The Cambrian explosion: Chinese palaeontologists hope to explain the rise of the animals

The Cambrian explosion

Chinese palaeontologists hope to explain the rise of the animals

Mar 23rd 2013 | Nanjing |From the print edition

AMONG the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period. Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for 56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfish-like creatures, sponges and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance a few million years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the Precambrian was not—for neither teeth nor claws existed.

Then, in the 20m-year blink of a geological eye, animals arrived in force. Most of the main groups of the animal kingdom—arthropods, brachiopods, coelenterates, echinoderms, molluscs and even chordates, the branch from which vertebrates went on to develop—are found in the fossil beds of the Cambrian. The sudden evolution of this megafauna is known as the Cambrian explosion. But two centuries after it was noticed, in the mountains of Wales after which the Cambrian period is named, nobody knows what detonated it.

A group of Chinese scientists, led by Zhu Maoyan of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, plan to change that with a project called “From the Snowball Earth to the Cambrian explosion: the evolution of life and environment 600m years ago”. The “Snowball Earth” refers to a series of ice ages that happened between 725m and 541m years ago. These were, at their maxima, among the most extensive glaciations in the Earth’s history. They alternated, though, with periods that make the modern tropics seem chilly: the planet’s average temperature was sometimes as high as 50°C. Add the fact that a supercontinent (illustrated above, viewed from the Earth’s south pole) was breaking up at this time, and you have a picture of a world in chaos. Just the sort of thing that might drive evolution. Dr Zhu and his colleagues hope to find out exactly how these environmental changes correspond to changes in the fossil record. Read more of this post

E-gadgets distract from literacy, critical thinking

E-gadgets distract from literacy, critical thinking

Created: 2013-3-21

Author:Wan Lixin

THE other day I was going down the elevator in my apartment building. It stopped at another floor, where a boy of about five was busy touching the panel of an iPad, with his mother beside him.

The mother shouted: “Get in!” The boy marched in without taking his eyes off the panel.
While the elevator was going down, the mother gave the boy a severe dressing-down, but there was no knowing if the boy heard the diatribe, for he was so concentrated on his toy.
Then the elevator stopped at the ground floor, and the mother shouted: “Get out!” and the boy exited, his eyes still glued to the screen. Read more of this post

KidZania, the world’s fastest growing “edutainment” brand from Mexico, on Friday inaugurated its largest indoor site in the world in Bangkok

KidZania opening largest indoor site

Published: 22 Mar 2013 at 17.13

KidZania, the world’s fastest growing “edutainment” brand from Mexico, on Friday inaugurated its largest indoor site in the world in Bangkok.

Developed at a cost of 810 million baht, the attraction will officially open to the public on Martch 29.

The 10,000-square-metre park for children between four and 14 years old, located on the fifth floor of Siam Paragon, offers role play for real-world professions among its attractions.

Xavier Lopez Ancona, KidZania’s global CEO and founder, said he expected the company’s 12th location in the world to become a new landmark attraction for Bangkok, increasing the capital’s appeal as a regional destination with a sophisticated family entertainment and educational product. Read more of this post

A Daring Designer of Snazzy Snacks; Jim Goldberg founded Deep River Snacks, whose kettle chips are sold in high-end delis from Darien to Dubai. How he bags aficionados

March 22, 2013, 9:00 p.m. ET

A Daring Designer of Snazzy Snacks

By AMY GAMERMAN

Jim Goldberg found one of his best potato-chip ideas in a pickle bowl. The founder of Deep River Snacks, whose kettle chips are sold in high-end delis from Darien to Dubai, was eating lunch at Katz’s Delicatessen in New York one day when he bit into a pickled green tomato.

“I said, ‘Holy crap, someone’s got to make something this good,’ ” he recalls. “We gotta do this!”

What Mr. Goldberg does is turn taste sensations into potato chips: chips that taste like they’ve come off a mesquite grill or bathed in a dish of olive oil and rosemary. So as soon as he had finished his pastrami sandwich, Mr. Goldberg made calls to four seasoning companies. “I said, ‘I want it to be a little bit spicy. It’s got to have good dill flavor—it’s really got to taste like the pickle.’ ”

After six months of experimentation, Deep River’s New York Spicy Dill Pickle kettle-cooked chip hit store racks last year. Unlike conventional “flat” chips, which are fried as they move along a production line, kettle chips are cooked in vats of oil. Mr. Goldberg makes 11 varieties.

“For the price and value, it’s the best chip,” says Charlie Moore, grocery buyer for the Fairway chain of stores. A 2-ounce bag of Sweet Maui Onion or Sea Salt & Vinegar retails for between 99 cents and $1.39. Mr. Goldberg says that he sold more than 24 million bags of his chips last year: a crumb compared with Lay’s, but not bad for an 11-year-old company with headquarters above a varicose-vein clinic in Old Lyme, Conn. Read more of this post

Sleeping Like a Baby, Learning at Warp Speed

March 22, 2013, 8:45 p.m. ET

Sleeping Like a Baby, Learning at Warp Speed

By ALISON GOPNIK

Babies and children sleep a lot—12 hours a day or so to our eight. But why would children spend half their lives in a state of blind, deaf paralysis punctuated by insane hallucinations? Why, in fact, do all higher animals surrender their hard-won survival abilities for part of each day?

Children themselves can be baffled and indignant about the way that sleep robs them of consciousness. We weary grown-ups may welcome a little oblivion, but at nap time, toddlers will rage and rage against the dying of the light.

Part of the answer is that sleep helps us to learn. It may just be too hard for a brain to take in the flood of new experiences and make sense of them at the same time. Instead, our brains look at the world for a while and then shut out new input and sort through what they have seen.

Children learn in a particularly profound way. Some remarkable experiments show that even tiny babies can take in a complex statistical pattern of data and figure out the rules and principles that explain the pattern. Sleep seems to play an especially important role in this kind of learning. Read more of this post

A refugee economist created an irresistibly useful approach to understanding how dissent shapes organizations

March 22, 2013, 7:40 p.m. ET

The Choice: To Squawk or to Go?

A refugee economist created an irresistibly useful approach to understanding how dissent shapes organizations

By ROGER LOWENSTEIN

Four decades ago, an economist named Albert O. Hirschman prophesied a rising gap in the quality of schools. As he reasoned: If the quality of public schools deteriorated, affluent families would switch to private schools. Hirschman labeled this the “exit” option. The parents of the remaining kids would try to restore quality via “voice”—that is, by appearing at school board meetings, speaking out, writing letters.

But these activists would be doubly handicapped. Public schools—being insensitive to profit—are less responsive to voice. And the desertion of wealthier parents would tend to deprive the public schools of influential voices.

Once you start looking at the world through the Hirschman lens, the paradigm of exit and voice is all around. Suppose you are unhappy at work: Should you complain to the boss or simply quit? Or maybe you are the boss: How much should you mollify employees—or customers—to keep them from leaving? It might depend on the presence of a third Hirschman factor: loyalty.

Broadly speaking, markets are all about exit: If the stock is a lemon, sell it. Politics deals in voice (just listen to talk radio).

What Hirschman grasped is that the strongest organizations (in either sphere) foster exit as well as voice. Both corporations and school districts have customers or members whom they need to retain—though at some point, it’s best to let the dissenters go. Read more of this post

No single government or nation deserves blame for World War I. But the question remains: How could such a calamity have occurred?

March 22, 2013, 4:57 p.m. ET

When the Lamps Went Out

No single government or nation deserves blame for World War I. But the question remains: How could such a calamity have occurred?

By WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY

The historian Fritz Stern described World War I as “the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.” It takes only the barest knowledge of the war to grasp his point. The war and its appalling slaughter strained combatant nations to the breaking point. By the end, it had overthrown dynasties, shattered empires and reconfigured the map of Europe—unleashing all sorts of political forces and intensifying sympathies and resentments that would themselves wreak havoc on history. In various ways, as we now know in retrospect, World War I helped to bring about the Russian Revolution and yet another world war.

How could such a calamity have occurred? Or to put the matter more pointedly: Who caused the war, and for what reasons? Such questions have made the origins of World War I the great whodunit of modern history. The political implications of assigning blame have only heightened the importance of the answer. Read more of this post

The Brains of the Animal Kingdom; New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Primatologist Frans de Waal on memory-champ chimps, tool-using elephants and rats capable of empathy

March 22, 2013, 7:15 p.m. ET

The Brains of the Animal Kingdom

New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Primatologist Frans de Waal on memory-champ chimps, tool-using elephants and rats capable of empathy.

By FRANS DE WAAL

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.”

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.

Aristotle’s idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher René Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his followers took up the same theme, painting animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Animals might be capable of learning, they argued, but surely not of thinking and feeling. The term”animal cognition” remained an oxymoron.

A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered “no” to all such questions. Now we’re not so sure. Read more of this post

The Secrets of Happy Families: How to Improve Your Morning, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smart, Go Out and Play, and Much More

March 15, 2013

The Stories That Bind Us

By BRUCE FEILER

I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of my extended family’s annual gathering in August, and we were struggling with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to prepare her preteens for bullying, sex and cyberstalking.

Sure enough, one night all the tensions boiled over. At dinner, I noticed my nephew texting under the table. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help myself and asked him to stop.

Ka-boom! My sister snapped at me to not discipline her child. My dad pointed out that my girls were the ones balancing spoons on their noses. My mom said none of the grandchildren had manners. Within minutes, everyone had fled to separate corners.

Later, my dad called me to his bedside. There was a palpable sense of fear I couldn’t remember hearing before.

“Our family’s falling apart,” he said.

“No it’s not,” I said instinctively. “It’s stronger than ever.”

But lying in bed afterward, I began to wonder: Was he right? What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make some families effective, resilient, happy? Read more of this post