But there is a deeper challenge the brain must tackle, without which feature-binding would rarely be possible. This is the problem of temporal binding: the assignment of the correct timing of events in the world. The challenge is that different stimulus features move through different processing streams and are processed at different speeds.

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So if the visual brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive. To accomplish this, it must wait about a tenth of a second. In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop: As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers' brains would automatically resynchronize the signals; outside that tenth- of- a- second window, it suddenly looked like a badly dubbed movie.

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It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such as a clap of the hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight, and touch are simultaneous.

While this is a normally adaptive mechanism, we have discovered a strange consequence of it: Imagine that every time you press a key, you cause a brief flash of light. Now imagine we sneakily inject a tiny delay (say, two hundred milliseconds) between your key-press and the subsequent flash. You may not even be aware of the small, extra delay. However, if we suddenly remove the delay, you will now believe that the flash occurred before your key-press, an illusory reversal of action and sensation. Your brain tells you this, of course, because it has adjusted to the timing of the delay.

The MONIAC was approximately 2 m high, 1.2 m wide and almost 1 m deep, and consisted of a series of transparent plastic tanks and pipes which were fastened to a wooden board. Each tank represented some aspect of the UK national economy and the flow of money around the economy was illustrated by coloured water. At the top of the board was a large tank called the treasury. Water (representing money) flowed from the treasury to other tanks representing the various ways in which a country could spend its money. For example, there were tanks for health and education. To increase spending on health care a tap could be opened to drain water from the treasury to the tank which represented health spending. Water then ran further down the model to other tanks, representing other interactions in the economy. Water could be pumped back to the treasury from some of the tanks to represent taxation. Changes in tax rates were modeled by increasing or decreasing pumping speeds.

Ask your organic chemists, how much of general chemistry is really necessary for students taking organic chemistry? The answer is, not much. The important parts of general chemistry are reviewed in the first chapter of every organic book, and it does not cover much. Lewis structures, bonding, polarity, hybridization (which the students swear they have never seen before and which is always taught in the organic course as if it were brand new), acids and bases, some kinetics, and thermodynamics. That's about the sum total of general chemistry necessary to learn organic. This amount of material could be covered in about five weeks; the rest of general chemistry is useless as far as learning organic is concerned. I suggest, therefore, that our imaginary chemistry department would invent a course that begins with about five weeks of preliminary material and then dives directly into organic chemistry.

Think of cancer research as a search space, where research advances are moving toward some (perhaps several) peaks. Now, the question is what kind of change will bring you closer to a peak?

Well, it depends how close to the peak you already are. If you're already close to a peak, a very large change can do nothing but take you further from it. An incremental change will be roughly halfway likely to take you up a small amount; halfway likely to take you down. So if you think you're already very close to an acceptable cure rate for cancer, you should focus on the very small incremental improvements.

On the other hand, if you're far from a peak, a large change is not unlikely to take you closer to the top, and it will certainly get you there a lot faster.

But worse, what if you're climbing some low peak, where the outcome -- even if you do everything entirely right -- is poor? A small incremental change will never do any better than the short peak you're on. But a large change has some chance of finding some other peak -- a radical shift in treatment that would bring much better outcomes. The likelihood of that for any particular change may be very low. But your coverage of the search space would be vastly larger -- making progress much faster.

"The incorporation of minerals probably starts as soon as ants start getting in touch with soil," she added, explaining to Discovery News that her team found ultra fine-grained crystals of magnetic magnetite, maghemite, hematite, goethite, and aluminum silicates in ant antennae. These particles could make a "biological compass needle" that drives ant GPS.

This story begins with a family in London who had trouble with language. Some members of the family had trouble speaking and understanding grammar. They turned out to have an inherited language disorder, and scientists were able to use the family’s genealogy to pinpoint the gene involved, which they dubbed Foxp2.

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To get a sense of how this new version of Foxp2 might have changed the brains of our ancestors, Enard and his colleagues have now tweaked Foxp2 in mice into a human form. Because Foxp2 has changed very little in mammal evolution (except in humans), a mouse version of Foxp2 is a fairly good model for what the gene looked like in our own ancestors. And so this experiment can, in very rough form, replay the transition from the old Foxp2 to the new.

As the scientists report in Cell tomorrow, the mice are generally healthy, but their behavior has changed. Their squeaks are lower in frequency. They explore less. They have less dopamine in the brain, a neurotransmitter that we need to control our bodies and to pursue rewarding things like food. Dopamine is produced in the base of the brain by a clump of neurons called the basal ganglia.

It's a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired.

The Scientist has reported that, yes, it's true, Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist.

As the pressure increases, the occasional tuft gets much larger and breaks away from its neighbours. But for the most part, they grow very slightly and in unison, shielding each other from the full force of the stress. This shielding explains why it's easy to start a crack in a tooth, but difficult to finish it.

Chai also suggests that the tufts help to bridge the physical differences between the hard, brittle enamel and the softer, more flexible dentin lying underneath it. That protects the dentin, by providing a smoother gradient between the otherwise starkly different properties of the two materials.

Other microscopic feature make it harder for individual cracks to get larger. Enamel consists of thousands of cylinders called "prisms" or "rods", each consisting of aligned mineral crystals. The prisms are arranged in rows, which can often cross over one another like a basket weave. On a cross-section of a tooth, you can see this weaved pattern as alternating dark and light lines.

By regularly switching their direction, the prisms make it harder for cracks to grow in any particular one.