Realitista

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? — discovermagazine.com — Readability

John Hawks is in the middle of explaining his research on human evolution when he drops a bombshell. Running down a list of changes that have occurred in our skeleton and skull since the Stone Age, the University of Wisconsin anthropologist nonchalantly adds, “And it’s also clear the brain has been shrinking.”

“Shrinking?” I ask. “I thought it was getting larger.” The whole ascent-of-man thing.

“That was true for 2 million years of our evolution,” Hawks says. “But there has been a reversal.”

He rattles off some dismaying numbers: Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cc, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball. The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. “I’d call that major downsizing in an evolutionary eyeblink,” he says. “This happened in China, Europe, Africa—everywhere we look.”

If our brain keeps dwindling at that rate over the next 20,000 years, it will start to approach the size of that found in Homo erectus, a relative that lived half a million years ago and had a brain volume of only 1,100 cc. Possibly owing to said shrinkage, it takes me a while to catch on. “Are you saying we’re getting dumber?” I ask.

Numerous phone calls later, it dawns on me that the world’s foremost experts do not really know why our organ of intellect has been vanishing. But after long ignoring the issue, some of them have at least decided the matter is of sufficient importance to warrant a formal inquiry. They have even drawn some bold, albeit preliminary, conclusions.

Want to Power Your iPhone by Burning Wood After the Apocalypse? Look No Further.

Is it a portable stove or a gadget charger? How about both. The BioLite ($130) is a compact, portable stove that burns sticks, twigs, pine cones, and other renewable resources instead of petroleum gas, lighting quickly and bringing water to a boil in no time. In addition, it packs a USB port on the front that draws its power from the heat of the fire, letting you charge your phone, GPS, or LED lights miles from the nearest outlet.

ePawn Arena gives figure-based board games a fresh chance

I was wondering when the first generally available digital board gaming table would arrive. Well it looks like it’s here.

” alt=”” />

Europe Weighs a Tough Law on Online Privacy and User Data

The EU does some cool things around defending rights. The US congress should take notes.

The proposed data protection regulation from the European Commission, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, could have significant consequences for all Internet companies that trade in personal data, whether it is pictures that people post on social networks or what they buy on retail sites or look for on a search engine.

The regulation would compel Web sites to tell consumers why their data is being collected and retain it for only as long as necessary. If data is stolen, sites would have to notify regulators within 24 hours. It also offers consumers the right to transport their data from one service to another — to deactivate a Facebook account, for example, and take one’s trove of pictures and posts and contacts to Google Plus.

If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?

It is a commonplace of scientific discussion that correlation does not imply causation. Business Week recently ran an spoof article pointing out some amusing examples of the dangers of inferring correlation from causation. For example, the article points out that Facebook’s growth has been strongly correlated with the yield on Greek government bonds:

Despite this strong correlation, it would not be wise to conclude that the success of Facebook has somehow caused the current (2009-2012) Greek debt crisis, nor that the Greek debt crisis has caused the adoption of Facebook! Of course, while it’s all very well to piously state that correlation doesn’t imply causation, it does leave us with a conundrum: under what conditions, exactly, can we use experimental data to deduce a causal relationship between two or more variables?

The standard scientific answer to this question is that (with some caveats) we can infer causality from a well designed randomized controlled experiment. Unfortunately, while this answer is satisfying in principle and sometimes useful in practice, it’s often impractical or impossible to do a randomized controlled experiment. And so we’re left with the question of whether there are other procedures we can use to infer causality from experimental data. And, given that we can find more general procedures for inferring causal relationships, what does causality mean, anyway, for how we reason about a system?

The future of food: By 2050 there will be another 2.5 billion people on the planet. How to feed them? Science's answer: a diet of algae, insects and meat grown in a lab

How can we feed the 2.5 billion more people – an extra China and India – likely to be alive in 2050? The UN says we will have to nearly double our food production and governments say we should adopt new technologies and avoid waste, but however you cut it, there are already one billion chronically hungry people, there’s little more virgin land to open up, climate change will only make farming harder to grow food in most places, the oceans are overfished, and much of the world faces growing water shortages.

Fifty years ago, when the world’s population was around half what it is now, the answer to looming famines was “the green revolution” – a massive increase in the use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers. It worked, but at a great ecological price. We grow nearly twice as much food as we did just a generation ago, but we use three times as much water from rivers and underground supplies. Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.