N Nitrogen

From Nature magazine

When considering the world's worst killers, alcohol likely doesn't come to mind. Yet alcohol kills more than 2.5 million people annually, more than AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis.

A simple math problem lies at the heart of a heated debate over whether scientists should be allowed to publish provocative research into the transmissibility of H5N1 flu . Assuming the avian virus could spread easily among people, just how deadly would an H5N1 pandemic be for humans?

It’s a heavy metal. It’s linked to learning problems in school children. And every child is exposed.

Kathy Wendolkowski used to make candy in her spare time. for the past year and a half, this mother of three from Gaithersburg, Md., has been spending two to three hours a day on the Web site Old Weather ( www.oldweather.org ). There she transcribes temperature, pressure and wind-speed records from the logbooks of HMS Foxglove , a British minesweeper that patrolled the South Pacific in the years following World War I. It was a friend, a naval historian, who told her about the site soon after its launch in October 2010, Wendolkowski says. She quickly got hooked--not by the actual weather data but by the narrative of the Foxglove ’s journey and crew, a story that played out alongside the thermometer readings in each day’s logbook entries.

Whether cute and cuddly or fierce and frightening, animals affect the brain in ways scientists are just starting to appreciate. In a study of people who had electrodes implanted in their brain for the treatment of epilepsy, an international team discovered neurons that respond specifically to animals. The 41 individuals in the study were shown picturesof recognizable landmarks, objects, animals and people for about one second each as tiny electrodes measured the activity of individual neurons in three regions of their brain. When the researchers analyzed the electrical data from the 400 to 550 neurons in each region, they found a marked jump in the activity of neurons in the right amygdala that was not seen in the other brain regions tested--and only after viewing the pictures of animals. The report by senior author Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and his colleagues appeared this past August online in Nature Neuroscience . (Koch also writes the monthly column Consciousness Redux for Scientific American Mind .)