Cranial surgery is tricky business today. Patients will need an aseptic environment, specialized surgical instruments and copious amounts of pain medication both during and afterward.

In ancient Peru, trepanation  - removing a section of the cranial vault using a hand drill or a scraping tool - was a lot more dangerous, and yet more common. They used it to treat a variety of ailments, from head injuries to heartsickness. 

Excavating burial caves in the south-central Andean province of Andahuaylas in Peru, U.C. Santa Barbara archaeologist Danielle Kurin and colleagues unearthed the remains of 32 individuals that date back to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. AD 1000-1250). Among them, 45 separate trepanation procedures were in evidence. 

Caterpillars of two species of butterflies in Colorado and California aren't waiting for China and India to stop belching out so much CO2 - according to a paper in the journal Functional Ecology, they have already evolved to feed rapidly at higher and at a broader range of temperatures, just in the last 40 years, suggesting to the biologists that they did so in order to quickly to cope with a hotter, more variable climate. 

This represents the first instance where recent climate change has affected physiological traits, such as the internal workings of how the body regulates feeding behavior, said Professor Joel Kingsolver at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A paper in the International Journal of Obesity has found that even weight loss can be discriminatory;  African-American women may need to eat less or exercise more than European-American women to lose the same amount of weight.

Some studies have suggested that women of color don't lose as much weight as white women even in response to the same behavioral interventions of calorie restriction or increased physical activity. 

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Population geneticist Montgomery Slatkin, graduate student Fernando Racimo and post-doctoral student Flora Jay were part of an international team of anthropologists and geneticists who generated a high-quality sequence of the Neanderthal genome and compared it with the genomes of modern humans and a recently recognized group of early humans called Denisovans.

Social authoritarian cultures like San Francisco want to ban things and limit choice but when it comes to healthier kids, it doesn't require creating higher prices, more taxes or political fundamentalism regarding Happy Meals, it can just mean a few less french fries. That saves McDonald's a little money and kids won't notice the difference.

Cornell marketing professor Dr. Brian Wansink and Dr. Andrew Hanks, also of Cornell, analyzed transaction data from 30 representative McDonald's restaurants and found that calories are unimportant to kids when eating. They're obviously important when it comes to obesity so the solution seems obvious.

A good number of very high profile philosophers and mathematicians have drawn attention to what they see as the intrinsic beauty in mathematical solutions.

For example :

"It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect but true."

A paper in the journal Child Development says that children as young as 3 understand multi-digit numbers more than previously believed and may even be ready for direct math instruction when they enter school.

This will have implications for the debate over education policy, where the chronic lament is that children are not being taught to the test enough and therefore only score in the middle on international standardized tests.

"Contrary to the view that young children do not understand place value and multi-digit numbers, we found that they actually know quite a lot about it," said co-author Kelly Mix, 
Michigan State University psychologist. "They are more ready than we think when they enter kindergarten."