HemmersChess

Army leaders in various countries have trialled compounds that can keep soldiers awake and alert – or send them to sleep

Drugs that reduce anxiety, tiredness and memory loss – all associated with the treatment of dementia – could be used "off-label" as cognitive enhancers by military personnel, according to a Royal Society report.

While caffeine and nicotine are used routinely to reduce fatigue and improve attention, British armed forces prohibit other stimulants in training or on operations. The US air force still allows amphetamines in some cases, such as where single or two-seater aircraft are involved.

The military in several countries have tested modafinil, a drug licensed to treat sleepiness in narcoleptics, and found it effective at maintaining performance in the sleep-deprived. Other drugs might help personnel learn faster by improving their attention and working memory, the report states.

More controversial are those drugs that could be used against opponents. The report highlights a natural compound called oxytocin that is released during childbirth, lactation and orgasm, and is involved in trust and bonding. Drugs based on oxytocin might potentially make adversaries more trusting and willing to give up information, though the report is cautious not to overstate the effects.

The report goes on to raise the prospect of drugs that could knock adversaries out. In 2002, Russian special forces used an anaesthetic, thought to be fentanyl, to subdue tens of attackers who held more than 800 people hostage in a Moscow theatre. The drug killed more than 100 in the building, highlighting the dangers of the approach.

The difficulty in making an effective knock-out drug will be hard to overcome, the report states, becauseany drug that reliably incapacitates is likely to kill in higher concentrations.

The report calls on the UK government to clarify its interpretation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans chemical weapons, including drugs that cause temporary incapacitation, but has an exemption that allows the use of toxic chemicals for domestic law enforcement.

The authors say the coalition has recently shifted its interpretation of the convention, suggesting that incapacitating chemicals are permitted for law enforcement.

Neuroscience breakthroughs could be harnessed by military and law enforcers, says Royal Society report

Soldiers could have their minds plugged directly into weapons systems, undergo brain scans during recruitment and take courses of neural stimulation to boost their learning, if the armed forces embrace the latest developments in neuroscience to hone the performance of their troops.

These scenarios are described in a report into the military and law enforcement uses of neuroscience, published on Tuesday, which also highlights a raft of legal and ethical concerns that innovations in the field may bring.

The report by the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, says that while the rapid advance of neuroscience is expected to benefit society and improve treatments for brain disease and mental illness, it also has substantial security applications that should be carefully analysed.

The report's authors also anticipate new designer drugs that boost performance, make captives more talkative and make enemy troops fall asleep.

"Neuroscience will have more of an impact in the future," said Rod Flower, chair of the report's working group.

"People can see a lot of possibilities, but so far very few have made their way through to actual use.

"All leaps forward start out this way. You have a groundswell of ideas and suddenly you get a step change."

The authors argue that while hostile uses of neuroscience and related technologies are ever more likely, scientists remain almost oblivious to the dual uses of their research.

The report calls for a fresh effort to educate neuroscientists about such uses of the work early in their careers.

Some techniques used widely in neuroscience are on the brink of being adopted by the military to improve the training of soldiers, pilots and other personnel.

A growing body of research suggests that passing weak electrical signals through the skull, using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), can improve people's performance in some tasks.

One study cited by the report described how US neuroscientists employed tDCS to improve people's ability to spot roadside bombs, snipers and other hidden threats in a virtual reality training programme used by US troops bound for the Middle East.

"Those who had tDCS learned to spot the targets much quicker," said Vince Clark, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author on the study at the University of New Mexico. "Their accuracy increased twice as fast as those who had minimal brain stimulation. I was shocked that the effect was so large."

Clark, whose wider research on tDCS could lead to radical therapies for those with dementia, psychiatric disorders and learning difficulties, admits to a tension in knowing that neuroscience will be used by the military.

"As a scientist I dislike that someone might be hurt by my work. I want to reduce suffering, to make the world a better place, but there are people in the world with different intentions, and I don't know how to deal with that.

"If I stop my work, the people who might be helped won't be helped. Almost any technology has a defence application."

Research with tDCS is in its infancy, but work so far suggests it might help people by boosting their attention and memory. According to the Royal Society report, when used with brain imaging systems, tDCS "may prove to be the much sought-after tool to enhance learning in a military context".

One of the report's most striking scenarios involves the use of devices called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to connect people's brains directly to military technology, including drones and other weapons systems.

The work builds on research that has enabled people to control cursors and artificial limbs through BMIs that read their brain signals.

"Since the human brain can process images, such as targets, much faster than the subject is consciously aware of, a neurally interfaced weapons system could provide significant advantages over other system control methods in terms of speed and accuracy," the report states.

The authors go on to stress the ethical and legal concerns that surround the use of BMIs by the military. Flower, a professor of pharmacology at the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and the London hospital, said: "If you are controlling a drone and you shoot the wrong target or bomb a wedding party, who is responsible for that action? Is it you or the BMI?

"There's a blurring of the line between individual responsibility and the functioning of the machine. Where do you stop and the machine begin?"

Another tool expected to enter military use is the EEG (electroencephalogram), which uses a hairnet of electrodes to record brainwaves through the skull. Used with a system called "neurofeedback", people can learn to control their brainwaves and improve their skills.

According to the report, the technique has been shown to improve training in golfers and archers.

The US military research organisation, Darpa, has already used EEG to help spot targets in satellite images that were missed by the person screening them. The EEG traces revealed that the brain sometimes noticed targets but failed to make them conscious thoughts. Staff used the EEG traces to select a group of images for closer inspection and improved their target detection threefold, the report notes.

Work on brain connectivity has already raised the prospect of using scans to select fast learners during recruitment drives.

Research last year by Scott Grafton at the University of California, Santa Barbara, drew on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to measure the flexibility of brain networks. They found that a person's flexibility helped predict how quickly they would learn a new task.

Other studies suggest neuroscience could help distinguish risk-takers from more conservative decision-makers, and so help with assessments of whether they are better suited to peacekeeping missions or special forces, the report states.

"Informal assessment occurs routinely throughout the military community. The issue is whether adopting more formal techniques based on the results of research in neuroeconomics, neuropsychology and other neuroscience disciplines confers an advantage in decision-making."

Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object

Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today's progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.

Perhaps it is in the same spirit of liberal constipation that, with the exception of Charlie Brooker, we have been too polite to mention the Canadian study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, which revealed that people with conservative beliefs are likely to be of low intelligence. Paradoxically it was the Daily Mail that brought it to the attention of British readers last week. It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own. But this, the study suggests, is not unfounded generalisation but empirical fact.

It is by no means the first such paper. There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly "different" others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking.

But, drawing on a sample size of several thousand, correcting for both education and socioeconomic status, the new study looks embarrassingly robust. Importantly, it shows that prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism. Those with low cognitive abilities are attracted to "rightwing ideologies that promote coherence and order" and "emphasise the maintenance of the status quo". Even for someone not yet renowned for liberal reticence, this feels hard to write.

This is not to suggest that all conservatives are stupid. There are some very clever people in government, advising politicians, running thinktanks and writing for newspapers, who have acquired power and influence by promoting rightwing ideologies.

But what we now see among their parties – however intelligent their guiding spirits may be – is the abandonment of any pretence of high-minded conservatism. On both sides of the Atlantic, conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won't drown in it. Whether they are promoting the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that man-made climate change is an eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy, or that the deficit results from the greed of the poor, they now appeal to the basest, stupidest impulses, and find that it does them no harm in the polls.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to what two former Republican ideologues, David Frum and Mike Lofgren, have been saying. Frum warns that "conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics". The result is a "shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology" which has "ominous real-world consequences for American society".

Lofgren complains that "the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today". The Republican party, with its "prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science" is appealing to what he calls the "low-information voter", or the "misinformation voter". While most office holders probably don't believe the "reactionary and paranoid claptrap" they peddle, "they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base".

The madness hasn't gone as far in the UK, but the effects of the Conservative appeal to stupidity are making themselves felt. This week the Guardian reported that recipients of disability benefits, scapegoated by the government as scroungers, blamed for the deficit, now find themselves subject to a new level of hostility and threats from other people.

These are the perfect conditions for a billionaires' feeding frenzy. Any party elected by misinformed, suggestible voters becomes a vehicle for undisclosed interests. A tax break for the 1% is dressed up as freedom for the 99%. The regulation that prevents big banks and corporations exploiting us becomes an assault on the working man and woman. Those of us who discuss man-made climate change are cast as elitists by people who happily embrace the claims of Lord Monckton, Lord Lawson or thinktanks funded by ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers: now the authentic voices of the working class.

But when I survey this wreckage I wonder who the real idiots are. Confronted with mass discontent, the once-progressive major parties, as Thomas Frank laments in his latest book Pity the Billionaire, triangulate and accommodate, hesitate and prevaricate, muzzled by what he calls "terminal niceness". They fail to produce a coherent analysis of what has gone wrong and why, or to make an uncluttered case for social justice, redistribution and regulation. The conceptual stupidities of conservatism are matched by the strategic stupidities of liberalism.

Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It's turkeys all the way down.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot

Scientists have used the exquisitely preserved, fossilised remains of a Jurassic bush-cricket to recreate its chirp

A love song that carried on the wind through the ancient forests of the late Jurassic has been reconstructed by scientists in Britain.

Researchers pieced together the staccato mating call of the long-gone creature, a distant relative of the modern bush-cricket, from fossilised remains unearthed in Mongolia.

The insect's body and wings were preserved in such exquisite detail that specialists in bioacoustics at Bristol University could measure the parts used to produce mating calls and recreate the sounds. The cricket, Archaboilus musicus, lived 165m years ago, when much of northwest China was a sparse forest of coniferous evergreens and giant ferns. "This is one of the oldest mating calls ever reconstructed from a fossil," lead researcher Fernando Montealegre Zapata told the Guardian.

The insect was large compared with many modern crickets, growing to 12cm and sporting 7cm-long wings. Each wing was furnished with the stiff plectrum and a toothed file that produce the familiar chirp of the cricket's mating call when rubbed together.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describe how they used high-resolution images of the extinct creature's wings to count the number and spacings of teeth on each file. Each had around a hundred tiny teeth.

The scientists compared the insect's song-making equipment with that of 59 living cricket species, whose mating calls have all been documented. Taking this information into account, they calculated that the ancient cricket produced chirps lasting 16 milliseconds. The song was a repetition of single notes, with a frequency of around 6.4 kilohertz. The top range of human hearing is around 20 kilohertz.

The brief bursts of sound produced by the plectrum scraping over the file caused the insects' wings to vibrate and amplify the sound. The call was well-suited to life on the forest floor, where the notes would carry a long distance to females far away.

"The work tells us that the elaborate structures used for producing and listening to these songs were already evolved 165m years ago," said Montealegre Zapata.

Further studies of the insects might give scientists some hints why the mating calls of many modern crickets have much higher frequencies, in the ultrasonic range beyond human hearing. Today, all similar species that use musical calls are nocturnal.

Daniel Robert, a co-author on the paper, said: "For Archaboilus, as for living bush-cricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction. Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to, or not. Using a single tone, the male's call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females."Such amorous calls are not without risk though. Mating calls make males more conspicuous to predators if they have evolved to eavesdrop on the sounds.

The mating call of an extinct bush-cricket has been reconstructed, using the microscopic wing features of a fossil

Sampling the waters of Lake Vostok could reveal clues about evolution and reveal unknown forms of life

Russian scientists have drilled into an Antarctic lake that has been sealed off from the rest of the world for about 15 million years. Sampling the waters of Lake Vostok could reveal clues about the evolution of life on Earth and may yield entirely unknown forms of life.

According to the Russian newswire RIA Novosti, scientists from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St Petersburg drilled through the 3,768 metres of ice above Lake Vostok to reach the surface of the lake on Sunday.

Lake Vostok is the largest of hundreds of lakes that sit under the thick layer of ice on the Antarctic continent. Russian scientists had been planning to drill through the ice to the lake for several decades, but the scheme was only recently approved by the relevant international bodies. Their drilling started in the first few days of this year.

In recent decades, scientists have found bacteria and other single-celled organisms that have evolved to live in conditions in which other life forms would struggle to survive, such as darkness or extreme temperatures or salinity. The scientists believe that Lake Vostok might be a haven for so-called "extremophiles". They want to take samples of the water to examine any such creatures, which will have lived in frigid waters for millions of years and followed a distinct evolutionary path to that of the rest of life on Earth.

Even though the Russian team has made it through the ice this week, it will not be able to take samples of the Vostock water until later in the year, when the Antarctic winter is over.

British scientists are also engaged in a project to drill to a sub-glacial lake on Antarctica. Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey will use a hot-water drill to cut through the ice cap to Lake Ellsworth, on the western Antarctic ice sheet, later this year. The team installed its equipment in November last year and will begin drilling in the weeks before Christmas.

Parents with chick? Subspecies? One species or two? Or ... ?

Mystery Birds photographed at Lake Washington, Seattle, Washington (USA). [I will identify these birds for you in 48 hours]

Image: Doug Schurman, 22 January 2012 (with permission) [velociraptorize].
Canon 7D with the Canon 400mm f5.6 lens

Question: These common North American mystery birds are strikingly different in size despite having the same colours and patterns. Why? Are these parent birds with one of their chicks? Are they different subspecies or are they two different species? Can you identify the taxonomic family and species for these birds?

The Rules:

1. Keep in mind that people live in zillions of different time zones, and some people are following on their smart phones. So let everyone play the game. Don't spoil it for everyone else by identifying the bird in the first 24 to 36 hours.
2. If you know the mystery bird's identity, answer the accompanying questions and provide subtle ID hints so others know that you know. Your hints may be helpful clues for less experienced players. Keep in mind that some hints may read like "inside jokes" and thus, may discourage others from participating.
3. Describe the key field marks that distinguish this species from any similar ones.
4. Comments that spoil others' enjoyment may be deleted.

The Game:

1. This is meant to be a learning experience where together we learn a few things about birds and about the process of identifying them (and maybe about ourselves, too).
2. Each mystery bird is usually accompanied by a question or two. These questions can be useful for identifying the pictured species, but may instead be used to illustrate an interesting aspect of avian biology, behaviour or evolution, or may be intended to generate conversation on other topics, such as conservation or ethics.
3. Thoughtful comments will add to everyone's enjoyment, and will keep the suspense going until the next teaser is published. Interesting snippets may add to the knowledge of all.
4. Each bird species will be demystified approximately 48 hours after publication.

You are invited to review all of the daily mystery birds by going to their dedicated graphic index page.

If you have bird images, video or mp3 files that you'd like to share with a large and (mostly) appreciative international audience here at The Guardian, feel free to contact me to learn more.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

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If you want your statues clean (and your pigeons healthy), you just need to make them of bronze laced with arsenic

As the heavens inevitably cover every mountain peak with snow, so do pigeons unstoppably deposit a protective white layer atop every outdoor statue – or so people believed. Yukio Hirose shocked and delighted the world by disproving one of these two supposedly eternal truths. He used arsenic to do it.

Chemistry provides a way to communicate certain messages to birds. Yukio Hirose figured this out after he noticed that something, some mysterious who-knows-what, had consistently attracted the attention of one particular group of pigeons.

In the Kenroku garden in the city of Kanazawa, Japan, stands a statue of the legendary hero Yamato Takeru no Mikoto. There are many things to admire about the statue, but, as a scientist, Professor Hirose was fascinated by how pristine the figure is. Birds rarely visit it, and seldom bestow the kind of personal gifts they often lavish on statuary.

The statue is old, and the historical records hold few technical details of its manufacture. There was no obvious reason why it should stand cleanly removed from its fellows in the vast, international populace of statues.

Hirose analysed a small sample of the metal. Its composition turns out to be unusual. The alloy contains copper and lead, which are not uncommon in statues – but also another element that seems very out of place. The statue's old bronze is laced with arsenic.

Arsenic by itself, of course, is famed as a poison. But when arsenic is bound up in an alloy of lead and copper, is it still somehow able to act poisonously or repellently on creatures that come near it? The answer to that question was not at all clear, and so Hirose did some experiments.

He carefully prepared some new bronze, with a chemical composition very like that in the statue. He forged sheets of this metal, and allowed birds to come and pay their customary kind of courtesy visit.

This was a starkly revealing experiment. Birds consistently declined to spend time on the metal sheets, or even to come near them. Thus, concluded Hirose, the statue's secret power was no longer a secret. It was simply a matter of chemistry.

Since that time he has been conducting further experiments. His hope – shared by millions of people who love statues (or at least love spending time near statues) – is that this discovery will change the world. He is developing a technology that, if perfected, will give humanity a simple way to protect its statues from pigeons, crows and other winged would-be loiterers. And to do so in a way that will not cause harm to the birds.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize

This week, we're focusing on some pivotal stories from the history of science and medicine.

First up are human-to-human transplants and intensive care medicine. These are among the greatest successes of post-war medicine, but they also raise some of the most profound ethical questions. Ahead of a discussion at the Royal Institution in London, Kevin Fong, an anaesthetist and physiology lecturer at University College London, and medical historian Richard Barnett came into the studio to discuss how these important medical interventions started and, crucially, where they are heading.

The debates will be held at the Royal Institution on 28 February. "From iron lungs to intensive care", "Hearts to hearts" will be on 15 February.

The Observer's science editor, Robin McKie, was on hand to delve into the secrets of the Piltdown Hoax of 1912. The discovery that the Piltdown Man remains were not all they seemed rocked the scientific establishment of the time, and now a new generation of researchers wants to find out the truth. Who was behind the hoax?

And finally … with Nature and Science voluntarily suspending their publication of studies into bird flu, we ask: should scientific research ever be censored?

Subscribe for free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed).

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Recent research suggesting potential therapeutic benefits of psilocybin focus attention on the need to reform drug laws

It's been a busy fortnight. First the publication of two major peer-reviewed research papers about magic mushrooms that attracted worldwide publicity. Then off to Prague for an international drugs policy symposium. And just last week, news of a large grant for our next collaborative study with Imperial College. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I established the Beckley Foundation some 14 years ago as a think tank on drugs policy. It was apparent even then that the "war on drugs" had failed. A 1997 report by the United Nations Drugs Control Programme put the value of the global trade in illicit drugs at around $400bn. Recent UN figures show that global production of opium (used mostly to make heroin) rose by almost 80% between 1998 and 2009. The market in illicit drugs is the third largest market in the world, after food and oil.

The health statistics are equally grim. In some countries – including some within the EU – more than three-quarters of intravenous drug users are infected with hepatitis C. Worldwide, there are several million non-fatal drug overdoses each year. Drug wars themselves also claim a dreadful toll: more than 47,000 deaths in the past five years for Mexico alone, according to the latest estimates.

However, while it is clear that existing policies are crying out for reform, what is less clear is how to foster the required political will.

The Beckley Foundation is the only organisation to combine rigorous scientific research with detailed policy analysis in an attempt to address that question. Our premise is simple: drugs policies should focus on health, harm reduction and cost-effectiveness, and should be based on the best available scientific evidence. That means trying out and evaluating a variety of policy ideas, as well as researching the physical effects of drugs.

Drugs policies around the world are based on three UN conventions, dating from 1961, 1971 and 1988. The conventions allow limited production and possession of drugs, but only for scientific and therapeutic use. In particular, parties to the 1988 Convention (which include the vast majority of UN member states) are obliged to criminalise the production, distribution, sale, purchase and possession of listed drugs other than for approved scientific and medical purposes. The result is the criminalisation of millions of people guilty of nothing other than personal drug use.

It is important to realise that an illegal market is a completely unregulated market. The evidence indicates that decriminalising personal possession and use saves valuable police time and criminal justice resources, and does not increase the prevalence of drug use. Moreover, because users are no longer regarded as criminals, their access to education and treatment is improved and the harm caused by problem drug use is reduced. That is why, together with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, we organised a meeting of government leaders, policy makers and experts at the House of Lords in November at which we launched a Global Initiative for Drug Policy Reform.

At that meeting, we presented a report commissioned by the Beckley Foundation into how the UN conventions could be amended to allow countries more freedom to create national policies based on their individual needs. We heard fascinating evidence from the Czech Republic, Portugal and elsewhere about their experiences of moving – within the "wiggle room" permitted by the UN conventions – towards policies based on public health, education and harm reduction rather than criminal enforcement.

At the symposium in Prague last week, a group of international experts again discussed possible reform mechanisms: partial decriminalisation under the existing conventions, and explicit decriminalisation or strict government regulation under amended conventions. We also considered problems caused by the current legal regime, such as the difficulty Bolivia faces in trying to get an exemption to permit the millennia-old indigenous tradition of chewing coca leaves.

The Beckley Foundation's focus on health-oriented policies demands a research programme to gather relevant evidence. That evidence also affords profound insights into how the brain works and potential therapeutic uses of psychoactive drugs.

Which brings me back to those recent scientific papers, products of a collaboration between the Beckley Foundation and Professor David Nutt's department at Imperial College London. Using the latest functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques, the team looked at the brains of subjects as they received an intravenous dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug found in magic mushrooms. The papers were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Many users of psychedelics report the experience as a consciousness-expanding one, and conventional wisdom suggests that such drugs should increase brain activity and blood flow to the brain.

Instead, the research in PNAS showed that psilocybin decreased blood flow to specific regions of the brain that act as "connector hubs", where information converges and from where it is disseminated. In the paper, we suggest that these hubs normally facilitate efficient communication between brain regions by filtering out the majority of input in order to avoid over-stimulation and confusion. But the hubs also constrain brain activity by forcing traffic to use a limited number of well-worn routes. Psilocybin appears to lift some of these constraints, allowing a freer and more fluid state of consciousness.

In the second study, subjects were given cues to recall positive events in their lives. With psilocybin, their memories were extremely vivid, almost as if they were reliving the events rather than just imagining them.

The findings suggest potential uses for psilocybin in the treatment of depression, a condition characterised by rigidly pessimistic thinking patterns. These fixated patterns are associated with overactivity in the medial prefrontal cortex – one of the same connector hubs deactivated by psilocybin. Psilocybin may also be a useful adjunct to psychotherapy, helping patients who are stuck in negative thought patterns to access distant memories and work through them.

The newly published results are exciting enough to have generated funding for a major study into psilocybin and depression, which will begin shortly. Watch this space.

Amanda Feilding is director of the Beckley Foundation, a think tank working for health-oriented drug policies based on scientific research

A nonsensical Indian song about love and loss became an internet sensation overnight. What lies behind its success?

A senseless Tamglish "soup song" sung by a "soup boy" instantly makes it to the echelons of global fame. Is this where the 21st-century psyche has led us?

I hear you ask: Tamglish? Soup song? Soup boy? If you happen to be among those not quite abreast of the latest internet trends, Tamglish is a conflation of the south-Indian language Tamil and English. For those who are up to speed, it is synonymous with – a song of rejection hummed by an inebriated jilted lover. A soup song sung by a soup boy. The song was released on YouTube last November, and the first two weeks of its life saw it clock up over 10m views. This week, it surpassed 41m views.

Kolavari Di, a moniker that in Tamil means "killer rage", has made history in more ways than one. Credited with being India's first social media miracle, a south-Indian song has for the first time transgressed the country's north-south divide by becoming a sensation throughout the country. It is now a mainstay in nightclubs across the length and breadth of India. In America, viewers also shared the song widely on various social networks, making both the song and the catchy Tamglish words it features an instant hit. Transcending cultural and geographical boundaries, the song quickly spawned myriad versions – Punjabi, Marathi, Japanese, Nigerian, Pakistani, reggae and rap to name but a few.

How did this number that noted Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar has labelled "an insult to sensibilities" find its way to global fame? Dhanush, Kolavari Di's singer and songwriter, on India's NDTV channel: "The song is something God-given and unexpected and there's only one explanation – some unseen energy, some unseen hand working in my favour. That's all I can come up with. It's a very, very simple song, a very, very silly song."

But if we tried to make visible the "unseen hand", what would it look like? Well, how about the hand of Sony for starters? Sony bought the rights of the song and marketed it aggressively. Simultaneous to Kolavari Di's YouTube release, it posted it on Tamil, Hindi and international Facebook pages. Second, the trio with the most direct hand in the inception and creation of the song all belong to Tamil film industry royalty. The song is from an upcoming film called 3, directed by Dhanush's wife Aishwarya – who also happens to be the daughter of Rajinikanth, the south-Indian superstar who enjoys demi-god status. Shruti Haasan, daughter of another south-Indian megastar Kamal Haasan, stars opposite Dhanush. But while these facts upset the myth of an organic success story, they do not quite explain the song's success.

At the first attempt, Kolavari Di comes across as nonsensical, randomly interspersed with words that end in the suffix "U". Does it have a narrative after all? Well, it is a spurned lover stringing together, in a very James Joyce-like stream of consciousness, words that in their nonsensicality are actually metaphorical. So he compares the physical beauty of his lady love to that of the "white-u moon-u" but her character is akin to the "black-u night-u". Is this Joyce's 20th-century symbolist writing making a comeback in a 21st-century guise?

What is most noteworthy is how the song plays on English. Regional English accents in India, Tamil being a case in point, are often caricatured by the anglicised urbane India, and stereotypes of vernacular accents are often inserted in Bollywood films for humorous effect. Kolavari Di reverses this psychology; it challenges the sclerotic ownership of the English language.

In the tremendous popularity the song has achieved it has brought the peripheral ownership of English into the centre where the regional lingo is now standing proudly shoulder to shoulder with the mainstream – both nationally and internationally. The English language was a legacy bequeathed to India by 250 years of British rule, and Kolavari Di stamps the English language's reclamation by the colonised as their own – in the full view of a global audience. What makes this rendition most remarkable is that the song's international audience are wittingly participating in this reclamation.

• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

In one Oxfordshire village, an idea is gathering traction: that it's time for a new agricultural revolution

Oxford city council has decided that we need more houses and jobs – not least in my own village of Wolvercote, to the north-west of the city. Under the coalition's neighbourhood development order (part of the localism bill) we, the yokels, the ordinary Joes, have some say in what should be done.

So now we plot and ponder in the village hall – and we are witnessing what I hope will prove to be a seismic shift in public mood, in the economy, and in the balance of power. For more and more people are beginning to feel that "development" shouldn't mean more of the same – more city-bound jobs and city-sprawl. Instead what we need is an agrarian renaissance: small-scale farming, including horticulture, integrated with the city, and of a kind that employs lots of people, preferably skilled, and often part-time.

A few brave souls in Wolvercote were voicing such thoughts five years ago – but were greeted with baffled silence. Now, everyone apart from the government feels in their bones that the neoliberal party is over; that the bubble based on debt has burst; that growth-growth-growth of a financial kind was always a daft idea and in an obviously finite world is self-immolation writ large. In short, those who say we need more and better farming, and control in the hands of people at large rather than banks and corporations and foreign speculators, are beginning to be listened to. Here are the main arguments.

1. The economic bandwagon of the past 30 years – the neoliberal global market and finance capitalism based on debt – has run out of road. The theory that drove it along, which said that unfettered markets can and will produce a tolerable world, is bankrupt (just as some people said it was at the outset). Attempts by governments like ours, and supra-national institutions like the EU, to put it back on its perch are doomed; the most terrible waste of effort, and of our (taxpayers') money.

Anyone half-way alert knows that we need something different. However, we do not need a Marxist revolution. We do not need to "smash capitalism". We merely need to restore those primitive forms of capitalism that are restrained by common sense and common morality, in a way that the unfettered market is not. The low-key capitalism of the much-despised "petit-bourgeoisie" will do: a nation of small farmers (as Thomas Jefferson put the matter) and of small shopkeepers (as Adam Smith said some years before Napoleon did).

2. Economies must be based on real stuff. The foundations provided by hypothetical money based on debt – money not yet earned, which possibly never will be – are unsatisfactory, as a great many people realised decades ago. Even if Gordon Brown and the bankers including Mervyn King did not.

3. But we can't simply go on digging what we need out of the ground and then chucking the debris. Renewables, recycling and all the rest must be taken seriously. Most serious of all, however, is agriculture. As much as possible, we have to grow what we need. Food is the priority, of course – if everyone was well fed, the world would look very different (and everyone could be well fed, easily, if only farming was expressly designed for that purpose). But we need to grow other things as well, just as farmers always have – such as cotton and precious oils and so on.

Farming and forestry should be considered together – so timber is in the mix – plus a host of fruits and resins. It's amazing what we could be growing, courtesy of natural sunshine, if we put our minds to it. The much-vaunted biofuel is the least interesting of agricultural outputs and in many ways deeply pernicious – but it helps the oil companies to greenwash their image, which is why our ill-informed and pusillanimous politicians and their attendant experts spend so much of our money on it.

4. The agriculture we need, however, emphatically is not the industrial kind we have now – an al fresco exercise in industrial chemistry (or industrial chemistry with bells and whistles, in the form of biotech). We need maximally mixed (polycultural) low-input farming – very intricate and therefore very skills-intensive. Not just lots of labour, but lots of skilled labour. Britain as a matter of urgency needs a million new farmers – about 10 times as many as it has now, which happens to be roughly the number of young people now out of work.

5. In short: of all future industries, agriculture is among the very few that we can be absolutely certain we will need in 10, 20 or a 100 years time – or 10,000 years time, if we are still here. But we cannot simply carry on with the kind we have now, corporate-owned and oil-based. We need farming of a complex kind, run by the people and for the people.

So it's here that the future of our village, and every village worldwide, lies: small-scale, skills-intensive, low-input, highly complex farming. Very few if any governments realise this, so in addition to everything else, we have to find ways of bypassing them. After which, preferably without serious confrontation and bloody revolt, they can be left to wither on the vine.

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Other wealthy individuals have also funded a series of reports into the future use of technologies to geoengineer the climate

• What is geo-engineering?
• Scientists criticise handling of geoengineering pilot project

A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The scientists, who advocate geoengineering methods such as spraying millions of tonnes of reflective particles of sulphur dioxide 30 miles above earth, argue that a "plan B" for climate change will be needed if the UN and politicians cannot agree to making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gases, and say the US government and others should pay for a major programme of international research.

Solar geoengineering techniques are highly controversial: while some climate scientists believe they may prove a quick and relatively cheap way to slow global warming, others fear that when conducted in the upper atmosphere, they could irrevocably alter rainfall patterns and interfere with the earth's climate.

Geoengineering is opposed by many environmentalists, who say the technology could undermine efforts to reduce emissions, and by developing countries who fear it could be used as a weapon or by rich countries to their advantage. In 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity declared a moratorium on experiments in the sea and space, except for small-scale scientific studies.

Concern is now growing that the small but influential group of scientists, and their backers, may have a disproportionate effect on major decisions about geoengineering research and policy.

"We will need to protect ourselves from vested interests [and] be sure that choices are not influenced by parties who might make significant amounts of money through a choice to modify climate, especially using proprietary intellectual property," said Jane Long, director at large for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, in a paper delivered to a recent geoengineering conference on ethics.

"The stakes are very high and scientists are not the best people to deal with the social, ethical or political issues that geoengineering raises," said Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace. "The idea that a self-selected group should have so much influence is bizarre."

Pressure to find a quick technological fix to climate change is growing as politicians fail to reach an agreement to significantly reduce emissions. In 2009-2010, the US government received requests for over $2bn(£1.2bn) of grants for geoengineering research, but spent around $100m.

As well as Gates, other wealthy individuals including Sir Richard Branson, tar sands magnate Murray Edwards and the co-founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström, have funded a series of official reports into future use of the technology. Branson, who has frequently called for geoengineering to combat climate change, helped fund the Royal Society's inquiry into solar radiation management last year through his Carbon War Room charity. It is not known how much he contributed.

Professors David Keith, of Harvard University, and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, are the world's two leading advocates of major research into geoengineering the upper atmosphere to provide earth with a reflective shield. They have so far received over $4.6m from Gates to run the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (Ficer). Nearly half Ficer's money, which comes directly from Gates's personal funds, has so far been used for their own research, but the rest is disbursed by them to fund the work of other advocates of large-scale interventions.

According to statements of financial interests, Keith receives an undisclosed sum from Bill Gates each year, and is the president and majority owner of the geoengineering company Carbon Engineering, in which both Gates and Edwards have major stakes – believed to be together worth over $10m.

Another Edwards company, Canadian Natural Resources, has plans to spend $25bn to turn the bitumen-bearing sand found in northern Alberta into barrels of crude oil. Caldeira says he receives $375,000 a year from Gates, holds a carbon capture patent and works for Intellectual Ventures, a private geoegineering research company part-owned by Gates and run by Nathan Myhrvold, former head of technology at Microsoft.

According to the latest Ficer accounts, the two scientists have so far given $300,000 of Gates money to part-fund three prominent reviews and assessments of geoengineering – the UK Royal Society report on Solar Radiation Management, the US Taskforce on Geoengineering and a 2009 report by Novin a science thinktank based in Santa Barbara, California. Keith and Caldeira either sat on the panels that produced the reports or contributed evidence. All three reports strongly recommended more research into solar radiation management.

The fund also gave $600,000 to Phil Rasch, chief climate scientist for the Pacific Northwest national laboratory, one of 10 research institutions funded by the US energy department.

Rasch gave evidence at the first Royal Society report on geoengineering 2009 and was a panel member on the 2011 report. He has testified to the US Congress about the need for government funding of large-scale geoengineering and, according to a financial statement he gave the Royal Society, also works for Intellectual Ventures. In addition, Caldeira and Keith gave a further $240,000 to geoengineering advocates to travel and attend workshops and meetings and $100,000 to Jay Apt, a prominent advocate of geoengineering as a last resort, and professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Apt worked with Keith and Aurora Flight Sciences, a US company that develops drone aircraft technology for the US military, to study the costs of sending 1m tonnes of sulphate particles into the upper atmosphere a year.

Analysis of the eight major national and international inquiries into geoengineering over the past three years shows that Keith and Caldeira, Rasch and Prof Granger Morgan the head of department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University where Keith works, have sat on seven panels, including one set up by the UN. Three other strong advocates of solar radiation geoengineering, including Rasch, have sat on national inquiries part-funded by Ficer.

"There are clear conflicts of interest between many of the people involved in the debate," said Diana Bronson, a researcher with Montreal-based geoengineering watchdog ETC.

"What is really worrying is that the same small group working on high-risk technologies that will geoengineer the planet is also trying to engineer the discussion around international rules and regulations. We cannot put the fox in charge of the chicken coop."

"The eco-clique are lobbying for a huge injection of public funds into geoengineering research. They dominate virtually every inquiry into geoengineering. They are present in almost all of the expert deliberations. They have been the leading advisers to parliamentary and congressional inquiries and their views will, in all likelihood, dominate the deliberations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as it grapples for the first time with the scientific and ethical tangle that is climate engineering," said Clive Hamilton, professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, in a Guardian blog.

The scientists involved reject this notion. "Even the perception that [a small group of people has] illegitimate influence [is] very unhealthy for a technology which has extreme power over the world. The concerns that a small group [is] dominating the debate are legitimate, but things are not as they were," said Keith. "It's changing as countries like India and China become involved. The era when my voice or that of a few was dominant is over. We need a very broad debate."

"Every scientist has some conflict of interest, because we would all like to see more resources going to study things that we find interesting," said Caldeira. "Do I have too much influence? I feel like I have too little. I have been calling for making CO2 emissions illegal for many years, but no one is listening to me. People who disagree with me might feel I have too much influence. The best way to reduce my influence is to have more public research funds available, so that our funds are in the noise. If the federal government played the role it should in this area, there would be no need for money from Gates.

"Regarding my own patents, I have repeatedly stated that if any patent that I am on is ever used for the purposes of altering climate, then any proceeds that accrue to me for this use will be donated to nonprofit NGOs and charities. I have no expectation or interest in developing a personal revenue stream based upon the use of these patents for climate modification.".

Rasch added: "I don't feel there is any conflict of interest. I don't lobby, work with patents or intellectual property, do classified research or work with for-profit companies. The research I do on geoengineering involves computer simulations and thinking about possible consequences. The Ficer foundation that has funded my research tries to be transparent in their activities, as do I."

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17 is the minimum number of clues required to give a unique sudoku solution – but how did mathematicians prove this?

For those who aren't familiar with it, sudoku is a popular logic-based puzzle where numbers are placed into a 9×9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids contain just one of the digits between 1 and 9. Sudoku has been around for a long time but was popularised by the Japanese under its current name, which comes from the Japanese for single number. Sudoku puzzles are published in thousands of daily newspapers around the world as partially completed grids, each of which is designed to have a unique solution.

Of course, sudoku's popularity has led to a number of mathematical questions focused on its unique solutions, such as, how many unique sudoku puzzles are possible? (6.67 x 10²¹) What are the greatest number of clues that can be provided that will not give an unique solution? (77 -- just 4 less than a filled grid) What are the fewest clues that can be provided that will give an unique solution?

It is this last question that was answered just a couple weeks ago by Gary McGuire, a professor in the college of mathematics at the University of Dublin.

According to Professor McGuire's recent paper, the minimum number of clues required to give an unique sudoku solution is 17 -- but how was this question answered? In this fun video, our favourite mathematician, professor James Grime, tells us more about the creative thought processes that went in to addressing this problem:

Visit 's YouTube channel [video link].

Source:

Gary McGuire, Bastian Tugemann, & Gilles Civario (2012). There is no 16-Clue Sudoku: Solving the Sudoku Minimum Number of Clues Problem. ArXiv: 1201.0749v1.

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Gary McGuire has a website devoted to the minimum number of sudoku clues problem that you may enjoy reading, too.

In this video, we met Dr James Grime, a mathematics professor at the University of Cambridge. Dr Grime is on facebook, he has his own YouTube channel full of maths stuff at , and he can also be found on twitter @jamesgrime

Numberphile, the latest project by video journalist Brady Haran, is on facebook and can also be found on twitter @numberphile

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Magic mushrooms work by shutting down parts of the brain, not expanding the mind, according to new research

Six thousand years ago palaeolithic hunters painted images on the walls of the Selva Pascuala caves in Spain that look remarkably similar to locally abundant Psilocybe hispanica, one of the many "magic mushrooms" that contains the hallucinogen psilocybin. The same or similar mushrooms have been used throughout the ages to induce states of religious ecstasy, spiritual enlightenment, mystical meanderings or simply to have a great time. But how do they work? Timothy Leary, who famously told a generation of Americans to "turn on, tune in, drop out", claimed these "mind-expanding chemicals … acts as a chemical key – it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures".

But a few weeks ago an Imperial College-based research group headed by Professor David Nutt (who was sacked as the government's chief drug adviser in 2009 after claiming that ecstasy and LSD were less dangerous than alcohol) reported a study that appears to show that, far from expanding the mind, psilocybin shuts it down. The researchers claim that by closing down certain regions of the brain that normally keep our minds on the reality rails, psilocybin may "enable a state of unconstrained cognition". More "turn off, tune in, drop out".

Professor Nutt suggests that psilocybin may be beneficial in the treatment of psychiatric diseases, such as depression, where the areas affected by the drug are often hyperactive. But perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the study is what it tells us about how our brains construct conscious experience.

The researchers used a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to continuously scan the brains of 15 subjects who were given psilocybin (under medical supervision) and asked to perform a battery of tests and rate their experiences. The subjects reported profound changes in consciousness including dreamlike states, visual hallucinations, heightened imagination and a sense of joy; and even felt that their experiences possessed a supernatural quality – all feelings that I'm sure would have been familiar to our palaeolithic ancestors.

But what was novel about these studies was that the researchers were able to simultaneously monitor the flow of blood through the brain. They were surprised to discover that, far from switching on underused regions, the hallucinogen caused decreased blood flow through so-called "hub regions" of the brain that connect its many parts.

Making brains work better, or at least differently, by closing down bits is not new. Immersion in isolation tanks that minimise sensory experience have been a popular form of consciousness-raising alternative medicine and meditation since the 1970s. For more than a decade Allan Snyder of the University of Sydney has used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to inhibit the left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) of the brain. Under the influence of TMS, his otherwise normal subjects can perform tasks (naturalistic drawing, mental arithmetic, efficient proofreading) to a standard that is usually considered the reserve of autistic savants. Snyder believes that the LATL normally acts as a gatekeeper that keeps the nitty-gritty detail of the real world from gaining entry to our holistically focused conscious mind. People with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, he claims, have direct access to the detail but at a price of losing the ability to handle the holistic stuff. The rest of us need our gatekeeper to be disabled before we can experience the world in all its detail.

Professor Nutt's studies suggest that psilocybin undermines brain connectivity, targeting the informational hubs where parallel streams of information compete for attention. These hubs may act as mental bouncers, keeping unwanted guests from disturbing the sobriety of our conscious minds. Our palaeolithic hunter ancestors found that it is was sometimes fun to eat mushrooms that would give the bouncer a night off and thereby enjoy the company of more riotous mental guests.

But mushrooms were, and still are, a dangerous way of tinkering with brain chemistry. Thousands of people suffer from mushroom poisoning each year, mostly from eating supposedly edible mushrooms, but the occasional death has also been reported from ingestion of magic mushrooms. Professor Nutt's study identifies those regions of the brain that are switched off by magic mushrooms. That knowledge, combined with the TMS-mediate manipulations provided by Allan Snyder's work may eventually provide a safe means for us all to enjoy the kind of experience that is normally reserved for the less risk-averse.

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Diabetic mothers-to-be have high risk of giving birth to children with congenital abnormality, study says

Women who have diabetes are almost four times more likely to have a baby with a birth defect, research reveals.

One out of 13 mothers-to-be with either Type 1 or Type 2 of the disease on giving birth have a child with a major congenital abnormality as a direct result of their condition. Overall for such women, the risk of having a child with a birth defect of whatever kind is 7%, according to the journal Diabetologia. The risk of having a baby who has a birth defect is 2% in females without diabetes.

Researchers led by Ruth Bell from Newcastle University reached their conclusions after studying 401,149 single-baby pregnancies between 1996 and 2008 in the north of England, 1,677 of them pregnancies of diabetics.

Diabetic women from poorer backgrounds, or who did not take folic acid, were at higher risk, they found.

Iain Frame, the research director at Diabetes UK, which funded the study, said it had identified that the mother's blood glucose level at time of conception was related to her risk of having a baby with a birth defect, such as a heart abnormality. Diabetic women considering becoming pregnant should alert their medical team so that steps can be taken to minimise the risk. In addition, women who are diabetic should make sure to use contraception so that they do not become pregnant unexpectedly, Frame said. This is because some drugs taken by Type 2 diabetics – 90% of the UK's 2.9 million patients diagnosed with the disease – can cause problems for a developing foetus, and in such cases the women need to take higher than usual doses of folic acid, he said.

"Although it has been known for some time that maternal diabetes is associated with an increased risk of foetal anomalies, this study has, for the first time, quantified the relative risk," said Justin Warner clinical lead for the National Paediatric Diabetes Audit, which is led by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

"This highlights the importance of good diabetes control in mothers at the time of conception and the need for careful diabetes monitoring if pregnancy is being considered."

Young women with diabetes need to be educated about the risk of having a child with an abnormality if they become pregnant, he said.

NHS staff should try to stabilise the health of diabetics who may become pregnant, and reduce the risk of birth defects by using insulin pump therapy and continuous monitoring of glucose levels, the authors suggest. Such women do get offered specialist preconception care, "but uptake remains low, and women from ethnic minority groups, socially deprived areas, and with Type 2 diabetes are less likely to attend", the study says.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "We know that diabetes brings increased risk of complications during pregnancy and that the best way to avoid the complications is through good planning and making sure that the diabetes is well controlled before and during pregnancy."

The Change4Life campaign was encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles, which would help prevent diseases such as diabetes in the first place, she added.

A 'neurocinematic' comparison provides clues about evolution of the human brain

Monkeys are closely related to us and their brains have long served as an indispensable model for understanding how our own brain works. But we're separated from each other by millions of years of evolution, so there are some major differences between their brains and ours. On the one hand, we can't assume that the results from experiments on their brains can be generalized to humans. But on the other, a better understanding of our differences can provide important clues about the evolutionary forces that shaped the human brain.

A new method may help to overcome some of the difficulties in comparing the human and monkey brains. To test the method, researchers scanned the brains of humans and macaque monkeys while they watched Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Their results, published in the journal Nature Methods, reveal a number of surprising differences between the functional architecture of the human and macaque brains.

In a 2004 study, Uri Hasson and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance to scan the brains of five participants as they watched a 30 minute clip from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. They found that the film activated widespread regions of the cerebral cortex, especially in the visual and auditory parts of the brain, and that the activation patterns were remarkably similar in all of them. This high degree of synchronicity led the researchers to the conclusion that films can make their viewers' brains tick collectively; it also led to a new field called "neurocinematics," which aims to assess the similarities in participants' brain responses during film watching.

Based on these earlier findings, Hasson and his colleagues therefore hypothesized that this might hold true not only for comparisons between humans, but also across species. The new method – called interspecies activity correlation – therefore builds on these earlier findings, and extends the approach to examine the extent to which the brain activation patterns observed in humans correspond to those of monkeys.

They recruited 24 human participants, and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan their brains as they watched the same film clip. This confirmed that the film clip evoked the same pattern of brain activity in all the participants, as in the 2004 study. They then did the same with four macaque monkeys, each of which was shown the same clip six times, and found that all four animals also exhibited the same activity patterns as each other across multiple viewings. Next, the researchers compared the activity patterns they observed in the human participants with those of the monkeys, focusing on 34 distinct regions the visual cortex.

In both species, visual information is processed in a hierarchical manner. The earliest stages of visual processing take place in the primary and secondary visual cortical areas, often referred to simply as V1 and V2, which contain cells that respond to the simplest features of a scene, such as contrast between adjacent areas of the visual scene and the orientation of edges. Each successive stage of processing encodes increasingly complex features, with higher order visual regions encoding complex features such as object categories.

In macaques, approximately half of the cortex is devoted to processing vision. During the course of human evolution, there was a dramatic expansion of the cortical surface. The human visual cortex did not expand dramatically, but gained additional specialized sub-regions instead. Much of the size increase occurred in other parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain, which is known to be involved in complex task such as decision-making and so-called executive functions. A good analogy for this cortical expansion is that of a pressurised balloon. If you mark two points on the balloon's surface and then blow air into it, the relative locations of the marks will gradually move when the balloon's volume expands and its surface area increases.

Brain scanning studies comparing human and monkey brains often use anatomical 'landmarks' to align the activity patterns seen in each species, and assume that areas which perform the same processing functions are located in anatomically corresponding locations. This in turn is based on predictive models of the cortical expansion that occurred during evolution. The new method was designed to test this assumption directly, and is based on the assumption that functionally corresponding regions – or those performing the same functions – will have the same time course of activity in humans and monkeys.

"Until now, we have relied on approaches that require us to know quite a bit about what we're looking for, and to focus in on very specific functions or brain regions," says Tal Yarkoni, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "The advantage of this new method is that it offers a way to identify regions with similar functional roles in different species. You can pick any brain region in one species and search across the entire brain for regions that show a similar pattern of activity in other species."

As expected, the first set of data obtained using the new method revealed a remarkable degree of similarity between the human and monkey brain. In general, there were very good correspondences between the activity patterns observed in both species, particularly in those brain areas involved in the earliest stages of visual processing. But the researchers also observed some surprising differences in higher order visual cortical areas. Some of those activated at the same time in both species were found to be in different locations, while others in corresponding locations were activated at different times, suggesting that they evolved entirely new functions in humans.

"We found that some regions responding very similarly to the movie can relocate to odd unpredictable positions," says senior author Wim Vanduffel of the University of Leuven. "Some functions are shifted to locations not predicted by the anatomy. This suggests that the human brain is not simply a scaled-up version of the monkey brain, and implies that particular functions may have been lost, or were shifted to existing or to evolutionary new areas."

Like most other films, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a complex multisensory stimulus, filled with rich, operatic imagery and, of course, Ennio Morricone's unforgettable score. It is, however, fairly safe to assume that humans and monkeys will interpret the film quite differently, and this is one of the major limitations of the new method. We understand the language used in the film and its emotional content. We follow the plot as it progresses, anticipate what is going to happen in the next shot while we watch, and may also make associations with the film, such as watching it on an earlier occasion at a friend's house.

"I'm pretty sure the monkeys aren't worrying about plot twists," says Yarkoni, "but the biggest limitation is the fact that two regions activated at similar times aren't necessarily supporting the same cognitive processes."

"Suppose we both watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," he explains, "but every time Clint Eastwood is on screen, you focus on how his presence furthers the plot, whereas I focus on what a nice-looking man he is. You might conclude that you and I have differently organized brains, because different parts of our brains seem to respond to the movie in similar ways".

Another problem in using a film is that it is difficult to discriminate between the brain's responses to specific categories of stimuli, such as faces and houses, since these may appear simultaneously during a scene. Vanduffel says he and his colleagues are now addressing this issue by using the new method to analyze data from more highly controlled experiments, in which they know exactly which types of stimuli are present at each given moment of the film.

"So far, our preliminary results are encouraging," he says. "We may be able to make inferences about homologous category-specific brain areas in humans and monkeys, something which was very difficult to do in the past."

The ultimate aim of the work is to provide a clearer picture of the processes that drove evolution of the human brain. Vanduffel and his colleagues identified several higher order regions of the visual cortex that apparently underwent changes in function during the course of human brain evolution. These changes may have occurred to accommodate cognitive functions that are specific to humans, so further work using this new method may provide a better understanding of how human cognitive abilities emerged.

"This could potentially be a very powerful tool," says Yarkoni, "but a lot of work still needs to be done to validate some of the assumptions the authors make. As with most promising new methods, the appropriate response is cautious optimism."

References: Mantini, D., et al. (2012). Interspecies activity correlations reveal functional correspondence between monkey and human brain areas. Nature Methods, DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1868

Hasson, U., et al. (2004). Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision. Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.108950

This distinctive Australian mystery bird is named for one of its life history traits (includes video)

Mistletoebird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum (protonym, Motacilla hirundinacea), Shaw, 1792, also known as the mistletoe flowerpecker, the Australian flowerpecker or as the fire-breasted flowerpecker, photographed in New South Wales, Australia.

Image: Marie-Louise Ng, 24 December 2011 (with permission) [velociraptorize].
Nikon D7000

Question: This distinctive Australian mystery bird is named for one of its life history traits. What trait is that? Can you identify this bird's taxonomic family and species?

Response: This is an adult male mistletoebird, Dicaeum hirundinaceum, which is the only Australian representative of the flowerpecker family, Dicaeidae, a group of passerines that originated in southeast Asia.

Dicaeidae consists of 44 species that are placed into only two genera. The flowerpeckers are all morphologically similar, being uniformly small, chunky birds with short tails, short legs, short thick bills and tubular tongues -- the tongue morphology is consistent with nectarivory, an important part of their diet.

The mistletoebird has four subspecies that are found throughout much of mainland Australia (excluding dry areas), New Guinea and the islands of eastern Indonesia. Male mistletoebirds have a brightly crimson chest and a red vent accentuated with glossy blue-black upperparts, white underparts, and a bold black stripe running down the center of its belly. The female has plain dark grey upperparts, a white throat and a pale red wash on her vent. Both sexes have black eyes and legs, and their sharp black bill is slender and slightly decurved. Juveniles resemble the female but have a pink bill.

Superficially, male mistletoebirds' black and crimson colouring resembles that of red-headed honeyeaters, Myzomela erythrocephala, and scarlet honeyeaters, M. sanguinolenta, but the pattern is different. The mistletoebird can be distinguished by its much shorter bill, by its black head, and by its heavier build and smaller size. Mistletoebirds may also be distinguished from red robins, Petroica species, by the mistletoebirds' much shorter tail, by the lack of a red cap on the head, the lack of a white wingbar and by their red vent.

In addition to nectar, mistletoebirds also consume pollen, insects and spiders, and mainly feed insects to their chicks. The female builds the nest alone, and it is described by Pizzey & Knight as being a "beautiful pear-shaped purse with a slit-like entrance; [constructed] of plant down, spiders' web, egg-sacs, web-debris, lichen or faded wattle-blossom; hung from [a] leafy twig" (as quoted by fingsaint in the original mystery bird comment thread). Here is a brief video showing a female constructing her nest (uploaded 10 January 2011):

Visit 's YouTube channel [video link].

I think the mistletoebird is fascinating because it is highly adapted to its diet, and for this reason, it is a wonderful example of co-evolution in action. In addition to its tubular tongue for sucking up nectar, the birds also are adapted to eating mistletoe berries. Not only do they lack a muscular proventriculus ("gizzard") for grinding food, but they have a sphincter muscle at the base of the ventriculus (stomach) that can close to prevent mistletoe berries from being subjected to most digestive enzymes. As a result, mistletoe berries bypass the ventriculus and move through the birds' gut in mere minutes, allowing the bird to digest the fruit without harming the seeds. The bird poops out the seeds a few minutes later. Because the seeds are sticky, the birds wipe their behinds on branches to dislodge them, where the seeds adhere. This ensures the seeds a good place to germinate and ensures the birds a future food supply. To say the least, the mistletoebird is an important dispersal agent for this parasitic plant.

You are invited to review all of the daily mystery birds by going to their dedicated graphic index page.

If you have bird images, video or mp3 files that you'd like to share with a large and (mostly) appreciative international audience here at The Guardian, feel free to contact me to learn more.

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This handsome Ethiopian mystery bird is placed into several taxonomic families, depending upon which authority you refer to

Mystery Bird photographed at Lalibela, northern Ethiopia (Africa). [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours]

Image: Dan Logen, 9 February 2011 (with permission) [velociraptorize].
Nikon D300s, 200-400 mm lens at 400, f/5.6, 1/800 sec, ISO 800

Question: This handsome African mystery bird is endemic to Ethiopia and Eritrea. It also is placed into several taxonomic families, depending upon which authority you are referring to. Can you identify this mystery bird's taxonomic family(ies) and species?

The Rules:

1. Keep in mind that people live in zillions of different time zones, and some people are following on their smart phones. So let everyone play the game. Don't spoil it for everyone else by identifying the bird in the first 24 to 36 hours.
2. If you know the mystery bird's identity, answer the accompanying questions and provide subtle ID hints so others know that you know. Your hints may be helpful clues for less experienced players. Keep in mind that some hints may read like "inside jokes" and thus, may discourage others from participating.
3. Describe the key field marks that distinguish this species from any similar ones.
4. Comments that spoil others' enjoyment may be deleted.

The Game:

1. This is meant to be a learning experience where together we learn a few things about birds and about the process of identifying them (and maybe about ourselves, too).
2. Each mystery bird is usually accompanied by a question or two. These questions can be useful for identifying the pictured species, but may instead be used to illustrate an interesting aspect of avian biology, behaviour or evolution, or may be intended to generate conversation on other topics, such as conservation or ethics.
3. Thoughtful comments will add to everyone's enjoyment, and will keep the suspense going until the next teaser is published. Interesting snippets may add to the knowledge of all.
4. Each bird species will be demystified approximately 48 hours after publication.

You are invited to review all of the daily mystery birds by going to their dedicated graphic index page.

If you have bird images, video or mp3 files that you'd like to share with a large and (mostly) appreciative international audience here at The Guardian, feel free to contact me to learn more.

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Compiled by an ardent bibliophile, this weekly report includes books about mosses, scientific art and stream ecology that have been newly published in North America and the UK

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.

Compiled by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, the Birdbooker Report is a long-running weekly report listing the wide variety of nature, natural history, ecology, animal behaviour, science and history books that have been newly released or republished in North America and in the UK. The books listed here were received by Ian during the previous week, courtesy of these various publishing houses.

New and Recent Titles:

• Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. 2003. OSU Press. Paperback: 168 pages. Price: $18.95 U.S. [Amazon UK; Amazon US].
  SUMMARY: Winner of the 2005 John Burroughs Medal Award for Natural History Writing
  Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
  In this series of linked personal essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.
  Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.
  IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: Most people only think of moss as something you get rid of. That should change after reading this book.
• Crane, Jeff. Finding the River: An Environmental History of the Elwha. 2011. OSU Press. Paperback: 250 pages. Price: $24.95 U.S. [Amazon UK; Amazon US].
  SUMMARY: In 1992, landmark federal legislation in the United States called for the removal of two dams from Washington State's Elwha River to restore wild salmon runs. Jeff Crane dives into the debate over development and ecological preservation in Finding the River, presenting a long-term environmental and human history of the river as well as a unique look at river reconstruction.
  Finding the River examines the ways that different communities -- from the Lower Elwha Klallam Indians to current-day residents -- have used the river and its resources, giving close attention to the harnessing of the Elwha for hydroelectric production and the resulting decline of its fisheries. Crane describes efforts begun in the 1980s to remove the dams and restore the salmon. He explores the rise of a river restoration movement in the late twentieth century and the roles that free-flowing rivers could play in preserving salmon as climate change presents another set of threats to these endangered fish.
  A significant and timely contribution to American Western and environmental history -- removal of the two Elwha River dams began in September 2011 -- Finding the River will be of interest to historians, environmentalists, and fisheries biologists, as well as to general readers interested in the Puget Sound, the Olympic Peninsula, and environmental issues.
  IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: For those with an interest in river restoration projects and/or Olympic Peninsula history.
• Li, Judith L. and Michael T. Barbour (editors). Wading for Bugs: Exploring Streams with the Experts. 2011. OSU Press. Paperback: 160 pages. Price: $19.95 U.S. [Amazon UK; Amazon US].
  SUMMARY: In Wading for Bugs, nearly two dozen aquatic biologists share their memorable encounters with stream insects. The contributors, based primarily in North America, work in diverse environments -- from arctic to desert, from mountain streams to river valleys. They represent a wide range of expertise as authors of standard field texts, leaders in biomonitoring and assessment programs, directors of major laboratories, and specialists in aquatic ecology and taxonomy.
  The writings in Wading for Bugs allow readers to experience -- through the eyes of the scientists -- what it's like to study stream insects and to make discoveries that could help develop biological indicators for stream health. General summaries introduce each insect order. Elegant insect drawings accompany each story, along with morphological, life history, and habitat information for each species or family.
  Wading for Bugs will appeal to general readers as well as students, naturalists, and outdoor enthusiasts curious about streams and the insects that live in them.
  IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: For those with an interest in aquatic entomology.
• Meyers, Amy R.W. (editor). Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740-1840. 2012. Yale University Press. Hardbound: 417 pages. Price: $65.00 U.S. [Amazon UK; Amazon US].
  SUMMARY: Philadelphia developed the most active scientific community in early America, fostering an influential group of naturalist-artists, including William Bartram, Charles Willson Peale, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon, whose work has been addressed by many monographic studies. However, as the groundbreaking essays in Knowing Nature demonstrate, the examination of nature stimulated not only forms of artistic production traditionally associated with scientific practice of the day, but processes of making not ordinarily linked to science. The often surprisingly intimate connections between and among these creative activities and the objects they engendered are explored through the essays in this book, challenging the hierarchy that is generally assumed to have been at play in the study of nature, from the natural sciences through the fine and decorative arts, and, ultimately, popular and material culture. Indeed, the many ways in which the means of knowing nature were reversed -- in which artistic and artisanal culture informed scientific interpretations of the natural world -- forms a central theme of this pioneering publication.
  IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: For those with an interest in early American scientific history.
• Milner, Richard. Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time. 2012. Abrams. Hardbound: 180 pages. Price: $40.00 U.S. [Amazon UK; Amazon US].
  SUMMARY: American wildlife artist Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) spent a lifetime creating some of the first paintings and sculptures of dinosaurs, mammoths, and cavemen that were both spectacularly beautiful and scientifically accurate. For generations, his work has inspired scientists, artists, and filmmakers all over the world. This richly illustrated celebration of Knight's artwork gathers together famous and never-before-seen paintings, sculptures, sketches, and murals. In addition to a new biographical essay, it also features excerpts from Knight's extensive writings about extinct and modern animals. Above all, it provides a refreshing new look at Knight's lifelong quest to depict the range of animal species, his struggles with failing eyesight, his desire for artistic independence, and his deep sense of kinship with Ice Age cave artists.
  IAN'S RECOMMENDATION: A must have for those with an interest in paleoart!

Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen is an avid and well-known book collector, especially to the publishing world. Mr Paulsen collects newly-published books about science, nature, history, animals and birds, and he also collects children's books on these topics. Mr Paulsen writes brief synopses about these books on his website, The Birdbooker Report.

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