In this image made available Thursday May 29, 2008, from Survival International, 'uncontacted Indians' of the Envira, who have never before had any contact with the outside world, are seen during an overflight in May 2008, as they camp in the Terra Indigena Kampa e Isolados do Envira, Acre state, Brazil, close to the border with Peru. 'We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,' said uncontacted tribes expert Jon

I think this started kind of like this:

Jones: Steve! Steve! listen to me! I'm got a killer idea! Lets go take a giant gleaming helicopter, and fly it over a bunch of people who have never seen technology before!

Steve: Brilliant!

...

At least they didn't land and proclaim themselves gods. Because that went really well last time.

Scaring the crap out of unvisited tribes!

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YouTube - Shark vs Octopus

Astronomers have been able to capture and record the first moments when a massive star blows itself apart.

After decades of searching, researchers have used the world's top telescopes to observe the remarkable event.

Previously, scientists had only been able to study these "supernovas" several days after the event.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show that within two hours of the blast, a giant fireball scattered radioactive debris across space.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Exploding star caught in the act

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A type of fat that accumulates around the hips and bottom may actually offer some protection against diabetes, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
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They said subcutaneous fat, or fat that collects under the skin, helped to improve sensitivity to the hormone insulin, which regulates blood sugar.

Mice that got transplants of this type of fat deep into their abdomens lost weight and their fat cells shrank, even though they made no changes in their diet or activity levels.

Scientists find something good about a big bottom - Yahoo! News

So for those who are not sure what to believe, here is our round-up of the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions.

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed - earth - 16 May 2007 - New Scientist Environment

The Gallup World Poll asks an amazing battery of questions about the subjectively-experienced lives of people across the globe, and hence offers an unparalleled opportunity to contrast the subjectively-experienced lives of those in rich and poor countries.

This chart is my personal favorite, showing the proportion of people in each country who report having smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. Higher levels of economic development are clearly associated with more smiles and laughter. But equally, there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, and plenty of puzzles.

Laotians are more likely to smile than anyone else, and the Irish appear to have earned their national reputation as jolly japesters. My own country, Australia, comes in as the 29th of the 131 countries in the Smile Stakes, while the U.S. is a disappointing 45th.
Smiling and Laughing

This survey also asks about a range of feelings that might have been experienced the previous day. It is clear that G.D.P. is correlated with more people reporting enjoyment, while those in richer countries are less likely to report experiencing physical pain, depression, boredom, and anger.

Interestingly, G.D.P. appears uncorrelated with feelings of worry.

The Economics of Happiness, Part 6: Delving Into Subjective Well-Being - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.

In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.

Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island

An engineered material that can be injected into damaged spinal cords could help prevent scars and encourage damaged nerve fibers to grow. The liquid material, developed by Northwestern University materials science professor Samuel Stupp, contains molecules that self-assemble into nanofibers, which act as a scaffold on which nerve fibers grow.

Stupp and his colleagues described in a recent paper in the Journal of Neuroscience that treatment with the material restores function to the hind legs of paralyzed mice. Previously, researchers have restored function in the paralyzed hind legs of mice, but those experiments involved surgically implanting various types of material, while the new substance can simply be injected into the animals. The nanofibers break down into nutrients in three to eight weeks, says Stupp.

Nanofibers Shown to Heal Spinal Cords in Mice | X2

Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox.

What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations:

1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
2) But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.

Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a “hedonic treadmill,” in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness.

Either way, the policy implications of the Paradox are huge, as they suggest that economic growth may not raise well-being by much.

Given the stakes in this debate, Betsey Stevenson and I thought it worth reassessing the evidence.

The Economics of Happiness, Part 1: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

There is an incredibly high correlation between average levels of happiness and average incomes — greater than 0.8. Angus Deaton actually beat us to this finding, and his analysis of these data is worth a close reading, (here).

There’s another striking finding in this graph: the relationship between happiness and log income appears nearly linear.

Thus, a 10 percent rise in income in the United States appears to increase happiness by about as much as a 10 perecent rise in income in Burundi.

...

2. Even so, it is worth noting that a 10 percent rise in income in Burundi requires one-sixtieth as much income as a 10 percent rise in income in the U.S. Thus, even if the slope is three times as steep for rich countries as poor countries (as we estimate), this still means than an extra $100 has about a twenty-times-greater effect on happiness in Burundi than it would in the United States.

Comparisons like this make you think that foreign aid may not be such a bad idea.

The Economics of Happiness, Part 2: Are Rich Countries Happier than Poor Countries? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog