But what they don’t know is what those ancient forests sounded like. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a glimpse.

The study was conducted by Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a biologist at the University of Bristol, in the UK. He studies how crickets and katydids communicate with sound.

Last year, he received an unusual request from some paleontologists in China. They had unearthed the fossil of a 165-million-year-old katydid.

“They asked me if I will be able to estimate how this animal [made] sounds – which frequencies this animal was using,” said Montealegre-Zapata.

Male katydids (also known as bush crickets) sing to attract females. They produce their songs by rubbing their wings together. One wing has a toothed vein that’s strummed by the other wing.

Montealegre-Zapata examined the ancient Chinese katydid. “The fossil [had] well developed teeth in both wings,” he said.

He measured those teeth and the length of the wings, and then he figured out what the calls of the prehistoric katydid might have sounded like.

Whereas the songs of most modern-day katydids are made up of a range of notes (“something like shhh shhh shhh shhh – very noisy,” he says), the ancient katydid song consisted of a single note. (See video for the reconstructed song of the ancient katydid.)

The fact that these animals sang a single note suggests that they lived in a noisy environment.

“If you are in a noisy environment, when many animals are singing, and you produce a single note, you will produce a private communication channel just between you and the receiver in the middle of the noise,” he said.

In this case, the receivers of that communication were presumably females of the species. Scientists in China have tracked down fossils of some of those ancient females. Montealegre-Zapata’s now plans to study them, to understand how their ears worked.

It was one morning about a couple of years ago. I turned to my colleague David Baron (The World’s health and science editor), who was sitting next to me and said: Ugh! I have a really nasty earworm and I just can’t get rid of it.

“Eeeewww!!” said David, as soon as he heard the word earworm. The look on his face as he said this will stay with me forever. By the time I realized why he was so disgusted, he had composed himself. He looked concerned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Does it hurt? Have you been to the doctor?”

I nearly fell off my chair laughing. “It’s not a real earworm, David,” I explained. “It’s just a silly little tune stuck in my head. I have no idea why it popped up this morning. And I just can’t get rid of it.”

Two years since, I’m delighted to have finally done a story about this phenomenon of songs suddenly popping up in our heads. After all, it is such a common, every day experience. If you missed my story on the radio, check it out here.

But here are some things I learned while doing the story, things I didn’t get to include in my radio piece.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have a scientific term for earworms. It is ‘involuntary musical imagery.’ In contrast, voluntary musical imagery is when we willingly think of a song, or a musical piece. It’s something we can control.

Earworms are like “unwanted or intrusive thoughts,” says Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. (I’ve interviewed him before for The World Science Podcast about the origins of music. You can listen to that interview here.)

“All of us are plagued by these (intrusive thoughts),” says Levitin. “You’re driving to the airport and you can’t drive out of your head this thought that you didn’t turn off the stove. Or you lie awake in bed at night because…of intrusive thoughts.”

Why do we have these songs and thoughts swim in and out of our consciousness?

Psychologist Victoria Williamson has been studying earworms for the past few years. She is also an expert on memory – both musical and non-musical. Williamson thinks our involuntary thoughts are the result of memory processes in the subconscious parts of our brain.

“For the memory process to work as well as it does for us, it may be that that process needs some kind of rehearsal going on in the background to keep it fully functional,” she says.

But that’s only an educated guess. Williamson hopes to test her idea in her future research.

That brings me to the unanswered scientific questions about earworms, of which there are many.

Here are some that Daniel Levitin would like to be answered.

“Is there a personality variable? Does it have something to do with people who are more outgoing, whether they’re more creative, whether they’re lonely? Is the music there to keep them company?”

You can help answer some of these and other questions. Victoria Williamson is continuing her investigations of earworms. Just go to The Earwormery and share your experiences with tunes that got stuck in your head.

Earworms at The World Newsroom

That’s a line from a song by rapper Tone Loc. I’m told it was a hit in the 1990s, but I’d never heard it until the night before. I was at a karaoke bar. My friend Jay Beezley sang it.

When the song reappeared in my head the next day, I could hear Jay singing the chorus again and again and again.

I was stuck with the song for nearly a day and a half before it finally went away, but it left behind a nagging question: Why do we get songs stuck in our heads in the first place? I figured someone must be trying to find an answer.

Victoria Williamson is a psychologist at Goldsmiths College in London. A few years ago, she became fascinated by tunes that stick in our heads.

“I personally couldn’t believe how little there was in terms of research on this phenomenon,” she says. “It seemed to happen to me very frequently.”

She found that scientists used a range of terms to describe the experience. Stuck-song syndrome. Sticky music. Cognitive itch. The most common term was this: earworm.

A few years ago, Williamson collaborated with a BBC radio program in the UK and asked listeners to e-mail and text their experiences with earworms.

Here are some responses she received:

“My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday. Woke up at 4.30 this morning with it going around me head.”

“I’ve got ‘ch-ch-ch-changes’ by David Bowie as a repetitive ear worm, because it was the last song I heard before the battery on my iPod ran out.”

“My earworm is still ‘Alive’ by Pearl Jam and has been for days.”

Williamson collected more stories through an international online survey. Then she looked for patterns to understand what causes these tunes to automatically pop into our heads and stay there.

She found several triggers.

“The first one is music exposure, which means the person has heard the music recently,” she says.

No surprise there. That explains why I was stuck with Funky Cold Medina.

Another unsurprising finding was that if you hear a song repeatedly, you’re more likely to get stuck with it.

But sometimes songs pop into our heads even when we haven’t heard them for a long time. In this case, something in our current environment may trigger the memory of a song.

Williamson experienced this herself recently, when she was in her office and noticed an old shoebox.

“It’s from a shop called Faith,” she says. “And just by reading the word faith, my mind went down a line of dominoes and eventually reached the song Faith by George Michael. And then he was in my head for the rest of the afternoon.”

Williamson says she found another trigger: stress.

One woman in Williamson’s survey said a song first got stuck in her head when she was sixteen and taking a big exam. The song was Nathan Jones by Bananarama.

“She now gets that song in every single moment of stress in her life,” says Williamson. “Wedding, childbirth, everything.”

But why is it that music gets stuck in our heads? Why not lines from movies or TV shows or books?

I asked Daniel Levitin, of McGill University in Montreal. He’s an expert on the neuroscience of music, and he’s been thinking about the phenomenon.

Levitin thinks there may be an evolutionary explanation for why music sticks in our brains.

He notes that modern humans have been around for some 200 thousand years, but he says written language may have been invented only five thousand years ago.

“So for a very long period of time, we needed to remember information, information like where the well is, or what foods are poisonous and which aren’t, and how to care for wounds so they won’t become infected.”

Levitin thinks for most of human history, people memorized this kind of information through songs. That practice continues today in cultures with strong oral traditions. He says the combination of rhythm, rhyme, and melody provides reinforcing cues that make songs easier to remember than words alone.

“So it may be the case that brains and music in effect selected each other through Darwinian natural selection and co-evolved in such a way that songs were intended to get stuck in our heads, and that’s why we still have them,” he says. “It’s a vestige of that.”

That’s just a hunch, of course. But he says the main question people ask him about the phenomenon of stuck songs is this: How do we turn it off?

Levitin doesn’t know, but he offers a piece of advice.

“You just think of another song and hope that that’ll push out the first one.”

But then, of course, you might just end up with a new song stuck in your head.

Earworms at The World Newsroom

Subscribe and follow The World’s Global Hit

• Global Hit Podcast on iTunes
• Global Hit Podcast via RSS
• Global Hit Archive (prior to June 2009)
• Global Hit on Facebook
• Follow @marcowerman
  

A NASA image showing fires(red marks) in the Northern Territory in Australia. (Photo: NASA). Click to enlarge.

For the Geo Quiz we are looking for a vast, but sparsely-populated territory of Australia.

It is summertime there with temperature averaging around 95 degree Fahrenheit.

The place we are talking about borders the Timor Sea to the north and to the south it abuts South Australia.

The southern region is mostly a desert with little rain in the forecast at least until March.

European miners arrived in this area in the 17th century, but long before they arrived, indigenous Australians had settled dating back as far as 40,000 years ago.

Nowadays there is a nickname for folks living there: territorians.

Australia’s Northern Territory is the answer to the Geo Quiz. It is a federal territory of Australia occupying much of the center of the mainland continent, as well as the central northern regions.

The Northern Territory is a vast region and has experienced an unusually high number of wildfires in recent years. One cause is an exotic grass that is a major fuel for fires.

An Australian scientist is now proposing a controversial solution: importing elephants and rhinoceroses to eat the grass.

African Elephant in Addo National Park, South Africa. (Photo: Gorgo/Wikipedia)

Scientists say there are many causes. Global warming may be one. Another is a kind of exotic grass that provides fuel for the fires.

It’s called gamba grass, and it was imported from Africa in the 1930s. Scientists brought it to Australia for cattle farmers because it produces a lot more feed for livestock than native grasses do.

But over the decades, gamba grass has spread across a large portion of Australia’s Northern Territory.

“Now it’s become very rampant, and it’s producing tremendously intense fires,” said David Bowman, an environmental scientist at the University of Tasmania.

Bowman is the author of a new commentary in the journal Nature, in which he proposes this solution to Australia’s gamba grass problem: introduce elephants and rhinoceroses.

“I’m thinking of using a big animal as an ecological machine to otherwise control something for which we don’t have any other options,” said Bowman.

Once gamba grass matures and becomes tall and woody, it is no longer edible to cattle or to native species, like kangaroos.

Elephants and rhinos, on the other hand, love the grass. Bowman thinks they would slow down the spread of the grass.

The idea may make sense on some level, but Bowman’s colleagues aren’t welcoming it.

“It’s not a solution at all,” said Stephen Garnett, a conservation biologist at Australia’s Charles Darwin University.

He says Australia is already overrun by a range of exotic species, including camels and water buffaloes. The country is spending millions of dollars trying to cull these feral animals.

Garnett says Bowman’s idea is a bit like the children’s song “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” The woman swallows a spider to eat the fly, then swallows a bird to eat the spider, and so on, each time creating an even bigger problem than the one she sought to solve.

“And the last verse is that she swallowed a horse, and then she died, of course,” said Garnett. “Well, David’s idea is a bit like swallowing a rhinoceros. It’d be yet another feral animal on Australian land.”

David Bowman says he is not proposing that elephants and rhinos be allowed to run wild.

“If we’re going to use these things, we’d use them in a sophisticated way,” said Bowman. He suggests sterilizing the animals, tracking them with GPS collars, and containing them with fences.

Bowman says he expected resistance to his idea, but he insists something must be done to reduce Australia’s wildfire risk. If scientists don’t want elephants and rhinos, he hopes he has at least provoked them to come up with other creative solutions.

• Geo Quiz Podcast on iTunes
• Geo Quiz Podcast via RSS
• The World on Facebook
• Follow @geoquiz
  

A rattail fish checking out NEPTUNE's seismometer off the coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. (Photo: NEPTURE Canada)

He points toward the water, to a sign that reads, “WARNING: CABLE.”

“The cable is going underneath here, and it’s going out 800 kilometers in a big loop in the ocean,” he says.

The cable connects to a network of scientific instruments deep in the Pacific Ocean. The network is called NEPTUNE Canada. (NEPTUNE stands for North East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiments.)

The network was set up by Pirenne and his colleagues at the University of Victoria two years ago. It continuously monitors the ocean environment, recording all sorts of information, including sound.

Pirenne takes me to a shore station a few minutes’ walk from the coast.

“This is where the first acquisition of the data is taking place,” he says.

Once the stream of data arrives at the shore station, it is relayed to the University of Victoria. From there, it’s sent to scientists in Canada and around the world on the Internet.

A Global Network

On the other side of the planet, in Spain, Michel André has been listening in.

“This is like big ears that are placed on the bottom of the ocean,” he explains. “And these ears constantly get the sounds.”

André is a bioacoustics expert at the Technical University of Catalonia, in Barcelona. He studies how human-made noises in the ocean affect whales and dolphins.

He wanted to share the sounds of the ocean with the general public to show how human activities are altering the marine environment.

So, a few years ago, André launched an ambitious global project called Listening to the Deep Ocean.

The project connects deep ocean observatories like the one in Canada to a single website. Go to the site and you’re greeted by a whale swimming across your screen, the scene complete with sounds of water and whale calls.

Click on the whale, and you arrive at a page with an image of the earth that spins slowly when you place your cursor on it. Scattered across the globe are a handful of green and blue dots that represent individual observatories. Most of them send sounds in real time to the website.

To listen in on what’s happening in the ocean, all you have to do is click on a dot.

Audio Extra: Listen to recorded sounds from the deep ocean.
For information on what you’re hearing, click on the SoundCloud button.

Software developed by André’s team identifies the different sources of sound and indicates what they are – dolphins, for instance, or ships – in a color-coded display.

The deep-sea observatories also pick up sounds of geological processes. Observatories off Japan recorded the devastating earthquake that triggered the tsunami earlier this year. Those sounds – sped up so they are audible to the human ear – are in the website’s sound library.

The Navy’s Concerns

The ability to listen to the world’s oceans isn’t exactly new.

During the cold war, the US Navy set up a network of underwater microphones in many parts of the world to track Soviet submarines. For decades, the sounds of the deep sea were considered highly sensitive military information.

Now that civilian scientists and the general public can listen in, the US Navy is uneasy.

Consider the region off Vancouver Island where scientists have installed microphones.

“It’s a region where we have naval operations,” says Robert Winokur, a Navy oceanographer. “It’s [also] a region where the Canadian Navy has naval operations.”

He says allowing the general public to listen to that part of the ocean poses a threat to national security because someone – he won’t say who – might use that information to target Navy vessels.

To reduce that threat, the US and Canadian navies struck a deal with scientists at the University of Victoria. It gives the navies control over the acoustic data.

Winokur says when there are naval operations in the region, the navies redirect the stream of sound.

“Rather than it being sent to the Internet in real time, we divert it to a naval facility where the data are screened and returned as soon as possible to the University of Victoria,” he explains.

In other words, the sound is scrubbed to remove noises from naval vessels.

Scientists at the University of Victoria’s NEPTUNE project aren’t complaining about this set up, at least not openly. But the US Navy hopes eventually to work out similar arrangements with ocean monitoring systems elsewhere in the world.

Cornell University ocean acoustics expert Christopher Clark says scientists outside the US and Canada are unlikely to comply with the US Navy’s request to scrub their data.

“The strategy that they’re using with NEPTUNE is a dead end,” he says.

Clark says the US Navy doesn’t own the ocean acoustic environment and has to accept that what was once military technology is now in the hands of civilians.

This is similar to what happened with satellite imagery. For decades, it too was sensitive military data, but now anyone can go on Google Earth and look down from space.

Clark says whether the Navy likes it or not, the public will increasingly listen to the oceans.

“The cat’s out of the bag, the horses are out of the barn, whatever the metaphor is, it’s happening,” he says.

Indeed, the number of observatories on Michel André’s website is growing.

The site currently links to listening posts only in the Northern Hemisphere, but soon it will be connected to microphones in the South Pacific, South Atlantic, and Southern Indian Ocean. And that will open up an even bigger swath of the deep sea to our ears.

• For more on this story take a look at my blog post: Understanding Noise Pollution in the Oceans.

• Subscribe to The World’s Science podcast on iTunes
• Subscribe to The World’s Science RSS
• Follow The World’s Science on Twitter @worldscipod
• Find The World’s Science on Facebook

The subjects in the study did not give informed consent. In fact, they didn’t even know they were being infected.

When the Guatemalan study came to light last year, President Obama apologized on behalf of the United States. He also asked a Presidential Commission to investigate if safeguards are in place to make sure such unethical experiments could not be repeated.

On Thursday the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its findings.

“It was bad science, and it was bad ethics,” says Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the commission. “The commission is confident that what happened in Guatemala in the 1940s could not happen today.”

Gutmann says that today there are measures in place to protect human subjects from unethical treatment. For example, volunteers must give informed consent, and institutional review boards oversee the ethics of research projects.

But the commission couldn’t tell how well these rules were followed in every study. Gutmann says when it comes to federally funded research, there needs to be more transparency and accountability.

When the bioethics commission asked the government to submit information on studies it had funded last year, some departments struggled.

“The Pentagon for example required more than seven months to prepare information on specific studies supported by the Department of Defense,” says Gutmann. “They did not have a central database to which they could refer, and they told us that it was very difficult for them to gather all the information that we requested.”

In its new report, the presidential commission recommends the government set up a website with information about the human subject studies it funds.

Another issue raised in the report is what to do when volunteers are injured or otherwise harmed in the course of research.

Larry Gostin is a bioethicist at Georgetown University who was not on the commission. He says compensation is a real issue.

“You have to remember that human subject research is just that – it’s a medical experiment,” he says.

The commission recommends that the federal government develop a clear policy to compensate participants who are harmed.

Gostin supports that recommendation. He points out that most developed countries have such policies.

“The United States is behind the curve on compensation,” he says.

The Guatemalan citizens who were experimented on without their knowledge never received compensation. Five of those Guatemalans who are still alive are suing the U.S. government.

Their lawyer, Terry Collingsworth, says that before filing the lawsuit in March he reached out to the government and asked for a compensation for his clients. He says he has yet to receive a response.

The presidential commission did not address the issue of whether the Guatemalans who were experimented on in the 1940s should be compensated.

But new research out of the U.K. suggests these social interactions leave a physical trace in our brains. Scientists say the study reveals the importance of having rich social experiences early in life.

The new study was done in monkeys. But we share a lot in common with our primate cousins, including relatively large brains compared to other animals.

“There’s been quite a debate on why is it that our human brain and the brain of other primates are so enormously big,” said Rogier Mars, a neuro-psychologist at the University of Oxford.

One theory is that primates evolved big brains to manage their complex social lives.

“They have to keep track of who’s dominant, who’s been friendly to you in the past, who you have to be friendly with in order to have access to food, to have a good life really,” said Mars.

But Mars and his colleagues were interested in a related question: If large brains enable complex social interactions, could social interactions in turn affect the structure of an individual’s brain?

To answer that question they worked with a research facility that housed rhesus macaques for a range of scientific experiments.

Mars says the monkeys were already kept in groups of different sizes.

“Some are singly housed, some have one friend, and some have bigger groups.”

The researchers wanted to know if the brains of monkeys in the larger groups were different from the brains of monkeys in the smaller groups. So they did MRI scans of the monkeys’ brains, and found that indeed there was a difference.

Two parts of the brain were noticeably larger in monkeys that lived in larger groups.

One of those regions is the temporal cortex. It’s a region “that contains areas that are sensitive to facial expressions, to body posture, to emotional expressions, all areas that are involved in processing of social stimuli,” said Mars.

The other region is the pre-frontal cortex, which sorts through information and helps us make decisions.

The new study is an important one, says Lisa Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston.

“It shows that experience in social groupings can change structural aspects of the brain,” said Barrett.

Now, this doesn’t come as a total surprise.

In fact, a flurry of recent studies in humans has found a connection between the size of social networks and the size of certain brain structures.

Barrett herself has shown that people with larger and more complex social networks have larger amygdalas, a part of the brain involved in processing social cues.

“These findings do strongly suggest that people who are exposed to larger and more complex social grouping will develop changes in their brain structures, that will be measurable and have visible effects in terms of emotional processing, and social ability and so on,” said Barrett.

And that means, those with fewer social interactions early in life might be at a disadvantage later, says Robin Dunbar, a cultural anthropologist at Oxford University. He says this is an especially big concern today, when so many children spend so much time online, engaging in virtual interactions.

“You don’t learn how to handle relationships with other people when you do it online because you can simply pull the plug if they offend you,” said Dunbar. “You know you don’t have to sweat it out, you don’t have to find some sort of social compromise with them in the way that you have to in real life the sandpit, or play pit as it were.”

But online interactions may also affect the brain. A recent study showed that parts of the brain that process social cues are larger in people with larger online networks. However, those very same people also had large real life networks. So it is unclear, which kind of social interaction has a greater impact on the brain.

On Monday, October 31st, millions of people will parade around in ghoulish Halloween costumes mocking death. But this year, October 31st will also be a notable day in the history of human life.

The UN estimates that it’s the day when human population will reach 7 billion people for the first time.

That number — 7 billion — is again stirring warnings about overpopulation. But the story of the human impact on the planet isn’t simply about numbers.

“There’s nothing special about 7 billion,” says Robert Engelman, director of the World Watch Institute in Washington D.C. “It’s just a big round number.”

What big round numbers like these do, Engelman says, is give us an opportunity to revisit discussions about the impacts of a rapidly growing human population.

“We hit six billion just in 1999, and here we are twelve years later, and we are at seven billion, raising questions about whether we will successfully get to eight billion, nine billion, or beyond without seeing rising death rates related to food insecurity, disease, conflict.”

Alarm bells have been rung about all those possible results of the growing number of people for at least two centuries.

Around 1800, demographer Thomas Robert Malthus warned that food supplies wouldn’t be able to keep pace with growing numbers of people. And he predicted that at a certain threshold—which he set at ONE billion—there would be massive disease outbreaks, famine, and a crash in human numbers.

And yet today, human population is seven times Malthus’ crisis threshold. Granted, disease outbreaks and famine remain a serious problem in many parts of the world. But the average human is living a longer, healthier life than in Malthus’s time.

That’s led some people to dismiss Malthus’s theory.

Not so fast, says Jonathan Foley, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.

“Humans aren’t exempt from Malthus’s observations. We just postponed it again and again and again through innovation.”

Foley says the industrial revolution, the green revolution and other new technologies boosted agricultural productivity far beyond what Malthus predicted.

“But at the end of the day, Malthus’s ghost is still lurking above us,” he adds.

We may have innovated our way out of mass starvation and other problems so far, but those very innovations have created a host of environmental problems that threaten our future, says Foley.

Take agriculture, for example.

“Feeding seven billion people takes a lot of land, a lot of land, a lot of water, and a lot of energy,” he says. “Forty percent of all the land on earth is devoted to growing food, 70 percent of all the water we consume is used to irrigate crops. And about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture.”

That makes agriculture the single biggest contributor to climate change, loss of species, and global water shortages, all of which scientists warn are reaching critical points. And Foley says we’re already running into several limitations.

“The limit of our ability to feed the world, our ability to stabilize our climate, the ability to keep the biosphere intact, and the ability to keep our water resources intact. We can’t invent our way out of every limit. We can push closer and closer to the physical limits of a planet, but we’re running very close to the edge already.”

So what does this mean for our future? And how many more people can the planet support?

For population expert Laurie Mazur, the answer is: it depends.

Mazur directs the non-profit, Population Justice Project. She says it’s not just about the number of people, but also about how much each person is consuming.

“If everybody on the planet ate like people in India, mostly vegetarian diet, the world’s agricultural production today could feed about 10 billion people,” she says.

In other words, there would be no food shortage.

“But on the other hand if we all ate like those of us in the United States, a very meat intensive diet, current agricultural production would feed only two and a half billion people.”

That’s because 40 percent of today’s crops are used as animal feed, making dairy and meat production one of the most inefficient kinds of farming.

Meanwhile, most consumption today is by people in developed countries. But that’s changing fast, as big countries like China and India—develop. And Mazur says that’s not a bad thing.

“Half of the world’s population now lives in poverty, on less than $2 a day, but that should not remain the case.”

All of these people have a right to more comfortable lives. But she agrees that the challenge of providing a better life to more people would be easier with fewer of us on the planet.

Besides, she says, the task of reducing our numbers just isn’t that difficult.

“This is something we absolutely know how to do,” says Mazur.

The average number of kids per woman has fallen from five in 1950 to 2.5 today, thanks to successful family planning programs.

“You don’t have to control anyone to slow population growth. The best way to slow growth is by educating girls, by empowering women, by assuring access to reproductive health services, including family planning.”

Educated and empowered women willingly choose to have fewer kids, as seen in countries like Bangladesh.

Besides, Mazur points out education and good health services also improve people’s lives.

“In other words, everything we need to do to slow population growth, is something we should be doing anyway.”

BBC Video: How Many More?

Blombos cave panoramic view. (Photo: Magnus Haaland)

By Rhitu Chatterjee

A team of archeologists excavating a cave in South Africa has found what may be the world’s oldest artists’ workshop. The team discovered two ancient tool kits that were used to make a reddish paint.

The tool kits were found in a cave called Blombos, which lies on the southern coast of South Africa, about a hundred and eighty five miles from Cape Town.

Christopher Henshilwood is an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has been excavating Blombos for nearly two decades.

In 2008, he and his team began finding signs that humans had lived in the cave as long as 100,000 years ago.

“We had bone, we had shell fish, we had hearths, many things like that,” said Henshilwood.

Deeper inside Blombos was an area covered by sand, where Henshilwood and his team came upon unusual find: two abalone shells that seemed to be part of a prehistoric tool kit.

“Centre of the toolkit was the shell, the abalone shell,” he said. “And above and below and next to the shell were a number of different components.”

The components of the kit included hammer stones, rounded cobbles, grind stones, and pieces of bone.

“First of all we realized that the shells were used as containers,” said Henshilwood. “It looked like they were plugged, so the liquid didn’t run out of them. And at the bottom of them was this thick, quite red deposit.”

That ancient red deposit was dried up paint made out of ochre, a stone that comes in shades of yellow and red.

Francesco d’Errico is the director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, and Henshilwood’s collaborator on this study.

According to him, scientists have known that humans used ochre as paint for more than a hundred thousands years.

“But we have never found before the association with all the tools involved in the production of pigment, nor the container in which the pigment was kept,” he said.

And the intact containers gave d’Errico and his colleagues the opportunity to analyze the paint still inside.

“And for the first time we were able to reconstruct the recipe of the paint, and how the paint was produced, processed and stored in the shells,” he said.

The analysis revealed that ancient people ground pieces of ochre with hammers and grindstones. Then they put the powder into the shells and mixed it with bone marrow to act as a binder. The scientists say the ancient paint makers also added water, or urine to make the paint liquid.

d’Errico said he was surprised at the paint makers’ sophistication.

“This clearly shows that these people were combining different types of stone and bone to create something,” he said.

Henshiwood and d’Errico’s findings appear in the latest issue of the journal, Science.

The study suggests that human understanding of the chemistry of paints started very early, according to Philip Ball. He is the author of the book, Bright Earth:The Invention of Color.

In later periods, say for example in the renowned Altamira cave paintings in Spain, humans showed more sophistication in the chemistry of paint making, said Ball.

“Other minerals are mixed in with ochres to give them different properties to make them stick better. People started increasingly to use fire to change their color. So they were gradually getting a better grip on the kind of chemistry that can be used.”

As for the ancient paint makers from Blombos, it is not clear whether they were artists. The study authors say it is possible that the paint was used for practical purposes, like preserving animal hides.

Still, early humans took a lot of care to create the tool kit, says Philip Ball. So the paint must have been culturally important.

A 100,000 year old ochre processing workshop at Blombos cave, South Africa.

Video produced by: Loic Quentin

The tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan was developing a Gross National Happiness Index, and it needed Pennock’s help.

Pennock says, as a Westerner, he was skeptical.

“We have a bit more discomfort with the idea of happiness as a government policy issue,” he says. “You know, if you use that phrase over here, they’d probably wonder what you’d been smoking.”

In Western countries, governments focus on ensuring economic development and generally assume that wealth will bring greater happiness. But, as Pennock came to learn, that’s not necessarily the case.

Pennock says that in a lot of developed countries, despite several decades of economic growth, “the percentage who say they’re satisfied with their life is completely flat and in some cases [has] dropped off.”

Clearly money alone does not ensure happiness. So what then does promote happiness? And what can governments do about it?

That’s what Pennock set out to answer in Bhutan, and he has now brought what he learned back home.

Pennock lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia, a quaint harbor city that is already known for its high quality of life. Pennock talked to local leaders and suggested starting a happiness index for the city. The city and local foundations agreed, and they created the Greater Victoria Happiness Index Partnership.

Victoria’s mayor, Dean Fortin, supports the Partnership. “The truth is we can’t make people happy, but we can address those issues around quality of life,” he says. “So we try to measure that in citizens.”

To measure happiness, Michael Pennock designed a survey similar to the one he developed in Bhutan.

Happiness is, of course, a subjective thing, but the survey doesn’t impose any particular definition. It simply asks Victorians: On a scale of 1 to 10, do you consider yourself a happy person?

It also asks a related question: How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?

The survey was first mailed in 2008, and according to the results, the residents of Victoria are pretty content. They rated their happiness and life satisfaction at 7.6 on a 10-point scale.

But the survey went deeper than that. It explored aspects of life in Victoria that contributed to the high rating, and it examined how the city could do better, by asking people about specific factors known to influence wellbeing.

For instance, it asked Victorians if they trust other people in their community (they do) and how they rate the state of their environment (highly).

Victorians also gave a high rating to their overall sense of community.

Kimberley Stratford, a sustainability analyst with the city, says Victoria encourages the development of friendly public spaces through zoning laws and urban design. She points to the example of Cook Street Village, one of many village centers that offer Victorians a venue to mingle with their neighbors.

“Even if you don’t live in Cook Street Village, [if] you come down here for a cup of coffee, it’s not unusual to strike up a conversation with a stranger down here,” she says while walking past sidewalk cafés along tree-lined streets.

The happiness survey also revealed some negative aspects of life in Victoria. At the top of the list is a lack of time. People reported not having enough time for family, friends and hobbies.

But one might ask: Is this a problem the government can address?

Mayor Dean Fortin thinks it is. He would like to tackle one of the causes of the time crunch: long commutes. Fortin says improving transportation—by expanding bus routes and bike lanes, for instance—could be part of the solution.

Whether that solution is ultimately effective will be revealed by future surveys, which the Greater Victoria Happiness Index Partnership plans to conduct every two years. Michael Pennock is currently analyzing the results of the second survey, which was sent out last year.

In the meantime, he says other cities are adopting Victoria’s survey. “Seattle is looking into using it, and it’s been used fairly extensively in Brazil, because we wanted to see how it worked in another culture.”

Pennock hopes the survey—which came to Canada from Bhutan—will cross over to many more cultures.

While most New Yorkers were understandably anxious in the days after the terrorist attacks, only a minority went on to develop debilitating psychological problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Even among people who were in the towers and who were trying to escape or got injured, the risk of PTSD was still in the minority,” says Galea.

He says it was an “aha” moment for him.

“Human beings are incredibly adaptive and incredibly resilient,” he says. “Even in the face of a dramatic trauma, with horrendous circumstances, most people are still pulling through fine.”

By “pulling through fine,” Galea does not mean that people were not upset. Rather, they were able to function normally even if they had periods of great sadness.

Galea wanted to know: was this resilience unique to New Yorkers, or was it a more general human trait?

So he approached a colleague who had studied the psychological impacts of a devastating flood in Mexico. Torrential rains in 1999 killed more than 400 people and displaced over 200,000.

“Even in the flood sample, where the vast majority of participants are people who had lost homes or lost loved ones, it was still nearly half who qualified as being resilient,” says Galea.

Psychologists are just beginning to understand what makes some people resilient and others vulnerable.

Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno has spent years studying the factors that influence human resilience.

“There are some factors that are inherent in people – their personality and the way they cope – that does tend to make some people more resilient than others,” he says.

Genetics may influence resilience. Also, men tend to be more psychologically resilient than women, although it is not clear why.

Bonanno says external factors also play a role.

“If a person has economic difficulties, or doesn’t have much of a social support network or a network of friends and people to rely on, that person is going to be less likely to be resilient,” he says.

Bonanno hopes that this research will lead to helpful tools for encouraging resilience.

One factor that plays a key role in determining resilience is the presence or absence of chronic stress. In a recent study, Bonanno and his colleagues looked at the mental health of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.

To Bonanno’s surprise, he found almost no resilient individuals in that population. He says that’s because people there were living under chronically stressful conditions, including “lots of loss, lots of injury and exposure to violence on a regular basis, combined with poverty and all kind of other factors.”

“You combine all these factors together,” he says, “and you get a very, very caustic and chronic situation.”

Bonanno says chronic stress wears us out and prevents us from recovering from trauma.

Fortunately for New Yorkers, the terror of 9/11 has not been repeated in the past decade. That in no way reduces the horror of what they experienced, but it gave most New Yorkers the chance to recover and resume their daily lives.

The region is also one of India’s wettest. Between June and November, the monsoons bring torrential rains to these parts. And it was a conversation about the monsoons that spurred engineer Harish Hande’s decision to open a rural engineering lab here.

A few years back, a local man told him about an embarrassing problem. He said during the rainy season women here can’t hang clothes out to dry, so the clothes remain damp.

“Because of which the clothes smell, and because of which there are marital problems,” says Hande. “There’s no physical relationship that happens in a marriage.”

To save Ujire’s marriages, the town needed an inexpensive clothes dryer that worked in the rainy season. Hande says this was not a problem that engineers at big institutes like MIT or Caltech would ever hear about.

“No labs in the world would have got this issue at all.”

Hande heard of the problem because his years of work in the area – selling solar lighting systems – had earned him the community’s respect and trust.

That realization gave Hande an idea: What if he opened a laboratory right here in Ujire? The lab would ask the community about its problems and then would try to solve those problems with new technologies.

A Rural Technology Lab

The result is SELCO Labs. It is supported by foundations and housed at the local engineering college.

One of the first issues the lab chose to address was an economic problem faced by local banana farmers, says Anand Narayan,* the lab’s manager and co-founder.

“The typical story is as a farmer that I would go to the local retailer and would say, ‘Here is a bunch of bananas,’” explains Narayan. “He will start off with the story that, oh, there is too much bananas in the market, price is very low, I can offer you about five rupees per kilogram, and that really irritates you because that is barely going to recover the cost of your transport.”

So what if there were a way to preserve the bananas and create more demand for farmers’ crops year-round?

The lab devised a solution – an inexpensive fruit dryer. It is currently being tested by one of SELCO’s local partners, a regional non-profit called Sri Kshethra Dharmasthala Rural Development Project that runs a small food packaging unit and employs poor women.

When it’s sunny, the dryer runs on solar energy. In the rainy season, it uses wood as a fuel.

The dryer is a big wooden box, covered in front by synthetic cloth. Inside, there are trays of wire mesh with thin slices of banana slowly drying in the heat of the fire underneath.

SELCO employee Sandeep Adyanthaya, who often stops by to check how the dryer is working, lets me try a couple slices. They are sweet, but with a hint of smokiness.

The executive director of the organization testing the dryer, L.H. Manjunath, says the dryer could be especially useful for poor women like those working in his food packaging unit.

“They (can) buy the bananas when it is available in the market, convert it into dried bananas, and then sell later,” he says. “So the shelf life increases, quality remains, and poor people get additional income.”

News about the lab’s work has spread, which has encouraged more local residents like M.N. Bhat to seek help for their problems.

Bhat is a retired school teacher with a small farm. He grows cashews, coconuts, and araca nuts, a type of nut that many South Asians chew like tobacco. He says in recent years his farm has received some unwelcome visitors: wild monkeys.

“They migrate from other place, they stay here for three or four days,” he says. “They eat tender coconuts and pluck the araca nut and throw it away. So totally they’re destroying my crop.”

Bhat showed me around the farm, pointing out the scores of broken coconuts strewn everywhere.

Several months ago, Bhat asked SELCO Labs: Could they build a device to scare the monkeys away?

The lab came up with an audio player hooked up to a megaphone that played sounds of fireworks, tigers, and lions. They put the device on a timer so that it would repeat the sounds every few hours, then sent it off to Bhat’s farm.

Bhat says the device worked, but only in the beginning.

“The monkeys, first they ran away, then they enjoyed,” says Bhat. “They came and saw where the sound comes. A small monkey came on the megaphone and looked into it.”

He was disappointed, but the monkey-scaring device remains a work in progress.

Lab manager Anand Narayan says his team plans to connect the device to a motion detector so it will go off only when the intruders are nearby. However, he admits that even that may not be a permanent solution to the monkey problem.

“Because they might continue to get smarter,” he says, “and we might have to keep fighting the arms race if you will.”

Task Tougher than Expected

As for the problem that inspired the lab in the first place – the problem of drying clothes during monsoons – Narayan and his colleagues are still scratching their heads.

For one thing, the dryer needs to be inexpensive because people here can’t afford what most urban Indians can. And they can’t use electric dryers because most homes have no electricity.

Narayan says a wood-burning dryer may solve the problem, but he worries that, like the banana dryer, it might give the clothes a smoky smell.

“And so the problem is in our court, where we have to get it built and tested, and then, if it works, go to the next step,” he says.

Two years since the lab first opened, Narayan says he has come to appreciate that developing technological solutions for the rural poor is tougher than he anticipated.

“It’s not your fairy tale story that SELCO Lab made this beautiful product, it sold in millions, life’s transformed, smiles on people, beautiful ending, nice pictures on webpage,” he says. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case.”

But over time, he hopes that the lab will make people’s lives here at least a little bit easier.