"Intelligence was predicted by adjustment, emotional intelligence, socioeconomic status and an interaction of these variables and the prediction percentage is quite high - R2>30%."
The development of a drug that controls a chemical used to form memories sparked heady scientific and philosophical speculation this week.
Granted, the drug has only been tested in rats, but other memory-blunting drugs are being tried in soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. It might not be long before memories are pharmaceutically targeted, just as moods are now.
Some think this represents an opportunity to eliminate the crippling psychic effects of past trauma. Others see an ill-advised chemical intrusion into an essential human facility that threatens to replace our ability to understand and cope with life's inevitabilities.
Oxford University neuroethicist Anders Sandberg spoke with Wired.com about the future of memory-editing drugs. In some ways, said Sandberg, our memories are already being altered. We just don't realize it.
Wired.com: Will these drugs, when they become available, work as expected?
Anders Sandberg: A lot of discussion is based on the false premise that they'll work as well as they would in a science fiction story. In practice, well-studied, well-understood drugs like aspirin have side effects that can be annoying or even dangerous. I think the same thing will go for memory editing.
Wired.com: How selective will memory editing be?
Sandberg: Current research seems to suggest that it can be pretty specific, but there will be side effects. It may not even be that you forget other memories. Small, false memories could be created. And we're probably not going to be able to predict that before we actually try them.
Wired.com: What's the right way to test the drugs?
Sandberg: The cautious approach works. Right now, there are small clinical trials using propranolol to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a good start. We should also find better ways of doing the trials, because we don't really know what we're looking for.
When testing a cancer drug, we look at side effects in terms of toxicity. Here we might want to look at all aspects of thinking, which is really hard, because you can't test for all of them.
In the future, since we're getting more technological forms of recording and documenting our lives, those will have a bigger part in testing the drugs. We'll be able to ask, How does this help in everyday life? How often do you get "tip of the tongue" phenomena? Does it increase in relation to the drug?
Wired.com:
It seems that it would be easy to test "tip of the tongue" drug effects on the sorts of small things one recalls on an everyday basis. But what if it's old, infrequently recalled but still-important memories that are threatened by side effects?
Sandberg: It's pretty messy to determine what is an important memory to us. They quite often crop up, but without us consciously realizing that we're thinking of the memory. That's probably good news, as every time you recall a memory, you also tend to strengthen it.
Wired.com: How likely is the manipulation of these fundamental memories?
Sandberg: Big memories, with lots of connections to other things we've done, will probably be messy to deal with. But I don't think those are the memories that people want to give up. Most people would want to edit memories that impair them.
Of course, if we want to tweak memories to look better to ourselves, we might get a weird concept of self.
Wired.com: I've asked about memory removal — but should the discussion involve adding memories, too?
Sandberg: People are more worried about deletion. We have a preoccupation with amnesia, and are more fearful of losing something than adding falsehoods.
The problem is that it's the falsehoods that really mess you up. If you don't know something, you can look it up, remedy your lack of information. But if you believe something falsely, that might make you act much more erroneously.
You can imagine someone modifying their memories of war to make them look less cowardly and more brave. Now they'll think they're a brave person. At that point, you end up with the interesting question of whether, in a crisis situation, they would now be brave.
Wired.com: You use another example of memory-editing drugs for soldiers in your article with S. Matthew Liao, that if the memory of a mistaken action is erased, a soldier might not learn from his remorse.
Sandberg: To some extent, we already have to deal with this. My grandfather's story of having been in the Finnish winter war as a volunteer shifted over time. He didn't become much braver from year to year, but there was a difference between the earlier and later versions.
We can't trust our memories. But on the other hand, our memories are the basis for most of our decisions. We take it as a given that we can trust them, which is problematic.
Wired.com: But this fluidity of memory at least exists in an organic framework. Might we lose something in the transition to an abrupt, directed fluidity?
Sandberg: There's some truth to that. We have authentic fake memories, in a sense. My grandfather might have made his memories a bit more brave over time, but that was affected by his personality and his other circumstances, and tied to who he was. If he just went to the memory clinic and wanted to have won the battle, that would be more jarring.
If you do that kind of jarring change, and it doesn't connect to anything else in the personality, it's probably not going to work that well.
Wired.com: In your article, you also bring up forgiveness. If we no longer remember when someone has wronged us, we might not learn to forgive them, and that's an important social ability.
Sandberg: My co-author is more concerned than I am, but I do think there's something interesting going on with forgiveness. It's psychological, emotional and moral — a complex can of worms.
I can see problems, not from a moral standpoint, but legal. What if I hit you with my car, and to prevent PTSD you take propranolol, and afterwards in court think it wasn't too serious? A clever lawyer might argue that the victim's lack of concern means the crime should be disregarded.
I'm convinced that we're going to see a lot of interesting legal cases in the next few years, as neuroscience gets involved. People tend to believe witnesses. Suppose a witness says, "I'd just been taking my Ritalin" — should we believe him more, because we've got an enhanced memory? And if a witness has been taking a drug to impair memory, is that a reason to believe that her account is not true?
With this kind of neuroscientific evidence, it's very early to tell what we can trust. We need to do actual experiments and see measure how drugs enhance or impair memory, or more problematically, introduce a bias. Some drugs might enhance emotional memories over unemotional, or vice versa.
Wired.com: Is it paranoid to worry that someday people will be stuck drifting in a sea of shifting and unreliable memories?
Sandberg: I think we're already in this sea, but we don't notice it most of the time. Most people think, "I've got a slightly bad memory." Then they completely trust what they remember, even when it's completely unreliable.
Maybe all this is good, because it forces us to recognize that the nature of our memory is quite changeable.
Scientists are coming ever closer to understanding the cellular navigation tools that guide birds in their unerring, globe-spanning migrations.
The latest piece of the puzzle is superoxide, an oxygen molecule that may combine with light-sensitive proteins to form an in-eye compass, allowing birds to see Earth's magnetic field.
"It connects from the subatomic world to a whole bird flying," said Michael Edidin, an editor of Biphysical Journal, which published the study last week. "That's exciting!"
The superoxide theory is proposed by Biophysicist Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of the study and a pioneer in avian magnetoreception. Schulten first hypothesized in 1978 that some sort of biochemical reaction took place in birds' eyes, most likely producing electrons whose spin was affected by subtle magnetic gradients.
In 2000, Schulten refined this model, suggesting that the compass contained a photoreceptor protein called cryptochrome, which reacted with an as-yet-unidentified molecule to produce pairs of electrons that existed in a state of quantum entanglement — spatially separated, but each still able to affect the other.
According to this model, when a photon hits the compass, entangled electrons are scattered to different parts of the molecule. Variations in Earth's magnetic field cause them to spin in different ways, each of which leaves the compass in a slightly different chemical state. The state alters the flow of cellular signals through a bird's visual pathways, ultimately resulting in a perception of magnetism.
Far-fetched as it sounds, subsequent research from multiple groups has found cellular evidence of such a system. Molecular experiments suggest that it's indeed sensitive to Earth's geomagnetics, and computational models suggest a level of quantum entanglement only dreamed of by physicists, who hope to use entangled electrons to store information in quantum computers.
But though cryptochrome is likely part of the compass, the other part is still unknown. In April, another group of magnetoreception researchers showed that oxygen could interact with cryptochrome to produce the necessary electron entanglements. Schulten's latest proposed role for superoxide, an oxygen anion found in bird eyes, fits with their findings.
Edidin cautioned that "this is still not an experimental demonstration. It's a possibility."
As for the perceptual result of the compass, it remains a mystery. Some researchers think birds might see a dot at the edge of their vision, swiveling according to the direction they're facing. Others think it might produce effects of color or hue. Perhaps migrating birds fly towards the light.
Once upon a time, scientists routinely found life in places where it wasn't supposed to exist. That doesn't happen anymore, and not because the pace of discovery has slowed. If anything, it's accelerated. It's simply become clear that life can exist almost anywhere on Earth.
After 3 billion years of evolution, life has flowed into every last nook and cranny, from the bottom of the sea to the upper edge of the stratosphere. From blazing heat and freezing cold to pure acidity and atomic bomb-caliber radiation, there's seemingly no stress so great that some bug can't handle it.
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Desulforudis audaxviator is perhaps the one truly singular microbe. Every other known organism exists in a system in which at least some nutrients are provided by other creatures. But not D. audaxviator, which was discovered in a South African mine shaft, two miles beneath Earth's surface and entirely alone. Using radioactivity from uranium-containing rocks as energy, it can harvest or metabolize every nutrient it needs from surrounding rock and gas — the world's only known single-species ecosystem.
| | | | | | | |
Ferroplasma acidophilum can grow in a pH of zero — conditions that make sulfuric acid look like mineral water. Found in the toxic outflow of a California gold mine, it uses iron as the central structural element of nearly all its proteins.
Image: Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (left), NASA (right)
You're in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, "Hai una sigaretta?"
If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.
"The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior," write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d'Annunzio in Italy.
It's the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they'll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.
What's surprising about the study is that ear choice had such a decided impact on the behavior of participants in a natural, or as the researchers put it, ecological, setting. Why would people feel more generous when their right ears are addressed?
Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain.
"These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized differential specialization of right and left hemispheres," they write.
In addition to the direct cigarette-ask study, they also simply observed people interacting and also asked for cigarettes without directing their requests towards a particular ear. The Italian researchers picked the night club setting because the loud music allowed the cigarette-asker to approach people and speak directly into one ear without seeming "odd."
Etymology
Latin acumen, sharp point
n.acumen (plural acumens)
Editor's note: Robin Chase thinks a lot about transportation and the internet, and how to link them. She connected them when she founded Zipcar, and she wants to do it again by making our electric grid and our cars smarter. Time magazine recently named her one of the 100 most influential people of the year. David Weinberger sat down with Chase to discuss her idea.
Robin Chase considers the future of electricity, the future of cars and the internet three terms in a single equation, even if most of us don't yet realize they're on the same chalkboard. Solve the equation correctly, she says, and we create a greener future where innovation thrives. Get it wrong, and our grandchildren will curse our names.
Chase thinks big, and she's got the cred to back it up. She created an improbable network of automobiles called Zipcar. Getting it off the ground required not only buying a fleet of cars, but convincing cities to dedicate precious parking spaces to them. It was a crazy idea, and it worked. Zipcar now has 6,000 cars and 250,000 users in 50 towns.
Now she's moving on to the bigger challenge of integrating a smart grid with our cars – and then everything else. The kicker is how they come together. You can sum it up as a Tweet: The intelligent network we need for electricity can also turn cars into nodes. Interoperability is a multiplier. Get it right!
Robin Chase
Chase starts by explaining the smart grid. There's broad consensus that our electrical system should do more than carry electricity. It should carry information. That would allow a more intelligent, and efficient, use of power.
"Our electric infrastructure is designed for the rare peak of usage," Chase says. "That's expensive and wasteful."
Changing that requires a smart grid. What we have is a dumb one. We ask for electricity and the grid provides it, no questions asked. A smart grid asks questions and answers them. It makes the meter on your wall a sensor that links you to a network that knows how much power you're using, when you're using it and how to reduce your energy needs – and costs.
Such a system will grow more important as we become energy producers, not just consumers. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids will return power to the grid. Rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines will, at times, produce more energy than we can store. A smart grid generates what we need and lets us use what we generate. That's why the Obama Administration allocated $4.5 billion in the stimulus bill for smart grid R&D.
This pleases Chase, but it also makes her nervous. The smart grid must be an information network, but we have a tradition of getting such things wrong. Chase is among those trying to convince the government that the safest and most robust network will use open internet protocols and standards. For once the government seems inclined to listen.
Chase switches gears to talk about how cars fit into the equation. She sees automobiles as just another network device, one that, like the smart grid, should be open and net-based.
"Cars are network nodes," she says. "They have GPS and Bluetooth and toll-both transponders, and we're all on our cell phones and lots of cars have OnStar support services."
That's five networks. Automakers and academics will bring us more. They're working on smart cars that will communicate with us, with one another and with the road. How will those cars connect to the network? That's the third part of Chase's equation: Mesh networking.
In a typical Wi-Fi network, there's one router and a relatively small number of devices using it as a gateway to the internet. In a mesh network, every device is also a router. Bring in a new mesh device and it automatically links to any other mesh devices within radio range. It is an example of what internet architect David Reed calls "cooperative gain" - the more devices, the more bandwidth across the network. Chase offers an analogy to explain it.
"Wi-Fi is like a bridge that connects the highways on either side of the stream," she says. "You build it wide enough to handle the maximum traffic you expect. If too much comes, it gets congested. When not enough arrives, you've got excess capacity. Mesh takes a different approach: Each person who wants to cross throws in a flat rock that's above the water line. The more people who do that, the more ways there are to get across the river."
Cooperative gain means more users bring more capacity, not less. It's always right-sized. Of course, Chase points out, if you're trying to go a long distance, you're ultimately forced back onto the broadband bridge where the capacity is limited. But for local intra-mesh access, it's a brilliant and counter-intuitive strategy.
Mesh networking as a broad-based approach to networking is growing. A mesh network with 240 nodes covers Vienna. Similar projects are underway in Barcelona, Athens, the Czech Republic and, before long, in two areas of Boston not far from the cafe we're sitting in. But the most dramatic examples are the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and tanks and airplanes are running around using mesh networks," said Chase. "It works, it's secure, it's robust. If a node or device disappears, the network just reroutes the data."
And, perhaps most important, it's in motion. That's what allows Chase's plural visions to go singular. Build a smart electrical grid that uses Internet protocols and puts a mesh network device in every structure that has an electric meter. Sweep out the half dozen networks in our cars and replace them with an open, Internet-based platform. Add a mesh router. A nationwide mesh cloud will form, linking vehicles that can connect with one another and with the rest of the network. It's cooperative gain gone national, gone mobile, gone open.
Chase's mesh vision draws some skepticism. Some say it won't scale up. The fact it's is being used in places like Afghanistan and Vienna indicates it could. Others say moving vehicles may not be able to hook into and out of mesh networks quickly enough. Chase argues it's already possible to do so in less than a second, and that time will only come down. But even if every car and every electric meter were meshed, there's still a lot of highway out there that wouldn't be served, right? Chase has an answer for that, too.
"Cars would have cellular and Wi-Fi as backups," she said.
The economics are right, she argues. Rather than over-building to handle peak demand and letting capacity go unused, we would right-size our infrastructure to provide exactly what we need, when we need it, with minimum waste and maximum efficiency.
"There's an economy of network scale here," she says. "The traffic-light guys should be interested in this for their own purposes, and so should the power-grid folks and the emergency responders and the Homeland Security folks and, well, everyone. Mesh networks based on open standards are economically justifiable for any one of these things. Put them together - network the networks – and for the same exact infrastructure spend, you get a ubiquitous, robust, resilient, open communication platform — ripe for innovation — without spending a dollar more."
The time is right, too. There's $7.2 billion in the stimulus bill for broadband, $4.5 billion for the smart grid and about $5 billion for transportation technology. The Transportation Reauthorization bill is coming up, too. At $300 billion it is second only to education when it comes to federal discretionary spending. We are about to make a huge investment in a set of networks. It will be difficult to gather the political and economic will to change them once they are deployed.
"We need to get this right, right now," Chase says.
Build each of these infrastructures using open networking standards and we enable cooperative gain at the network level itself. Get it wrong and we will have paved over a generational opportunity.
David Weinberger is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. E-mail him at self@evident.com.
"Some might say that Mathematica and A New Kind of Science are ambitious projects.
But in recent years I’ve been hard at work on a still more ambitious project—called Wolfram|Alpha.
And I’m excited to say that in just two months it’s going to be going live:
Mathematica has been a great success in very broadly handling all kinds of formal technical systems and knowledge.
But what about everything else? What about all other systematic knowledge? All the methods and models, and data, that exists?
Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things and that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.
But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.
I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.
I had two crucial ingredients: Mathematica and NKS. With Mathematica, I had a symbolic language to represent anything—as well as the algorithmic power to do any kind of computation. And with NKS, I had a paradigm for understanding how all sorts of complexity could arise from simple rules.
But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated?
A lot of it is now on the web—in billions of pages of text. And with search engines, we can very efficiently search for specific terms and phrases in that text.
But we can’t compute from that. And in effect, we can only answer questions that have been literally asked before. We can look things up, but we can’t figure anything new out.
So how can we deal with that? Well, some people have thought the way forward must be to somehow automatically understand the natural language that exists on the web. Perhaps getting the web semantically tagged to make that easier.
But armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.
It’s not easy to do this. Every different kind of method and model—and data—has its own special features and character. But with a mixture of Mathematica and NKS automation, and a lot of human experts, I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten a very long way.
How can I say it?
"But, OK. Let’s say we succeed in creating a system that knows a lot, and can figure a lot out. How can we interact with it?
The way humans normally communicate is through natural language. And when one’s dealing with the whole spectrum of knowledge, I think that’s the only realistic option for communicating with computers too.
Of course, getting computers to deal with natural language has turned out to be incredibly difficult. And for example we’re still very far away from having computers systematically understand large volumes of natural language text on the web.
But if one’s already made knowledge computable, one doesn’t need to do that kind of natural language understanding.
All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do.
Of course, even that has never been done in any generality. And it’s made more difficult by the fact that one doesn’t just want to handle a language like English: one also wants to be able to handle all the shorthand notations that people in every possible field use.
I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work.
Neverending trillions
"Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task.
It’s certainly the most complex project I’ve ever undertaken. Involving far more kinds of expertise—and more moving parts—than I’ve ever had to assemble before.
And—like Mathematica, or NKS—the project will never be finished.
But I’m happy to say that we’ve almost reached the point where we feel we can expose the first part of it.
It’s going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.
We’re all working very hard right now to get Wolfram|Alpha ready to go live.
I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. A new paradigm for using computers and the web.
That almost gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago!
Wolfram Alpha differs from search engines in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a keyword, but instead computes answers and relevant visualizations from a collection of known information. Other new search engines, known collectively as semantic search engines, have developed alpha applications of this type, which index a large amount of answers, and then try to match the question to one. Examples of companies using this strategy include True Knowledge, and Microsoft's Powerset.
Wolfram Alpha has many parallels with Cyc, a project aimed at developing a common-sense inference engine since the 80s, though without producing any major commercial application. Cyc founder Douglas Lenat was one of the few given an opportunity to test Wolfram Alpha before its release:
It handles a much wider range of queries than Cyc, but much narrower than Google; it understands some of what it is displaying as an answer, but only some of it ... The bottom line is that there are a large range of queries it can't parse, and a large range of parsable queries it can't answer
-Douglas Lenat[2]
Wolfram's earlier flagship product Mathematica encompasses computer algebra, numerical computation, visualization and statistics capabilities and can be used on all kinds of mathematical analysis, from simple plotting to signal processing, but will not be included in the alpha release, due to computation-time problems.[3]
Today's key features of logical positivism (or logical empiricism; see also constructive empiricism), as originally created by A. Comte (19th century) and later adapted and corrected by Karl Popper, are:
1. A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements;
2. A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements (Göedel's 1921 and 1951 demonstrations of the essential insufficiency of many axiomatic systems, have largely reshaped and structured this vision);
3. An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, that is amenable to being verified, confirmed, or falsified by the empirical observation of reality; statements that would, by their nature, be regarded as untestable included the teleological; (Thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.)
4. The belief that science is markedly cumulative;
5. The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;
6. The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator;
7. The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable;
8. The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones;
9. The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world;
10. The belief that "all true knowledge is scientific"[14];
11. The belief that all things are ultimately measurable;
12. The belief that "entities of one kind... are reducible to entities of another,"[14] such as societies to numbers, or mental events to chemical events (reductionism).
What's new
Major progress over this picture came, at the end of 20th century, from the science (i.e. mathematics) of complexity. It is now clear that the scaling, up or down, of a phenomenum usually produces new laws, that essentially account for new, qualitatively different, phenomena. This essencially challenges the 12th point, above.
In this sense, although macro-processes can, indeed, be "reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events,"[14] and "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,"[14] or "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems"[14] . It is no longer believed that ALL laws of the former phenomena can be tracked back or inferred up, from the later. In a parallel to Goedel's finding, about the incompleteness of most axiomatic mathematical systems, there is now a perception of an essencial insufficiency of micro laws, to explain macro phenomena.
Simple programs, for instance, are capable of a remarkable range of complex behavior. Some have been proven to be universal computers, others exhibit properties familiar from traditional science, such as thermodynamic behavior, continuum behavior, conserved quantities, percolation, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and others. They have been used as models of traffic, material fracture, crystal growth, biological growth, and various sociological, geological, and ecological phenomena.
Stephen Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science argues that, in order to capture the essence of almost any complex system it is necessary to systematically explore these systems and document what they do. He believes this study should become a new branch of science, like physics or chemistry. The basic goal of this field is to understand and characterize the computational universe using experimental methods.
The proposed new branch of scientific exploration admits many different forms of scientific production. For instance, qualitative classifications like those found in biology are often the results of initial forays into the computational jungle. On the other hand, explicit proofs that certain systems compute this or that function are also admissible. There are also some forms of production that are in some ways unique to this field of study. For instance, the discovery of computational mechanisms that emerge in different systems but in bizarrely different forms.
What's wrong
As of the first decade of the 21st century, the main challenge posed to Positivism (by its own ranks; "metaphisical" and teleological claims being, naturally, disqualified a priori) is the emergence of unsolved paradoxes from within seemingly "well-constructed" theories. Namely, Quantum Phisics and Bayesian Statistics result in disturbing, logic-defying results, that have generated a lot of havoc and schism within the positivist community.
December 05, 2008 | 4:57:14 PMCategories: Animals Known as living fossils, they lasted for millions of years with barely a change, even as their relatives went extinct or took different paths across the tree of life.
Many are now threatened or endangered. But with some luck and a little help, living fossils will be able to survive the age of humans, too.
The Purple frog, discovered just five years ago in western India, likely escaped detection because it lives underground, emerging for just two weeks during the monsoon season. Distinguished by a pointed snout, it's related to a family of frogs now found only on the Seychelles islands, which split from India 100 million years ago.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Scientists disagree over whether the frilled shark has survived for 380 milllion years, or a mere 95 million years. Only two living specimens have been found — both off the coast in Japan, in the late 19th century and again in 2007 — but they are sometimes caught accidentally by deep-sea fishing nets.
Video: Xagtho Channel
Until a preserved specimen was found in the Smithsonian in 1975, the 10-footed, lobster-like Jurassic shrimp was thought to have gone extinct 50 million years ago. Living Jurassic shrimp have since been found.
Image: Census of Marine Life
What it lacks in convenient nomenclature, the Siberian
Image: St. Petersburg Zoological Institute
Found mostly in Southern Hemisphere rain forests, velvet wormstardigrades, their legs are hollow and supported by fluid pressure. After a few early adaptations for land, they've hardly changed in 360 million years.
have legs and — unlike other worms — bear live young. Closely related to
Video: InfiniteWorld
The most widespread of all living fossils, crocodiles have barely changed in the 230 million years since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Image: Flickr/Keven Law
One of the relatively few mammalian living fossils, duck-billed platypuses have been weird for 110 million years: in addition to their bills, they lay eggs and have venom-filled leg spurs. No wonder they were considered a hoax by early naturalists.
Video: Springbreakwas2short
Its spiraling chambered shell was a symbol of perfection in ancient Greece, and the nautilus has changed little in 500 million years.
Image: Flickr/Ethan Hein
Found commonly on Atlantic beaches, horseshoe crabs are more closely related to spiders, ticks and scorpions than crabs. Their ancestors evolved in the Paleozoic's shallow seas, and they've evolved only slightly in the last 445 million years. If you see one on its back, flip it over: They can regrow lost limbs, but can't right themselves when tossed in the surf.
Image: Flickr/Chris Howard
Better known as the "Ant from Mars," Martialis heureka is a direct-line descendant of the last common ancestor of all ants — a subterranean forager who wouldn't go above-ground until flowering plants evolved 120 million years ago.
Image: Christian Rabeling
Coelacanth vanished from the fossil record 410 million years ago — and then one was caught in 1938 off the coast of South Africa. A second species was discovered in Indonesian waters in 1999.
Video: Pinktentacle3
Neither a mantis nor a shrimp, the mantis shrimp has changed little in 400 million years. It has the world's most complex eyes, and its prey-killing claw motion is the second-fastest animal motion. To quote mantis shrimp eye researcher Tom Cronin, "Whenever they get into any type of situation, they smash things. You can't pick these up. They're really great animals to have around."
Image: Tom Cronin
Palaeontologists are criticizing a new article on an armoured dinosaur fossil because the 80-million-year-old specimen may have been taken illegally from the Gobi Desert. The prominent California neuroscientist who purchased the fossil five years ago says he will send it back, to China or Mongolia, if someone can demonstrate that laws were indeed broken.
The 80-million-year-old specimen is of an ankylosaur.Western Paleontological LaboratoriesVilayanur Ramachandran, who directs the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, says that he bought the skull for US$10,000 at the Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil Showcase in Arizona, long troubled by the sale of illegally-imported fossils (see 'The biggest, wildest fossil market in the west').
Ramachandran, an amateur fossil collector, was walking around the displays with Clifford Miles, of Western Paleontological Laboratories near Salt Lake City, Utah, when Miles pointed out the perfectly preserved skull. "He said, 'You buy it, I'll name it after you,'" says Ramachandran.
Miles did just that on 10 January, in an article1 in an Indian journal that names the bull-like ankylosaur Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani. But there is no clear paper trail that guarantees the fossil was acquired through legal channels; in fact, when it was cleaned in 2003 in Denver, the museum made sure the work was done outside the museum because of the fossil's suspect origin.
"It is totally inappropriate to publish on this specimen; it is stolen patrimony," says Mark Norell, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who does field work in Mongolia and China.
Miles acknowledges that the specimen's provenance is questionable, but says that publishing its details will help shed more light on the fossil. "We need to publish on fossils like this so people can learn where they came from," he says.
Miles and his brother, Clark, attempted to publish the fossil's description in 2006 in a Polish journal, but their submission was rejected because the fossil seemed to have been obtained illegally from Mongolia. Two years ago they described it as coming from the Barun Goyot Formation in Mongolia, but now say they "hit a dead end" in trying to confirm its origin.
In Tucson, the fossil was displayed by Colorado cast-maker Robert Gaston for Hollis Butts, a dealer in Japan. Ramachandran says that he purchased it from Butts, who couldn't be reached for comment.
Philip Currie, a palaeontologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says that publishing work about such fossils only encourages the raging illegal trade. "This really flags a horrendous problem in Mongolia, where a frightening number of specimens are smuggled abroad," says Currie. Bolortsetseg Minjin, who directs the Institute for the Study of Dinosaurs in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, says that the rock the skull is encased in suggests it probably came from Mongolia. "It should be sent back," says Minjin, who is also a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.
Ramachandran says that he would be happy to repatriate the fossil to the appropriate nation, if someone shows him "evidence it was exported without permit". For now, the specimen rests at the Victor Valley Museum, an hour's drive east of Los Angeles in the isolated town of Apple Valley.
