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.

Some people believe in magic. In Science Left Behind, in the process of debunking claims that one American political party is overwhelmingly pro-science and one is anti-science,  we put a handy chart on page 213 itemizing the various anti-science positions of registered voters.  Sure, evolution and climate change was higher on one side but the list of anti-science beliefs by the other side was as long as your arm - astrology, psychics, ghosts, UFOs, homeopathy, you name it and that global-warming-accepting party is more anti-science - they just have better public relations.  

Sabine Hossenfelder is a well-known theoretical physicist as well as a successful blogger. In her blog today I read a letter she sent to Time Magazine. The letter was triggered by the following sentence in a piece by Jeffrey Kluger discussing the runners-up for "person of the year":

“Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t. But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes.”

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."

In a genome-wide analysis of 13 metastatic prostate cancers done on men who died of metastatic prostate cancer and whose tissue samples were collected after a rapid autopsy, scientists found consistent epigenetic signatures across all metastatic tumors in each patient. 

The discovery of stable epigenetic marks that sit on the nuclear DNA of cancer cells and alter gene expression, defies a prevailing belief that the marks vary so much within each individual's widespread cancers that they have little or no value as targets for therapy or as biomarkers for treatment response and predicting disease severity. 

A new image from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile shows a beautiful view of clouds of cosmic dust nebula NGC 1999 in the region of Orion. While these dense interstellar clouds seem dark and obscured to visible-light observations, APEX’s LABOCA camera can detect the heat glow of the dust and reveal the hiding places where new stars are being formed. But one of these dark clouds is not what it seems.