Word: braine
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...name roughly means "grandmother who eats everything") were assumed by anthropologists to be mythical. That was until a team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavating a cave on the island uncovered ancient bones that included the 18,000-year-old skeleton of a 1-m-tall female with a brain the size of a grapefruit. In 2004, they announced in Nature magazine that the bones were the remains of a previously unknown species of human?which they named Homo floresiensis?that coexisted for a time with modern Homo sapiens. The remarkable discovery of this ancient hobbit meant the history...
...handing our child a paint set, we want to know we're doing something grander than simply keeping her occupied until dinner. (Expressive planning! Original art!) And since so much of child rearing involves playing the same games, singing the same songs and answering the same questions until your brain goes soft, it's arguably even more important for parents to be reassured that seemingly trivial activities serve a higher calling...
...team of researchers from the U.S., Indonesia and Australia report on their own investigation of the Flores bones and conclude that the so-called hobbit isn't a separate species, but just an unfortunate pygmy with a form of microcephaly, a developmental disorder that shrinks the head and the brain. Or as the archaeologist Alan Thorne, one of the authors of the PNAS paper, says: "They are just like hobbits. They're the products of someone's imagination." (See TIME's photo-essay "Where Did the Hobbit Come From...
...Smiling Through Surgery Re Michael Kinsley's essay written in anticipation of brain surgery [July 24]: I again see the man I frequently admired on the television program Crossfire, someone with whom I disagreed politically but who was analytical and fair. I think that better understanding our frailty helps us keep a balanced perspective. I hope that he continues along that path. As a Republican, I would welcome the old Kinsley back. Bill Kistulinec Warren, New Jersey...
...fMRIs may be more serious. Physical anomalies such as evidence of a stroke or tumor can interfere with the scan's accuracy. And the test is administered in a decidedly unnatural way--with the subject lying down inside a giant magnet. Since speaking aloud activates regions of the brain that could swamp lie-detection results, subjects are asked yes-or- no questions and then instructed to push a button to answer. Maybe the brain operates the same way with a push-button fib as with a verbal one--but maybe it doesn't. And because we all do a certain...