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[Areas of inquiry once reserved for historians and social scientists are now studied by neuroscientists, and among the most fascinating is cultural conflict. Science alone won't provide the answers, but it can offer new insights into how social behavior reflects -- and perhaps even shapes -- basic human biology. An upcoming issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B features a collection of new studies on the biology of conflict. On the following pages, Wired looks at the findings. ...]

Crowdsourcing Works... not only in Research Matters but in The Creative Ones... :) Thhe Power of The e@ple.

[In the days since the tragedy of Aaron Swartz's suicide, many academics have been posting open-access PDFs of their research. It's an act of solidarity with Swartz's crusade to liberate (in most cases publicly funded) knowledge for all to read. ...]

*Collective Intelligence" ~ Open Knowledge

"Scientists discover a new planet that might be able to support life. A drug that targets certain cancer receptors. Evidence of a previously unknown branch of human ancestors. Extreme weather. Dinosaurs had feathers? Who the hell knew ravens were so clever! And you saw the story on Facebook, on Twitter, in an email from your mom. Then you shared it to your coworker via Slack, your boss over lunch, from a barstool during your date that evening."

"Scientists discover a new planet that might be able to support life. A drug that targets certain cancer receptors. Evidence of a previously unknown branch of human ancestors. Extreme weather. Dinosaurs had feathers? Who the hell knew ravens were so clever! And you saw the story on Facebook, on Twitter, in an email from your mom. Then you shared it to your coworker via Slack, your boss over lunch, from a barstool during your date that evening."

"The brains of people who get chills when the right song comes on are wired differently than others"

"The brains of people who get chills when the right song comes on are wired differently than others"

" year and a half ago, the Internet did something it likes to do: It got outraged. A man in Washington made a bad decision that screwed over thousands of small businesses and hundreds of thousands more consumers."

"Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who's who. The findings suggest that face-recognition and other cognitive skills may be separate from each other, and independent of general intelligence. This could help explain what makes one person good at math but bad at music, or good at spatial navigation but bad at language "People have wondered for a long time what makes one person cognitively different from another person," said cognitive psychologist Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, coauthor of the study published Jan. 7 in Current Biology. "Our study is one tiny piece of the answer to this question." The ability to recognize faces is not just handy for cocktail parties, it's crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and facilitating social interactions. If face recognition increases our ability to fend off predators and find mates, there is an evolutionary drive to encode this ability in our genes. To test this, Kanwisher's team looked at whether the ability to recognize faces runs in the family. They found that identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, were more similar in their face-recognition ability than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. This suggests the ability to recognize faces is heritable."

"Minerva Project Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn't to prepare students for a career. It's to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point." [# ! #Many... # ! … -steering educational institutions, around the world- # ! still have to #LEARN this: # ! Schools and Faculties ARE NOT #indoctrination #quarters.]

"Minerva Project Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn't to prepare students for a career. It's to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point."

"The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Egence" "Open Source" OpenAIlon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December."

"Henry Ford famously quipped that if he'd asked what people wanted, they'd have said, "faster horses." There are countless numbers of ideas being funded every day that are aimed at essentially building faster horses. The result is that we have available an enormous embarrassment of riches in technology, information and economy - but how many of them are truly groundbreaking or innovative?"

"...schools don't think the demand from parents and students is there. ..."

"You don't have to look very far to get head-bangingly upset about the current state of medical and scientific research. Pfizer (maybe) hid evidence that Zoloft use by pregnant women caused heart defects in babies. GlaxoSmithKlein paid $3 billion in fines for a) generating a fake journal article"

"You don't have to look very far to get head-bangingly upset about the current state of medical and scientific research. Pfizer (maybe) hid evidence that Zoloft use by pregnant women caused heart defects in babies. GlaxoSmithKlein paid $3 billion in fines for a) generating a fake journal article"

"To what extent do the ideas of free software extend to hardware? Is it a moral obligation to make our hardware designs free, just as it is to make our software free? Does maintaining our freedom require rejecting hardware made from nonfree designs?"

"To what extent do the ideas of free software extend to hardware? Is it a moral obligation to make our hardware designs free, just as it is to make our software free? Does maintaining our freedom require rejecting hardware made from nonfree designs?"

"the note-taking group performed much worse"

"Computer security researchers who expose hackable vulnerabilities in digital products face plenty of occupational hazards: They can have their work censored by threats of lawsuits from the companies whose products they hack, or they can even be criminally indicted if their white-hat hacking runs afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one still-mysterious encounter between security researchers and the law points to a newer, equally troubling possibility: They can have their work subpoenaed in a criminal investigation and used as a law enforcement tool."

"Computer security researchers who expose hackable vulnerabilities in digital products face plenty of occupational hazards: They can have their work censored by threats of lawsuits from the companies whose products they hack, or they can even be criminally indicted if their white-hat hacking runs afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one still-mysterious encounter between security researchers and the law points to a newer, equally troubling possibility: They can have their work subpoenaed in a criminal investigation and used as a law enforcement tool."

needed: * The trend-spotter, who finds a promising innovation early. * The evangelist, who passionately makes the case for idea X or person Y. * The superspreader, who broadcasts innovations to a larger group. * The skeptic, who keeps the conversation honest. * General participants, who show up, comment honestly, and learn.

[...Gleick: When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance. ...]