Glance at the Past - Palmistry in 1943

An article in Time magazine from 1943, 65 years ago, shows that handreading was taken a lot more seriously back then. While not endorsing the practice, the article does give the subject some serious reflection. In addition, handreaders are referred to as "artists", which is much more palatable than "fraudsters" and "con-men", which is how they are often seen today. Here's an extract from the article:

"To artists, and a few scientists, the hand is as revealing as the face in expressing temperament, heredity, life habits, glandular function. One such scientist, Dr. Charlotte Wolff, physician and psychologist, last week gave her second summary of findings in the science of chirology. In The Human Hand (Alfred A. Knopf, $3) she carried on her rescue of the hand from the hocus-pocus of palmistry and fortunetelling, gave laymen some interesting reading as well."

Read the full article

Thanks to Lynn Seal for digging this article up.

Indian Girl with Eight Limbs named after multi-limbed Hindu goddess

"An Indian girl born with four arms and four legs is to undergo a 40-hour operation tomorrow as doctors try to give her a chance at a normal life.

Lakshmi Tatma is a two-year-old girl named after the Hindu goddess of wealth who has four arms. She was believed to have been "sent from God" when she was born to a poor rural family in the Indian state of Bihar.

As news of her birth spread among the 500 inhabitants of Rampur Kodar Katti — a remote settlement without electricity or running water — men, women and children queued for a darshan, or blessing, from the baby.

However, it will require the latest techniques in medical science to separate Lakshmi from her "parasitical", headless, undeveloped "twin", which is joined to her body at the pelvis.

source: dailymail.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk

Chimps, baboons, use hands to communicate

"A study of how baboons gesture with their hands suggests gesturing may have been a precursor to human language, scientists say.

The findings could help to explain why humans often gesture with their hands, and particularly the right hand, when they speak.

The right hand is controlled by the brain's left hemisphere, which is the source of most linguistic functions.

Scientists believe communication by hand probably existed in apes 30 million years ago and was a forerunner to spoken and written language.

French researchers Adrien Meguerditchian and Professor Jacques Vauclair studied a particular hand gesture in 60 captive baboons.

The gesture consists of quick and repetitive rubbing or slapping of the hand on the ground, and is used to threaten or intimidate others.

The researchers, from the University of Provence, say this motion "might be comparable in humans to the slap of ... one hand toward the palm of the other hand".

For the study, which is published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, the researchers observed this gesture as it occurred naturally.

They also triggered it by having a human abruptly shake his head and then glance at a baboon. Head shaking is another threatening move in the ape and monkey world, which includes all sorts of communicative gestures.

"A nonhuman primate can effectively raise an arm to ask a social partner to groom it ... give another a little slap as an invitation to play, touch furtively the hand or genitals of another to greet it, slap the ground to threaten," the researchers say.

Among the baboons in the test group that favoured a certain hand, 78% were right-handed and tended to gesture with this hand. Other studies have shown that most human babies and deaf individuals also communicate with their right hands.

"There is little chance that our [primate] cousins will evolve language skills in the near future," the researchers say.

"Monkeys and apes and their specific communication systems result from other evolutionary roads than those of humans ... It is very unlikely that the natural selection for primate species will reproduce exactly the same phylogenetic path that gave linguistic skills to humans."

William Hopkins, a US psychology professor at Berry College and an expert on the evolution of brain development in primates, says:

"I agree with the findings and think this is a very good and interesting paper. In many ways the results are nearly identical to those we have previously found in chimpanzees."

He explains that both chimps and baboons seem to use right-hand gestures for communication. This suggests the brain is asymmetrical when it comes to language, meaning that the left hemisphere tends to dominate.

"It will be interesting to see whether the asymmetries in hand use seen in the baboon link at all to brain asymmetries as we have found in the chimpanzees," Hopkins adds.

Source: News in Science

World's Strangest Feet?

Shen Xiaojing, a 21 year old girl from Nong'an County in Changchun, a city in northeastern China, was born with very big feet. Although she herself is quite beautiful, her big feet have frightened away several prospective suitors.

Shen Xiaojing says that she was born with very big feet and they were twice as big as her contemporaries when she was 4 years old. She says that she has been unable to buy herself suitable shoes and always wears shoes made by her mother. When she was in primary school, her schoolmates laughed at her and called her "big feet Shen". At that time, her big feet surpassed in size any male adult's feet in her county.

Recently, she met with a local news reporter who interviewed her and measured her feet. Her right foot is 32 cm in length and 12 cm in width (The average foot length for a Chinese girl is between 22 and 24 cm). Her feet bear no similarity with her parents and both of them have average sized feet.

Her feet have kept growing over the past 20 years. Her family has spent much money in medical bills trying to ascertain the cause of her "strange condition," but have found no answers. "It was fortunate that my feet finally stopped growing last year," she told the reporter.

Although she is tall and slim with good looking features, she has frightened away all the prospective mates arranged by her parents. Last year, a friend introduced her to a man who was divorced and eight years older than Shen. At the beginning they talked with each other happily, however, he refused Shen after he saw her big feet. Traditionally, men like women with small feet in China.

Shen told the reporter, "My family is very poor and my brother is working in a restaurant to earn money to cover my hospital bills. He often calls me and encourages me to be strong and live happy. I would never disappoint him." In addition, she said in the interview, "I hope I can go to work in a big city like Beijing and Shanghai and see the outside world. I also hope I can earn a lot of money to help my parents live a better life."

Source: Jongonews

Statues show why we need hands

To celebrate

To push

To swing

To throw

To encourage

To connect

To show the way

To honor

To greet

To communicate

To sense

To hold on

To discover

To point out

To complain

To play

To protect ourselves

To make ourselves comfortable

To comfort others

Amazing hand art

These are by Italian Artist Daniele Guido.

What could it BEE ?

The BEE genome has just been unravelled, and it is hoped to unravel important questions about the intelligent behavior of bees. Bees have brains about 20,000 times less massive than the human brain, yet they are able to recognize faces from black-and-white pictures and even remember them days after training. In contrast, powerful computers still have great difficulty doing that.

So what could it BEE that makes them so good at the task? The clue must lie in the fact that faces, like hands, consist of certain unique patterns. Somehow, bees are able to identify these different patterns, and apparantly, it doesn't take many brain cells to do so.

Hand to replace mouse and keyboard

A fingertip device that recognises hand gestures and senses texture is being developed in the US.

The digitiser could one day input information without a keyboard; come in handy for gaming, where it could imitate squeezing a trigger; and be worn to paint on a screen by moving a finger through the air.

The 'Fingertip Digitizer', was developed by mechanical engineer Youngseok Kim and Associate Professor Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the University at Buffalo's Virtual Reality Laboratory.

They say it could be used for everything from inputting information into a computer or PDA to transferring the physical characteristics of an object to a computer for design purposes.

"With this device a computer, cell phone or computer game could read human intention more naturally," says Kesavadas.

"Eventually the Fingertip Digitizer may be used as a high-end substitute for a mouse, a keyboard or a joystick."

According to Kim and Kesavadas, other gesture-recognition devices available on the market can sense movement but not force.

And although there are several force-feedback, or haptic devices, none can measure details of dynamic fingertip activities, including acceleration and inertia.

"Our digitiser bridges the contact and non-contact input strategy," says Kim. "We keep track of everything happening on your fingertip."

After all, says Kesavadas, the fingertip is the most intuitive interface humans already posses. We use it to point, push buttons, touch objects and sense textures.

If the wearer touches or traces around an object, the motion data is combined with the force-feedback information to determine the object's shape. It will also know if the person is tapping on a table, scratching or snapping fingers, for example.

Read more on News in Science

Three armed baby born

A baby was born in China with an unusually well-developed third arm. In fact, doctors have difficulty deciding which of the two left arms is the best-developed. Incidentally, the baby was born on the 1st of April, but this is no joke.

"His Shanghai surgeons now must decide which arm to remove, and at this point, they aren't sure which arm will be the one to go."

"Neither of the boy's two left arms is fully functional and tests have so far been unable to determine which was more developed, said Dr. Chen Bochang, head of the orthopedics department at Shanghai Children's Medical Center.

UPDATE: The arm closest to the chest was found to be less developed and has successfully been removed.

"His case is quite peculiar. We have no record of any child with such a complete third arm," Chen said in a telephone interview.

The boy, identified only as "Jie-jie," also was born with just one kidney and may have problems that could lead to curvature of the spine, local media reports said. Jie-jie cried when either of his left arms was touched, but smiled and responded normally to other stimuli, the reports said.

Chen said doctors hoped to work out a plan for surgery, but the boy's small size made it impossible to perform certain tests that would help them prepare.

Media reports said other children have been reported born with additional arms and legs, but in those cases it was clear what limb was more developed. Chen's hospital is one of China's most experienced in dealing with unusual birth defects, including separating conjoined twins."

"While an extra limb is rare, children with multiple digits and even hands are more common, said Dr. Ann Van Heest, an upper extremity surgeon at Gillete Childrens Speciality Healthcare in Minnessota. She has never seen a case like the baby in China. Van Heest estimated that one out of 200,000 babies are born with two thumbs on one hand and one out of 2 million have doubling at the wrist, resulting in two hands."

From: usatoday.com , abcnews.go.com

Early humans had sex with chimps

"Our early ancestors interbred with chimpanzees after the two species drew apart millions of years ago, a new paper suggests.

The provocative idea is sketched by US genome experts, who have discovered that hominids and chimps diverged far more recently, and over a much longer timescale, than anyone had thought.

During this time, the authors theorise, the two primates were rather more than kissing cousins: they had sex, swapping genes before making a final separation."

"The ... analysis revealed big surprises, with major implications for human evolution," says Professor Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-author of the paper in today's issue of the journal Nature.

Until now, the belief was that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor but went their separate ways around 6.5-7.4 million years ago. "

Genetically, chimpanzees are 98.5% identical to humans.

Looking at DNA

"Exploiting the mountain of data that has come from the human and chimpanzee genome projects, the researchers compared the genetic codes of the two species as they are today.

They believe that the two species made their split no later than 6.3 million years ago and probably less than 5.4 million years ago. In other words, around 1 to 2 million years earlier than the Toumai estimate.

Moreover, speciation of chimp and hominid, the process by which they emerged as separate species, took an extraordinary long time: around four million years in all."

Sex chromososmes

"Previous studies suggest that sex chromosomes are among the most vulnerable of chromosomes when it comes to interbreeding. This is because co-mingling places its genes under swift selective pressure.

Thus something unusual must have happened on the way to speciation: an initial split between human and chimp, followed by interbreeding, whose results show up in progressive younger genes, and then a final separation."

From: News in Science

Men's fingers and faces reveal masculinity and attractiveness to women

Both our faces and our fingers have a lot to reveal about ourselves.

New research suggests that women can spot subtle signs of interest in children in a man's face, and accurately assess his level of the sex hormone testosterone.

"Women are fine tuned subconsciously to detect the qualities they are looking for in a man - just by looking at his face."

The study was carried out by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara

Researcher Dr Dario Maestripieri said:

"Our results also show that women value masculinity as a desirable trait for short-term relationships and interest in infants as a desirable trait for more stable long-term relationships."

Pictures of the volunteers were shown to 29 female undergraduates, who were asked to rate the men according to whether they thought they liked children, appeared masculine, physically attractive, or kind. The women were then asked to determine men's attractiveness as short-term romantic partners or as long-term partners for relationships such as marriage.

The men women chose as being most interested in children were the same men who had expressed the most interest in children in the photo test. The women also accurately rated the men with the highest testosterone levels as being the most masculine.

Dr James Roney, who also worked on the study, said: "The research suggests that men's interest in children may be a relatively underappreciated influence on men's long-term mate attractiveness."

Other research, by Dr. Roney and Dr. Maestripieri, suggests that the ratio of the lengths of the second and fourth fingers (2D:4D ratio) is also associated with men's attractiveness as well as with levels of behavioral displays during social interactions with potential mates.

"Our results confirm that male 2D:4D was significantly negatively correlated with women’s ratings of men’s physical attractiveness and levels of courtship-like behavior during a brief conversation. These findings provide novel evidence for the organizational effects of hormones on human male attractiveness and social behavior."

Link to full article.

Another news article on finding mr. Right

A study on the attractiveness of the average face

How to catch a liar? Bodylanguage myths exposed

We all think we know the signs of a liar - twitchy, nervous, blinking, doesn't want to look you straight in the eyes, strokes hair, touches nose.

Well, you're wrong, research shows. It's exactly the opposite. In a study of 130 volunteers, liars touched their noses and stroked their hair 15-20% less than truth tellers. Liars tend to be more still, with fewer movements.


So how do you catch a liar?

Well, look for signs that someone is suddenly more self conscious, more restrained, more concentrated. When the person does make hand gestures, it is to try to come across as honest. Look especially for the following signs:

- holding hands apart to indicate size
- touches the heart, a gesture of love and being genuine (see Bush picture)
(these gestures are used 25% more when lying, research has shown)

No doubt this data is culturally biased though.

Aside from the above hand gesture clues, you have to pay much closer attention. Liars usually don't give themselves away that easily. Look for changes in breathing, pupil dilation, skin flush, muscle tone changes, even pore size.

Also, look for exaggerated signs of honesty rather than stereotypical signs of lying. It's obvious in a way - liars make sure they avoid any body language that is commonly believed to indicate a liar, and try to imitate the body language of someone telling the truth. Acting - and therefore (indirectly) lying - is something we learn to do since we are very young. We learn to manipulate our body language to make it appropriate to the social situation.

So what about the looking to the right versus looking to the left tactic? (Looking right = invention, accessing part of the brain that constructs information, so would entail lying). Well, apparantly even that is a myth. We construct information even when telling the truth. But this could still be useful if we pay particular attention to what the person is saying - and if it involves constructing information.

So to catch a liar, you have to look closely for fake or exaggerated signs of honesty, listen carefully to see if body language contradicts what they're saying, and of course, ask lots of questions.