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.

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

Karachi street scene (flickr image: megabeth)

So for our Geo Quiz, we want you to name the two countries that are on the opposite ends of the tight/loose spectrum. That’s according to the criteria defined in this study. The “tight” country is in South Asia, wedged between Iran and India. The “loose” one is a former Soviet Republic and shares a border with Russia.

So, which countries are we talking about?

“Loose” Ukraine and “tight” Pakistan are the answers this time. The World’s Adeline Sire reports.

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AP report on the study

By Ari Daniel Shapiro

Kenichi Kojima complains that Japan’s young people seem to have lost their interest in science.

A retired physicist who used to work at Yokohama City University, Kojima points to his daughter, now in her thirties, who was good at math in school. He had hoped she would follow in his footsteps.

“I said to her, ‘You should go [into] science or engineering field,’” he recalled. “But she don’t like such a way.”

It is a complaint heard across Japan these days. Fewer and fewer young people are choosing careers in science, math, and engineering.

This phenomenon even has a name: rika banare. It means a turning away from science.

Yoshio Watanabe, a professor of electrical engineering at Kanagawa University, calls rika banare “a very, very big problem” for Japan, a country that built its economy on technological prowess.

Watanabe, who has written about the causes of rika banare, blames a relaxed education policy in the 1970s that meant fewer math and science requirements.

He also points to Japan’s economic collapse in the 1990s that caused many companies to outsource their research, development, and engineering jobs.

Test scores falling

Japanese 15-year-olds still perform well on international science and math tests, but not as well as they used to. At one time, they ranked first or second in the world, but by 2009, they had slipped to fifth place in science and ninth in math.

Watanabe said the quality of his engineering students has steadily declined over the last 20 years. “The students nowadays don’t want to think [for themselves],” he said.

Some in Japan are now trying to get young people reengaged in science. One effort is a new school, opened in 2009, called Yokohama Science Frontier High School.

The school has top-notch faculty, access to real-world scientists, and lab facilities rivaling some universities. Up on the roof there is an astronomical observatory at one end and a small honeybee colony at the other.

“Science is fun,” said sophomore Ryo Suzumoto, standing beside the apiary. “If students understood how wonderful science is, they’d study it, no matter how demanding it is.”

Spirit to save the world

That is the point of Yokohama Science Frontier High School – to cultivate scientific ability and passion. The school seeks to graduate students with “the spirit and strength to save the world.”

Some scientists hope the high school will serve as a model for districts throughout Japan, but it is not clear whether other communities can afford such a high-tech and high cost school.

Sophomore Lisa Tanaka said she loves being at the high school, but she has one complaint – only 25 percent of the students are female. “[The] science world needs more girls,” she said.

Junior Taketoshi Watanabe said he’s glad to be at a school that treats science seriously. He said that wasn’t the case at his elementary school, where he had to teach himself science by reading books and surfing the Web.

Yokohama Science Frontier High School is reaching out to today’s elementary students to make sure they get engaged in science too. Several times a year, young children visit the high school to tour the laboratories and classrooms and to meet the students.

“Our students, they look really cool,” said high school principal Takeshi Miyazaki. “So little children get motivated for studying science.”

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: In his speech last night president Obama said American education in math and science lacks behind that of other nations. He specifically mentioned India and China, and the greater emphasis in schools there on math and science. Young Zhao grew up in China. He got that big dose of math and science in the schools there. He is now a professor of education at the University of Oregon. Young Zhao, we hear about these high math and science test scores out of places like China and South Korea and Singapore. What exactly is the pedagogical difference in how math and science are taught in places like China, your home country compared to the United States?

YONG ZHAO: Well I think the biggest pedagogical difference is that in China and other Asian countries get good scores, students spend excessive amount of time on doing mathematics and in memorizing math facts. And in addition is that the Chinese teachers typically are going to have more training in a mathematic content, but they may not have enough knowledge about the children, but they know the content quite well.

WERMAN: So in your mind what are the pros and cons of the Asian approach if we dare call it to math and science?

ZHAO: Well I say more cons actually than pros at this time. I think I’m biased in that regard. But I think the cons generally come in terms of how they learn mathematics, for example is that they do not necessarily have mathematic competency or mathematic interest or competency in that.

WERMAN: So as president Obama tries to press for better math and science education in American schools, I mean he’ got some peculiar American challenges he’ got to deal with like the federal state and local layers of education.

ZHAO: That’ true, but I think president Obama’ problem is that he is trying to draw the link between innovation, economic development and education, but he draws the connections only through test scores. Last night he talked a lot about how the US is still strong, still innovative, but at the same time he is talking about how American public education is not doing well and worse than other countries for over half a century since the Sputnik moment. The US grades have been said to be worse than that of Russia, then Japan, and now China, India, but regardless of this conversation with a half of century US remains very strong. Another problem he talks about is US needs innovation. I think that the current formula of the federal government [xx] Race to the top and other accountability measures such as No child left behind are not necessarily stimulating the kind of innovation we need or prepare a type of innovative [xx] we might need in the future. He has challenges, but I don’t think the way he is doing it is necessarily the right way for the future of the US.

WERMAN: Why I’d love to know what your prescription is then for Mr. Obama. I mean if he is so impressed by China’ track record in math and science and you feel there are pros and cons in China’ teaching of math and science, because he is upon, but let’ treat it as a Chinese menu, what should he take and what should he leave behind from China’ example?

ZHAO: I don’t think necessarily China is necessarily the country to imitate in terms of education in general. What I think America should do right now is continue to broaden the definition of education beyond certain subject areas, certain content areas or what we need in US is actually to develop the spirit of entrepreneurship. So I think from China we can learn perhaps more about classroom instruction or content instruction, but at the same time we need to think education is much broader than just content instruction in the classroom. I don’t know we should be happy or sad but in the past three decades the Chinese changes have all trying to be to reorient education to move away from test scores, to be more like the US, to allow more flexibility and more diversity in the curriculum choices to scores. I think the US education, right now, our problem is not trying to switch more efficiency in instruction. Therefore to nationalize everything, we need to think about local and I think distributed decision making. Giving teachers and others more autonomy might be the best way to stimulate more consistency in learning. These policies can come and go, but the most reliable stable force is public school educators. If you respect them, if they develop the professionalism can have, that will be very powerful. [?]

WERMAN: Yong Zhao a professor of education at the University of Oregon with a special interest in the impact of globalization on education. Young Zhao, thanks for speaking with us.

ZHAO: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Programming language tree featuring at the computer history museum (Photo: Corey Takahashi)

In Mountain View, California a new exhibition is opening. It’s called Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

The exhibition, at the Computer History Museum, was more than six years in the making, a lifetime in computer years.

But unlike most technological enterprises it doesn’t look forward, but back.

This exhibition is on show in the heart of Silicon Valley, just down the road from Google’s worldwide headquarters. But according to exhibition launch director Paul Connolly the region is by no means the center of the computing world. Not if you take the long view.

The story of computing is “very much international,” says Connolly. He says it begins with Chinese abacuses all the way up to PCs, and even the web. France had an early version of the web, called the Minitel system, which has since been completely eclipsed by the web.

All of this is on display — the serious, the mathematical, and the whimsical. There’s an original Pong machine, from 1972, which is one of the earliest examples of a video game. There are archaic census machines, and Cold War-era defense and radar systems, complete with built-in ashtrays for the Air Force personnel who watched them.

There are plenty of obsolete items, like a Kookaburra laptop from an Australian company, or a Dragon 32, that may be the only computer ever mass-produced in Wales.

The Revolution exhibition is roughly chronological. As you step in deeper –beyond the hardware breakthroughs of World War II and the Cold War — the focus shifts to themes like artificial intelligence and data.

“People now tinker less with building hardware and more with building software,” says Alex Bochannek, one of the exhibition’s curators. “To build software, you need programming languages.”

Programming is something that to a lot of people who are not in the computing field is something of ”a black art, ” says Bochannek. It’s “somewhat magic.”

To demystify that magic, the exhibition has a family tree of programming languages that dates back to 1954.The chart features about 150 of the thousands of programming languages invented worldwide.

The languages’ names are far from familiar: Fortran, Lisp, Snobol, Algol, Simula, Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk.

But Bochannek says programming languages behave like regular spoken languages. They have “a syntax, a semantics,” and follow other conventions.

Programming languages are used in everything from automated banking to website building. This diversity of use is the reason so many exist.

Bochannek says it’s important to maintain that diversity. “There was an idea early on in programming languages that there’s going to be this one language that solves all problems,” he says. “And it’s similar in the spoken-language community, as well, with things like Esperanto and so forth. But oftentimes there are nuances you can not very easily express.”

Gio Wiederhold, started his own computer exhibition at Stanford University, where he is an emeritus professor. The Stanford museum shares some items with the Computer History Museum.

Wiederhold says it’s more difficult to capture computer history, than, say, art history. He says the true intellectual value of computing is represented less by artifacts than by ideas and ‘evolving code.’ As he puts it, an artifact “once it exists … is very hard to change.”

So what distinguishes ‘beautiful code’ that belongs in a museum from code that should just be tossed in the trash?

According to Wiederhold, “some ugly code works, so it won’t be tossed in the trash. But beautiful code is … just like beautiful text in writing, where somebody can read it. It is clear what is meant.”

As a young emigré programmer, Wiederhold wrote the code for combustion equations in the Polaris missile. He says that code was still in use as recently as a decade ago.

But, of course, the software has hugely increased in volume. Today there are millions of lines of code written just for say, an iPhone.

Wiederhold’s current research deals with the flow of intellectual property. He says the rapid flow has turned many programming languages into commodities, and it complicates old notions of software authorship.

He says all programming languages are converging. “We have many fewer languages than we used to have. So that’s a good thing.”

“It helps communication a great deal. When people were more narrow, they thought they needed different languages in their own country.”

“It means that I can send a program that’s written by a programmer here, at 6 p.m., to India, for somebody to help me in testing and de-bugging it.”

It’s a phenomenon called the 24-hour software factory.

Programming languages are completely universal, says Wiederhold. They’re no longer bound by countries.

Wiederhold hopes exhibitions like Revolution can help to explain these languages, so the next generation gets inspired to write new code. Perhaps, even beautiful, gallery-worthy code.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  We’re joined now by journalist and author Ethan Waters.  His new book is called Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American Psyche.  Ethan Waters, you argue that other cultures have their own ways of dealing with mental illness and those can be as good, sometimes better, than western diagnoses and treatment.  So what is your take on the story we just heard?

ETHAN WATERS:  Well it’s difficult to know because without knowing a great deal about those individual cases, it’s hard to say what would have been best for those people.  But if you take a global look at this, take for instance a look at the World Health Organization studies on outcomes of schizophrenia around the world, I do think it challenges a premise that was in that story that suggested that these people would necessarily be better if they were left in the west.  And the results of that World Health Organization study done over decades, multi-cultured studies, suggests that indeed, schizophrenics in the developed world do better than schizophrenics in the developed countries and in the west.  So often times, there is something going on in these cultures that we, I think, under-appreciate that has a remarkable ameliorative effect on even illnesses as severe as schizophrenia.

WERMAN: Now you contend that Americans are forcing their ideas of mental health on the rest of the world.  But isn’t the western understanding of the mind, a scientific objective approach that transcends culture.

WATERS: I don’t think it is.  Every generation of psychiatrists believes they they’ve finally got past cultural influence.  But mental illness and the expression of mental health are always shaped by culture.  You can look across time and you can see every period and every era there is a way to express mental illness.  Scientists refer to this as the symptom pool and each culture has it’s now symptom pool and each period in history has its own symptom pool by which the person learned those symptoms.  In one period it might be symptoms of anorexia, in another period it might be depression, in another period it might be anxiety.  And in this moment in history, the west I believe globalizing ideas about the mind and also beliefs about what are the valid psychiatric symptoms such that we’re homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

WERMAN: Give us an example of that.

WATERS: Well I went to Hong Kong and spent a lot of time with a psychiatrist named Sing Lee there who documented the rise of anorexia in the middle 1990′s of Hong Kong.  This was a very nervous time for Hong Kong.  This was after Tiananmen Square on the mainland.  Families were being broken up.  And there was a great amount of, as Sing Lee says, a general loading of psychopathology in the population.  Into that moment in history, a young woman who was clearly an anorexic died on a downtown Hong Kong street and suddenly the culture was very interested in this disorder.  And flooding into Hong Kong on this very nervous moment in time was the western knowledge about anorexia and western experts saying, dictating basically, what this disease was.  It was only after that moment in time when there was this sudden understanding of anorexia did you see indeed a rise of the disease.

WERMAN: Are you saying that before the nineties there weren’t any presentations of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong?

WATERS: They were extremely rare.  Sing Lee was studying one in a million anorexics in Hong Kong and he was discovering that they weren’t like American anorexics in a lot of ways.  They didn’t, for instance, have fat phobia.  They didn’t have body dismorphia.  They often came from poor populations on the outskirts of cities and he was trying to find out what this particular rare form of anorexia was at the moment in time when suddenly the earth shifted underneath him.  Suddenly there was an influx of this American form of anorexia.  And I believe that had partly to do with how American experts came in and began to explain to Hong Kong who is at risk, what this disease was, and what it meant.

WERMAN: I guess I’m having a hard time getting my head around the idea that other cultures and nations would essentially adopt American mental illnesses, or diagnoses of mental illness, when, as you argue in your book, they’ve got their own mental illnesses.

WATERS: That’s true, but every culture, including ours, the new mental illness that comes down the line, the new kids are now cutting, or there is a suicide spike.  We are fascinated as a culture by the new mental illness and that’s true of cultures around the world.  And it’s also true that other cultures around the world looked to the west for innovation.  They looked to the west for technology and they looked at the west for modern drug treatments.  They expect innovation from the west.  And so when a newspaper reporter in Hong Kong has to explain what anorexia is, it makes perfect sense for them to look to a western expert.  So it’s not just us forcing these ideas on the rest of the world, it’s the rest of the world literally reaching out and asking for this information from us, because they expect it.

WERMAN: Now even before I let you go, I should tell our listeners that you’ll be taking their questions online.  You’re the guest in our world science forum through next week.  And you listeners can join the online discussion with Ethan Waters.  Go to the world dot org slash science.  Journalist Ethan Waters, author of the book Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American psyche.  He joined us from San Francisco, thank you very much Ethan.

WATERS: It’s been a pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  We’re talking about raptors in The World’s Science Forum.  The Science Forum is your opportunity to talk online with a featured science expert.  And right now you can talk to none other than David Bird.  Professor Bird is a wildlife biologist at McGill University in Montreal and he says that some cities around the world provide good habitat for raptors, at least for some species.

PROFESSOR DAVID BIRD:  South African cities have birds of prey like the black sparrow hawks.  Germany, there’s something like 15 pairs of Gosshawks breeding right downtown Hamburg in various green spaces and so on.  The city of London, England is now home to Paragon Falcons nesting on churches and large skyscrapers down there.  The skyscrapers are nothing more than cliffs to them.

WERMAN:  But it’s not just about the skyscrapers.  These cities also offer other benefits to birds of prey.  What kinds of benefits?  Well, you can find out by listening to a conversation between David Bird and The World’s science correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee, and you can ask your own questions.  What can you do to protect raptors in your community?  To listen and to participate in The World’s Science Forum, go to the world dot org slash science.  The conversation continues through next week.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

It’s just one of the places where the 19th-century English naturalist spent time puzzling over his theory of evolution by natural selection.

We’re looking for another place where Darwin spent time.

Not the HMS Beagle… That was Darwin’s floating home as he voyaged around the world… exploring exotic lands and collecting everything from fossils to finches.

Not the Galápagos Islands – where he studied mockingbirds and giant tortoises. And not the Cambridge University library where Darwin’s field notes and manuscripts are kept.

Nope.

We’re looking for the name of the 3-story house where Darwin toiled away in his study and wrote On the Origin of Species.

The house is 15 miles outside of London. It’s right by the Sandwalk. And it’s the subject of our Geo Quiz.

RC: Hi Marco, the answer is Down House.

MW: And that house is located just outside a village called Downe, about 15 miles from London.

RC: Correct. And I spoke with someone who has a personal connection to that house. He’s Darwin’s great, great grandson. His name’s Randal Keynes.

MW: Oh so the house is open to the public obviously.

RC: Yes, but you don’t have to go all the way to London to see Down House. There’s a new film out. It’s called Creation and it tells the story of Charles Darwin in the months before he published On the Origin of Species. It’s based on a biography written by Randal Keynes, the great, great grandson. Keynes told me that parts of the movie were filmed on the grounds of Down House. And Keynes says it was eerie to watch the movie makers recreate his great, great grandfather’s life in Darwin’s own house. And by the way, Darwin’s played by the actor Paul Bettany.

MW: So does Randal Keynes like the final product?

RC: Yes he likes the film. He believes it was true to his book and Darwin’s life. He told me that if Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, who is a central figure in the film, were to watch the movie, they’d be pleased with it too.

MW: Rhitu, we’ll have to leave it there.

But our listeners can hear the full interview with Keynes on this week’s Science podcast.

RC: Right.
And here’s the exciting part, listeners can chat with Randal Keynes directly online. He’s the guest in our latest Science Forum. And the conversation will go through next week.

MW: To join the discussion with Randal Keynes and to download Rhitu’s podcast, go to www.theworld.org/science.

Rhitu Chatterjee, The World’s Science reporter thank you for joining me.