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“Bees manage surprisingly complex behavior with tiny brains,” making the evolution of bee brains an especially interesting subject.

Bees that only go through one generation each year have larger brains, relative to their body size, than bees with multiple generations a year.

A bee with a broad diet can fly into a field and drink the first nectar it finds. But a bee with a specialized diet may have to spot its preferred bloom, with its specific color and fragrance, among a whole field of similar flowers — a task that might require more brain.

Larger brains have also been linked to social behavior in primates and other mammals. But scientists found no connection between brain size and whether a bee lived in hives like honeybees or was a loner like our big-brained aster-eater.

“Highly social species have smaller brains because each individual is more like a cell in the body of the hive,”

Dr. Tibbetts said that even for vertebrates, whether bigger-brained animals are smarter is a topic of wide debate.

During speech perception, our brain integrates information from our ears with that from our eyes. Because this integration happens early in the perceptual process, visual cues influence what we think we are hearing. That is, what we see can actually shape what we "hear."

When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear

Perceptual systems, particularly smell, connect with memory and emotion centers to enable sensory cues to trigger feelings and recollections, and to be incorporated within them

What might life be like if you had synesthesia? Here is one artist's rendition of the experience of a synaesthete. In this surreal world, music records smell like different colors, foods tastes like specific noises, and sound comes in all varieties of textures and shapes

Long before scientists were studying the properties of neurons, artists had devised a series of techniques to deceive the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional or that a series of brushstrokes was indeed a still life.

Visual illusions are defined by the dissociation between the physical reality and the subjective perception of an object or event.

Brightness, color, shading, eye movement and other factors can have powerful effects on what we “see.”

Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality — it does not occur to one to question them. But since all of our perceptions must be constructed by the brain, from often meager and ambiguous sensory data, the possibility of error or deception is always present.

Was Freud entirely wrong then about slips and mishearings? Of course not. He advanced fundamental considerations about wishes, fears, motives and conflicts not present in consciousness, or thrust out of consciousness, which could color slips of the tongue, mishearings or misreadings. But he was, perhaps, too insistent that misperceptions are wholly a result of unconscious motivation

Gillespie has seen this same pattern before, among Hawaii’s long-jawed goblin spiders. Each island has its own representatives of the four basic types: green, maroon, small brown, and large brown. At first, Gillespie assumed that all the green species were related to each other. But the spiders’ DNA revealed that the ones that live on the same islands are most closely related, regardless of their colors. They too have hopped from one island to another, radiating into the same four varieties wherever they land.

One of the most common misunderstandings about evolution is that it is a random process. Mutations are random, yes, but those mutations then rise and fall in ways that are anything but random. That’s why stick spiders, when they invade a new island, don’t diversify into red species, or zebra-striped ones. The environment of Hawaii sculpts their bodies in a limited number of ways.

Gillespie adds that there’s an urgency to this work. For millions of years, islands like Hawaii have acted as crucibles of evolution, allowing living things to replay evolution’s tape in the way that Gould envisaged. But in a much shorter time span, humans have threatened the results of those natural experiments. “The Hawaiian islands are in dire trouble from invasive species, and environmental modifications,” says Gillespie. “And you have all these unknown groups of spiders—entire lineages of really beautiful, charismatic animals, most of which are undescribed.”

Unaccounted for, this missing matter was predicted to exist, but hard to find. In fact, astronomers have been searching for it over the last 30 years, the researchers said. Measurements of the Big Bang show how much matter was present in the early days of the universe, suggesting its existence.

"It turned out that it was hiding in a density so low that it does not emit light, it doesn't absorb it, and it doesn't reflect it," he said.

"The radiation from fast radio bursts gets spread out by the missing matter in the same way that you see the colors of sunlight being separated in a prism," Macquart said.

"Their millisecond durations made it very easy to measure the effect of dispersion — the process by which their longer wavelength emission is delayed with respect to their shorter wavelength emission is delayed — and hence to measure exactly how much matter they have encountered on their multi-billion year intergalactic journeys to Earth," Macquart said.

Astronomers were able to pin down the source of a repeating fast radio burst in 2017. But single radio bursts are harder to pinpoint because they don't reoccur.

"ASKAP both has a wide field of view, about 60 times the size of the full Moon, and can image in high resolution," said Ryan Shannon, study coauthor and associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, in a statement. "This means that we can catch the bursts with relative ease and then pinpoint locations to their host galaxies with incredible precision.

"We've discovered the equivalent of the Hubble-Lemaître Law for galaxies, only for fast radio bursts," Macquart said. "The Hubble-Lemaître Law, which says the more distant a galaxy from us, the faster it is moving away from us, underpins all measurements of galaxies at cosmological distances."

Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.

Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.

"I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."

"I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"

Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.

She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.

Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.

We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.

To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.

Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."

Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.

let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.

Ultimately, though, we live in an era in which neither poetry nor science is the key cultural player. Our world is mediated not by language or matter but media. The information at our fingertips doesn’t require observation, only downloading. With prepackaged imaginations luminescing at us from almost every screen, we need only swipe left for an entirely different view. 

The researchers then conditioned the participants to be afraid of certain images by showing them pictures of ordinary-looking rooms lit with lamps of various hues, some of which were paired with a mild shock to the finger. Through the shocks, they were taught to fear the rooms that were lit by certain colors.

The subjects with more REM sleep also had less activity in those areas of the brain. That suggests that the more well-rested subjects may not have been hard-wiring those fears into their brains quite as strongly.

PTSD is already known to be associated with sleep disturbances, and past studies have shown that sleep-deprived people have more activity in their amygdalae upon being shown upsetting pictures.

“REM is very unique because it’s the only time that area of the brain is completely silent,” said Shira Lupkin, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University.

Because of that, people who get plenty of REM sleep might be less reactive to emotional stimuli.

If the study is replicated, there could be real-world implications for stopping trauma—before it starts.

I heard Floyd scream "Mama," and through my tears, even though I knew the events in the video had already unfolded to a tragic conclusion, I was still ready to fight. He wasn't my baby, but he was someone's child. And he needed someone with a mother's love to help him

I'm tired of being scared for him. I'm tired of reading about Ahmaud, Travis, George and so many others. The list never stops. I need the white mamas to share this burden. I need my white friends to love me and mine enough to come running, too.

While I'm waiting for white mothers to come running, to let me rest for just a moment while they carry the baton for a bit, I have a special thank you for my friend Stacie. I'm blessed with a multi-cultural array of friends. Stacie personifies compassion, sensitivity, godliness and intellect. She knows the world sees and treats her differently because she's white, financially comfortable and socially connected. In her heart, she's just a mama like me.

My baby calls me every time he's caught being black -- the security officer trailing him in the Harvard museum while he waited for his friend's commencement to start last May.

And the white woman who scurried away from the ladies' room on his college campus, presumably because he was walking toward her? Wasn't he just going in the same direction to use the adjacent men's room?

I need them to hear that cry and to tell their sons and daughters that my child is a human. I need them to declare and believe that he's in danger, that I can't protect him by myself and that his life matters to me and to them. I need them to tell their white friends' children, too. My child's life is sacred. My child is not dangerous.

She sees my blackness and the pain it brings. She'd never declare, as too many do, that she "doesn't see color." She sees it because she truly sees me. She knows it shapes how I see the world and how the world sees me. She knows my son, and she authentically cares about him. She knows I'm hurting without my having to tell her. And one mama to another, she cared.

That kind of curating acts as a fertile host for falsehoods by simultaneously engaging two predigital social-science standbys: the urban myth as “meme,” or viral idea; and individual biases, the automatic, subconscious presumptions that color belief.

“My experience is that once this stuff gets going, people just pass these stories on without even necessarily stopping to read them,” Mr. McKinney said.

“The networks make information run so fast that it outruns fact-checkers’ ability to check it.

"you ain't black" if you were undecided on who to vote for in 2020.

Biden helped to write the 1994 crime bill, a law that has been widely panned -- particularly by members of the black community -- for its impact on levels of incarceration, among other reverberations.

Biden owes his status as the presumptive presidential nominee almost entirely to black voters -- particularly those in South Carolina. Biden's campaign was faltering badly -- he had finished 4th in Iowa, 5th in New Hampshire and 2nd in Nevada -- prior to the February 29 Palmetto State primary. According to exit polling, black voters made up a majority (56%) of the South Carolina primary electorate and went overwhelmingly (61%) for Biden. His victory in the state propelled him to a series of wins on Super Tuesday -- just three days later -- and, at that point, the nomination was his.

It will be a plus to have an African American woman. It will be a plus to have a Latino. It will be a plus to have a woman."

non-college educated voters who went with Trump, had Clinton been able to drive black turnout to the level it was during Obama's two victories, she almost certainly would have won.

Now, simply putting a person of color on the ticket doesn't mean that you win the votes of black people or ensure they turn out in large numbers. But politics at the presidential level is often about symbolism. And who Biden picks as his vice president will be his best chance to reveal how he views his party, the country and the world -- and what he prioritizes amongst the many, many issues facing the US at the moment.

And lucky for Biden, he has a number of African American women who would make excellent choices

Even before Biden's "you ain't black" gaffe and the uprising following George Floyd's murder, California Sen. Kamala Harris (age 55), who was both the first African American and Indian American elected to the Senate from California, was at the top of my VP rankings. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (50 years old) and Florida Rep. Val Demings (63 years old) were in the Top 6. Now? It's hard to see three more people more likely to be the pick. (Stay tuned for my new rankings on Thursday!)

That requires a high bar and makes it difficult to win unless the situation is similar to a prior case with nearly identical facts. In some cases with unique fact patterns, of which there are many, officers have been granted immunity even if they have been found to have acted in violation of the Constitution.

"Everyone has the potential for adverse encounters with state actors, whether it's members of law enforcement, public school officials, city council members, or other municipal employees," said Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. "So long as the Supreme Court continues to permit this unlawful shield for government agents, no citizen will have any assurance that their rights will be respected."

"Until we shift the focus of our inquiry to whether immunity existed at common law, we will continue to substitute our own policy preferences for the mandates of Congress," the conservative Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion. "In an appropriate case, we should reconsider our qualified immunity jurisprudence."

In its 1982 decision, the court found that the aides were entitled to qualified immunity. "Government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known," the court ruled.

"The principle that government officials should be accountable for their violations of the Constitution is not a partisan issue. It's an American one," Boston University law professor Jack Beermann said in an interview with CNN. "Conservatives are just as concerned with abuse of government power as liberals are. And you combine that with what seems to be a rash of police misconduct in recent years and you can get a pretty strong coalition."

"There's an incredible urgency as communities across the country seek accountability for police violence against individuals of color in particularly, to open up the courts, claim a constitutional violation and make sure officers aren't provided a get-out-of-court-free card when they violate people's rights,"

"We are in the midst of a crisis of accountability in law enforcement,

As George Floyd's death tragically illustrates, for many people in this country, our culture of near-zero accountability for law enforcement is not an abstract public-policy concern, but a matter of life and death.

"At its heart, qualified immunity protects police officers' split second decisions ... courts must afford them a measure of deference in their on-the-scene assessments about the application of force to subdue a fleeing or resisting suspect,"

"Abandoning qualified immunity ... would leave hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers exposed to potential liability, likely second guessing themselves in situations where a hesitation to act could mean the difference between life and death," the lawyers said in court papers.

Our case presents some of the problems with qualified immunity very starkly," said Michelman, lead counsel representing Baxter in the case. "Everyone should know, and everyone does know, that putting your hands up is a universal symbol of surrender and it is completely out of bounds to attack somebody who has surrendered."

"These cases very frequently arrive from police use of force in particular circumstances," Hughes said. "When an individual or his or her estate alleges that a police officer used excessive force the officer will invariably raise a qualified immunity defense."

Figuring out exactly what happened that Saturday night will take time and require generous listening to reveal important details about exactly what events took place, how law enforcement became involved and whether permitting and operational procedures were followed.

I'm convinced that the depiction of the event and the actions of law enforcement is contrary to what was initially reported. This was not a pop-up Spring Hill block party that spontaneously became massive, disruptive and violent. Instead, it involved groups gathered for a series of events (including, among others, a car show, a concert and memorial for a former Spring Hill resident who in 2008 was a victim of gun violence) that were promoted successfully enough to attract attendees from as far away as Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville.

And instead of becoming yet another incident where unarmed African Americans were shot by law enforcement officers who felt threatened based on preconceived fears and racist assumptions, there have been no reports or claims that these law enforcement officers shot, killed or inflicted life-threatening injury on any residents or visitors

law enforcement officers claim they were hit and injured that night by a sucker punch and the hurling of bottles, a bar stool and a mason jar; that they recovered one loaded Ruger 9 mm and other guns, some narcotics and $3,840 in cash; that they made seven arrests and issued five traffic citations. It remains the subject of further investigation and reporting to resolve community complaints in social media posts about undue provocation, escalation and unlawful business interruption. Videos of the incident shed some light but do not capture all aspects of a crowd this large -- the Volusia sheriff's office estimated it at 3,000 -- moving across multiple locations.

To facilitate effective community policing during this pandemic crisis, law enforcement leaders and African American leaders and residents need to further discuss and endeavor to reach consensus on four practical steps: suspending plans for any large gatherings until public health officials say they are safe; advocating for national and state leaders to put health over politics by warning about the continuing risks of asymptomatic virus transmission as the economy reopens; using social media to promote a consistent message about the danger of asymptomatic spread, especially given that the African American community is experiencing a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths, and ensuring that when large events are permissible organizers comply with local permitting requirements, which should be consistently enforced in ALL communities, not just in African American neighborhoods.

Ironically, on the same morning as the Spring Hill neighborhood events in question, I was part of a group of 19 racially, politically and socially diverse individuals from eight states and 11 cities gathered for a virtual "Color Line Roundtable."

participants thoughtfully discussed what values, beliefs and principles would guide their votes -- or abstentions -- in the November election. Each of us had a slightly different way of articulating those foundational beliefs, but, as one first-time participant emailed me after the discussion, it was "affirming to hear the commonality of beliefs and principles amongst a group of people who obviously also have some significant differences in opinions and positions."

upon further reflection, I have come to appreciate the value of our community's years-long series of roundtable discussions. Covid-19 restrictions and Floyd's murder might have complicated relations with law enforcement officials, but they offer yet another opportunity for us to talk candidly about the complex issues of effective community policing, racial diversity, equity and inclusion.