The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT.

Berwick will describe his ideas about language in a session at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sunday, Feb. 17. The session is called “Mind of a Toolmaker,” and explores the use of evolutionary research in understanding human abilities.

“Think globally, act locally” makes for a nice bumper sticker — but is it an effective policy for coping with global climate change? Can local actions make a difference in a process principally driven by worldwide trends?

The short answer is “no,” according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We cannot do much locally to lessen the effects of global drivers; therefore, our local policies must focus on adaptation.

A team of scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, has shown that by sampling a person’s breath with laser light they can detect molecules in the breath that may be markers for diseases like asthma or cancer. While many studies have been done to showcase the potential of optical technologies for breath analysis, the JILA approach takes an important step toward demonstrating the full power of optics for this prospective medical application.

The technique, called cavity-enhanced direct optical frequency comb spectroscopy, may one day allow doctors to screen people for certain diseases simply by sampling their breath. “This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once,” says Jun Ye, who led the research. He is a fellow of JILA, a fellow of NIST and a professor adjoint at CU-Boulder’s Department of Physics.

 

I have written several columns about cell phones in the past.  Each one was due to milestones of growth.  The speed of growth in the use of cell phones continues to be astounding.  It was announced last week by the International Telecommunication Union that the number of total global cell phone subscribers will exceed the number of non-subscribers for the first time in 2008. 

Large-scale digital music distribution is bringing about a profound revolution in the way we ‘consume’ music. The market is still in flux, but it is very clear that the hi-fi systems of the future will be significantly different to what we see today, say European researchers.

With the advent of compressed music files (MP3) and easily accessible internet file exchange and download services, consumers are increasingly turning to personal mini-databases of music files (iPod, MP3 players) for their musical enjoyment. The CD market has already taken a hard knock and many predict its imminent demise. The hi-fi market is also suffering with sales decreasing steadily every year.

Anyone trying to build sandcastles on the beach will need some degree of skill and imagination, but not an instruction manual. The water content is actually relatively unimportant to the mechanical properties of the sand.

This observation, which is borne out by precise measurements in the laboratory, puzzles researchers.

Even with water content of just 3%, the fluid inside represents a highly-complex structure. The mechanical stiffness of the wet sand remains practically constant with moisture ranging from less than 1% to well over 10%, although the fluid structure changes enormously internally.

"Crime procedurals, like 'CSI' or 'Law & Order,' indexed highest among all genres of programming, retaining 95% of their viewers through all commercial breaks during the hour." (In other words, the audience stays glued to the tube through bathroom breaks.) --------------------- I wrote the following in April 2007, just after the Virginia Tech shooting. Here we are again, and again and again. The names and numbers change, the location changes. What else? What are the commonalities?

While most people understand the dangers of flushing toxic chemicals into the ecosystem through municipal sewer systems, one potentially devastating threat to wild fish populations comes from an unlikely source: estrogen.

After an exhaustive seven-year research effort, Canadian biologists found that miniscule amounts of estrogen present in municipal wastewater discharges can decimate wild fish populations living downstream.

The strange world of quantum mechanics can provide a way to surpass limits in speed, efficiency and accuracy of computing, communications and measurement, according to research by MIT scientist Seth Lloyd.

Quantum mechanics is the set of physical theories that explain the behavior of matter and energy at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It includes a number of strange properties that differ significantly from the way things work at sizes that people can observe directly, which are governed by classical physics.

In response to Wright and Muller-Landau’s paper on the future of tropical forests (which suggests that declining rural populations can allow forest recovery; see my previous post), Sloan pointed out reduced rural population often leads to increased deforestation. Really that’s not a huge surprise - peasant farmers tend to have limited labour to clean and plant land, and being capital-limited they tend not to be able to switch to mechanised agriculture.