Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals’ feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality. 

Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard biologist, has built on this idea to propose that people are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution. In a new book, “Moral Minds” (HarperCollins 2006), he argues that the grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind. 

People are generally unaware of this process because the mind is adept at coming up with plausible rationalizations for why it arrived at a decision generated subconsciously.

Dr. Hauser presents his argument as a hypothesis to be proved, not as an established fact. But it is an idea that he roots in solid ground, including his own and others’ work with primates and in empirical results derived by moral philosophers. 

The proposal, if true, would have far-reaching consequences. It implies that parents and teachers are not teaching children the rules of correct behavior from scratch but are, at best, giving shape to an innate behavior. And it suggests that religions are not the source of moral codes but, rather, social enforcers of instinctive moral behavior.
NYT (reg/req)

Future generations may come to regard the apocalyptic report by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, as the turning point in combating global warming, or as the missed opportunity. The Independent

The big bird, which stood about 10 feet tall and probably weighed 400 pounds, was fleet of foot and able to chase down and devour rodents, reptiles and small mammals 15 million years ago on the plains of Patagonia. Not for nothing are its closely related species, a group known as phorusrhacids, more commonly called the “terror birds.”

Such avian giants evolved and prospered in the time of South America’s total isolation from other continents. All of these birds were apparently flightless, and most of them ate only plants. Until now, the only known species of carnivorous terror birds averaged five to nine feet tall and had relatively small heads.

Paleontologists said the new fossil discovery might force them to reconsider previous ideas that the terror birds that evolved the biggest bodies were significantly slower runners.

“This is not only the largest bird ever found,” said Luis M. Chiappe, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “It also tells us the idea we have heard and repeated over the years may not be entirely valid.” NYT (reg/req)

The findings confirm a long-standing suspicion among scientists that elephants, with their big brains, complex societies and reputation for helping ill herdmates, have a sufficiently developed sense of identity to pass the challenging "mirror self-recognition test." Washington Post (reg/req)

But to my wife, my napping is the sign of a basic character flaw. 

"You're napping again? I can't believe how lazy you are!"

She's not alone. To be an enthusiastic napper in 21st-century North America is to be out of step with your time and place. In most of the industrialized world, a nap is seen as a sign of weakness, either physical or moral. The very young and the very old nap. Sick people nap. 

Bums nap. Healthy, productive adults do not nap.

We are a culture that celebrates action, doing, achieving, an attitude that leads to a disdain for sleep in general. We stay up late and get up early. We pull all-nighters. We'll sleep when we're dead, and in the meantime there's always a Starbucks on the corner.

It's a misguided attitude. A good nap is one of life's great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old. Toronto Star 

Americans are pumping almost 940 million more gallons of gas into their vehicles than they did in 1960 because the average American is roughly two dozen pounds heavier. That amounts to $2.8 billion more spent on gas each year, if gas is selling for $3 a gallon. 

So says a new study from researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University. Chicago Sun-Times

The number of troops held back has climbed dramatically in the last few years. While they appear to represent a small percentage of all U.S. military personnel, the increase is occurring as the military is stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The Pentagon says financial problems can distract personnel from their duties or make them vulnerable to bribery and treason. As a result, those who fall heavily into debt can be stripped of the security clearances they need to go overseas. The AP

In a preview of a major international multiyear report on climate change that comes out next year, a study out of the National Center for Atmospheric Research details what nine of the world's top computer models predict for the lurching of climate at its most extreme. The AP

In addition to the two statewide ballot measures, at least five cities are letting voters decide whether to direct police to make enforcement of marijuana laws a low priority. Those towns: Missoula, Mont.; Eureka Springs, Ark.; and three California communities — Santa Cruz, Santa Monica and Santa Barbara.

In Colorado, where possession of an ounce or less is classified as a petty offense subject to a $100 fine, backers of Amendment 44 promote it as a healthier alternative to alcohol use. USA Today

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day in an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.

It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.

It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, but out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.

We go 'round every two hundred million years, and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whizz as fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth, and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth. By Steve Judd

At the annual Pediatric Academic Society meeting in May in San Francisco, they presented a report that described how a preschool-age girl, and then her kindergarten-age brother, mysteriously began growing pubic hair. These cases were not isolated; in 2004, pediatric endocrinologists from San Diego reported a similar cluster of five children. 

It turns out that there have been clusters of cases in which children have prematurely developed signs of puberty, outbreaks similar to epidemics of influenza or environmental poisonings. In 1979, the medical journal The Lancet described an outbreak of breast enlargement among hundreds of Italian schoolchildren, probably caused by estrogen contamination of beef and poultry. Similar epidemics in Puerto Rico and Haiti were tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980’s. NYT (reg/req)

But as Hollywood power shifts more to Wall Street investors, financiers are starting to bypass studio bosses by dealing directly with successful producers. 

Now, instead of deals being cut over lunch at Spago or the Grill, movies are increasingly being greenlighted in conference calls to New York.

The reason is a simple desire for more control. Wall Street financiers want a greater say over what movies they finance and who makes them; producers want more artistic independence and a larger share of the profits.

The studios themselves are nudging the trend along, too, since they are making fewer movies.

A result for moviegoers is that they could begin to see even more thrillers, comedies and horror movies at the multiplex — the types of movies Wall Street favors, because of their more predictable payoff. NYT (reg/req)

The BBC News Website team set up a honeypot PC – a computer that looks like a normal PC online but records everything that's done to it – in order to find out the dangers facing web users. 

Every single time the 'honeypot' was put online it was attacked. In one of the busiest nights of malicious online activity, the computer was attacked 53 times. The Evening Standard

The nuclear test, once conducted, will have far-reaching implications for the Koreas and the rest of the world. It carries five messages.

The first message is that Kim Jong-il is the greatest of the peerless national heroes Korea has ever produced...Asia Times

But the growth of new media is expanding total media consumption rather than simply cannibalising print and television. The Financial Times 

They wouldn’t get far, as Sadah recalls today. When they presented their passports, a Pakistani border guard grew angry. Sadah could go through, the officer barked, but there was a problem with al-Haj’s passport. The officer produced an English-language notice from Pakistani intelligence instructing border guards to apprehend al-Haj for suspected links to al-Qaeda, Sadah recalled.

Both journalists were puzzled. Several times over two months, al-Haj had crossed Chaman with another Al-Jazeera crew without incident. Just a few days earlier, Sadah and al-Haj had traveled across the border to Spinboldak, where they reported on damage to the main Afghan road from Chaman to Kandahar. 

Al-Haj thought there was a misunderstanding. The written order that the border guard produced listed the number of his old Sudanese passport, which he had lost two years earlier. A Pakistani intelligence official identifying himself as Major Nadeem arrived at the border later that day and told the two journalists not to worry. The next morning, Sadah said, the major drove off with al-Haj.

“Since that time, I have not seen Sami,” Sadah told CPJ. Neither have al-Haj’s colleagues, family, and friends.
Committee to Protect Journalists

Milum eventually was acquitted. Ordinarily, that might have been the last Banks ever heard about his former client. But then Milum started a blog.

In May 2004, Banks was stunned to learn that Milum's blog was accusing the lawyer of bribing judges on behalf of drug dealers. At the end of one posting, Milum wrote, “Rafe, don't you wish you had given back my $3,000 retainer?” 

Banks, saying the postings were false, sued Milum. And last January, Milum became the first blogger in the USA to lose a libel suit, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, which tracks litigation involving bloggers. Milum was ordered to pay Banks $50,000.

The case reflected how blogs — short for Web logs, the burgeoning, freewheeling Internet forums that give people the power to instantly disseminate messages worldwide — increasingly are being targeted by those who feel harmed by blog attacks. In the past two years, more than 50 lawsuits stemming from postings on blogs and website message boards have been filed across the nation. The suits have spawned a debate over how the “blogosphere” and its revolutionary impact on speech and publishing might change libel law.

Legal analysts say the lawsuits are challenging a mind-set that has long surrounded blogging: that most bloggers essentially are “judgment-proof” because they — unlike traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television outlets — often are ordinary citizens who don't have a lot of money. Recent lawsuits by Banks and others who say they have had their reputations harmed or their privacy violated have been aimed not just at cash awards but also at silencing their critics. USA Today

The U.S. team who carried out the research said the findings could potentially help to uncover new treatments for obesity. The work, led by a New York scientist, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. BBC

The author, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, paints a devastating portrait of Bush as an incompetent pawn of his chief advisers and the Pentagon's war planners. 

He says that, with Bush locked in a desperate battle to win re-election in 2004, they were more interested in hiding the truth about the failures to thwart the September 11 attacks and find weapons of mass destruction than running a competent military operation. Daily Mail

In many ways the report stated the obvious: The Iraq war has contributed directly to the rise of Islamic radicalism and the diffusion of the Jihad ideology globally, and made the overall problem of terrorism considerably worse.

What is tragically sad is not the report’s findings but the Bush administration’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the Iraq war and the occupation have enraged Arabs and Muslims throughout the world. Yidioth Ahronot 

While aspirin may not represent a suitable treatment for cancer, since many of the effects are only seen at very high doses, understanding how the drug works may lead to new therapies. Reuters

Google executives have long known that almost no one uses it. Washington Post (reg/req)

"Who needs the money? We don't really care," Craig Newmark said in an interview at the Picnic '06 Cross Media Week conference here.

"If you're living comfortably, what's the point of having more?" Newmark said.

Just a few hours earlier, RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan said MySpace could be worth around $15 billion within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of its parent company, News Corp.

MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million less than a year ago. It now boasts more than 90 million active users, against 10 million monthly users of craigslist.

Craigslist, despite its no-frills layout, gets more than four billion page views per month with just 22 employees.

Measured as a proportion of the number of employees, it claims to rank seventh amongst English language sites, behind Yahoo, AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, Google, eBay and News Corp.

Newmark said raising the money to subsequently give it away to good causes also did not interest him.

"Finding a good cause is incredibly hard and time-consuming," he said, adding that he and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster agree on not cashing in.

"We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they're not any the happier. They also need bodyguards," he said.

Craigslist is 25 percent owned by eBay after one of the shareholders who helped to set up the site in the 1990s sold his stake in 2004. Newmark declines to specify exactly who owns the remaining shares. Reuters

Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, a Mormon father of eight, represents the most children: 278,398. 

These two extremes reflect a stark demographic divide between the congressional districts controlled by the major political parties. 

Republican House members overwhelmingly come from districts that have high percentages of married people and lots of children, according to a USA TODAY analysis of 2005 Census Bureau data released last month. 
USA Today

The excerpts were selected by the office of U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. Subheadings have been added by the BBC. 

Earth has been warming at a rate of 0.36 degree Fahrenheit a decade for the last 30 years, according to the research team, led by James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. And that brings the overall temperature to the highest since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, it said. The AP

The paleontologists who [announced] the discovery in the journal Nature [last week] said the 3.3-million-year-old fossils were of the earliest well-preserved child ever found in the human lineage. It was estimated to be about 3 years old at death, probably female and a member of the Australopithecus afarensis species, the same as Lucy’s.

An analysis of the skeleton revealed evidence of a species in transition, the scientists said in interviews yesterday. 

The lower limbs supported earlier findings that afarensis walked upright, like modern humans. But gorillalike arms and shoulders suggested that it possibly retained an ancestral ability to climb and swing through the trees. NYT (reg/req)

The exploits of the intrepid Ming Dynasty explorer known as the Three-Jewelled Eunuch, a devout Muslim of Mongolian descent from Yunnan province, still resonate in China today, where he is seen as a symbol of emerging modern China's peaceful rise.

Zheng He's journeys took him to 37 countries over 28 years as part of the mightiest fleet that ever sailed, with 300 ships and 28,000 sailors. It wasn't until the First World War that a bigger flotilla took to the seas.

The pride of the fleet was the flagship, Zheng He's treasure ship, a hardwood vessel with 1,000 men on board. At 400ft, it dwarfed Christopher Columbus's Santa Maria, a minnow at 98ft. It had nine masts and 12 red sails and was packed full of porcelain, calligraphy scrolls, elegant musical instruments - the finest items China had to offer.
The Independent

In the 1980s officials at the Chhatbir Zoo in the northern city of Chandigarh, bred captive Asiatic lions with a pair of African circus animals, resulting in a hybrid species. Within a few years it became obvious it had not worked.

The offspring found it hard to walk, let alone run, because their hind legs were weak. And by the mid 1990s the big cats -- which live for up to 20 years in captivity -- showed symptoms of failing immune systems.

But it wasn't until 2000 that the breeding program was ended, and the male lions given vasectomies, by which time the zoo had 70 to 80 such lions. Their number dwindled slowly, with disease killing some and some dying of wounds inflicted by other lions.

Authorities say they are waiting for the population to "phase out" before they can start breeding pure Asiatic lions.

"But the effort here is to help them die with dignity," said Dharminder Sharma, a senior zoo official. "We give them all the facilities to live a happy life in their last years. Some of the old lions are even given boneless meat."
Reuters

The farmer, Anil Kondba Shende, 31, left behind a wife and two small sons, debts that his family knew about only vaguely and a soggy, ruined 3.5-acre patch of cotton plants that had been his only source of income. 

Whether it was debt, shame or some other privation that drove Mr. Shende to kill himself rests with him alone. But his death was by no means an isolated one, and in it lay an alarming reminder of the crisis facing the Indian farmer. 

Across the country in desperate pockets like this one, 17,107 farmers committed suicide in 2003, the most recent year for which government figures are available. Anecdotal reports suggest that the high rates are continuing. 
NYT (reg/req)

Contrary to traditional belief, hearing voices is not necessarily a symptom of mental illness, UK researchers at Manchester University say. 

Indeed, many who hear voices do not seek help and say the voices have a positive impact on their lives, comforting or inspiring them. BBC

Antonio Pernas, whose sixties-inspired collection marked the start of Madrid Fashion Week, said the rules banning overly-thin models had thrown his and others' plans into chaos.

"I had to change the whole lot in one day. Eighteen models. It gave us problems, but look, this industry sets an example to young women. We want to project a healthy image, so I'm not against the measures," Pernas told Reuters.

Organizers, under pressure from Madrid's regional government which sponsors the show, imposed restrictions on any model with too low a body mass index (BMI) -- a measure based on weight and height.

Regional President Esperanza Aguirre, who has argued young women copy the super-skinny look and might develop eating disorders, sat smiling at the end of the runway as tall, willowy girls in Austin Powers-style sunglasses strutted past.

The show's director Leonor Perez-Pita said some models last year "really were too thin" and welcomed the restriction that they must have a BMI of higher than 18. Reuters

In the five years since that shattering day, the government has spent billions on anti-terrorism projects, instituted a color-coded alert system that has never been green, banned fingernail clippers and water bottles from airplanes, launched a pre-emptive war on false pretenses, and advised citizens to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting.

But despite the never-ending litany of warnings and endless stories of half-baked plots foiled, how likely are you, statistically speaking, to die from a terrorist attack?

Comparing official mortality data with the number of Americans who have been killed inside the United States by terrorism since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma reveals that scores of threats are far more likely to kill an American than any terrorist -- at least, statistically speaking.

In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.

With that in mind, here's a handy ranking of the various dangers confronting America, based on the number of mortalities in each category throughout the 11-year period spanning 1995 through 2005 (extrapolated from best available data). Wired News