While many people believe they can multitask, a new paper indicates yet again that people who multitask the most, including supposedly easy things like talking on a cell phone while driving, are least capable of doing so.

Since this is a psychology study, it involved putting 310 undergraduate psychology students who wanted extra credit through a series of tests and questionnaires to try and measure actual multitasking ability, perceived multitasking ability, cell phone use while driving, use of a wide array of electronic media, and personality traits such as impulsivity and sensation-seeking. The key findings:

Antidepressant prescriptions in the UK increased by 9.6% in 2011, to 46 million prescriptions. Since that is for a total of only 63 million people in the last census, a lot of whom are children, the antidepressant prescription total is quite high.

But does that reflect over-medication or appropriate treatment for better diagnoses? 

An international team of researchers sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China and found that the human from 40,000 years in China is related to many people on multiple continents.

Analyses of this individual's DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA in this early modern human is not higher than in people living in this region nowadays.

Researchers have announced the discovery of a two million year old fossil fox at the now renowned archaeological site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site.
 

The previously unknown species of fox is named Vulpes Skinneri, for the recently deceased South African mammalogist and ecologist Prof. John Skinner of the University of Pretoria.
 

In Europe, where over 19 million students are in tertiary education, they are looking for ways to improve the teaching skills of scientists in order to teach more effectively the next generation of innovators.  It would seem obvious that reducing the anti-science mentality of the culture would be the obvious step but the sociologists argue instead that the position of 'teacher researcher' should be created under the social sciences banner.

Rats socially isolated during a critical period in adolescence are more vulnerable to addiction to amphetamine and alcohol, according to a new paper. Amphetamine addiction is also harder to extinguish in the socially isolated rats.

These effects persist even after the rats are reintroduced into the community of other rats.

"Basically the animals become more manipulatable," said Hitoshi Morikawa, associate professor of neurobiology in the College of Natural Sciences. "They're more sensitive to reward, and once conditioned the conditioning takes longer to extinguish. We've been able to observe this at both the behavioral and neuronal level."