Chimps kill chimps. And according to a 10-year study of Ngogo chimps in Uganda, they do it to defend and extend their territory. John Mitani documented 21 chimp-on-chimp killings during the study, 18 of which they witnessed. And when the chimps kill another, they take over its land.

Because of the 1 percent difference of DNA between us and our ape cousins, it can be irresistible to anthropomorphize them, referring to their deadly attacks upon each other with terms like “murder” or “crime.” And given the murders over territory that litter human history books, it’s hard not to see echoes of our ourselves in chimp “warfare.”

Chimpanzee warfare is of particular interest because of the possibility that both humans and chimps inherited an instinct for aggressive territoriality from their joint ancestor who lived some five million years ago. Only two previous cases of chimp warfare have been recorded, neither as clear-cut as the Ngogo case [The New York Times].

But not so fast, says DISCOVER’s own award-winning blogger Ed Yong. He contacted chimp expert Frans de Waal, who would like to dissent:

“There are many problems with this idea, not the least of which is that firm archaeological evidence for human warfare goes back only about 10-15 thousand years. And apart from chimpanzees, we have an equally close relative, the bonobo, that is remarkably peaceful… The present study provides us with a very critical piece of information of what chimpanzees may gain from attacking neighbours. How this connects with human warfare is a different story” [Not Exactly Rocket Science].

For much more, check out Yong’s full post on the study.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Chimpanzees Murder for Land
80beats: How Chimps Mourn Their Dead: Reactions to Death Caught on Video
DISCOVER: Chimps Show Altruistic Streak

Image: John Mitani

What do you see in this detail from the Sistine Chapel frescos?

We’ll give you a hint: Look at God’s neck.

Still can’t see it? Take a look in a May issue of the journal Neurosurgery. What do a medical illustrator and a neurosurgeon see when they look at a Michelangelo masterpiece?

We propose that in the Separation of Light From Darkness, Michelangelo drew into God’s neck a ventral view of the brainstem as well as the perisellar and chiasmatic regions.

Though finding this hidden drawing seems to take a lot of squinting and genuine imagination, the article’s authors claim that their beliefs have historical and artistic groundings. For one, Michelangelo was a master at dissecting cadavers, a hobby he started at age 17, the authors told NPR. They also point to the lighting, God’s trimmed beard, and the fact that, as a neck, it isn’t anatomically correct. For a brainstem, the authors think, it’s just right.

Some art historians aren’t convinced. Brian A. Curran, an associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University told The New York Times:

“I think this may be another case of the authors looking too hard for something they want to find. . . I don’t want to discourage people from looking. But sometimes a neck is just a neck.”

Related content:
Discoblog: Astronomers Identify the Mystery Meteor That Inspired Walt Whitman
Discoblog: Super-Size Me, Jesus: Last Suppers in Paintings Have Gotten Bigger
Discoblog: Artistically Challenged Man Becomes “Michelangelo” After Brain Surgery
Bad Astronomy: A vast, cosmic cloudy brain looms in a nearby galaxy
DISCOVER: Visual Science The Achilles Heel on Michelangelo’s David: His Shin

Images: Wikimedia, Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo / Neurosurgery

After my post yesterday on Bryan Caplan’s argument for having more children, I was curious as to what the public perceptions of the ideal number of children was in the General Social Survey. There’s a variable with large N’s which is already in there: CHLDIDEL. It asks:

What do you think is the ideal number of children for a
family to have?

Curiously I noticed a bounce back in terms of ideal numbers in the 2000s plotting CHLDIDEL by year, YEAR. This could be just due to demographic changes (a larger proportion of pro-natalist immigrants after 1965), so I sliced the sample in a few different ways. More specifically, I focused on women aged 18-40, since these are presumably the ones who are the ultimate agents in terms of family size, and combined years by decade to increase sample size for the demographic slices.

It does seem that there was a broad societal shift among women of child-bearing age to prefer larger families in the 2000s in relation to the previous decade. Below the fold I have some charts with the means (the small dots) by decade as well as the 95% confidence interval for various demographics.

One of the two reasons that Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo were wrong about the future economic equilibrium, at least over the medium term, is that in the 19th century industrializing nations began to go through demographic transitions. But there is no reason that this need to persist eternally, and one presumes that over time there will be some shift back toward pro-natalism because by tautology those who are by disposition or ideology toward favoring procreation will propagate their genes and memes to a greater extent into the future.

No, I'm not just talking about the economy. The Pew Organization and Smithsonian teamed up to poll us about where we think technology will take us, and I'm struck by the results:
Large majorities expect that computers will be able to carry on conversations (81% say this definitely or probably will happen) and that there will be a cure for cancer (71%). About two-thirds (66%) say that artificial arms and legs will outperform real limbs while 53% envision ordinary people traveling in space.
At the same time, most say that war, terrorism and environmental catastrophes are at least probable by the year 2050. Nearly six-in-ten (58%) see another world war as definite or probable; 53% say the same about the prospect for a major terrorist attack on the United States involving nuclear weapons. An even higher percentage (72%) anticipates that the world will face a major energy crisis in the next 40 years.
The public is evenly divided over whether the quality of the earth’s environment will improve over the next 40 years; as many say the environment is not likely to improve (50%) as say it is (47%). There continues to be a widespread belief that the earth will get warmer in ...

Click here to view the embedded video.

I spotted this right after piano practice this morning. The video is pretty short and still long enough (just like my practice haha).    I like the idea,  it’s quite innovative.  Maybe they are on the way to finding out for sure why the corona is actually hotter than the surface.

From the University of Sheffield:

Musical sounds created by longitudinal vibrations within the Sun’s atmosphere, have been recorded and accurately studied for the first time by experts at the University of Sheffield, shedding light on the Sun’s magnetic atmosphere.

Using state-of-the-art mathematical theory combined with satellite observations, a team of solar physicists from the University have captured the music on tape and revealed the harmonious sounds are caused by the movement of giant magnetic loops in the solar corona – the outermost, mysterious, and least understood layer of the Sun’s atmosphere. Most importantly, the team studied how this sound is decaying, giving an unprecedented insight into the physics of the solar corona.

High-resolution images taken by a number of satellites show that the solar corona is filled with large banana-shaped magnetic structures known as coronal loops. It is thought that these giant magnetic loops, some of them over a few 100,000 km long, play a fundamental role in governing the physics of the corona and are responsible for huge atmospheric explosions that occur in the atmosphere, known as solar flares.

Deep inside the Milky Way’s companion galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud lies a vast complex of stars, gas, and dust. From our vantage point, 170,000 light years away, we see it as a softly-glowing pinkish brain-shaped cloud studded with stars — a description that grossly underdescribes the tremendous beauty of the newly-released Hubble view of it:

Oh, my. Click it to get a bigger version, or go here to get a 26 Mb 4000×4000 pixel version.

What a staggeringly lovely image! And so much to see. More than you’d expect… but that’s part of a surprise I’ll have for you at the end of this post. Bear with me, it’s worth it.

Until then, let me show you a thing or two…

LHA 120-N 11B, as this object is formally called (or just N11B for short), is a giant cloud of star-forming gas, containing as much as 100,000 times the mass of the Sun in gas alone! Inside the cloud, to the lower right, you can see dozens of brilliant blue stars. These are newly-born, massive stars. They burn fiercely hot, blasting the space around them with ultraviolet light and expelling strong winds of gas from their surfaces. Together, these twin waves slam into surrounding material, heating and compressing it. To the upper left of that group of stars you can see what looks like a weather front as the shock waves move through the gas. If this gas is dense enough, it too will collapse and form more stars.

To the extreme upper left of the image is another case of this, but this time from what appears to be a single star. It’s the brightest star in the image, so it’s most likely at the top end of the mass scale for stars, and its heat, light, and wind commensurately stronger. It’s brutal enough to be slamming a region of the cloud light years across! Right around the star itself is more gas, which is most likely left over from the star’s formation itself: a star that massive cannot live for long, and so there hasn’t been time for it to totally blast away its environment. Take a good look at this while you can: in probably less than a million years this star — like almost every other blue star in this entire image — will explode in a titanic supernova event. It will be easily visible to the naked eye, in fact… if you’re fortunate enough to live in the southern hemisphere.

Another fascinating region of the cloud is to the lower left. You can see dark splotches dotting the area; these are dense clouds of gas mixed with dust, a complex opaque molecule formed in both star birth and death. These are the precise spots where stars are being born, collapsing from that material. We see these in almost every gas cloud actively forming stars… and 4.6 billion years ago, our own Sun almost certainly formed in just such a cocoon.

Amazingly, astronomers studying this cloud have found the population consists of three separate generations of stars. The ones in those blobs are merely the youngest, but the most aged stars are only a few million years older. Even the most decrepit of stars in this cloud is only a thousandth as old as the Sun!

Now it’s time for the surprise I promised.

In that first image at the top of this post, turn your attention to the lower right, outside the cloud. In what looks like clear space is a cluster of thousands of jewel-like stars. However, that space is not clear, and, in fact, hints that I’ve been holding out on you. You see, the Hubble image above actually only sees a tiny portion of the entire complex of gas and dust! Check out this much wider field-of-view picture from the Curtis Schmidt 0.6 meter telescope in Chile:

Aha! This object is much, much larger than I’ve been leading you to believe. The brain-shaped region in the Hubble image is actually just that one small part of the far bigger complex called LHA 120-N 11. What we’ve been looking at, N11B, is the region just above the center. The cluster of brilliant stars in the lower right of the Hubble image is actually a massive cluster of newly-born stars occupying the center of the much larger complex. The combined might of those stars is carving out a bubble, a cavity in the middle. The cluster is about 3.5 million years old, and soon stars in it will start exploding as they reach the ends of their lives. What will that do to the gas in that cluster, I wonder?

Incredibly, with all the detail visible in the Hubble image, it’s really only a small fraction of the activity going on in this enormous object. I’ll admit, I was rather stunned when I found that last image. I could tell that the Hubble image was incomplete, and must be part of a larger object, but even so the scale of this amazed me. To see such incredibly fine detail, to see where individual stars are being born and where others are affecting their surroundings… and then to zoom out and see that this must be happening everywhere, all over that vast region. The entire object is several hundred light years across: that’s several quadrillion kilometers, hundreds of trillions of miles. There must be thousands of stars forming in all those clouds, tens of thousands. It’s a stellar factory, churning out baby stars at a ferocious rate.

And yet, with all that, it’s still only the second most massive such object in the Large Magellanic Cloud; the Tarantula Nebula is comfortably heftier.

When I see images like this, I’m reminded quite strongly that the Universe is incredibly complex, beautiful, and — my favorite of all — surprising. The more we look, the more there is to see.

Picture credits: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain) and C. Aguilera, C. Smith and S. Points/NOAO/AURA/NSF

The International Society for Stem Cell Research has had enough. When the organization of stem cell scientists met last week in San Francisco, its leaders promised to get serious about unregulated stem cell treatments.

First, society president Irving Weissman declared his intention to “smoke out the charlatans,” New Scientist reported. The ISSCR is investigating its members who provide advice to clinics that offer experimental stem cell treatments (no such treatments have yet received FDA approval).

At a press briefing on 17 June, he revealed that these members are being told to explain their connections with such clinics. Expulsion from the society was a possibility for members who continue to associate themselves with unproven “therapies”, added Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a member of the ISSCR board of directors [New Scientist].

Also this month, the society debuted its website aimed to inform people about stem cell treatments (and fraudulent claims). Says Weissman:

“Stem cells do hold tremendous promise for the treatment of many serious diseases. Yet there are organizations out there that are preying on patients’ hopes, offering stem cell treatments – often for large sums of money – for conditions where the current science simply does not support its benefit or safety” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel].

Authorities are putting the clamps on stem cells treatments abroad, too. Earlier this month Costa Rica shut down the stem cell treatments offered by a top clinic there that was run by an American. Stem cell tourists still have other countries they could flock to for unregulated treatments. But they might think twice after the news last week that a woman died from an experimental kidney treatment in Thailand.

Suffering patients may lose their patience at the slow pace of stem cell research, but Weissman says it’s critical to put a stop to quack treatments when the science is still so young:

“Probably 90 percent of what you hear at this conference won’t be even close to trials” [San Francisco Chronicle].

Related Content:
80beats: Stem Cell Tourists Denied: Costa Rica Stops Treatments at Top Clinic
80beats: Danger, Stem Cell Tourists: Patient in Thailand Dies from Treatment
80beats: FDA Approves the First Clinical Trials Using Embryonic Stem Cells
DISCOVER: Stem Cell Science Takes Off

Image: iStockphoto

No offense, Lucy, but at three feet, six inches you were kind of short. Your diminutive, 3.2 million-year-old bones made it difficult to tell whether your species could even walk like us. Fortunately, researchers in Ethiopia have uncovered an older, bigger relative. As described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some researchers believe that these new bones show that members of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, could walk like modern humans. 

The paper’s authors call him Kadanuumuu (kah-dah-nuu-muu)–”big man” in the Afar language. Big Man still isn’t really that big by today’s standard: His 3.6 million-year-old bones show that he stood at around five feet.

The fossilized remains don’t include a head, but Big Man has many of the same bones as Lucy, and also others previously missing: a shoulder blade and a rib cage bits. Lead researcher Yohannes Haile-Selassie argues that Big Man’s skeleton upends previous beliefs about Lucy’s love of tree climbing and more primitive walk.

“This individual was fully bipedal and had the ability to walk almost like modern humans,” said Haile-Selassie. “As a result of this discovery, we can now confidently say that ‘Lucy’ and her relatives were almost as proficient walking on two legs as we are, and that the elongation of our legs came earlier in our evolution that previously thought.” [Cleveland Museum of Natural History]

Haile-Selassie argues that Lucy’s stubby legs mislead researchers into thinking that she wasn’t fully adapted to upright walking. He says that if she had been as tall as Big Man, she would have a similar stance.

Others researchers argue that the skeleton adds little new information.

Fossil hominid skeletons as complete as Big Man “are few and far between,” says anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York. But the new find mostly confirms what was already known about Lucy, he asserts. Lucy’s kind, including Big Man, were decent tree climbers, even if they couldn’t hang from branches or swing from limb to limb as chimpanzees do, he says. “Riddle me this,” asks Jungers in considering Hailie-Selassie’s [sic] emphasis on a ground-dwelling A. afarensis. “Where did they sleep? Did they wait for fruit to fall to the ground? Where did they go to escape predators?” [Discovery News]

Even if Big Man can’t settle the walking debate, he does give researchers some new clues about past hominids and even some close living relatives.

Carol Ward of the University of Missouri at Columbia agrees that the debate over exactly how A. afarensis walked is likely to continue. Still, Big Man does add important information about the evolution of the upper body of hominids, she notes. The shoulder blade, or scapula, is the oldest hominid scapula discovered, and an adult one, which allows for a proper comparison to other species. [Nature News]

This shoulder blade is very different from that of chimpanzees, our closest living relative, as described in a Cleveland Museum of Natural History release, meaning that chimpanzees have evolved quite a bit since we shared a last common ancestor.

Beautiful bone footage available, here.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Was Lucy a Brutal Brawler?
DISCOVER: How Loyal Was Lucy?
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Did “Ardi” Change the Story of Human Evolution?
80beats: 9-Year-Old Kid Literally Stumbled on Stunning Fossils of a New Hominid
80beats: 1.5 Million Years Ago, Homo Erectus Walked a Lot Like Us

Image: Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Liz Russell, Cleveland Museum of Natural History.