It's been hard for archaeologists to pin down the extent of idle wealth in ancient people, but it is generally believed only those in the richest locations, like capital cities, had it.   

A recent discovery, in an urban context and at an orderly archaeological dig, may be of great significance in learning about ancient people outside large cities.  Most small pieces of art originating in the Near East are of unknown origin, having been displaced through illegal antique trade, or purchased by museums and collectors before scientific archaeological research began, but an ornately designed signet ring of Apollo may lend some insight into the economic state of ancient Phoenicians.

Why does exposure to the name Walmart, a brand typically associated with saving money, reduce subsequent spending, but exposure to the Walmart slogan "Save money. Live better" increase it? ask researchers in a Journal of Consumer Research study.   They delve into a strange facet of consumer behavior: people behave differently when they encounter companies' brands than they do when they encounter their slogans.

Last week, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW.

The way it works is this:

If we could identify a gene for creativity, let's call it the "creativity gene", you would be hard pressed to find very many people who would consider it a "negative gene" or a hazard to possess or carry.  But what if, purely hypothetically, we could identify a gene for Schizophrenia?  Or Bipolar Disorder?  Or Depressive Disorder?  Or ADHD?  Would you select for those traits if you could genetically engineer your offspring at will?  If you wanted to give birth to a creative child, the answer should be yes.

The La Jolla, California-based company BUMP launched earlier this week with an eponymous web service that uses license plates as a means to connect with drivers around you. As reported by Technology Review and Popular Science, users can "claim" their license plates and receive messages sent to them by other drivers.

Petermann's Progress

The huge ice island which calved from Petermann Glacier on August 4th was stuck in the mouth of Petermann Fjord for quite some time.  As I had suggested, it did not get into Nares Strait as a single ice island.  It broke into two main parts: Petermann 2010-A and Petermann 2010-B


Petermann Ice Island 2010-B

We accept that genetics make some people smarter though few consider instead that genes may be making us dumber, but deleting the RGS14 gene in mice did make them smarter - by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found.

Bring on the psychic fans!

The spread of mass panic through Short Message Service (SMS) and text on phones and services like Twitter is unnecessary and people need to learn to look at information with a more critical eye.   People in general are too quick to pass on information without checking - especially if they want to believe what it says - and propagating dubious or false information can have devastating results. 

Mass-panic through technology is not a new phenomenon - in 1938 the first segment of HG Wells' "War of the Worlds" was aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network and as the first episode was done as a simulated news bulletin, many listeners who came on late thought that an actual Martian invasion was taking place.

A group of researchers have developed what are known as vortex beams - rotating electron beams - which make it possible to investigate the magnetic properties of materials and in the future it may be possible to manipulate the tiniest components in a targeted manner and set them in rotation also.

Electron beams have been used to analyze materials for a while, such as in electron microscopes. For the most part, the beams' rotation does not affect this analysis because in classical physics, an electron current in a vacuum does not have any orbital angular momentum. But in quantum mechanics, the electrons must be envisaged as a wavelike current, which can rotate as a whole about its propagation direction, similar to the air flow in a tornado.

India, due to its unique variety of geographical and climatic factors, has a rich and varied flora of medicinal plants. No wonder that out of a total number of over 15,000 plant species in India, about 2,000 are known to have medicinal properties and some of them are used even as home remedies in the rural and remotest parts of our country (Arora, 1985).

Ethnobotany