An Unproven Theorem

Snapshots explore Einstein’s unusual brain Photos reveal unique features of genius’s cerebral cortex. Mo Costandi 16 November 2012 Image Slideshow Newly released photos of Einstein's brain are helping researchers what physical features might have been behind his genius. FROM REF 1 / WITH PERMISSION OF NMHM, SILVER SPRING, MD Article tools print email rights & permissions share/bookmark Albert Einstein is considered to be one of the most intelligent people that ever lived, so researchers are naturally curious about what made his brain tick. Photographs taken shortly after his death, but never before analysed in detail, have now revealed that Einstein’s brain had several unusual features, providing tantalizing clues about the neural basis of his extraordinary mental abilities 1 . While doing Einstein's autopsy, the pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the physicist's brain and preserved it in formalin. He then took doze...

How birds are used to monitor pollution Swallows and homing pigeons do their part for environmental surveillance. Richard A. Lovett 19 November 2012 Homing pigeons can be used to monitor air pollution in the cities where they live. ARTERRA PICTURE LIBRARY/ALAMY Article tools print email rights & permissions share/bookmark Common nesting birds may provide a convenient way to track environmental clean-up efforts. Nesting birds that feed on insects that hatch in lake or stream-bed sediments may make good biomonitors for pollution, says Thomas Custer of the US Geological Survey's Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. That's because any contamination in the sediment will make its way into the birds and into their eggs and young. An example, says Custer, is the tree swallow ( Tachycineta bicolor ), which still showed "significant quantities" of toxic chemicals called polychlorinated biphenols in it...

'Tree of life' constructed for all living bird species Ambitious attempt to link geography to diversification ruffles some feathers. Virginia Gewin 31 October 2012 Expand A massive 'tree of life' for all known bird species shows their evolutionary relationships, and where they live today. CODY SCHANK Article tools print email rights & permissions share/bookmark Scientists have mapped the evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world's known living bird species. The study, published today in Nature 1 , is an ambitious project that uses DNA-sequence data to create a phylogenetic tree — a branching map of evolutionary relationships among species — that also links global bird speciation rates across space and time. “This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map,” says study co-author Walter Jetz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut...