Neurophilosophy has posted an article and video regarding tool-use in wild crows being caught on video for the first time.
An excerpt from the article and the video:
For example, one of the crows observed in the study used at least 3 different tools while foraging for food in loose substrate on the ground. The tool was transported from one site to another, and discarded briefly while the crow used its beak. Use of the tool was then resumed.
This film shows the crows making tools from what appears to a dry, grass-like stem. Prior to this study, crows had never been seen using this material for tool-making.
This video is pretty phenomenal in what it is exhibiting. I imagine we will begin seeing proof of many other animals’ tool-use, along with other heretofore unknown habits.
An article at National Geographic points to some new research out of Germany that shows that birds can see Earth’s Magnetic Field in their regular vision. This would help enable migratory birds to find their position, and eventually home, in relation to their surroundings.
Scientists already suspected birds’ eyes contain molecules that are thought to sense Earth’s magnetic field. In a new study, German researchers found that these molecules are linked to an area of the brain known to process visual information.
In that sense, “birds may see the magnetic field,” said study lead author Dominik Heyers, a biologist at the University of Oldenburg.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are subtle, but noticeable differences in the Earth’s magnetic fields that would be perceptible to the birds that would give them a series of “landmarks” that would allow them to know where they are. Subtle forms of pattern recognition seem to have helped almost every species along its path. I think we’re just beginning to see the full potential of the natural world.
The Milken Institute has released a report on the economic burden caused by often avoidable chronic diseases around the the United States. The financial impact is not only broken down by treatment costs, but by lost work productivity as well.
According to their research in 2003 alone $277 billion dollars was spent on treatment, while a little over a trillion dollars was lost due to a lack of work productivity by the affected for a combined $1.3 trillion dollars in economic damage. If we stay on our current course, the Milken Institute believes that by 2023 the combined losses could be as high $4.13 trillion dollars.
An article at the New York Times discusses the possibilities of health risks associated with being reserved in marital conflicts. The idea of open lines of communication between couples has only recently been integrated into marital common sense and there are still certain mores and synthesized, unspoken agreements (no pun intended) creating emotional boundaries between loved ones.
Here is a snippet:
Recent studies show that how often couples fight or what they fight about usually doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s the nuanced interactions between men and women, and how they react to and resolve conflict, that appear to make a meaningful difference in the health of the marriage and the health of the couple.
A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Mass., asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically bottled up their feelings during a marital spat.
In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk.
Two interesting article over at Neurophilosophy regarding the American Eugenics Movement. I think this image from the first article is a pretty telling example of the absolutely appalling perspective on intelligence that was held until relatively recently:
In 1927, U.S. Supreme Court passed a landmark ruling - Buck vs. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 - that upheld a statute for compulsory sterilization of those considered to be mentally retarded, “for the protection and health of the state”.
The state of Virginia had adopted the statue in 1924. On September 10th of that year, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendant of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, filed a petition to his board of directors to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old patient at his institution.
Priddy told the board that Buck had a mental age of 9, that she was one of three children of unknown parentage, and that her 52-year-old mother, who had a mental age of 8, had a record of immorality and prostitution. Buck had by that time given birth to a child; the father was her adoptive mother’s nephew, who had raped the “feeble-minded” woman in 1923.
