From PhysOrg:

Chimpanzees (along with bonobos) are humans' closest living relatives. Anthropologists have long known that they kill their neighbors, and they suspected that they did so to seize their land. “Although some previous observations appear to support that hypothesis, until now, we have lacked clear-cut evidence,” Mitani said. The bouts occurred when the primates were on routine, stealth “boundary patrols” into neighboring territory. Amsler, who conducted field work on this project described one of the attacks she witnessed far to the northwest of the Ngogo territory. She and a colleague were following 27 adult and adolescent males and one adult female. “They had been on patrol outside of their territory for more than two hours when they surprised a small group of females from the community to the northwest,” Amsler said. “Almost immediately upon making contact, the adult males in the patrol party began attacking the unknown females, two of whom were carrying dependent infants.”

The Ngogo patrollers seized and killed one of the infants fairly quickly. They fought for 30 minutes to wrestle the other from its mother, but unsuccessfully. The Ngogo chimpanzees then rested for an hour, holding the female and her infant captive. Then they resumed their attack. “Though they were never successful in grabbing the infant from its mother, the infant was obviously very badly injured, and we don't believe it could have survived,” Amsler said. In most of the attacks in this study, chimpanzee infants were killed. Mitani believes this might be because infants are easier targets than adult chimpanzees. Scientists are still not sure if the chimpanzees' ultimate motive is resources or mates. They haven't ruled out the possibility that the attacks could attract new females to the Ngogo community.

Mitani says these findings disprove suggestions that the aggression is due to human intervention.

More here.

Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:

Ever since the late French physician, Maurice Bucaille — on a hefty payroll of the Saudi royal family in Riyadh — wrote Islam, Bible & Science (1976), many believe that ‘proving’ scientific truths from holy books has been the exclusive domain of Muslims. However, in spite of being impressed by the holy book’s ‘scientific wonders’, Bucaille remained a committed Christian.

Very few of my wide-eyed brethren know that long before Muslims, certain Hindu and Christian theologians had already laid claim to the practice of defining their respective holy books as metaphoric prophecies of scientifically proven phenomenon. They began doing so between the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas Muslims got into the act only in the 20th century.

Johannes Heinrich’s Scientific vindication of Christianity (1887) is one example, while Mohan Roy’s Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism (1999) is a good way of observing how this thought has evolved among followers of other faiths. It is interesting to note how a number of Muslim ‘scientists’ have laboured hard to come up with convoluted interpretations of certain scriptures. Ironically, their ancient counterparts, especially between the 8th and 13th centuries in Baghdad and Persia, had put all effort in trying to understand natural phenomena and the human body and mind through hardcore science and philosophy.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

On a recent Monday, Helen Elzo got a call from her doctor’s office. A device implanted in her heart was not functioning. She needed to go to the hospital and have it replaced. She was aghast — her heart is damaged and, at any time, can start quivering instead of beating. If the device, a defibrillator, was unable to shock her heart back to normal, her life was in danger. In the old days, Mrs.Elzo, 73, who lives outside Tulsa, Okla., could have gone for months before the problem was discovered at a routine office visit. But she has a new defibrillator that communicates directly with her doctor, sending signals about its functions and setting off alarms if things go wrong.

On the horizon is an even smarter heart device, one that detects deterioration in various heart functions and tells the patient how to adjust medications. They are part of a new wave of smart implantable devices that is transforming the care of people with heart disease and creating a bonanza for researchers. The hope is that the devices, now being tested in clinical trials, will save lives, reduce medical expenses and nudge heart patients toward managing their symptoms much the way people with diabetes manage theirs. Patients, who often are frail or live far from their doctors, can be spared frequent office visits. Doctors can learn immediately if devices are malfunctioning or if patients’ hearts are starting to fail.

More here.

I have always liked the fact that we are not the primary objects of our own intellects. We are said to be the lowest of the intellectual beings in the universe. We do not know by knowing ourselves. We know ourselves by knowing first what is not ourselves. While knowing what is not ourselves, we become alive, active. We reflect that it is my very self that knows. I become alive to myself through the gift of what is not myself. Again this suggests that things fit together. They serve one another even by being what they are. Aristotle pointed out that a medical doctor has a very precise purpose that limits what he does. If things could not go wrong with the physical side of man, we would not need doctors. They are called in when things do not function properly. The doctor does not, however, cure us. Nature cures us. The doctor removes or adds to what is preventing our bodies from curing themselves. The doctor is not qua doctor concerned with the good life. He is concerned with life, health. His activities are properly directed to restoring a particular patient to health. When this is accomplished, the relationship of doctor and patient ceases.

more from James V. Schall, S.J. at First Principles here.

It was hard to forget the account of parasitologist Arthur Looss pouring hookworm culture over a boy’s still warm amputated leg, or of the African infested with nematodes who has to ‘wheel his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow’. An Egyptian girl has a yard of ‘spaghetti-thick’ Guinea worm emerging from her arm, wound gingerly around a twig. In the Australian outback, Missus Murphy’s phantom pregnancy proves to be a cyst of tapeworm tips weighing all of eighteen pounds. Well, you get the idea. In his saga of trysts and cysts, exploding buboes, chiggers, leeches, defecation and ingestion, Kaplan keeps his already pullulating narrative constantly on the move with personal anecdotes attesting to his unquenchable enthusiasm. We see him chasing escaped cockroaches, embarking on a seagull cull, and hunting the Brooklyn mudflats as a boy, where couples making out in their automobiles were said to be ‘watching the submarine races’. But it is the biological drama of his subject that enthrals him. Of the canine tapeworm, he notes: ‘The proglottids are tapered at each end into a lovely chain that I have seen imitated in jewellery’ (I bet Mrs K can’t wait for her birthdays); and of land snails, that they ‘eat the egg-laden faeces with the leaf like caviar on crackers’. Dissecting a frog, he admires ‘huge, ciliated protozoans regally gliding along in the rectal fluid like motile, translucent leaves’.

more from David Profumo at Literary Review here.

Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. Through Marcus’ writings, individual self-interest and concern for others become mutually supporting ends: The well-being of others and my own well-being are one and the same. And so my happiness consists in orienting my actions toward others and the good of the whole, rather than in pursuing the endless vagaries of earthly desire-sex, fame, fine things, the love and approval of peers-the Goblin Market cravings (to borrow a term from the poet Christina Rossetti) that contemporary society usually encourages us to indulge as the means to self-fulfillment. Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate. Stoicism says just the opposite: Stop indulging illusory physical and emotional longings and see your real happiness outside of yourself, your body, your emotions. As McLynn points out in his explanation of Marcus Aurelius’ intense popularity in the Victorian era and increasing neglect in our own, ours is a culture more interested in rights and entitlements than in duty, while Stoicism is only interested in duty, and duty understood to be synonymous with virtue and happiness. But it is a duty that liberates-a duty that teaches us to transcend the tyranny of the emotions and the body and that insists that contentment is ours for the having whenever we summon the strength to push away the things of the world that obscure it.

more from Emily Colette Wilkinson at In Character here.

Richard Dawkins has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
2. Strange Quark, $300: The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
3. Charm Quark, $200: My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts

Congratulations to the winners (I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Richard Dawkins for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carla Goller, Sughra Raza, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD science prizes work, here.

Joan Brigham. Steamshuffle. Circa 1977-79

“Poems appear by walking along” this installation.

More on this environmental artist here, here, and here.

Thanks to artist Lauren Shaw (www.laurenshaw.com) for the introduction to this work.

To the Choirmaster

From The Boston Globe:

How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.

Monday summer officially begins, and freed from the hunker-inducing cold, New Englanders’ imaginations have already turned to vacation: to idle afternoons and road trips, to the beach and the Berkshires. School is out, and the warm weekends stretch before us, waiting to be filled. Of course, this creates its own pressures. Where to go? When? What to do? Is it better to try somewhere new and exotic, or return to a well-loved spot? Doze on the beach or hike the ancient ruins? Hoard vacation days for a grand tour, or spread them around? Time off is a scarce resource, and as with any scarce resource, we want to spend it wisely. Partly, these decisions are matters of taste. But there are also, it turns out, answers to be found in behavioral science, which increasingly is yielding insights that can help us make the most of our leisure time. Psychologists and economists have looked in some detail at vacations — what we want from them and what we actually get out of them. They have advice about what really matters, and it’s not necessarily what we would expect.

For example, how long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and in the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation — far from being a nuisance — can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place — people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist. “How do we optimize our vacation?” asks Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of the new book “The Upside of Irrationality.” “There are three elements to it — anticipating, experiencing, and remembering. They’re not the same, and there are different ways to change each.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.” This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer? Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

More here.

Bernard Avishai in The Nation:

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Actually, that is just scientific irrationality. In human affairs, alas, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting the same result. A case in point is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which—considering what happened at the University of California, Berkeley, in late April, and off the Gaza coast in late May—will be coming soon to a campus near you.

If you missed it, Berkeley's student senate passed a BDS resolution against Israel, targeting General Electric and United Technologies, which presumably support Israel's occupation force. The student president vetoed the resolution. The senate then failed to override it, but the vote was thirteen to five in favor, with one abstention. The reports I've read of the debate suggest people falling into a familiar pattern: professors, students, union activists, etc. torturing logic to depict Israel's faults—which are serious enough to be unique—as “apartheid,” while rehearsing the principles of action that arguably worked against South Africa a generation ago.

I say “arguably” because some of apartheid's most courageous critics, who helped to bring about an end to white rule, were opposed to B and D, even when they cautiously favored S. In 1987, when I was an editor of the Harvard Business Review, I interviewed Tony Bloom, CEO of the South African food processing giant Premier Group. Early on, Bloom rejected apartheid's foundations, and his company hired political detainees after they were released from prison. He had been among the small group of white business leaders who risked all in 1985 to meet with ANC leaders in Zambia—a great turning point. He befriended future South African President Thabo Mbeki and worked to support the transition to democracy. Though he eventually moved to London, he continued to transform his conglomerate into a model postapartheid firm.

What Bloom told me in 1987 was that, yes, foreign government sanctions on South African trade made sense in certain cases. But the boycott of South African universities and business people, and especially divestment campaigns against international companies doing business in the country, were seriously counterproductive. Why? Because those actions generally undermined the very people who advanced cosmopolitan values in the country. To get social change, you need social champions, in management as in universities.