Now that the military dictatorship in Myanmar [Burma] has cut off the country’s Internet access, and few reporters have been able to enter the closed country, the newest means to document human rights abuses hasn’t come a moment too soon. As troops storm Buddhist monasteries and kill protesters (at least nine on Thursday, Sept. 27), scientists are marshaling high-resolution satellite images to document the destruction of villages, forced relocations, and growing military presence at sites across eastern Burma where eyewitnesses have reported human rights violations.

It is the latest use of digital satellite imagery from companies such as Digital Globe, whose QuickBird and WorldView-1 satellites (the latter launched earlier this month) have provided images that are revolutionizing fields as diverse as chimp conservation and oil-spill tracking.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has previously used satellite image analysis to document human rights violations and destruction in Darfur and Zimbabwe. Like those sites, Burma is an especially difficult place to document human rights violations, such as the military forcing ethnic minorities to abandon their homes, and the use of mortar fire to intimidate farmers. “Physical evidence of reported attacks on civilians sometimes can be subtle compared to the slash-and-burn types of destruction that we saw in Darfur or Zimbabwe,” says Lars Bromley, who heads the AAAS Science and Human Rights program. “It’s also a lush ecosystem where plants can quickly grow to cover burn marks.”

AAAS mapped the locations of 31 reported human rights violations, and then through satellite image analysis pulled together physical evidence to corroborate the reports at 25 of the sites. “Eighteen of the locations showed evidence consistent with destroyed or damaged villages,” Bromley said. “We found evidence of expanded military camps in four other locations as well as multiple possibly relocated villages, and we documented growth in one refugee camp on the Thai border. All of this was very consistent with reporting by multiple human rights groups on the ground in Burma.”

Satellite images also revealed burn scars in an otherwise lush forest, consistent with reports of villages in Papun District that were burned on and around April 22, 2007. Before-and-after satellite images showed that several structures had been removed, “consistent with eye-witness reports of village destruction,” AAAS reported in a news conference today.

For instance, one “before” image shows a small settlement on May 5, 2004, while the “after” image on Feb. 23, 2007, shows all structures removed, consistent with reports of military attacks at and near the village of Kwey Kee. Another image shows multiple burn scars on June 24, 2007, corroborating reports that a settlement there was burned in April.

Satellite images of a Burma village in 2004 (top) and 2007. Photo: Top: Copyright GeoEye, Inc. Bottom: Copyright 2007 Digital Globe

The elderly man had just sat down in the pew. Folding up his walker, he watched his home health-care aide push his wife’s wheelchair down the hallway toward the ladies room, then turned to me (I was serving as an usher at this service). "Will you tell the colored girl where I’m sitting?”

I cringed. But, figuring there was no point in saying anything, I just nodded politely and put the man’s language down to his age, to being raised in an era when “colored” was acceptable. At least he didn’t say something worse.

Studies since the late 1990s have shown that older Americans tend to be more racist than younger people. That has been explained by the Social Security generation growing up, and having its social and political attitudes formed, in a period when racism and ethnic prejudice were not as unacceptable as they became in, say, the 1960s. But now there is evidence that this generational explanation is only part of the story, finds a study being published in the October issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Many people harbor unintentional and even unconscious stereotypic thoughts--"ethnic or racial group X is [fill in the blank with unflattering adjective of your choice]"--which we manage to overcome or at least squelch. By “we,” I mean our frontal cortex, the site in the brain that acts to inhibit unwanted thoughts and behaviors. (It is immaturity of the frontal lobes that makes many teens so impulsive and unable to inhibit their worst instincts.) “It might be that older adults have greater difficulty inhibiting these stereotypic thoughts despite their efforts to avoid being prejudiced,” writes psychologist William von Hippel of Australia’s University of Queensland. Older adults might be "more prejudiced than younger adults because they can no longer inhibit their unintentionally activated stereotypes.”

The loss of inhibition is the result of the brain’s traitorous tendency to shrink as we age. The frontal lobes in particular atrophy. The result is educed ability to inhibit irrelevant or unwanted thoughts. This loss of inhibition might explain other behaviors that crop up in many elderly, including “social inappropriateness.”

Something leaped out at me from my colleague David Gates' provocative review of the upcoming Ken Burns World War II documentary, "The War." As he wrote, "some affiliates—which didn't seem to mind the obscenely gruesome Holocaust pictures or the scene where a machine gun blows off a soldier's head—had a problem with the four uses of cusswords, one of which is alluded to in the anagrammatic title of episode five, "FUBAR." (For you youngsters, this was a GI term standing for "F---ed Up Beyond All Recognition." Perhaps it was a snafu to include that.)

This is not news, of course. Films get in trouble with the motion picture ratings board for saying the F in FUBAR and snafu, but not for a high, gruesome body count. You can stop a pleasant dinner cold by uttering that word, but not by describing in gory detail the latest atrocity on the battlefront. For insight into the peculiarities of profanity, I turned to psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, "The Stuff of Thought."

Why is sex, which at first glance (and, if you're lucky, subsequent glances) seems like a nice thing, the source of so many taboo words, including the above? Because "sex has high stakes," Pinker writes, "including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, . . . and rape." As a result, "plain speaking about sex"--and what is plainer that using variations on the f-word as noun, adjective and adverb?--"conveys the attitude that sex is a casual matter." Society as a whole does not want that conveyed, and if you think we're beyond that, Pinker counsels, notice that for all our sexual liberation most of us "still don't copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a dinner party, [or] have sex with their siblings and children." Most people want to keep it that way. Sex-loaded terms starting with f--- threaten to erode the barriers we erect to behaviors like the above, so we treat them as taboo. Indeed, this aversion to casual sex is so embedded in the human psyche that trying to reason your way around it---surely no form of sex, casual or otherwise, is as bad as battlefield atrocities?---just doesn't work.

. . . among chimpanzees, at least.

Although chimps share meat (such as small monkeys) that they have hunted, mostly to cement alliances, they almost never share the plants they have foraged. The reason seems to be that hunting is risky and strenuous, so sharing says to potential allies, "Lookit this monkey I just killed with my bare hands! I am strong and fit, buddy; wanna join forces?" Sharing some figs you’ve pulled down from a branch falls a bit short in the self-advertising department.

Now scientists are reporting the first-ever observation of wild chimpanzees sharing plant food they have raided from farmers’ fields. And since the lucky recipients of the largesse were sexually-receptive females living in the troop near the village of Boussou in the west African Republic of Guinea, one conclusion leaps to the fore: “We believe the males may be using crop-raids as a way to advertise their prowess to other group-members, especially the opposite sex,” said Kimberley Hockings of the University of Stirling, Scotland. “Such daring behavior certainly seems to be an attractive trait and possessing a sought-after food item, such as papaya, appears to draw even more positive attention from the females.”

Adult male chimps raided nearby fields about 22 times a month, pinching papayas, bananas, oranges, rice, maize, cassava and other goodies, the scientists reported Tuesday evening in the online journal PloS ONE. Females and juveniles almost never engaged in agricultural shop-lifting. At least the males had a guilty conscience about their theft: before and during the raids, the chimps exhibited classic signs of nervousness, including a characteristic scratching (OK, if not guilt, maybe the anxiety reflected worries about being caught by the farmers). And they always carried their ill-gotten gains back to the safety of the forest before sharing, the better to escape the wrath of the farmers.

The following findings have nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that they come from scientists at New York University, which is situated in what is arguably one of the bluest neighborhoods (Greenwich Village) of the bluest borough (Manhattan) in the bluest city (New York) of one of the country's bluest states (New York). What they've found, basically, is that political conservatives don't, won't and can't change their minds, reverse a decision or revise a judgment no matter how much contradictory evidence stares them in the face. Liberals? They, say the scientists, "report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences." The study appears today in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

In all fairness, the study is rigorous in its design and execution. It is also the next beat in a series of advances in understanding what underlies political beliefs. In round one, psychologists took the lead: they studied the behavior and personalities of self-described liberals and conservatives. (Let me add a cautionary note here: in most of these studies, people place themselves along the political spectrum from right to left, typically from +5 for very conservative to -5 for very liberal. Obviously, how you rate yourself is not only subjective but relative to those around you. Someone in red-state Idaho who considers herself a liberal -3 because she doesn't think gay men should be fired from their jobs because of their sexual orientation might be more like a conservative +3 in, say, Greenwich Village because she also regards gay marriage, civil unions and adoptions as abominations.)

Okay, but let's say the self-ratings have some validity. Psychologists repeatedly find that conservatives are "more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision making," and have greater "personal needs for order, structure and closure," as the new paper puts it. Liberals, on the other hand, are more tolerant of "ambiguity and complexity," and more open to new experiences.

Round two is being waged by neuroscientists wielding the latest in brain-imaging toys. For the current study, led by David Amodio of New York University, the scientists used a technique called event-related potentials, which measures electrical activity due to the concerted firing of neurons. They had their 43 subjects play a game of Go/No-Go, in which they have to quickly respond to a stimulus that means "go" (such as seeing a red triangle on the computer monitor, which means "press a button"). The go stimulus appears over and over and over, so you get used to pressing the button. Then, out of the blue, comes a no-go stimulus, such as a green circle. You have to stifle your button-pressing habit.

When their brains needed to recognize the conflict between their habitual response (press button) and the new information (a no-go stimulus), liberals and conservatives looked as different as, well, red and blue. Liberals showed much greater activity in the part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which recognizes conflicting information or signals; they were also more accurate at repressing the button presses. The more liberal they were, the more accurate they were. The brains of conservatives, on the other hand, showed less activity in response to a signal (no-go) that conflicted with their expectations (go) and habits of thought.

Liberalism, conclude the scientists, "is associated with greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cognitive conflict" between, say, what they believe and the evidence before their eyes.

The reader is referred to the correlation between political ideology and the belief that, for instance, after the 2003 invasion weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq. A 2004 poll in Britain, for instance, found that "Labour supporters (58%) are more likely than Conservatives (42%) or Liberal Democrats (41%) to believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction"; see also here and here.

By now you will likely have heard that scientists have figured out what’s causing the honeybee crisis, formally known as Colony Collapse Disorder, in which these crucial pollinators have been dying off in droves. The stories—all over radio, online news sites and newspapers—may say more about journalism than about dead bees.

Some background. Since 2004, something has been killing worker bees that go out to gather nectar and, by the by, pollinate crops by carrying pollen from one plant to another. About one-quarter of commercial honeybee colonies in the U.S. have been affected, and the death toll is something on the order of tens of billions of bees. Commercial beekeepers are panicking and farmers are worried that their crops are at risk (or that they’ll have to pay more to beekeepers for pollination service). In the U.S., some $14.6 billion worth of crops—one-third of the nation’s food crops—is pollinated by honeybees. But no one knows what’s killing the bees. So: Big Problem. Big Mystery. Guaranteed headlines.

When the high-profile and well-respected journal Science therefore alerted reporters to its imminent online publication of a paper identifying a virus as a possible cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, and organized a teleconference on Wednesday, and every university and company involved in the research sent out hyperventilating press releases, you could almost hear scepticism falling by the wayside. No matter how solid the study, it was going to get a lot of ink. It did.

But during the press conference, the scientists practically tripped over themselves cautioning that they had not come close to proving that their suspect—a virus called the Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus—was guilty in the massive bee die-off. Yes, the scientists had found the virus in CCD-infected hives but not in healthy ones. But, they write, “We have not proven a causal relationship between any infectious agent and CCD.” All they can say is that the presence of IAPV in hives afflicted by CCD “indicate that IAPV is a significant marker for CCD.”

Note the use of the word “marker.” That means something is lying around with something else—like, say, gravestones are markers for corpses. But gravestones don’t cause corpses, and IAPV might not cause Colony Collapse Disorder. If it’s involved in a causal sense, it is almost surely not the only cause.

To be sure, many reports of the study emphasized this uncertainty. The question is whether the study deserved the attention it got. But the combination of a mystery that has intrigued the public, and the drumbeat of PR in advance of the study’s release, probably made that inevitable. And who knows—maybe IAPV will turn out to be guilty as suspected. On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times dug up this factlet: “researchers from the Army's Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland cautioned that they had unpublished results in which the Israeli virus had been found in colonies without the disorder.” And Science itself, in a news story accompanying the study, quoted one scientist this way: "This paper only adds further to the confusion surrounding CCD."

When NEWSWEEK reported on the murder of mountain gorillas in Congo, the identity of the killers was a mystery, with speculation centering on charcoal smugglers who intended to send a message to Congo authorities not to mess with them. Now the situation has turned even more sinister.

Conservation sources at World Wildlife Fund and elsewhere tell me that at around 3 a.m. local time on Sept. 3, two ranger outposts in Virunga National Park, site of this summer's gorilla killings, were attacked by troops comprised of FARDC (Forces Armées de la Republic Democratic du Congo) and of a rebel faction. The attackers seized the guns and communication equipment of rangers employed by the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN); no one was injured. The attacks came at two of sites most visited by tourists, called Mikeno and Jomba. In an attack the following day, at the Kabaraza ranger station in the center of Virunga, one ranger was killed and the station looted.

The surviving rangers fled to park headquarters. That leaves none in park sectors that are home to a number of gorilla families, including the 12-member Mapuwa family; three lone silverbacks (Ruzirabwoba, Pilipili and Mareru), the four-member Lulengo family and the five-member Rugendo family, survivors of the group targeted in the June killings. There are now no patrols taking place in the Park, and ICCN says it has lost control of Virunga.

That could pose a real risk to the gorillas, especially the five remaining members of the Rugendo group, which before the rebel attacks were being monitored daily. They are spending much of their time outside the park in agricultural fields, which is likely to increase conflicts with the neighboring communities.

The reason the Hubble Space Telescope has its middle name is that getting above Earth’s atmosphere eliminates the distortion that otherwise plagues light waves barrelling down on us from stars, nebulas, galaxies and other denizens of the universe. But a multi-billion-dollar space telescope is no longer the only way to avoid smeared-out images of the heavens. Astronomers have developed a new camera that makes use of what’s called adaptive optics—something that has previously worked only for infrared radiation, not visible light—to produce sharper, more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than the Hubble, from no closer to space that a California mountaintop.

The camera works by taking high-speed images (20 frames per second or higher) that have been partially corrected with adaptive optics. Software then combs through the images, selecting the sharpest and rejecting those smeared by the atmosphere. The clear ones are combined, producing a high-resolution image. It’s called “Lucky Imaging” because it depends on chance fluctuations in the atmosphere occasionally occurring in such a way as to provide images that the adaptive optics system can correct.

When used on the 200-inch Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain, whose images normally have less than one-tenth the detail of those from the Hubble Space Telescope, the result is images twice as sharp—and the sharpest direct images ever taken in visible light from the ground or space. You can see the results, of the globular star cluster M13 and the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), here.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but wasting your brain is just as bad. Nature seems to realize that, for when people are blind from birth or a young age because of damage to their eyes, the part of the brain that ordinarily processes visual signals doesn’t just sit idly by. The visual cortex, which takes up about one-third of the entire brain, makes a nimble career switch. Receiving no signals from the eyes, it instead begins processing signals from the fingertips (to read Braille) or even from the ears (which accounts for the greater auditory acuity of many blind people).

This is yet another manifestation of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself. Now a treatment that exploits the malleability of the visual cortex has taken another step forward. Veterans and active-duty military personnel who have lost all or part of their vision due to stroke or traumatic brain injury (of which the war in Iraq is producing tragically many cases: an estimated 10 to 30 percent of returning service members suffer traumatic brain injury) will be offered a new therapy to induce healthy regions of their brain to take over the job of seeing that injured regions once did.

Called Vision Restoration Therapy, it was developed by a company called NovaVision, Inc., and will be offered at the Tampa Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, part of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In Vision Restoration Therapy, a physician first determines which region of the visual cortex has been knocked out by injury or stroke. The company then devises a custom-made rehabilitation program that patients can use on their own. A computer screen shows a green dot in its center, and the patient is to stare at this “fixation point,” resisting the urge to glance at white dots that appear on the screen. The patient is instructed to watch for the white dots only with his peripheral vision, and when he sees one to click the mouse. At irregular intervals, the central green dot changes color, and the patient is to click the mouse again (it’s a check to make sure the eyes remain front and center, so only the peripheral vision is involved in glimpsing the white dots).

The idea is to stimulate peripheral vision around the blind spot, engaging the “border zone” in the visual cortex between damaged neurons and healthy ones, explains neurologist Randolph Marshall of Columbia University, who was one of the first to offer the system to patients. Only neurons adjacent to those damaged by the stroke register the white dots. The hope is that if these “transition zone” neurons are activated often enough, they will take over the function of the injured neurons, and the patient’s blind spot will disappear.

Experiments in the late 1990s suggested that this repeated stimulation can accomplish that, and larger studies are now confirming it. Marshall and colleagues recently studied  patients, aged 35 to 77, who had lost sight on the same side of both eyes due to stroke or traumatic brain injury. As they trained surviving neurons to pinch-hit for the damaged ones, the visual cortex rewired itself, beginning a month after starting the vision restoration treatment, they report online in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair.