According to Japanese researchers paying people a compliment appears to activate the same reward centre in the brain as paying them cash. The study offers scientific support for the long-held assumption that people get a psychological boost from having a good reputation.

Specially created team studied 19 healthy people using a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. In one set of experiments, people played a gambling game in which they were told one of three cards would yield a payout. The researchers then monitored the brain activity triggered when the subjects received a cash reward. In a second set of experiments, people were told they were being evaluated by strangers based on information from a personality questionnaire and a video they had made. The researchers then monitored reactions to these staged evaluations, including when the subjects thought strangers had paid them a compliment. Both kinds of rewards triggered activity in a reward-related area of the brain.

The finding represents an important first step toward explaining complex human social behaviours such as altruism.

Reference:

http://www.nips.ac.jp/eng/news/2008/20080424/

Rhesus macaque monkeys performed nearly as well as college students at quick mental addition, researchers reported on Monday, adding to the evidence that non-verbal math skills are not unique to humans.

The study from Duke University follows findings by Japanese researchers earlier this month that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game.

Prior studies have found that non-human primates can match numbers of objects, compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects.

Her study pitted Boxer and Feinstein — two female rhesus macaques named after U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California — against 14 Duke University students. "We had them do math on the fly," – says Cantlon said.

The task was to perform mental addition on two sets of dots that were briefly flashed on a computer screen. The teams were asked to pick the correct answer from two choices on a different screen. The humans were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. The monkeys and the humans all typically answered within 1 second. The college students answered correctly 94 percent of the time, while the monkeys were right 76 percent of the time. Both the monkeys' and the students' performance worsened when the two choice boxes were close in number, following a similar downward-sloping curve.

"If the correct sum was 11 and the box with the incorrect number held 12 dots, both monkeys and the college students took longer to answer and had more errors," Cantlon explained in a Duke news release. "We call this the ratio effect. What's remarkable is that both species suffered from the ratio effect at virtually the same rate."

Cantlon says that the study was not designed to show up Duke University students. "I think of this more as using non-human primates as a tool for discovering where the sophisticated human mind comes from," she said.

The researchers said the findings shed light on the shared mathematical abilities in humans and non-human primates and shows the importance of language — which allows for counting and more advanced calculations — in the evolution of math in humans.

"I don't think language is the only thing that differentiates humans from non-human primates, but in terms of math tasks, it is probably the big one," she said.
As for the teams, both were paid. Boxer and Feinstein got their favorite reward: a sip of Kool-Aid soft drink. As for the students, they got $10 each — enough for a beer or two.

Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers say. In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago. Human evolution is the biological and cultural development and change of our hominin ancestors to modern humans.

The genetic changes have related to numerous different human characteristics, the researchers say in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Two genes involved in determining the size of the human brain have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60,000 years, researchers say, suggesting that the brain is still undergoing rapid evolution.

The scientists make their claim based on the recent evolutionary history of two genes microcephalin and abnormal spindle-like microcephaly-associated, which appear to regulate brain size.

Over thousands of years, both genes seem to be generating new and improved versions of themselves - beneficial mutations that are spreading rapidly among the human population to reshape and strengthen brain capacity.

Many of the recent genetic changes reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases that became mass killers following the growth of human civilizations, the researchers say. For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax drier.

“The changes have been driven by the colossal growth in the human population, from a few million to 6.5 billion in the past 10,000 years, with people moving into new environments to which they needed to adapt. The central finding is that human evolution is happening very fast, faster than any of us thought,” - says Professor Henry Harpending, a University of Utah Anthropologist.

Most of the acceleration is in the last 10,000 years; basically corresponding to population growth after agriculture is invented.

Gene mutations

The researchers looked for the appearance of favorable gene mutations over the past 80,000 years of human history by analyzing voluminous DNA information on 270 people from different populations worldwide.

Data from this International HapMap Project, short for haplotype mapping, offered essentially a catalogue of genetic differences and similarities in people alive today. Looking at such data, scientists can ascertain how recently a given genetic change appeared in the genome and then can plot the pace of such change into the distant past. Beneficial genetic changes have appeared at a rate roughly 100 times higher in the past 5000 years than at any previous period of human evolution, the researchers determined. They add that about 7% of human genes are undergoing rapid, relatively recent evolution. Even with these changes, however, human DNA remains more than 99% identical, the researchers note.

Harpending says: “the genetic evidence shows that people worldwide have been getting less similar rather than more similar due to the relatively recent genetic changes.”

Genes have evolved relatively quickly in Africa, Asia and Europe but almost all of the changes have been unique to their corner of the world.

This is the case, because since humans dispersed from Africa to other parts of the world about 40,000 years ago, there has not been much flow of genes between the regions.

That is a very good question with variety of answers. While searching for information about patents and plagiarism facts, one can come across to tenth of web pages of different countries, different prices and different conditions , with different obstacles about patents.

The UK Intellectual Property Office provides following prices for: the process of the patent - GBP 200, a preliminary examination - GBP 30, a search - GBP 100, and a substantive examination - GBP 70. As for the Cornell University Law School provides the information about Patent Law.

United States Patent and Trademark Office identifies following types of patents:
Provisional Patent Application
Non-provisional (Utility) Patent Application Filing Guide
Design Patent Application Filing Guide
Plant Patent Application
International Application

It is easy to notice that all the procedures listed above is time consuming and a bit expensive, too, in comparison with the resolution of the problem provided by the Online-Witness. That asks just to “Fix the data of your know-how online.”

There are three main steps through which one can manage easily and avoid time consuming and expensive procedures:

- Free registration on our web site - Create a project for your know-how- Describe your know-how most detailed including its newness, benefits, features etc.

Online-Witness provides the evidence in the form of on-line certificate. The certificate provides the information, when and whom was the work, invention, or idea presented by? Online-Witness guarantees that the online version of the certificate and the paper copy signed and stamped will be produced automatically upon the request. Online-Witness is the third party witness that has the acknowledgement that the product, idea or invention was registered at the certain date.

Types of the information that are available to post on the web site are: Textual, graphical, Binary Files.

There are several reasons, why one prefers to choose exactly Online-Witness to protect his or her, works, ideas, inventions... Free, Quick, Accessible.

This article has been featured on MediaPath