The first month of 2012 has been a good month for interesting reads of all kinds, not just science ones, but this series is all about the science, so here goes:

• Scientific American reports on a clever experiment which attempts to shed light on how multicellular organisms evolved. These have always been a bit of a conundrum since indications are that the earliest such organisms were clusters of single cell creatures that somehow “decided” to stick together and work together for the common good. This is perplexing because while it makes sense for a single cell to snag resources for its own well-being, it’s a bit of leap from that to how the cells came to subsume their own self-interest in favor of that of the group as a whole. In this experiment, single-celled yeast were observed to achieve the earliest forms of multi-cellular organisms when selection pressure induced by the scientists encouraged them to cluster together and even develop a rudimentary version of division of labor.
• The next article is from Malaysia’s very own The Star (actually just an article bought from Reuters, but whatever.) Researchers on Alzheimer’s disease have known for some time that people who actively exercise their brains through activities like reading and playing games seem to build up a sort of reserve of mental capacity. This allows their brains to function normally even after the destructive proteins that characterize the disease show up. However this new finding indicates that such activities do more than that. It appears that as long as these activities are started early on in life, they actually help to prevent the plaques from forming in the first place. The caveat is that starting brain-stimulating activities after Alzheimer’s has already been diagnosed does nothing so only a lifetime’s habit of being intellectually engaged appears to help.
• The next two articles are somewhat related and they deal with open-mindedness, and what might or might not cause it. Discovery News highlights a finding that contravenes a commonly held belief, that as people age, they tend to become more conservative. This is based only on statistical data from surveys from 1972 to 2004, plus interviews, so it’s not exactly hard science. I think it makes sense with the key being that even if old people are conservative, their views become less extreme as they age and they learn to appreciate a greater range of other views from a lifetime of experience, even if they don’t agree with them.
• The last article however is the controversial of all. Live Science cites research claiming that conservative beliefs are correlated with low intelligence. In particular, the correlation is between low levels of IQ measured as children and conservative beliefs held as adults when they grow up. As usual correlation doesn’t prove causation but the working theory is that it is more mentally draining to deal with people who are different from you and hence people with lower IQ gravitate towards beliefs and ideologies that stress conformity to tradition and resistance to everything that is new and different. These findings were buttressed by other studies that showed that people with lower cognitive abilities had less contact with people who did not share their race and were more likely to be prejudiced against homosexuals.

I spent some time looking for cool stuff to share but only have a couple of articles for the last month of 2011, so here they are anyway:

• The Economist has a simple story about how the usual practice of cutting off an infant’s umbilical cord immediately following birth may not be a good idea. The theory is that as long as the cord is still attached, blood continues to flow from the detached placenta to the infant. If the cord is cut too soon, not enough blood flows into the infant, causing anemia. Indeed, a study found that infants who had their umbilical cords cut after at least 3 minutes following birth had up to 45% more iron in their blood compared to those whose cords were cut within 10 seconds when they were 4 months old. As the article suggests, this may be what nature “intended” as other mammals tend to leave the cords attached for some time following birth.
• The next article is the latest in a long line of findings in evolutionary psychology which show that human infants are born with an ingrained sense of morality. What makes this one different is that it also shows that infants’ sense of morality is capable of quickly growing more sophisticated as they grow older. Previous studies showed that infants like to reward actors in events that they perceive to be good, which usually means an actor that has been seen to be helping other actors in a scenario, such as retrieving an object for them or helping them climb across an obstacle etc. However, this time the researchers showed that at the age of about 8 months, the babies, when asked to reward an actor, would choose to reward a bad actor if they had previously seen this actor doing bad things to another antisocial actor as opposed to another actor who only did good things all the time. This means that they are rewarding an actor who they think is justly punishing someone bad.