If I asked you to name the animal that was most human-like, you’d probably say chimpanzee, right? It’s a good answer: we are close to them on the evolutionary tree, and our genomes are about 95% identical.

Are you smarter than an elephant? (CCBYSA: SuperJew) But if you limited the comparison to ‘high-level’ behaviors of humans—like feeling empathy, mourning the dead, or cooperating with others—then you’d find a lot of non-primates that are surprisingly similar to us. For example, like ours, the brains of humpback whales contain spindle cells, neurons that are thought to be involved in advanced thinking, self-awareness and communication. Dolphins can categorize objects, learn an artificial language, and recognize themselves in a mirror, according to some studies.

Then, of course, there’s the wise old elephant. Loads of studies attest to the elephant’s keen mental abilities, but I want to point out a new one that’s particularly cool. Scientists have demonstrated that two Asian elephants will patiently work together to get a sweet snack—even without any previous training. The study was published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You can read more about exactly how the researchers set up this clever experiment (and see a video!) at Wired Science.

Shaundra Daily builds software that helps kids recognize, and learn from, their emotions. It’s a topic close to her heart: when she was a child, she says, she “didn’t really get emotion.”

Many children with autism struggle with a similar problem: not being able to fully communicate their emotions, or fully understand what others are feeling. Fortunately, scientists like Shaundra are building high-tech tools that can help. Read. My. Stress Levels. (Image courtesy of nerissa’s ring)

Last summer, I had the pleasure of seeing one of Shaundra’s MIT colleagues, Rosalind Picard, give a talk at the World Science Festival in New York about several of her autism projects.

One of her team’s tools, called the Q Sensor, is a wristband that measures the electrical conductivity of the skin and then wirelessly transmits this data back to computers or cell phones. Skin conductance is a good measure of the body’s response to stress. So, when wearing the device, individuals with autism—or their teachers or family members—can monitor their emotional response even if they don’t show it on their face or express it verbally. (You can see a video of how the Q Sensor works here.)

Individuals with autism also have trouble reading other people’s facial expressions and emotions, which Picard has addressed in another project. She created a video system to be used during one-on-one conversations. The system can predict simple emotions—such as confusion, interest, or disagreement—based on footage of head movements and facial expressions. One person in the conversation wears a pair of glasses outfitted with a tiny display that shows this feedback about the other person’s emotions. Ideally, this tool will help people with autism interpret subtle cues during real interactions.

That’s only two of Picard’s many amazing projects. Check out the full list here.

Caryn’s favorite biological drawings were made by Ernst Haeckel, a 19th-century German naturalist, philosopher, physician and extremely talented artist.

1. Muscinae or moss Haeckel was one of Charles Darwin’s contemporaries. When Darwin’s On the Origins of Species came out, in 1859, it was a huge success. Still, it was long and dense and had only a few drawings. That might be why, nine years later, Haeckel’s illustrated book on evolution, called The History of Creation was also so well received. 2. Actiniae or anemones

Haeckel made hundreds of illustrations in his lifetime. Here, I’ve showcased a few from one of his other books, Artforms of Nature. 3. Chaetopoda or worms The drawings highlight taxonomical classes, which he’s probably best known for:

1) This shows 16 different species of moss. In Haeckel’s time, these belonged to the Muscinae family; today, they belong to the Bryophyta family (and Muscinae actually refers to a group of houseflies).

2) Here’s the Actiniae family, showing 15 species of sea anemones. When they’re touched, these creatures release toxins that paralyze their prey (usually small fish and shrimp).

3) The Chaetopoda, of which seven species are shown here, are segmented worms.

Allan prefers blackboards to whiteboards because of the rich history of chalk. I had no idea where chalk comes from, so I looked it up. Turns out it’s a long, long story.

The coccolithophore Gephyrocapsa oceanica, via Wikimedia Commons One hundred million years ago, tiny creatures called coccolithophores were hanging out at the surface of the ocean, soaking up some sun. Then they died, and their calcium carbonate-filled skeletons dropped to the sea floor. Then more died, piling on top of the others and eventually creating a layer of lime mud.

Over time, as the bottom layers of gunk were exposed to more and more pressure, and more and more heat, they turned into the soft, porous rock we know as chalk.

During this era of the Earth’s history, sea levels were incredibly high, which meant that there wasn’t much land around to drop other kinds of sediments into the floor. That’s why chalk is mostly white.

The skeletons of many other sea creatures, though—such as sea urchins, moss animals, and sponges—did get trapped in the chalk deposits. Less frequently, live animals—such as this stunning starfish—were also caught in the chalk, to the ‘The Needles’ chalk stacks off the Isle of Wight, in England. Photo by Greg Marshall, via Flickr great delight of today’s fossil hunters.

Millions of years after the horizontal layer of chalk formed, continental movements gradually pushed it up into large mounds that we can still see today. For example, take a peek at “The Needles” chalk formation off the Isle of Wight, in England:

The coccolithophores, it seems, made it back to the water’s surface.

Stephon studies the connections between things that are enormous—like universes—and things that are teeny—like neutrinos. I already know of one shared feature: their size is incredibly difficult for me to wrap my mind around.

The observable universe is apparently 92 billion light years across. But how big is that, really? In my head, that means about the same as if it were 92 million, or 92,000, or 9.2 light years across.

A neutrino—which is a particle, like an electron, except with neutral charge—has mass, but the number is debated: it’s somewhere between 0.05 to 0.58 electron volts. Huh? What’s an electron volt?

It all looks teeny here… but it’s enormous. I’m not the only one who struggles with conceptualizing the very big and the very small. Luckily, my neighborhood science museum—the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan—has a fabulous exhibit to help us out. It’s called the “Scales of the Universe.”

The exhibit spirals around an 87-foot planetarium, called the Hayden Sphere, which becomes a reference point for all of the objects around it. For instance, you might stand in front of a 10-inch globe with the big dome behind it. The exhibit text tells you that if the dome were the sun, then the globe would be the earth. If the dome were a raindrop, the globe would be a red blood cell. If the dome were a red blood cell, the globe would be a rhinovirus. And if the dome were a rhinovirus, then the globe would be a hydrogen atom.

Pretty cool way to think about size, right? Plus, if you walk up the spiral path that leads to the planetarium, you’ll see a timeline of the earth’s history, beginning with the Big Bang and ending with present day. On this scale, the era of human existence spans the width of a human hair.

So next time you’re in the Big Apple, make sure to stop by. It’ll blow your mind.

Photo by ajstarks on Flickr

Rachel’s day job—testing how bacteria react to our dwindling antibiotic arsenal—is extremely important, for drug resistance is one of our scariest public health threats.

One of the most well known superbugs is MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), which causes painful sores, fever and pneumonia and is impervious to a slew of common drugs. Every year, more than two million MRSA infections rack up some $4.5 billion in healthcare costs and kill 90,000 people.

New wrestling hold… the “Anti-Bacterial Scrub.” As recently as 1998, MRSA was thought to be a problem only in hospitals and other confined settings, such as nursing homes and prisons. But in the past decade, researchers have realized, much to their horror, that the bug crops up all over the place—including, famously, in high school wrestlers.

In 1993, for example, one boy on a high school wrestling team in Vermont got an infection on his arm. It healed, but he still managed to spread it to his teammates and to wrestlers from 11 other teams. Years later, the incident was recognized as one of the first MRSA outbreaks outside of a hospital.

Jean wasn’t kidding—she really did title one of her research papers “Hi, thanks and goodbye.” It was published in 1980, in a scholarly journal called “Language in Society.”

She wanted to know how mothers and fathers might play a role in their children learning the politeness routines of—you guessed it—saying “hi,” “thank you,” and “bye-bye.”

If you don’t wave, you’ll be despised. Jean’s experiment was sort of…sneaky. She had 22 toddlers (aged 2 to 5 years) visit her lab twice, once with mom and once with dad. Each time, the parent and child would play for 30 minutes while the researchers secretly videotaped the interaction. Then, at the end of each session, a research assistant entered the room and nonchalantly asked the child a series of scripted questions.

Let’s call the assistant Julie and the child Johnny. The script went like this:

Julie: Hi, I’m Julie. Hi, Johnny. (Pause.)

Julie: Here’s a gift for you for today’s visit. (Pause.)

(Casual conversation.)

Julie: Goodbye, Johnny. (Pause.)

Later, the researchers poured through the tapes and counted how many times the children responded with the expected, polite response. The data may surprise you.

There’s been a lot of excitement over the past few years about genes linked to brain diseases. You may have heard that people carrying certain variations of the LRRK2 gene, for example, have an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.

But did you know that gene expression—that is, the translation of DNA into RNA and, eventually, into proteins—can vary quite a bit in different tissues and cell types?

LRRK2 expression map made by Virginia (Image courtesy Allen Institute for Brain Science) That’s why, in 2006, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle launched the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas, an online, three-dimensional map of the critters’ brains. Since the 19th century, scientists have been mapping various regions of the brain—such as the outer layer, or cortex, that “Secret Life” star Mollie Woodworth studies. But the Allen Brain Institute is zooming in much, much closer, mapping the complicated brain expression patterns of more than 21,000 genes (that’s more than 80 percent of all mouse genes!).