I’ve always read that beyond the ages of 3-5, a child cannot develop “perfect pitch” so it’s a very good idea to start ‘em young if you want to raise the next Yo-Yo Ma or Duke Ellington. I was always impressed by friends of mine who made a point to make sure they had things like a complete Beatles CD collection in their babies room or who started their kids with piano lessons at two, but this article, from Science Daily makes the case that expectant mothers might want to start even earlier and maybe evan wear headphones around their tummies!

It turns out that when babies are born, they’ve already been absorbing the sounds that go on around them, in particular the sounds of their mother’s voice. So much so that they are, in a sense, already speaking their parents native tongue as the exit the womb. Researchers can hear it in their first gurgles and cries:

From their very first days, newborns’ cries already bear the mark of the language their parents speak, reveals a new study published online in Current Biology. The findings suggest that infants begin picking up elements of what will be their first language in the womb, and certainly long before their first babble or coo.

“The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation,” said Kathleen Wermke of the University of W?ɬ

 
Make of this what you will. It certainly seems plausible enough to me, but the article doesn’t really quote any pharmacological experts so that always raises my eyebrow. Valid information or merely anecdotal evidence that probably shouldn’t be a major newspaper until it’s a bit more solid? You decide:

“I first took coke when I was 18 and at university. I remember two friends who did chemistry told me I should get really drunk first because it would mix into this new chemical in my blood and make me even higher,” a 30-year-old woman who works in publishing told the Observer yesterday.

What her friends did not tell her is that the combination of cocaine and alcohol in her then teenage body will have left a highly toxic chemical in her liver called cocaethylene.

While few outside the world of pharmacology have heard of the chemical, fewer still are aware of its life-threatening properties. Now, however, its side-effects, discovered in 1979, are threatening to become tragically familiar as they take their toll on users in their 30s and 40s.

Drug addiction clinics say they are becoming increasingly concerned by the health risks associated with the chemical ?

 

 

 
From The Big Picture:

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real. (35 photos total)

Martian landscapes

 
Or so says Australian psychologist, Joe Forgas, who seems to think a case of the “grumps” can, in fact, make us think more clearly.  The University of New South Wales researcher says grumpy people, rather than happy types, are better at coping with demanding situations because of the way the brain “promotes information processing strategies.”

He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood.  Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events.  Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly—they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.

Professor Forgas said: ‘Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world.’

Bonus: Grumpy, Yet Clear-Thinking, Max Von Sydow In Hannah And Her Sisters

BBC News: Feeling Grumpy Is Good For You

UPI says,

Italian scientists say CAT scans have helped them uncover an “inner statue” under one of the world’s best-known faces, the bust of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.

The bust, about 3,400 years old, was discovered in 1912 by German archaeologists in what had been the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose. It is now in the Neues Museum in Berlin.

Franco Crevatin , an ethnologist at Trieste University, and Stefano Anselmo, an expert in the history of cosmetics, have created a computer-generated image they believe is closer to Nefertiti’s actual face than the one shown in the finished statue. Their findings were published this month in Focus Storia, a history journal.

The researchers added skin color to the image picked up by CAT scans and studied surviving Egyptian portraits of Nefertiti’s relatives. Their image makes the queen’s nose somewhat less perfect and adds laugh lines around her mouth. The cheekbones are less dramatic and the eyes shallower.

(via UPI and Jezebel)

 
Some provocative pictorial context for the swine flu, via InformationIsBeautiful (click here for a larger, more illuminating image).  Given that far higher spike on the left for cardiovascular disease, rather than line up for a flu shot, looks like you’ll ultimately fare far better by putting aside the Chunky Monkey.  Possibly even more revealing?  Death-by-swine flu these last 300 days ran neck and neck with death-by-leprosy.

 
Fascinating research from the University of Delaware reveals that plants recognize their siblings, but “fight” with strangers. Who knew?

Back in 2007, Canadian researchers discovered that a common seashore plant, called a sea rocket, can recognize its siblings ?

 
Interesting murmurs are emanating from Cupertino this week about Apple’s alleged plans to offer an all-you-can-watch television buffet for the princely sum of $30 a month. It’s about time. The days of the public buying a single song or downloading a single show for $2.99 are waning; they’d prefer to buy digital media the way they buy pens or Twizzlers from Staples, in bulk. With savvy senior citizens figuring out how to illegally download movies and music, it can be said with some confidence that iTunes has served for many as the “training wheels” for illegal Bit Torrent downloads. (It’s not a great leap—first step: download stuff from iTunes; a year later: download the same stuff for free). This alleged reasonably-priced Apple service would probably keep these folks within the paying fold. Why? Because the price is right and it’s convenient, and for no other reason.

2009 is the year when many cable customers (I’m one of them) cut the wire for good. With it being so easy to get the things they want for free online, why should consumers be obliged to spend $90 a month for 500 channels, 490 of them that are never, ever watched? Paying just $30 for the things you do want to watch is a no-brainer. You won’t need the DVR either, saving you an additional $12 a month.

And then there is what could be called the “Hulu problem” which should theoretically make this service more attractive for the networks (although it might take a while to get them there): Hulu execs make a big deal about selling out the advertising inventory for Hulu, but as CBS’s outgoing digital CEO Quincy Smith stated bluntly to All Things D, “You and I can say all day long, ‘We?

 
A little more than a year after its ill-fated debut, the Large Hadron Collider is getting ready to roll again. The controversial device, including an 18-mile circular tunnel—bigger than the London Underground’s Circle Line—is housed in the gigantic CERN laboratory in the Jura mountains just outside of Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland. Using the particle collider, the largest ever built, would allow scientists to re-create conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, as well as prove the existence of the spooky “Higgs boson” entity, also called the “God Particle” which give “things” (including living things like you and me) their mass. It is further anticipated to solve the mystery of “dark matter” and shed light on many other quirky physics conundrums.

On Sept. 19, 2008, just days after the Hadron’s launch, a small piece of electrical cable providing power to the magnets broke loose, sending a shower of sparks across the wiring. This caused temperatures within one of the tunnels to rise quickly, followed by the release of helium cooled to -271 degrees. The results weren’t pretty, causing nearly $60 million in damage to the $9-billion project. Now, with hope, everything is back on track. Within the next few weeks, bunches of protons should be loaded into the device, and it’s expected to be operational near the Christmas holiday. Fully up to speed, the particles should move just a hair slower than the speed of light.

Not everyone is happy about the Hadron’s snappy comeback. Some scientists fear the experiment could cause several tiny black holes to form, which would grow and devour the entire Earth. Still others, like Dr. Holger Bech Neilson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen believe that the manufacture of Higgs bosons may be so “abhorrent” to nature,” as Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times, that their creation would cause ripples backward through time to stop the collider before it could produce one, much like the paradox of a time traveler going back in time to halt his own birth by killing his grandfather. Neilson calls the collider’s problems an “anti-miracle” and adds, tongue-not-entirely-in-cheek, that the collider’s epic failure in 2008 might actually have proved the existence of God. Got your head around that one?

What is even scarier about the Large Hadron Collider, however, is that one of the CERN physicists working on the project (his name has not been released) was arrested Oct. 12 on suspicion of having Al Qaeda connections. Gulp!

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Chinese HAARP-ists meteorologists say let it snow!  Yesterday, using high-powered artillery, the ominous-sounding Weather Modification Office seeded rain clouds with 186 doses of silver iodide, triggering Beijing’s earliest snowfall in a decade.  And while this effort was primarily initiated as “drought relief,” the resulting blizzard disrupted road, rail and air travel.  For some BBC footage of post-snowfall shoveling, click here.

And while their footage may be unembeddable, the BBC’s graphics are not.  For those days when sunshine “inexplicably” turns to snowfall, here’s a handy cloud seeding chart:

 
1. Silver iodide is fired into cloud using flares on planes or from the ground
2. Water droplets then attach to these particles
3. They fall as snow if surface temperatures are below or near freezing, or as raindrops at warmer temperatures
4. Heat released as the droplets freeze boosts updrafts, which pull more moist air into the cloud
5. Despite the use of the cloud seeding technique, many scientists remain skeptical of its effectiveness (my bold)

Scientists “Cause” Beijing Snow

Bonus: Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting