The Week in News
It's been a big week in science, and I'm actually not talking about the stem cell breakthrough.
Let's get onto serious stuff. For example, how a seemingly harmless lottery scratch game revealed a suprising number of people have trouble knowing what numbers are larger than others. So much, that the lottery game had to be cancelled. (thanks pop for the link!)
My favorite story of the week was that young chimps were shown to have better ultra-short term memory/perception than human adults. It's an incredibly cool study. For information that was displayed just a fraction of a second, the chimps recalled it better than the humans. It suggests two things. First, that this is a skill with questionable or no survival benefit and was lost evolutionarily by humans when other higher-order capabilities evolved (evolving possibly by reallocating this cognitive capability in other ways). Second, the researchers acknowledged an age discrepancy and note that short term memory is better in children and that they could be seeing this trend in the chimps too. As always, more work is needed, but if you don't think that's cool then what rock have you been living under?
Another big story that might have been overlooked is that women took the top prizes in the Siemens science competition. This is a really complex issue - at the college level the percentages of women in the sciences has increased tremendously. But the percentages dip looking ahead to graduate schools. Visibility can only help.
I have concerns about these national competitions for high school students (Intel and Siemens). The students in these competitions are of course extremely talented, but their accomplishments must be taken in the context of extraordinary support networks such as access to major research universities, extensive mentoring by Ph.D. scientists, etc. If we could provide this level of scientific nurturing more extensively, we would not be worried about scientific excellence or scientific literacy in this country.