried out its own investigation into Wakefield’s work, called it outright “fraud.”  Amid the controversy, Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the UK.

But the anti-vaccine campaign spurred by Wakefield’s work has hardly lost ground. Thousands of parents in the U.S., the U.K., and other European countries continue to not immunize their children. The movement has had support from parents of autistic children and celebrities like Jenny McCarthy.

Faced with the daunting task of caring for a child with a poorly understood disease, vaccines have become an easy target for the fear and wrath of parents, according to Mnookin. Scientists do know that autism is a complex developmental disorder with a strong genetic basis. But they are only just starting to identify some of the risk factors that increase the likelihood of parents having an autistic child.

As for cures, there are none known and Mnookin acknowledges how incredibly frightening that is for parents. But the success of the anti-vaccination movement is starting to take a toll on public health. Diseases that were considered to be under control, like pertussis (whooping cough) and measles have made an unprecedented comeback in both the U.S. and parts of Europe.

• Are you struggling with the decision over whether or not to vaccinate your children?
• How do you get the best scientific information to help you decide what to do?
• Is it too late to stop diseases like pertussis, measles and mumps from taking their toll?

Join our conversation with Mnookin. It’s just to the right. He’s taking your questions until January 31st.

Additional Resources:

• For a longer version of our interview with Mnookin, download the latest episode of The World Science podcast.
• Seth Mnookin’s Blog.
• A review of The Panic Virus in the Columbia Journalism Review.
• Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.
• Three-part series in British Medical Journal on the fraud behind the original study in The Lancet: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
• CDC pages on recent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough.

This week: Magicians and neuroscientists have been collaborating to teach each other about the human brain. What they’re learning is the topic of a new book, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions. I spoke with the authors, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. Listen to that conversation. Then stop by our online conversation with Macknik and Martinez-Conde in our  Science Forum. They’re talking your questions through January 12th.

Magic and the Human Mind: Magicians have been manipulating human perceptions for centuries. Now, neuroscientists are teaming up with them to learn about the human brain.
Guests: Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik
Click here to join our online conversation with Macknik and Martinez-Conde.

Best Illusion of the Year Contest:Click here for award winning illusions from around the world.
Watch the 2010 winner of the contest in this video.

Change Blindness: British illusionists Derren Brown tests people’s attention in this video. Click below to watch the video and tell us, would you notice the swap?

Black Art: Watch French magicians Michelle and Ernest Ostrowsky perform this classic act called Omar Pasha. Then ask Macknik and Martinez-Conde how it works.

Listen to our interview with Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik. They were guests in this latest Science Forum discussion.

They are scientists at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, and they have teamed up with magicians and illusionists to learn about the human mind.

Martinez-Conde and Macknik describe what they have discovered in their new book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions.

Why are our brains so susceptible to illusions?

How do magicians use humor to perform tricks?

What do artists like Leonardo Da Vinci have in common with magicians?

Read our conversation with Macknik and Martinez-Conde. 

Additional Resources:

Best Illusion of the Year Contest:Click here for award winning illusions from around the world.

Change Blindness: British illusionists Derren Brown tests people’s attention in this video. Click below to watch the video and tell us, would you notice the swap?

Black Art: Watch French magicians Michelle and Ernest Ostrowsky perform this classic act called Omar Pasha. Then ask Macknik and Martinez-Conde how it works.

Ah, yes…the human brain. There’s quite a bit of interesting discussion going on in the media these days about what, exactly, our time spent online might be doing to our cerebral circuitry. A lot of that discussion has been spurred by the recent publication of Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains. Well, we here at WTP want to help listeners get a handle on the issue. So, in WTP 301, we’ve got an interview with Steven Rose, a neuroscientist who in 2005 authored the book The Future of our Brains.

Also in this episode, The World’s Jeb Sharp travels to Tanzania to report on a solar energy project called SolarAid. The project itself makes the piece worth a listen, but for real impact, listen to the descriptions of what it’s like to live without reliable electricity. You can also check out a great slideshow made up of photos that Jeb took during her trip.

Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro travels to Scotland to tell us about another interesting project. Imagine what it would be like if everyday objects could tell you their stories. Well, that’s exactly what Oxfam and a University of Edinburgh researcher have done with something called Tales of Things and Electronic Memory (or TOTeM). You can hear more from some of the objects mentioned in Ari’s piece, and you can find out more about researcher Chris Speed as well. Better yet, you can find out how to tell your own stories about your favorite objects.

And we end with a challenge. Can you text faster than Melissa Thompson of Manchester, England?

Also, we’d love it if you could help us with a survey on our science and technology coverage here on The World.

Music in this week’s ‘cast: “Meanwhile, Rick James” by Cake.

(Image: Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator)

This week: We’re visiting Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park to hear about a battle between conservation and development. A Scottish researcher tells us how to make biofuel from the byproducts of single malts. We have two stories about bacteria—one about microbes that survived outer space, and the second about methane-eating bacteria in peat bogs. Also in today’s show, plastic in the Atlantic ocean and helping the blind see, with sound.

Conservation vs. Development in Tanzania: Can wildebeest and trucks coexist? That’s the question at the heart of a controversy in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. The Serengeti is home to some of the last great herds of migrating animals… including hundreds of thousands of wildebeest. That’s great for nature lovers and tour operators, but there’s a downside: most of the region has no roads, which is bad news for some remote communities. Now the Tanzanian government has a controversial plan to build a road through the park.
Report by: Benedict Moran
Wildebeest facts from National Geographic.
Serengeti official site.
Serengeti information from UNESCO.

Microbes Survive Outer Space: Bacteria from an English village have survived more than a year in space. The microbes were taken from cliffs in the village of Beer and placed in experimental boxes outside the International Space Station. Scientists were conducting the research to find microbes that could be used as life-support systems for humans traveling in space. The surviving bacteria are now back in a laboratory at the Open University in Milton Keynes.
Guest: Charles Cockell
See a video of Charles Cockell in his laboratory talking about his space-traveling microbes.
Cockell also studies microbes that live in Icelandic volcanoes.
Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Methane-Eating Bacteria: One-third of the Earth’s terrestrial carbon is tied up in peat bogs, where it’s stored as frozen and partially decayed plant matter. Global warming could thaw the bogs, accelerating decay and pumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Now researchers have found that methane-eating bacteria living inside sphagnum moss could help sop up the greenhouse gas as its released from rotting plant matter.
  The study.
  Photo gallery of sphagnum mosses.
  More about permafrost, peat bogs, and climate.
• Plastic in the Atlantic: Researchers have released 22 years’ worth of data on the location and quantity of plastic crumbs floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Much as in the Pacific Garbage Patch, ocean currents in the Atlantic concentrate the plastic soup in a giant slow-moving whirlpool hundreds of miles from shore. The amount of plastic in the Atlantic didn’t increase over the 22 years of the study–but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve been keeping our garbage out of the ocean.
  The study.
  The Sea Education Association led the new research.
  Our previous coverage of plastic in the Atlantic, in the Pacific, and in albatross bellies.
  Slate article on plastic beads in exfoliants.
• Seeing with Sound: A Dutch inventor came up with a way to translate camera images into soundscapes. Blind people can train their brains to interpret these sounds as visual scenes in their minds. New Scientist looked into how the system works.
  The New Scientist article (preview only).
  More about the technology from the inventor’s website. (To hear soundscapes and the images to which they correspond, follow the link next to “No Surgery” at the top of the page, then scroll down to “Example Sounds.”)

Biofuel from Single Malts: A team from Edinburgh Napier University has come up with a way to produce a biofuel from the byproducts of whiskey. They say the fuel could soon be mixed with gasoline or diesel to power cars. Not only would that be a boon to Scotland, but the new process could save a lot of fuel.
Guest: Martin Tangney
Edinburgh Napier University’s Biofuel Research Team.
Watch a video about the discovery from Edinburgh Napier University here.