When I wrote last year about the Center for Global Development’s Carbon Monitoring for Action database last November when it launched, I noted what a wealth of information it offered on sources of carbon dioxide emissions throughout the world, from the worst actors down to whether your own utility is an angel or a villain when it comes to CO² emissions. With its latest data, CGD shows again what a mess we’re in when it comes to reining in greenhouse emissions. Some highlights, which are more lowlights:

*China set a new world record this year, surpassing the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of CO² from power generation (itself the source of just over one-quarter of the world’s CO² emissions). But Americans can still be proud that their power-sector emissions are still nearly four times those of China on a per capita basis—though not number one globally. That “honor” goes to Australia, with 10 tons of CO² per person per year compared to the U.S.’s 9.5.

*China accounts for more than half of the increase in global CO² emissions due to power generation over the past year, mostly due to the construction of, on average, one new coal-fired plant every week.

*Chinese power plants will produce about 3.1 billion tons of CO² this year, up from about 2.7 billion tons in 2007. Power plants in the U.S will produce about 2.8 billion tons of CO² this year, about the same as last year.

*Global emissions from power generation have grown just over 34 percent in the past eight years, to 11.4 billion tons per year from 8.5 billion tons in 2000. Those additional 2.9 billion tons are equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of Australia, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. I really don’t think you are turning down your thermostat in winter or your AC in summer, people. As CGD’s David Wheeler put it, “Emissions from power generation are racing in the wrong direction.” Did someone say Kyoto?

*Since it’s always fun to know who are the worst villains, CARMA finds that the world’s biggest corporate carbon emitter is China’s Huaneng Power International, whose plants pump out about 285 million tons of CO² per year, compared to 227 million tons produced by all of the power plants in the United Kingdom and almost as much as all of Africa (335 million tons). In the U.S., the biggest CO² emitter is Southern Co. with over 200 million tons per year, followed by American Electric Power Company Inc. (175 million tons) and Duke Energy Corp. (112 million tons).

Does anyone really think we’re going to conserve our way out of a climate crisis? As CGD’s Kevin Ummel says, “The needed shift to renewable and low-carbon alternatives is happening far too slowly to avert dangerous climate change.” T. Boone Pickens, you have your work cut out for you.

The reason you can’t swat a fly is that, for a creature with a brain hardly deserving of the name, the fly is a marvel of calculating ability. But before I explain what scientists led by Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology (that would be the Dickinson whose email is "flyman") have learned about how the fly brain calculates the location of the looming swatter, formulates an escape plan and plants its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way (all within about 100 milliseconds of spotting the swatter), let’s cut to the chase: the best way to swat a fly, Dickinson says, is “not to swat at the fly’s starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter.”

Where will it jump? Using high-resolution, high-speed imaging of flies in action, the scientists are reporting today online in Current Biology, they found that if the descending swatter (they used a 6-inch-diameter black disk, dropping at a 50-degree angle toward a fly) comes from in front of the fly, the fly moves its middle legs forward and leans back, then raises and extends its legs to push off backward, away from the swatter. Are you approaching your quarry from behind? The fly has a nearly 360-degree field of view and can see behind itself, so when it spies the swatter behind it it moves its middle legs a tiny bit backwards and flies forward. With a swatter from the side, the fly keeps its middle legs still and leans in the opposite direction before jumping. The idea is to position its center of mass so that when the legs push off the fly will evade the swatter.

“When the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat,” Dickinson says. “The fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture.” It does all this “long” (in fly time) before it takes off. “These movements are made very rapidly, within about 200 milliseconds” of seeing the swatter, says Dickinson, “but within that time the animal determines where the threat is coming from and activates an appropriate set of movements to position its legs and wings.”

Don’t believe the folk wisdom that if you approach the fly really, really slowly so your swatter doesn’t stir the air then the fly won’t notice. The Caltech scientists found that flies can tell you’re coming by sight alone—and remember that 360-degrees of vision thing.

It is Dickinson’s hope that discoveries about the fly’s neuronal processing will shed light on more complicated brains, not that his work will help humans kill flies better. His admiration for the little guys’ abilities, in fact, have made him hope that people will “think before they swat.”

Metin Eren just spent three years in his lab living like a Neanderthal—or at least working like one. Starting with a specimen of a green sand silicate from the chalk cliffs at Seaton on the Devonshire coast, he used hammerstones to knock off flakes the way Neanderthals did and then a piece of boxwood to knock flakes off the way Homo sapiens sapiens, who replaced Neanderthals in Europe, did. He also found antler billets to be quite useful for the finer details of stone-tool making.

Eren played caveman because he is a student at Britain’s University of Exeter in “experimental archaeology,” which seeks to discover the past by going beyond mere observation to actual experimentation—in Eren’s case, working hunks of stone into flakes and blades. The idea was to determine whether the latter, which are narrower and were introduced by modern Homo sapiens about 40,000 years ago after they had poured into Europe from Africa via the Middle East about 100,000 years ago, were a superior technology. It is only by “learning how to physically make these tools that we were able to finally replicate them accurately enough to come up with our findings,” says Eren, who with colleagues describes the results this evening in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Judging by the examples of his handiwork that Eren posts on his googlepage, he would have made an excellent caveman.

According to the conventional wisdom in archaeology, blade-making is technologically superior to flake production: you get more blades from the same hunk of stone (the core), you are able to use more of the core and thus waste less, and blades have a much longer cutting edge per weight of stone, making them a more efficient tool. But these beliefs about the advantages of blade production have not been thoroughly tested by actually making lots of the tools the way our ancestors did. That's where Eren’s stone-age activities came in.

After producing piles of flakes and blades, it looked pretty doubtful that Neanderthals had the worse of it, tech-wise. Blade technology was no more efficient than flakes, he found. That casts doubt on the belief that Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals went extinct (the last ones vanished about 28,000 years ago, in Spain) because of a superior intellect manifested in superior technology.

For one thing, the useful life of flake edges “surpasses that of blades of equivalent mass because the narrower blades are more rapidly exhausted by retouch,” the scientists find; the newer technology, in other words, had built-in obsolescence. For another, although blades do have more cutting edge per unit weight on average, the edge length varies wildly, with the result that blade-making is “a riskier business that is more prone to failures.” Nor does blade-making use the core stone more efficiently. “It remains to be shown that blades are in any way better butchery tools than flakes," write the scientists.

“Our research disputes a major pillar holding up the long-held assumption that Homo sapiens were more advanced than Neanderthals,” says Eren. “It is time for archaeologists to start searching for other reasons why Neanderthals became extinct while our ancestors survived. Technologically speaking, there is no clear advantage of one tool over the other. When we think of Neanderthals, we need to stop thinking in terms of 'stupid' or 'less advanced' and more in terms of 'different.'”

But if blades were not technologically superior to flakes, why did Homo sapiens adopt them? Because blades made what the scientists call “a fashion statement.” That is, they symbolized for the early modern humans a shared and flashy-looking technology that served as “cognitive glue,” binding members of this species into a cohesive whole recognizable by their fashion—er, blades. Eren put it this way: “Colonizing a continent isn’t easy. Colonizing a continent during the Ice Age is even harder. So, for early Homo sapiens colonizing Ice Age Europe, a new shared and flashy-looking technology might serve as one form of social glue by which larger social networks were bonded. Thus, during hard times and resource droughts these larger social net works might act like a type of ‘life insurance,’ ensuring exchange and trade among members on the same team.”

A growing number of studies are looking at whether non-human animals have a moral sense. One of my favorites from a few years back focused on fairness. Scientists at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center placed two cups of food on a tray that was counterweighted so that, in order for the capuchin monkeys in a nearby cage to reel it in and have a snack, both had to pull a bar. By cooperating, the monkeys could move the tray against the cage so that Sammy could reach one cup and Bias the other. The monkeys figured it out and cooperated.

Here’s where it got interesting: when the scientists filled only one food cup, the monkey whose efforts brought him the full cup shared the spoils with the monkey who worked just as hard but got only an empty cup. By sharing, of course, a monkey may figure that when he is the one to work hard but get an empty food cup, his companion will share. When the companion is a relative, monkeys are even more willing to work even if their food cup (which they can see) holds nothing, perhaps expecting this generosity. “Winners were, in effect, compensating their partners for received assistance,” Yerkes’ Frans de Waal wrote. Fair is fair.

Then the scientists changed things so that it took only one monkey to reel in the tray. In this case, when the monkey who did the work all by himself reached the food cup, he almost never shared the treat with the monkey who hadn't worked. Again, fairness dictates that you don’t get a reward if you don’t work.

It turns out that monkeys know their own kind pretty well when it comes to sharing. In their latest work, reported online this evening in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Yerkes led by de Waal and Kristi Leimgruber gave eight adult female capuchins a choice of two tokens. One meant that the scientists would give her, and only her, a slice of apple; the other token meant that the scientists would give apple slices both to her and to the capuchin she was paired with for the experiment—a relative, an unrelated female from her social group or a stranger. When paired with a relative or familiar monkey, the females chose the “let’s share” option much more often; when paired with a stranger, they chose the selfish option, even though selecting the token that would have brought her companion an apple slice would have cost her nothing.

“The fact that the capuchins predominantly selected the pro-social option must mean that seeing another monkey receive food is satisfying or rewarding for them,” said de Waal. “We believe pro-social behavior is empathy based. Empathy increases in both humans and animals with social closeness, and in our study, closer partners made more pro-social choices. They seem to care for the welfare of those they know.”

You have to wonder, though, if it was more Machiavellian than that. With a stranger, the monkeys might figure, "why bother doing a kindness, I’ll never see her again?" With a friend or relative, the calculus might be, "I’d better select the token that gives her an apple slice, too, so she’ll do me a favor when we get out of this dumb experiment and back to the troop."

It’s always risky to anthropomorphize animal behavior by, in this case, imputing a sense of generosity or empathy. De Waal and his team admit that their next task is to determine whether capuchins act to get their friend or relative food because they like to eat together, because they like to see another monkey enjoying food, or because they expect a quid pro quo down the line.

This week brought a rich assortment of “isn’t that amazing” animal stories, including the mother gorilla in a German zoo who continued to carry her dead infant. Mourning (to be anthropomorphic about it) is hardly unknown in the non-human part of the animal kingdom. In 2006 a panda named Ya Ya, living in a zoo in China, seemed inconsolable after accidentally crushing her newborn to death. She wailed and kept searching for the tiny body after a keeper took it away, and when the keeper checked on her she looked at him with teary eyes.

Animals also display compassion, or what looks an awful lot like it. In 2006 scientists reported that after an elephant matriarch—“Eleanor”—living in the Samburu Reserve in northern Kenya collapsed one day, the matriarch of a different family walked over and nudged her to her feet using her tusks. When Eleanor was too shaky to stand, Grace kept at her, pushing Eleanor to walk. When Eleanor fell, Grace appeared “very stressed,” trumpeted loudly and kept nudging Eleanor. She stayed with the dying Eleanor all night.

Scientists argue about whether that kind of behavior means what we humans impute to it, though it’s tough to see how expending time and effort to help an unrelated animal could be a genetically-based instinct.

In any case, this week also brought evidence that animals have an instinct for democracy.

As the British magazine New Scientist reports, macaques have a sense of what constitutes a majority vote. Before a group of Tonkean macaques moves, a single individual takes a few tentative steps, walks off to a distance of 3 to 15 feet, looks back, and waits, reported Odile Petit of the National Centre of Scientific Research in Strasbourg, France. Not surprisingly, the others eventually followed.

What was surprising was how the troop behaved when two monkeys had different ideas about where to go and what to do—forage or stay put, for instance. A few monkeys would line up behind each would-be leader (whose sex, age and status didn’t seem to matter: “Even the children can get the group moving,” Cédric Sueur, a graduate student who worked with Petit, told New Scientist), and once one of them had a clear majority the monkeys backing the losing candidate switched to the winner, avoiding fragmenting the troop.

Democracy in action.

How do you look at a face? Since 1965 it has been a tenet of psychology that people look at faces through the triangle method; that is, they scan the eyes (especially) and then the mouth, in a basic visual process assumed to be common to all humans. But guess what? This conclusion was based on studies in which only Westerners participated. Now that someone has finally thought to study non-Westerners, you can consign the universality of facial processing to the scientific dustbin.

As scientists report today in the journal PLoS ONE, Westerners tend to look at particular features on a face, such as the eyes or mouth, while East Asians focus on the center of the face, which provides a more holistic view of all the features.

“Social experience has an impact on how people look at faces,” said Roberto Caldara of the University of Glasgow, who led the study. One reason may be that in traditional East Asian cultures, direct eye contact may be considered rude. Another is that how children are brought up affects even something as basic as visual processing. Westerners’ habit of visually skipping among the eyes and mouth fits the stereotype of Westerners as more focused on components of a whole and being more individualistic, while East Asians’ homing in on the center of a face—from which it is possible to take in the whole—reflects a more collectivist bent and greater interest in the overall picture. It also supports the stereotype of Westerners thinking and perceiving in a more focused way while East Asians think and perceive more globally or holistically. Or, as the scientists write, “Westerners focus analytically on salient objects. . . . By contrast, people from China, Korea and Japan . . . focus more holistically on relationships and similarities among objects.”

Despite the decades-old assumption that human beings the world over see faces the same way, the study shows instead that “the external environment, including the society in which we develop, is very influential in basic human mechanisms,” said Caldara. As he and his colleagues write, “Psychologists and philosophers have long assumed that while culture impacts on the way we think about the world, basic perceptual mechanisms are common among humans. We provide evidence that social experience and cultural factors shape human eye movements for processing faces, which contradicts [that] view.”

People of different cultures literally see the world, and the people in it, differently.

The work jibes with the research of Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan, whose 2003 book “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why,” includes such fascinating nuggets as what Westerners and East Asians see when they look at pictures (Japanese see and remember background elements—such as plants, rock and bubbles in an aquarium—much more than Americans do). It also fits with a fascinating new theory that I wrote about last April, which seeks to explain why different cultures are more or less individualistic or collectivist (basically, societies situated in areas where disease-causing pathogens are prevalent tend to be more group-oriented, xenophobic and collectivist, while those where pathogens have historically been fewer—cold climates, for the most part—had the luxury of individualism, extraversion and openness). The new work underlines even more strongly the gaps in scientists’ understanding of how cultures become distinct.

Next time you want to start a bar fight, proclaim to everyone within earshot that “race is not real; it is just a social and cultural construct and has no biological validity.” Then duck before you get punched in the face. . . . but as you're avoiding injury try to hand your would-be assailants a new paper published online this afternoon by the journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, which concludes that classifying people by the crude category of race—as in, of African, Asian or European ancestry—for medical purposes, as some people want to do, is really, really stupid.

It would seem that nothing is as obvious as the reality of race. But while differences in skin color and facial features that are characteristic of the continent you trace your ancestry to—Africa, Asia or Europe—are clear, they are also superficial and potentially misleading. As I wrote way back in 1995, where you draw the lines between races depends on which trait you notice. It happens that skin color and facial features are obvious, which is why we draw the dividing lines where we do.

But how you group people depends on which traits you focus on: sorting people according to one set of traits produces different groupings than sorting them by different but equally valid traits. Say you decide that the distinguishing trait is the gene for hemoglobin. If you divide humankind by which of two forms of the gene each person has, then equatorial Africans, Italians and Greeks fall into the “sickle-cell race;” Swedes and South Africa’s Xhosas (Nelson Mandela’s ethnic group) are in the healthy-hemoglobin race. Or how about dividing humanity by who has epicanthic eye folds, which produce the "Asian" eye? Then the !Kung San (Bushmen) belong with the Japanese and Chinese. Or say you sort humanity by the presence of the lactase gene. Then Norwegians, Arabians, north Indians and the Fulani of northern Nigeria are in one race, while everyone else—other Africans, Japanese, Native Americans—forms the no-lactase race. Depending on which trait you choose to demarcate races, “you won't get anything that remotely tracks conventional [race]categories,” anthropologist Alan Goodman told me back then.

The point is, “race” is too broad a category, and three is not enough. There are indeed real genetic, biological differences between people, but at the level of population or ethnicity, not race. As Goodman put it then, “race, as a way of organizing [what we know about that variation], is incredibly simplified . . . There is no organizing principle by which you could put 5 billion people into so few categories in a way that would tell you anything important about humankind’s diversity.”

Which brings us to the new study. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute got the cool idea of analyzing the genomes of two white guys who, according to the conventional racial categories, belong to the same race. The two are Venter himself and James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. Venter led the private effort to sequence the human genome, winding up in a tie with the public project to do the same.

It happens that the genomes of both men are in the public domain. Watson agreed to have his sequenced and published last year, with Venter right behind. So what do the genomes reveal?

The two men metabolize drugs, including antidepressants, codeine, antipsychotics and the cancer drug tamoxifen, differently. Venter has two functional copies of the CYP2D6 form of the cytochrome P-450 gene, which metabolizes more than 75 percent of drugs, while Watson has two copies of the more-sluggish variant of the gene. That’s rare for Caucasians (only 3 percent of whites have the sluggish version), but common in East Asians (49 percent of whom have it). Funny, Watson doesn’t look Chinese. But if Watson’s doctor decided to use race-based medicine to predict how he would metabolize drugs, she’d say, well, we have a white guy here, and whites rarely have the sluggish version, so I’ll assume Watson doesn’t have it either. As a result, the drug would stay in Watson’s system longer, with stronger effects compared to someone in whom the drug was quickly metabolized and cleared from the body. “It is unlikely that a doctor would guess that optimal drug dosages might differ for Drs. Watson and Venter,” the scientists write.

That’s why Venter and colleagues conclude that race is too crude a proxy for what genetic group—ethnicity or, as biologists say, population—someone belongs to. It is imperative to “go beyond simplistic ethnic categorization,” they write, since that can be seriously—and perhaps fatally—misleading. (In the U.S., some 100,000 people a year die of adverse drug reactions, many caused by an inability to properly metabolize the medication because of a particular CYP2D6 variation.) “Race/ethnicity should be considered only a makeshift solution for personalized genomics because it is too approximate,” they write.

We are on the verge of the $1,000 genome, and existing tests for CYP variants and other genes relevant to medicine cost a few hundred dollars. If we want to tailor medical care to someone’s genes, we should make sure what those genes are. And not assume that all white guys have “Caucasian” genes.

Memo to Gov. Schwarzenegger: you are right to make California a leader in the fight to control global warming. If a new study is right, your state is going to get hammered more than any other in the country as the climate changes. Droughts? Wildfires? Yes, yes and more yes.

One reason climate change doesn’t get people as fired up as, say, $4 gasoline is that its worst impacts lie years in the future, and will hit different regions differently. Alaskan ports that used to be ice-locked for most of the year can now be used for more weeks before and after the summer’s temperature peak than was ever possible, for instance. It’s easy for people, who have ostrich-like tendencies anyway, to convince themselves thattheir region will make out just fine—maybe even enjoy milder winters.

And they may be right. A new study, which will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, projects how seriously global warming will affect different areas of the United States and Mexico. Look for yourself, but the bottom line is that southern California, northern Mexico and western Texas will be the climate-change hotspots in coming decades, the scientists, led by Purdue University’s Noah S. Diffenbaugh, conclude.

“One interesting and surprising result is that we see the same hotspot patterns even at lower greenhouse gas concentrations," saysDiffenbaugh. "This suggests that we may be able to see these hotspots emerging already.”

Why do animals, notably women, outlive their reproductive years? Nature would seem to have little or no use for us once we reach middle age, let alone our dotage; after all, the only thing evolution cares about—by which I mean, acts on—is how many offspring we leave. Why, then, should we live beyond the time when we can reproduce?

That mystery has given rise to the grandmother hypothesis: the idea that primates, elephants and a few other long-lived species survive long enough for their offspring to have offspring because older generations retain a store of knowledge that helps their descendants survive and multiply.

In the case of the elephants, scientists describe in a new study in the journal Biology Letters how they followed three family groups during the 1993 drought in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park, the most severe one in that region in the past 35 years. Sixteen of 81 elephant calves in the three groups died; normally, only two or three would have. But the mortality was not spread evenly among the three groups. The two groups that left the park suffered lower mortality rates than the one that stayed; the wanderers apparently found enough food and water outside the park to provide for themselves and their young.

Which raises the question: why did the two groups leave the park? They both had elderly matriarchs—45 and 38 years old, respectively. The group that stayed put had a 33-year-old matriarch. These older females may have been able to draw upon memories of an earlier drought and how they survived it: the 45-year-old, for instance, born in 1948, would have been 10 when the great drought of 1958-61 began. The 38-year-old (born in 1955) would have been only three then, but was 6 when it ended, old enough to remember. The 35-year old, born the first year of the previous drought and only 3 when it ended, would have been too young to remember it.

That suggests that experienced matriarchs give their families an edge in periods of drought through their memories of distant, life-sustaining sources of food and water, says Charles Foley of the Wildlife Conservation Society, who led the study: “Older females with knowledge of distant resources become crucial to the survival of herds during periods of extreme climatic events. It’s enticing to think that these old females and their memories of previous periods of trauma and survival would have meant all the difference.”

Sympathy for the U.S.? Kobe Bryant in action against China. Photo: Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Literally—as in, they feel in their own arms and hands what other players are doing. According to a study released Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, that ability gives them a crucial edge in predicting whether a shot will go in, which in turn tells them whether they should start running down court or going in for a rebound. Elite basketball players are better than even veteran coaches, not to mention novices with no experience watching or playing the game, at predicting whether a shot will land go in, find Salvatore Aglioti of Universite de Roma and his colleagues.

What explains the superiority? According to measurements the scientists did of elite players’ brain activity, they had significantly greater activity in their own motor cortex—especially the region responsible for moving the hand and forearm—when they were watching someone else’s shot than non-players did. They felt the other guy's moves.

In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters (considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw, compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and writers.

The players were especially accurate when they had to call “in” or “out” just when the ball left the shooter’s hand. That suggests that the prediction is not based on the ball’s trajectory—it doesn’t have one at this early stage—but on the shooter’s body posture and finger position. The best players “predicted the shot’s fate by reading the body kinematics,” the scientists write. They were significantly better than non-players (even the coaches, who watch as much basketball as the players) at predicting when a free throw would miss. If it’s the last one a shooter is taking, that’s when you need to go in for the rebound.

The basis for the players' ability to predict free-throw success seems to be mirror neurons in the motor cortex. These neurons fire when we see someone else undertake some action; you can think of them as the brain’s empathy neurons, since they seem to be the basis for our ability to, literally, feel what someone else is experiencing. This neuronal activity was higher in players than in non-players, as if observing others’ actions triggered “a covert simulation of the very same action,” write the scientists. That unconscious simulation serves as the basis for the impressive accuracy in predicting whether a free throw will go in: it’s as if the players are unconsciously processing the idea of what would happen if they held their arm and fingers the way the shooter is. That requires actual shooting experience, not just watching. “Seeing without doing is not enough to achieve excellence,” the scientists conclude.

If you watch Olympics hoops, keep an eye on the phenomenal anticipatory skills of the elite players. They often know when a shot is good or not before it has even left the shooter’s fingertips. If they can’t, don’t expect to see them at the medal ceremony.

Nothing against fossils, but when it comes to tracing the story of human evolution they’re taking a back seat lately to everything from DNA to lice, and even the DNAof lice. A few years ago scientists compared the DNA of body lice (which are misnamed: they live in clothing, not the human body) to that of head lice, from which they evolved, and concluded that the younger lineage split off from the older no more than 114,000 years ago, as I described in a cover story last year. Since body lice probably arose when a new habitat did, and since that habitat was clothing, that’s when our ancestors first needed a haberdasher. The Y chromosome has been an even greater source of clues to human evolution, showing among other things that the most recent common ancestor of all men alive today lived 89,000 years ago in Africa, and that the first modern humans walked out of Africa about 66,000 years ago and became the ancestors of everyone outside that natal continent.

The Y chromosome is at it again. Scientists reported this week that an analysis of Y chromosomes in a dozen African populations sheds light on one of the more controversial questions in human prehistory: did innovations such as animal herding spread because their inventors did, migrating to new places and teaching the natives new tricks, or because the idea spread on its own, as neighboring tribes noticed the new trick and adopted it, and then neighbors of those guys did the same, on and on until the idea had spread like wildlfire?

According to a paper in the online version of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pastoralism—cattle- and sheep-herding—arrived in southern Africa 2,000 years ago on a wave of human migration from eastern Africa, not by the spread of ideas to neighbors near and far.

“There's a tradition in archaeology of saying people don’t move very much; they just transfer ideas,” said genetic anthropologist Joanna Mountain of Stanford University, senior author of the paper with geneticist Peter Underhill. But in this case, at least, the people themselves moved.

Scientists knew about two prehistoric migrations of Bantu-speaking people from eastern Africa, where pastoralism first arose, to southern Africa: 30,000 years ago and again 1,500 years ago. But anthropological evidence showed that the first sheep and cattle herds existed in southern Africa 2,000 years ago. That suggested that the idea jumped from group to group (“hey, look what those guys are doing”) without the people themselves actually trekking south.

The Stanford scientists analyzed genetic variation on the Y chromosome, which is passed almost intact from father to son. The only change through the generations occurs through rare mutations. By counting and comparing mutations, geneticists can trace ancestries of living men, in this case 13 populations in Tanzania and in the Namibia-Angola-Botswana border region of southern Africa. In this case, it revealed a novel mutation in some men in both places, which implies that those men had a common ancestor. The novel mutation arose in eastern Africa about 10,000 years ago and was carried by migration to southern Africa about 2,000 years ago not by Bantu-speakers, in whom the mutation is absent, but in speakers of what’s called the Nilotic language. These unsuspected ancestors first brought herds of animals to southern Africa before the Bantu migration.

Why did they migrate south? Underhill suspects that a shift in rainfall 10,000 years ago caused some people to stay in rainy areas and grow crops, while others moved to dry regions and lived the nomadic life of herders, he and colleagues proposed in the June issue of the journal Antiquity.

More than this: Western lowland gorillas. Photo: Thomas Breuer/Wildlife Conservation Society-Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Conservation biologists used to think that there are perhaps 110,000 western lowland gorillas, which live in seven countries of equatorial Africa. But when scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society (best known for running the Bronx Zoo) combed an area of 18,000 square miles of rainforest and isolated swamps in the Republic of Congo and counted gorilla "nests," they reported at the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh, they came up with a population estimate that essentially doubles the known population of western lowland gorillas. (Gorillas construct nests each night from leaves and branches for sleeping.) In some patches of forest, there were eight gorillas per square kilometer, one of the highest densities ever recorded.

Western lowland gorillas are one of four gorilla sub-species, the others being mountain gorillas, Cross River gorillas and eastern lowland gorillas. The first two are classified as “critically endangered” by the IUCN, and the last as endangered.

Seventy three thousand of the newly-discovered gorillas are in the Ntokou-Pikounda region, and 52,000 around Ndoki-Likouala, including nearly 6,000 in an isolated Raphia swamp. WCS credits the Republic of Congo’s long-term conservation management for the gorillas’ survival, including setting aside protected areas such as the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and the Lac Tele Community Reserve. But the remoteness and inaccessibility of the gorilla lands clearly are key to the survival of this species, which is elsewhere endangered by habitat destruction from, in particular, logging both legal and illegal, which opens up remote regions (as a result of road building) to illegal hunting. Thousands of the newly-found gorillas live outside protected areas.

“Northern Republic of Congo contains the mother lode of gorillas,” said Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, WCS’s President and CEO. “It also shows that conservation in the Republic of Congo is working. This discovery should be a rallying cry for the world that we can protect other vulnerable and endangered species.”

It also makes you wonder, what else is out there in remote regions of the world? Years ago I wrote a few stories about cryptozoology, the search for and study of creatures unknown to science. Yes, there were the predictable reports of Bigfoot and Nessie, but the respectable core of the discipline is the idea that even in an era when it seems no place is innocent of the human foot print, there are still undiscovered places—and beasts. And now we know about another 125,000 of them.

For at least two decades the dogma in the conservation world had been that habitat destruction, not hunting, posed the gravest threat to the world’s rare animals. But the slaughter in the jungle was just the most notorious wake-up call that poaching was back, and in a way that threatened to send an unknown number of species into extinction. After the murders of the Congo gorillas, scientists realized that the proposed reclassification would be premature: mountain gorillas are still critically endangered and, according to the first comprehensive review in five years of the world’s primates, they are not alone. Monkeys, apes and other primates are disappearing from the face of the Earth. And as with Congo’s gorillas, a key cause is hunting. Our cousins are being eaten into extinction.

Take it from a fish: if you have your eye on someone cute at the beach or a party this weekend, pretend to your friends that you have no interest whatsoever in him (or her), to throw them off the scent.

Everything else being equal, male Atlantic mollies (Poecilia Mexicana) prefer to mate with female Atlantic mollies rather than female Amazon mollies (a cousin species, but one in which male sperm do not contribute any genes to the offspring, meaning there’s hardly any evolutionary reason to bother mating). They all prefer largefemale Atlantic mollies to smaller ones, since the former are more fecund. That’s indeed what scientists led by Martin Plath of the University of Potsdam in Germany and the University of Oklahoma found: they put male mollies in a tank with a large female and a smaller one, and the males nipped (that’s a sign of affection) and tried to mate with the larger molly more and sooner than with the smaller. Same thing when the males had a choice of an Atlantic molly or an Amazon: they went for the girl of their own species.

But as the biologists report in a study in the online edition of Current Biology, when another male molly was watching the action in a nearby Plexiglass cylinder, they ignore the girl of their dreams and direct their sexual advances toward the punier female in the first case and the Amazon in the second—neither of which was their true first choice.

“I find it particularly interesting that fish are capable of such a sophisticated behavior,” Plath said in a statement. “The study highlights that traits that we typically ascribe to humans only can also be found in other, seemingly simpler animals and that no consciousness or self-awareness is needed for a behavior like deception to occur.”

Deception is rife in the animal world—the non-human part, too. Ravens try to trick other birds about where they hid food, for instance. But this seems to be the first evidence that males deceive other males about their preferred mate rather than simply, as Plath expected, acting as though they’d lost interest in sex. Feigning interest in the not-girl-of-their dreams is smart strategy: male mollies are known to copy other males’ mating preferences, so by leading a rival away from his preferred female a male increases the chance that he and not they will sire offspring.

Does anyone need more proof that stem cells are not going to serve as universal repair kits for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease and spinal cord injury any time soon? Here is what counts as a big breakthrough in stem-cell research these days: producing cells that can then be studied for clues to what drugs will work against a particular disease.

I don’t mean to be cynical. Scientists today are announcing what is truly a milestone: they have taken skin cells from two elderly women—ages 82 and 89—who have Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and used a technique that was announced less than a year ago to make the cells go backward in time, so to speak, and become embryonic stem cells. The researchers then made the stem cells morph into spinal motor neurons, the very ones that die in ALS. It’s a milestone because earlier studies had generated these induced stem cells from healthy donors, but no one knew if it would work on cells from elderly patients with a serious genetic disease.

So kudos all around. But the achievement is not, as the press release puts it, “an important step toward the goal of using induced pluripotent stem cells . . . to treat disease”—except if the step is small and the goal is decades away.

Just to recap what scientists led by Kevin Eggan of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Christopher Henderson of Columbia are reporting online today in Science. They started with skin cells from the two women, who had an inherited form of ALS in which one gene is mutated (this mutation is the cause of only about 2 to 5 percent of ALS cases, however, something to keep in mind). They then followed the recipe discovered last year, introducing four genes into the skin cells to “reprogram” them, essentially causing the cells to revert to embryonic stem-cell status. They then bathed the "pluripotent" cells in a stew of molecules that caused them to morph into motor neurons. Voila: motor neurons with the exact same genetic make-up as the women.

Not too long ago, that possibility was hailed as a technique for producing “patient-specific cells” that could then be returned to the patient to cure what ailed her. But think about it. The cells carry the same mutation that causes these women’s ALS in the first place. Transplanting them into the women would be like putting a cirrhotic liver into an alcoholic whose own liver was kaput.

Sure, maybe the cells could be used to generate genetically-matched healthy neurons to replace the diseased ones. But in a press conference, the scientists were quite clear about the more likely next step. “Because the cells contain the genes that produced the disease [in these women],” Eggan said, “you can study them in a Petri dish.” Henderson added, “we don’t understand the disease process, and that is preventing us from developing cures. But we now have in a culture dish cells with the same genetic make-up as the ALS patients in the very cells that are affected by the disease. We’ll see if they degenerate and die faster than normal cells, and will try to understand the mechanism of the degeneration process, since it is the mechanism that is the key to a cure, and will test chemical compounds that might stop the degeneration.”

That may sound like something that should have been done before, but in fact it has been impossible to isolate the diseased motor neurons from ALS patients, of which there areabout 30,000 in the United States. With a limitless supply of those neurons thanks to the iPS technique, scientists can both study the disease process and try everything they can think of to stop it.

Eggan had originally hoped to produce patient-specific stem cells using human eggs, in the process called therapeutic cloning, or somatic-cell nuclear transfer. In this technique, scientists remove all the genetic material from the ovum and replace it with the DNA from the skin cell of a patient. The fertilized ovum undergoes several cell divisions, yielding stem cells that the scientists then extract and induce to differentiate into the motor neurons they want to study.

But despite blanketing the Boston area with ads asking women to donate, he had no takers: women were eager to help, but when they learned that Massachusetts law prohibits the scientists from compensating them in any way—not for lost time at work, not for transportation—they had second thoughts. Women can, of course, be paid thousands of dollars for donating eggs to infertile couples. “Over the last two years we’ve done everything we could within the law to recruit women to donate ova,” Eggan said. “We were never able to recruit enough donors because we were legally prevented from providing the same sort of compensation that these women would receive for donating their ova for in vitro fertilization.”