Ask your favorite 6-year-olds what doomed the last dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and unless they don’t know a Troodon from a Triceratops they’ll tell you it was a killer asteroid. This idea, first proposed in 1980 and widely adopted a decade later, has entered the public consciousness like few others in science. Too bad it doesn’t have nearly the credibility among geoscientists as it does in local sandboxes and Hollywood: evidence keeps emerging that the asteroid was framed.

Instead, a series of titanic volcanic eruptions in India may have wiped out T. rex and his friends (and prey). That idea has been around for a while, but today paleontologist Gerta Keller, who has long been dubious about the asteroid theory, will unveil the strongest evidence yet that scientists convicted the wrong perp. In a study presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, she will announce that the volcanic eruptions that created the enormous Deccan Traps lava beds in India peaked at just the right time to explain the dinos’ demise—releasing what she and colleagues estimate was ten times more climate-altering gases (mostly carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide) into the atmosphere than the asteroid impact.

Previous research had dated the volcanic eruptions to within 800,000, then 300,000, years of the worldwide extinction whose highest-profile victims were the dinosaurs but which also killed some half of all species on Earth. But by dating the appearance of tiny marine fossils that are known to have evolved immediately after mass extinction, Keller’s team now concludes that the most intense period of volcanic eruptions ended right when the mass extinctions began.

In contrast, the asteroid, which landed off Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and formed what’s called the Chicxulub crater, predated the mass extinction by some 300,000 years. Keller and like-minded geoscientists who have been poking holes in the asteroid theory for years now reached that conclusion in 2004, in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Chicxulub impact, they calculated from cores taken from the crater, simply came too early to the crime scene: the mass extinction did not get underway for millenia. There's never been a convincing explanation for why it would have taken so long for the dying to start. If the victim wasn't killed until long after the suspect left the scene, it's time to start looking for a new suspect.

The Indian volcanoes, on the other hand, were timed just right to poison the planet and wipe out much of its life. They spewed out sulfur dioxide that poisoned rivers, lakes and seas; chlorine gas that shredded the ozone layer and allowed dangerous ultraviolet radiation to reach Earth’s surface; and carbon dioxide that triggered a global-warming greenhouse effect.

Many other scientists (not to mention tourist guides and popular books) are sticking with the killer-asteroid theory, but it never hurts to be reminded that even the most popular theories in science are only as good as the next experiment.

The murder of gorillas in Congo which so shocked the world's conscience is only the tip of the iceberg of the threats facing vanishing primates. This evening, Conservation International is releasing a report documenting the world's 25 most endangered apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates, which are under unprecedented threat from destruction of tropical forests, illegal wildlife trade and commercial bushmeat hunting.

Today, 29 percent of all species in danger of going extinct, and we may soon witness the first primate extinctions in more than a century. (Overall, 114 of the world’s 394 primate species are classified as threatened with extinction.) One species, Miss Waldron’s red colobus of Ivory Coast and Ghana, already is feared extinct, while the golden-headed langur of Vietnam and China’s Hainan gibbon number only in the dozens. The Horton Plains slender loris of Sri Lanka has been sighted just four times since 1937.

Some images of the possibly doomed:

I'm pretty conservative about attributing weird weather and other climate anomalies to global warming: all you can say is that a record-setting hot October, or a string of 70-degree days in January in New York, is consistent with what a greenhouse world would be like. But when scientists go on record with a specific prediction of how climate change will play out, and when it indeed plays out that way, attention must be paid.

Last year, a study in the journal Science found that "large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons." The greatest increases were in forests of the Northern Rockies, but was seen throughout the west The pattern of western fires matched what would be expected not from changes in land use--mostly logging and ranching--but from climate change.

Specifically, a warmer world caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases produces alternating deluges and droughts. The extra heat causes greater evaporation, but the water vapor remains in the atmosphere longer, or travels farther, before falling--in buckets. The result is alternating wet and dry years. In wet years, vegetation grows like mad. In drought years, that vegetation becomes tinder, exactly what southern California is now experiencing. As the scientists said, "an increased incidence of large, high-severity fires may be due to a combination of extreme droughts and overabundant fuels."

And no, it's not just a matter of media attention or the ubiquity of fire video on YouTube. The scientists found that the frequency of wildfires beginning in the mid-1980s was nearly four times that of 1970 to 1986, "and the total area burned by these fires was more than six and a half times its previous level." It's real, and it's going to continue.

Hot on the heels of a controversial book arguing that voters choose a candidate based on how he or she makes them feel—issues and position papers be damned—comes a study that’s enough to make you yearn for the good old days of monarchy: by measuring people’s unconscious judgments of an unfamiliar face, you can predict the outcome of elections 70 percent of the time.

Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov and his student showed several dozen volunteers pairs of photos of unfamiliar faces, and asked them to choose, based on gut feelings alone, who was probably more competent. His earlier research had shown that people make judgments about someone’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and other traits in a mere one-tenth of a second. Now, in a study published online Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he goes one depressing step further: these lightning-quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election results.

This time, in a study done two weeks before the 2006 elections, the pairs of photos were (unbeknownst to the participants) of the two frontrunners in either a gubernatorial or a U.S. senate race. (If a participant recognized either of the two faces, that pair didn't count.) “We never told our test subjects they were looking at candidates for political office. We only asked them to make a gut reaction response as to which unfamiliar face appeared more competent,” said Todorov.

When election night '06 arrived, the scientists compared the competency judgments with the results from the ballot box. The judgments predicted the winners in 72 percent of the senate races and 69 percent of the gubernatorial races. “This means that with a quick look at two photos, you have a great chance of predicting who will win,” Todorov said. “Voters are not that rational, after all.”

The assessment of competence doesn’t seem to be culture-specific. Other research, by political scientist Chappell Lawson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finds that Americans can predict the outcome of elections in Mexico based on the same gut reactions. “Our findings surprised us, because Mexican politicians often emphasize very different aspects of their appearance, such as facial hair, which American political figures avoid,” said Lawson. “But Americans could still pick out the Mexican winners.”

What’s not clear is how this works when the faces you’re assessing are not anonymous, but those of pols you know. In that case, the assessment of competence—even when it’s made in one-tenth of a second—is likely (hopefully?) affected by what you know about the candidate. If so, then simply scanning the line of faces at the next presidential debate and deciding who looks most competent might not necessarily serve as a crystal ball for November ’08.

Just in time to think long and hard about your sunscreen options for next summer—or a tropical vacation this winter—comes a study suggesting that, to the truly hip, a dab of blinding white zinc oxide will be so last year. Bring on the green broccoli extract!

Slathering on an extract of broccoli sprouts, find scientists at Johns Hopkins University, can protect against the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation. (Hey, don’t knock broccoli sprout extract. A clinical trial is currently studying whether it can prevent lung cancer in smokers.) Unlike sunscreens, which absorb UV and keep it from getting into the skin where it can damage DNA and thereby trigger skin cancer, a nice coating of broccoli sprout extract works inside cells. The result may be as good for your skin, cancer-wise, as a heaping helping of broccoli is for warding off other forms of cancer.

Skin covered with broccoli sprout extract and exposed to sunlight suffered much less inflammation and cell damage than bare naked skin, scientists led by Hopkins’ Paul Talalay are reporting this evening in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It wasn’t that the goop absorbed UV. Rather, it gets into your skin cells, boosting production of enzymes that protect cells against UV damage. That means the protection lasts for several days, even after the extract is no longer on your skin.

Interestingly, the protective compound in the broccoli sprout extracts is the same one, sulforaphane, that protects against several forms of cancer when you eat it. So if mom puts too much broccoli on your plate, rather than getting into a fight about throwing it away, preserve family peace by offering to smear it on your bod.

You know you feel lousy when you haven’t gotten enough sleep, but you probably didn’t know why—and neither did scientists. Although anyone who’s pulled an all-nighter or stayed up with a screaming baby or otherwise failed to get a good seven hours of shut-eye can testify to how grumpy they are the next morning, exactly what, in the brain, was behind that grumpiness was anyone’s guess. Now it can be told: your prefrontal cortex has gotten disconnected from your amygdala.

So find scientists who kept 13 healthy volunteers up for 35 hours straight, for one day and the following night and another day, and compared them to 13 similar people who slept during that intervening night. At the end of day two, all 26 had their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), while they were shown 100 images that fell along an emotional gradient from neutral to very upsetting, from images of leaves and wicker baskets to pictures of mutilated bodies, severed limbs and children with grotesque tumors.

In the sleep-deprived, seeing gruesome images led to a noticeable spike in activity in the brain’s amygdale, the structure that tags incoming information with an emotion, especially a negative one—labelling a sight or sound frightening or disgusting. On no sleep, the scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Medical School will report online tomorrow in the journal Current Biology, the amygdala goes into overdrive, and the usual braking mechanism is broken.

“It’s almost as though, without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive patterns of activity, in that it was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses,” said Matthew Walker, director of Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and lead author of the study.

Tracing the patterns of firing showed why. Usually, signals from the amygdala reach the prefrontal cortex and vice versa. Since the prefrontal cortex is the site of logical reasoning, it can take the amygdala’s terror and calm it down by pointing out that, say, the frightening sound coming from the ceiling is just branches blowing in the wind, or that a terrifying scene in a movie is just celluloid.

In sleep-deprived brains, the fMRI showed, the amygdala connects more strongly to the locus coeruleus. This evolutionarily-ancient part of the brain, rather than acting as an emotional brake the way the prefrontal cortex does, steps on the accelerator: it releases noradrenalin, ramping up the brain’s jumpiness and emotionality even further. “The emotional centers of the brain were over 60 percent more reactive under conditions of sleep deprivation than in subjects who had obtained a normal night of sleep,” Walker said. “It is almost as though, without sleep, the brain reverts back to a more primitive pattern of activity, becoming unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses.”

As a result, that friendly, reasonable co-worker turns into what he calls “emotional Jell-O” after an all-nighter, or else has to make a Herculean effort to rein in those emotions.

“You can see it in the reaction of a military combatant soldier dealing with a civilian, a tired mother to a meddlesome toddler, the medical resident to a pushy patient,” says Walker. Next step: figuring out how sleep deprivation cripples the emotional brain's connections to the rational brain.

Those Geico (and now ABC) cavemen might not be as fictional as you’d think (well, okay, the tennis playing and working on a thesis, maybe). I’m talking about talking.

Language is supposed to be the trait that distinguishes modern humans both from other animals and from our grunting ancestors. But a new study, published online today in Current Biology, suggests that while we might be special, we might not be unique. Contrary to the claim that the only gene known to play a role in speech and language arose in its current form some 20,000 years ago—long after modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged evolutionarily—it looks like Neanderthals had this FOXP2 gene. That raises the possibility that Neanderthals possessed some of the biological machinery necessary for language.

“From the point of view of this gene, there is no reason to think that Neanderthals would not have had the ability for language,” said Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. But since FOXP2 is not the only gene that underlies the capacity for language, Neanderthals would presumably have needed them, too, in order to have the gift of gab.

For the new study, Krause and his colleagues extracted DNA from Neanderthal fossils found in a cave in northern Spain, one of the species’ last redoubts before going extinct. They then identified and sequenced the Neanderthal FOXP2 gene. It was identical to the version found in modern humans.

Other studies of Neanderthal genes have turned out to be flawed due to contamination (what was thought to be an ancient gene actually came from DNA lying around the lab, as in sloughed-off skin cells). The scientists say they have taken pains to make sure this didn’t happen, including by sequencing parts of the Neanderthal Y chromosome, which was found to be different from the version in today’s men.

The finding, say the researchers, “establishes that these changes [in FOXP2 that distinguish it from the chimp version and, thus, presumably help confer the capacity for speech and language] were present in the common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals.” Our lineage might have been a much chattier past than anyone suspected.

James Watson has made a career out of being the enfant terrible of molecular biology, but a 79-year-old enfant is just downright icky. In the past, as I noted in a recent story, Watson has endorsed aborting fetuses if they are known to carry a gene for homosexuality, encouraged genetic engineering so we can "make all girls pretty," and posited that having a darker skin makes you more libidinous.

Now he has ventured into even stupider waters, telling The Sunday Times of London that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours–whereas all the testing says not really." Although people of good will might hope that all humans are equal in intellectual potential, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

Watson is in London to promote his latest book, "Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science," with a sold-out speech scheduled for the Science Museum tomorrow. Last night the Museum canceled the appearance after Watson's remarks, but merely skimming the book would have given them advance warning of what Watson is thinking these days. He writes, “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

We have been this way before. In 1990, Science magazine noted that "To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script.” Now colleagues are, predictably, condemning his remarks, with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York putting out a statement saying the board and faculty "vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments.''

Watson, of course, shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for discovering, with the late Francis Crick, the double-helix structure of DNA, the master molecule of heredity. In his chronicle of that achievement, "The Double Helix," Watson cast himself as the swashbuckling genius fighting his way to the top, climbing over anyone who got in his way (including Rosalind Franklin, who took the x-ray images that formed the basis for Watson and Crick's inference about DNA's structure but whom Watson and Crick failed to credit at the time).

Sure, a mouse can smell a cat, and a vervet monkey can smell an approaching leopard, and lots of animals can smell the most dangerous hunter of all—man. But here’s a new one: elephants that can tell members of one African tribe from another by smell.

It’s a useful skill. In the Amboseli region of Kenya, the cattle-herding Maasai warriors show off their virility by spearing elephants (not fatally, in many cases), while the agricultural Kamba leave the elephants alone. Telling Maasai from Kamba seems like a good way to avoid danger, if you're an elephant, so scientists tested 18 groups of pachyderms in Amboseli to see what they were capable of.

In the experiment, being reported today online in the journal Current Biology, the scientists left out three kinds of garments: cloths that had been worn for five days by an adult Masai man, cloths that had been worn for five days by a Kamba man, and clean unworn cloths. Then they measured how the elephants reacted--how long they froze after catching the scent of the garment (it was obvious when an elephant smelled the cloth: he paused, raised his head, and curled his trunk upward in the direction of the scent), how fast they ran way in the first minute of flight, how far away they moved in the first five minutes, and how long it took them to relax.

“We expected that elephants might be able to distinguish among different human groups according to the level of risk that each presents to them, and we were not disappointed,” said Richard Byrne of the University of St. Andrews, who led the study.

The scent of a garment worn by a Maasai man made the elephants flee twice as fast as when they smelled never-worn clothing or clothing worn by a Kamba man. They traveled some four times as far. They also took twice as long to relax. The Maasai cloths also made the elephants flee to taller grass than the Kamba cloths did. The elephants were reacting to smell alone, since the cloths were never closer than 30 feet to them too far to see. “Elephants can classify members of a potential predator species into subgroups based on [smell] alone,” conclude the scientists.

The basis for the difference in smell is probably the different diets of the Kamba and Maasai. The latter, since they raise cattle, consume significant amounts of milk, cattle blood and meat, while the Kamba diet is mostly maize, vegetables and meat, differences that can translate into different body odors. Also, the scent of cattle permeates Maasai villages, and the warriors smear themselves with sheep fat and ochre as decoration.

Curiously, whether or not an elephant group had ever had a member speared by a Maasai warrior had virtually no effect on its reaction to the Maasai odor. The groups’ reactions “did not differ with their spearing history,” write the scientists. “Reactions were strong, even in groups with the least experience of spearing.” That suggests a remarkable learning curve, as one group of elephants with experience of bloody encounters with the Maasai somehow conveys to elephants with no such history that a particular smell means trouble.

Hit a wall in your efforts to construct your family tree? Can’t get past the garbled last name that authorities at Ellis Island conferred on great-grandpa Maurizio? It’s DNA to the rescue—or, as critics say, yet another example of questionable “recreational genetics.”

Tomorrow, Ancestry.com, the Website where 15 million people have been accessing census and other records to build their family trees since the company’s founding in 1997, is rolling out its latest genealogy resource. Called DNA Ancestry, it starts by having you take a cheek-swab sample and mail it to the company, which will compare it to DNA samples in its database and tell you if it gets a hit—that is, someone to whom you are even distantly related. If it finds someone, you can contact him or her through an anonymous email and piggy-back on their own genealogy research. “If you don’t know your family history, you can match your DNA profile to one in our database and connect to other people who are related to you and might have broken through the wall” of historical records needed to construct a family tree, says Ancestry.com vice-president Brett Folkman.

Both women and men can have a DNA analysis of their mitochondrial DNA for $179. mtDNA, which is inherited by sons and daughters from their mothers, has become a standard way for a number of online sites to trace ancestry, as Family Tree DNA and Ancestry By DNA, among others, do. Men can also have their Y chromosome, which is inherited by sons (but not daughters) from their fathers virtually unchanged, analyzed for $149 or $199, depending on whether you want 33 or 46 genetic markers included. Unlike other DNA-based ancestry sites, which focus on telling you where in the world—sometimes down to the village—your family roots are sunk and even when your “family” migrated out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, DNA Ancestry aims to link you to specific individuals. It can’t tell you your exact relationship to someone else, only that a relationship exists. For example, a Y-DNA test could verify that you’re related to a co-worker, but not that you both share the same great-grandfather.

This will work as the company says—linking you to someone who has mined federal census data from 1790 to 1930 and the 100 million names in passenger ship records from 1820 to 1960 in Ancestry’s database, among other sources, to piece together a family tree—only if Ancestry.com has lots of DNA profiles in its database. Within six months, that should be about 50,000, says Megan Smolenyak, the company’s chief family historian and co-author of the 2004 book "Trace Your Roots with DNA." “As more people add their results,” she says, “the DNA Ancestry database becomes a powerful asset for users to make connections and discover their family tree.”

The question is whether even 50,000 is enough. The service might tell you that you and another user share a great-great-grandfather—that is, four generations back. Everything more recent than that would diverge, so although genealogical research that this long-lost cousin of yours has done might fill in the distant parts of your family tree, it won’t help much with the branches that include your grandfather’s and father’s generations.

Overselling the value of DNA for ancestry searches is causing more and more scientists to scorn what they are calling “recreational genetics.” Since 2000, a study finds, some 460,000 people have bought DNA tests from some two dozen companies that trace ancestry, and some users are doubtless being misled. One problem is that by testing only a limited number of genetic markers, the services miss many relatives: while they tell you that your family roots are sunk in, say, the Piedmont, they overlook that you have just as many roots in, say, Nova Scotia, or this African village as well as that one. More problematic, in terms of identifying an individual to whom you are related, is that it can make the connection sound more notable than it is. Yes, you and Sam might have the same great-great-great-grandfather but, under standard assumptions about reproduction and survival, so do (on average) 500 other people living today. But hey, you might just get lucky and find that one of them is a demon genealogist who has done all the census-digging and Ellis-Island sleuthing for you.

What is it about mercury and fish that spawns (sorry) such fishy science? For the second time in a year, industry has tried to undercut the government’s advice that mothers-to-be should avoid mercury-contaminated fish. Their tactics: publicize industry-funded research that touts the benefits—and makes light of the risks—of eating fish. The latest such statement, issued last week by a group calling itself the Healthy Mothers/Healthy Babies Coalition (HMHB), touched off a new round of debate over eating fish and over the impacts of one-sided science on public understanding.

Last year, the hoopla followed a study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, sponsored in part by the tuna industry (tuna is a big source of mercury in the diet because Americans eat so much of it and predator fish like tuna tend to have high levels of mercury). When researchers made a worst-case assumption—that people are too stupid to understand the government’s advice to eat less mercury-laden fish but keep consuming cleaner species—they got an unsurprising result: people would lose the heart-healthy benefits of eating fish. Duh. But in the scenario where people have half a brain and follow the government’s advice to eat fish but avoid certain mercury-tainted species such as swordfish, tilefish, shark, king mackerel, and albacore tuna, both their hearts and their babies benefited (mercury can be toxic to developing brains). And yet, the press release, and contrarian media stories it spawned, focused on the first scenario, concluding that “fish warnings do more harm than good.”

There is no evidence that Americans are so worried about mercury in fish that they’ve cut back on fish consumption. Quite the contrary: per capita fish consumption has grown steadily, and is at its highest levels since records began decades ago. But few Americans are aware of the government’s advice. Only about one-third say they have heard the warnings, and most of those who have can’t name the fish they should avoid.

Also clear is that the fishing industry is deeply worried that these warnings will sink their market. The U.S. Tuna Foundation, an industry group, launched a national campaign urging women to eat more tuna, and asserting that there is no scientific basis for concern about mercury’s effects on a baby’s brain. In asserting that mercury should not be a health concern, the tuna industry disagreed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, and numerous other expert bodies. Yet the fishing industry sponsors a web site, fishscam.com, which claims that the concern about mercury is simply “hype” and that pregnant women should simply eat more fish.

Where does our moral sense come from? Those of a fundamentalist persuasion say “God,” and leave it at that, but a more interesting answer comes from research on the nonhuman primates we share ancestors with.

Economists used to say that people are self-interested and rational, maximizing whatever payday is within reach. But recent studies have blown that idea to smithereens. When people are given the choice of accepting or rejecting the split of some spoils that a partner offers—say, how to divide the $10 that researchers have given them in an experiment—they reject offers perceived as unfair. So if you offer me $2 and propose to keep $8 for yourself, I’ll walk away and leave us each with nothing—stupid, considering that I’m rejecting $2 in free money, but consistent with the emerging idea that humans have a strong, evolved sense of fairness that trumps immediate self-interest. Something like this probably underlies people’s tendency to punish cheaters, free-riders and noncooperators. The game has been played uncounted times in labs, and the basic finding is that proposers typically offer 40 to 50 percent of the pot, and responders walk away from any offer less than 20 percent.

Now there is evidence that a fine-tuned sense of justice—insisting on fairness at the expense of tangible rewards—may be uniquely human, rather than something our closest living relatives also have.

With the ubiquity of cell-phone and security cameras turning us into YouTube Nation, scientists, too, are putting cameras where no lens has gone before: on bird tails. Mounting little video cameras on New Caledonia crows, which are renowned for their use of tools, the researchers have captured footage that will make you think twice before deploying that old epithet, bird-brained.

Studying tool use is all the rage among animal behaviorists because it promises to shed light on animal minds and the origins of the human one. So far, scientists have seen green herons using bait (twigs, berries, discarded crackers . . . ) to attract fish, Egyptian vultures using stones to crack open ostrich eggs and the woodpecker finch of the Galapagos using a splinter or cactus spine to pry grubs out of holes.

And that’s just the birds. Primates other than humans are no slouches in the tool-using sweepstakes, either. Chimpanzees in the Tai Forest of Cote d'Ivoire and Bossou in Guinea use flat stones as anvils on which to crack rock-hard coula nuts with chunks of wood, chimps at Mahale and Gombe in Tanzania fish for termites with strips of bark, and chimps in Sierra Leone place smooth sticks over the thorns of kapok trees so they don’t get pricked while scampering around the treetops.

New Caledonian crows are tool whizzes in the lab, able, for instance, to bend a straight wire into a hook and use it to fetch a bucket containing food. But since the crows are nearly impossible to observe in their native habitat of forested, mountainous areas on their South Pacific island, the obvious question arises: How clever are the birds in their native state rather than the lab?

Enter the tail camera. It does not interfere with movement, and is shed when the birds molt, scientists at Oxford University report this afternoon in the online edition of the journal Science, so what it captures is probably the birds’ natural behavior and not something out of an avian reality show.

Of the 18 video-equipped crows, two adult males used at least three different sticks to poke around in leaf litter and grass, something never before seen. One male used a tool for more than 18 minutes, put it aside a few times to use his beak, carried it with him during a flight, then used it again. “As sticks are plentiful in forest habitats, these observations indicate that crows may keep particularly ‘good’ tools for future use,” write the scientists. Both male crows made tools from dry stems, also something crows had never been seen to use before. Other crows used sticks to reach into beetle burrows and scoop out beetle larvae. Another window into the animal mind.