What explains the ascendance of Homo sapiens?

Early Pleistocene Animals
Start by looking at our pets: “…[A]nthropologist Pat Shipman believes… that the unique ability to observe and control the behavior of other animals is what allowed one particular set of Pleistocene era primates to evolve into modern man. The hunting of animals and the processing of their corpses drove the creation of tools, and the need to record and relate information about animals was so important that it gave rise to the creation of language and art. Our bond with nonhuman animals has shaped us at the level of our genes, giving us the ability to drink milk into adulthood and even, Shipman argues, promoting the set of finely honed relational antennae that allowed us to create the complex societies most of us live in today. Our love of pets is an artifact of that evolutionary interdependence….” (Boston Globe)

Optical Illusion of Child Gets Drivers to Brake

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“I don’t know about you, but my heart skips a beat if I see a ball suddenly roll out into the street in front of my car. I’m on the brake as fast as I can.

It’s a reaction that the British Columbia Automobile Association Traffic Safety Foundation is hoping lots of people have. In an effort to get speeding drivers to slow down, they’re painting an image of a child playing with a ball on the road in a school zone. The image is painted in an elongated manner, so that at the right distance, it appears three-dimensional.” (Discovery News)

NeuroTribes

Steve Silberman

A Renaissance of Wonder: My online friend, journalist Steve Silberman, returns to weblogging. As he explains, he was one of the first, at hotwired.com. I have always appreciated his incisive articles, especially those on neuroscience, for Wired, although I first became familiar with his name as a luminary in the Deadhead world. Now, he introduces his new smart science blog for PLoS.