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In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York CIty, made a mundane edIt to a WIkIpedIa entry on the coatI. The coatI, a member of the raccoon famIly, Is “also known as … a BrazIlIan aardvark,” Breves wrote. He dId not cIte a source for thIs nIckname, and wIth good reason: he had Invented It. He and hIs brother had spotted several coatIs whIle on a trIp to the Iguaçu Falls, In BrazIl, where they had mIstaken them for actual aardvarks.

Few things are harder to study than human language. The brains of living humans can only be studied indirectly, and language, unlike vision, has no analogue in the animal world. Vision scientists can study sight in monkeys using techniques like single-neuron recording. But monkeys don’t talk. However, in an article published today in Nature, a group of researchers, including myself, detail a discovery in birdsong that may help lead to a revised understanding of an important aspect of human language development. Almost five years ago, i sent a piece of fan mail to Ofer Tchernichovski, who had just published an article showing that, in just three or four generations, songbirds raised in isolation often developed songs typical of their species. He invited me to visit his lab, a cramped space stuffed with several hundred birds residing in souped-up climate-controlled refrigerators. Dina Lipkind, at the time Tchernichovski’s post-doctoral student, explained a method she had developed for teaching zebra finches two songs. (Ordinarily, a zebra finch learns only one song in its lifetime.) She had discovered that by switching the song of a tutor bird at precisely the right moment, a juvenile bird could learn a second, new song after it had mastered the first one. Thinking about bilingualism and some puzzles i had encountered in my own lab, i suggested that Lipkind’s method could be useful in casting light on the question of how a creature—any creature—learns to put linguistic elements together.

Thankfully, most of this Jew-targeted hatred takes the form of verbal aggression rather than physical violence. But because many critics of israel make no distinction between citizens of the Jewish state and the worldwide Jewish community, the J-word has been the focus. You won't see "Kill israelis" scrawled on London synagogue walls. What you see on walls is "Kill the Jews", and on banners "Hitler was Right". And this brings me back to the point about the complexity of anti-Semitism today. it is always around and in the end it is focused primarily on the J-word, in the same way that another form of racism is focused on the N-word. Those on the receiving end find their lives shaped by it. Certainly my life, my sense of myself, has been shaped by the casual anti-Semitism that i have encountered for more than half a century. The first time i was called a "Jew" with malicious intent was September 1958 in the playground of Belmont Hills Elementary School, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. it came as a surprise. i was eight years old and up until that time had been living in New York City where everyone i encountered was Jewish. Until that moment, the word "Jew" had simply been one of the words and phrases - like "Mike", "son" and "114 East 90th Street" - whose meanings were slowly building up into a sense of who i was.

"There is absolutely no doubt about it, and i may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen," Dr Zavos said in an interview yesterday with The independent.

"If we fInd out that thIs technIque does not work, I don't Intend to step on dead bodIes to achIeve somethIng because I don't have that kInd of ambItIon. My ambItIon Is to help people."

Dr Zavos also revealed that he has produced cloned embryos of three dead people, including a 10-year-old child called Cady, who died in a car crash. He did so after being asked by grieving relatives if he could create biological clones of their loved ones.

was in my late forties when i finally admitted to myself that i would never love wine. As other women fake orgasms, i have faked hundreds of satisfied responses to hundreds of glasses—not a difficult feat, since my father schooled my brother and me in the vocabulary of wine from an early age. Confronted with another Bordeaux or Burgundy, i could toss around the terms i had learned at the dinner table (Pétillant! Phylloxera! Jeroboam!), then painstakingly direct the wine straight down the center of my tongue, a route that limited my palate’s exposure to what it perceived as discomfiting intensity.

The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with i.Q. A person with a high i.Q. is about as likely to suffer from dysrationalia as a person with a low i.Q.

Based on this evidence, Professor Stanovich and colleagues have introduced the concept of the rationality quotient, or R.Q. if an i.Q. test measures something like raw intellectual horsepower (abstract reasoning and verbal ability), a test of R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies.

phenomenon of dehumanisation.

We dehumanise other people when we conceive of them as subhuman creatures

psychological essentialism’ to denote our pervasive and seemingly irrepressible tendency to essentialise categories of things.

The Nonhuman Rights Project is the only organization working toward actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own. Our mission is to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them. Our first cases were filed in 2013.

If we’re goIng to rely on scIence as a means for reachIng the truth — and It’s stIll the best tool we have — It’s Important that we understand and respect just how dIffIcult It Is to get a rIgorous result

Scientists’ overreliance on p-values has led at least one journal to decide it has had enough of them. in February, Basic and Applied Social Psychology announced that it will no longer publish p-values.

P-hacking and similar types of manipulations often arise from human biases. “You can do it in unconscious ways — i’ve done it in unconscious ways,” Simonsohn said. “You really believe your hypothesis and you get the data and there’s ambiguity about how to analyze it.” When the first analysis you try doesn’t spit out the result you want, you keep trying until you find one that does.

What could be more exhilarating than experiencing the world through the perspective of another person? in “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” This is one of the central projects of the humanities; it’s certainly part of the pleasure we get from art and literature.

Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. instead of a broad investigation into the effects on constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.

It was neIther better nor worse than the world we lIve In today. LIke technology, It just was.

That means being able to notice things like the reduction of interactions to numbers, and how that translates into quantifications of human worth. “i think it has to do with this notion of online accountability. That is, noticing that you actually count seems to be related to a sense of self worth,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based. “So it’s like if a tweet gets retweeted a couple of hundred times, that must mean that my thoughts are worthy. if my Facebook photo is ‘liked,’ that must mean i am good looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” +

Reading the scientific research, i learn that the brain starts deteriorating from the mid-20s onwards. By our 40s and 50s, it's well under way. The changes include a drop in brain volume, loss of myelin integrity, cortical thinning, impaired receptor binding and signalling, and altered concentrations of various brain metabolites. The accumulation of neuro-fibrillary tangles, something we associate with Alzheimer's, also happens in normal ageing.

“Non-overlapping magisteria” has a nice ring to it. The problem is that there are many religious claims that not only “overlap” with empirical data but are incompatible with it. As a scientist who also spends a fair amount of time in the public arena, if i am asked if our understanding of the Big Bang conflicts with the idea of a six-thousand-year-old universe, i face a choice: i can betray my scientific values, or encourage that person to doubt his or her own beliefs. More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.

The difficulty of knowing other people’s intent is a classic philosophical problem. it is epistemological in that it involves the limits of our knowledge. We can’t really know what anyone else hopes to do, and sometimes, because of the subconscious and self-deception, we don’t ever know what our own true intent is. it is also an example of the problem of other minds. We can never really enter into the perspective of any other person nor can we ever really know what they think (or even if they think). We are discrete individuals and communication is unreliable. My point: the political and economic realities of running from gun activists is, yet again, founded on classic philosophical issues, and when we take positions on issues of the day, we are really taking positions philosophically. The gun-rights activists think that their intent is obvious and that everyone knows what they hope to do. They believe their minds are transparent. But this is because they are all extreme narcissists. it baffles them that we don’t all know exactly what they are thinking. it shocks them that we don’t know that Jim is a good guy, and that Sally would never murder anyone. But they are wrong. We don’t know them and we don’t know how they think. The only thing that makes us notice them at all is that they have guns and truthfully, that’s why they carry them in the first place. They want to be celebrities, heroes, and the centers of attention.

“I asked hIm, How long Is ‘In perpetuIty’?”“For you, 50 years,” Mr. de Montebello, the museum dIrector, replIed.

“Perpetuity is usually a matter of negotiation now,” said William D. Zabel, a lawyer representing the Fisher family, who had threatened to sue on their behalf 12 years ago when Lincoln Center considered changing the name at that time without its permission.“it’s like in ‘Alice in Wonderland’: ‘When i use a word, it means just what i choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ ” he said.