China Toughens Restrictions on Internet Use

HONG KONG — The Chinese government issued new rules on Friday requiring Internet users to provide their real names to service providers, while assigning Internet companies greater responsibility for deleting forbidden postings and reporting them to the authorities.

The decision came as government censors have sharply stepped up restrictions on China’s international Internet traffic in recent weeks. The restrictions are making it harder for businesses to protect commercial secrets and for individuals to view overseas Web sites that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive.

The new regulations, issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, allow Internet users to continue to adopt pseudonyms for their online postings, but only if they first provide their real names to service providers, a measure that could chill some of the vibrant discourse on the country’s Twitter-like microblogs. The authorities periodically detain and even jail Internet users for politically sensitive comments, such as calls for a multiparty democracy or accusations of impropriety by local officials.

Any entity providing Internet access, including over fixed-line or mobile phones, “should when signing agreements with users or confirming provision of services, demand that users provide true information about their identities,” the committee ordered.

In recent weeks, Internet users in China have exposed a series of sexual and financial scandals that have led to the resignations or dismissals of at least 10 local officials. International news media have also published a series of reports in recent months on the accumulation of wealth by the family members of China’s leaders, and some Web sites carrying such reports, including Bloomberg’s and the English- and Chinese-language sites of The New York Times, have been assiduously blocked, while Internet comments about them have been swiftly deleted.

The regulations issued Friday build on a series of similar administrative guidelines and municipal rules issued over the past year. China’s mostly private Internet service providers have been slow to comply with them, fearing the reactions of their customers. The committee’s decision has much greater legal force, and puts far more pressure on Chinese Internet providers to comply more quickly and more comprehensively, Internet specialists said.

In what appeared to be an effort to make the decision more palatable to the Chinese public, the committee also included a mandate for businesses in China to be more cautious in gathering and protecting electronic data.

“Nowadays on the Internet there are very serious problems with citizens’ personal electronic information being recklessly collected, used without approval, illegally disclosed, and even traded and sold,” Li Fei, a deputy director of the committee’s legislative affairs panel, said on Friday at a news conference in Beijing. “There are also a large number of cases of invasive attacks on information systems to steal personal electronic information, as well as lawbreaking on the Internet through swindles and through defaming and slandering others.”

Mr. Li denied that the government was seeking to prevent the exposure of corruption.

“When citizens exercise these rights according to the law, no organization or individual can use any reason or excuse to interfere, and cannot suppress them or exact revenge,” he said. “At the same time, when citizens exercise their rights, including through use of the Internet, they should stay within the bounds of the Constitution and the laws, and must not harm the legitimate rights and interests of the state, society, the collective or of other citizens.”

A spokesman for the National People’s Congress said that 145 members of the committee voted in favor of the new rules, with 5 abstaining and 1 voting against them.

The requirement for real names appeared to be aimed particularly at cellphone companies and other providers of mobile Internet access. At the news conference, an official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Zhao Zhiguo, said that nearly all fixed-line services now had real-name registration, but that only about 70 percent of mobile phones were registered under real names.

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Iran’s Only Female Cabinet Minister Dismissed

Iran’s president on Thursday dismissed his health minister, the only woman to serve in the cabinet since the 1979 Islamic revolution, after she publicly criticized the government’s response to acute shortages of medicine imports, an indirect consequence of the Western sanctions imposed on the country.

Accounts in the state-run news media of the dismissal of the minister, Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi, did not provide an explanation for it. Iran’s Press TV Web site said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had appointed a caretaker health minister, Mohammad Hassan Tariqat-Monfared, and had told him in a presidential decree that the reduction of people’s health care expenses was among “the main priorities of this important ministry.”

Dr. Vahid-Dastjerdi, a gynecologist, was appointed in 2009 and is considered an advocate of women’s rights in Iranian society. She spoke out last month, apparently angering the president, by saying that an allocation in the budget of foreign currency needed to purchase medicines abroad was inadequate.

“I have heard that luxury cars have been imported with subsidized dollars, but I don’t know what happened to the dollars that were supposed to be allocated for importing medicine,” Dr. Vahid-Dastjerdi said on state television, according to a translation of her remarks reported by Reuters.

Absent such an allocation, she said, it was necessary to impose a large increase in the price of medicines, which would add to the inflationary pressures already afflicting the economy because of a plunge in value this year of the Iranian currency, the rial. Mr. Ahmadinejad opposed the price increase.

Many economists have attributed the rial’s depreciation to Iran’s increased isolation, a consequence of the penalties imposed by the United States and European Union to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium for its disputed nuclear energy program. Some of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s critics in Iran have also blamed the currency problems on what they call his economic mismanagement.

The medicine shortage in Iran has become an urgent problem because many Western-made drugs are increasingly hard to obtain. Under the sanctions, a broad Western ban on many financial transactions with Iran has dissuaded many foreign companies from doing business with the country, even though medicines are among items exempted from the sanctions.

Recently, the president of the Iranian Academy of Medical Sciences, Seyed Alireza Marandi, bitterly complained about the medical impact of the sanctions in a letter to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general. Dr. Marandi called the sanctions brutal measures that had increased mortality rates “as a result of the unavailability of essential drugs and shortages of medical supplies and equipment,” according to a report by the Fars News Agency.

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Libraries Try to Update the Bookstore Model

Tyler Bissmeyer for The New York Times

Vicki Culler shops for discounted books at The Friends of the Public Library in Cincinnati.

At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to check out best sellers and other popular books. But it has had some unintended consequences, too: the library’s shelves are now stocked with 36 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Of course, librarians acknowledge that when patrons’ passion for the sexy series lacking in literary merit cools in a year or two, the majority of volumes in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy will probably be plucked from the shelves and sold at the Friends of the Library’s used-book sales, alongside other poorly circulated, donated and out-of-date materials.

“A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as a store, and stock it with the things that people want,” said Jason Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Renovations going on there now will turn a swath of the library’s first floor into an area resembling a bookshop, where patrons will be pampered with cozy seating, a vending cafe and, above all, an abundance of best sellers.

As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores. Indeed, today’s libraries are increasingly adapting their collections and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call customers. Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares, showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering grassroots technology training centers. Faced with the need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the taxpayers as the police and fire department can.

“I think public libraries used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big, impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, a former librarian and author of “Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model.”

“Public libraries tread a fine line,” Ms. Woodward said. “They want to make people happy, and get them in the habit of coming into the library for popular best sellers, even if some of it might be considered junk. But libraries also understand the need for providing good information, which often can only be found at the library.”

Cheryl Hurley, the president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher in New York “dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing,” said the trend of libraries that cater to the public’s demand for best sellers is not surprising, especially given the ravages of the recession on public budgets.

Still, Ms. Hurley remains confident that libraries will never relinquish their responsibility to also provide patrons with the opportunity to discover literary works of merit, be it the classics, or more recent fiction from novelists like Philip Roth, whose work is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.

“The political ramifications for libraries today can result in driving the collection more and more from what the people want, rather than libraries shaping the tastes of the readers,” Ms. Hurley said. “But one of the joys of visiting the public library is the serendipity of discovering another book, even though you were actually looking for that best seller that you thought you wanted.”

“It’s all about balancing the library’s mission and its marketing, and that is always a tricky dance,” she added.

While print books, both fiction and nonfiction, still make up the bulk of most library collections – e-books remain limited to less than 2 percent of many collections in part because some publishers limit their availability at libraries — building renovation plans these days rarely include expanding shelf space for print products. Instead, many libraries are culling their collections and adapting floor plans to accommodate technology training programs, as well as mini-conference rooms that offer private, quiet spaces frequently requested by self-employed consultants meeting with clients, as well as teenagers needing space to huddle over group projects.

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Measles: Measles Epidemic Is Spreading in Central Africa

Jehad Nga for The New York Times

An internally displaced persons camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to recent violence in the country, a spreading measles epidemic is further endangering the lives of thousands of children there.

A large measles epidemic is spreading in Central Africa, endangering the lives of thousands of children, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned last week.

Since October, the charity has vaccinated more than 226,000 children in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization has also treated nearly 13,000 Congolese for the effects of the disease.

Measles is very contagious. In places where many children are malnourished and vitamin-deficient, it kills 1 percent to15 percent of those who don’t receive medical care, Doctors Without Borders estimated. (Even in the United States in the 1990s, although cases were rare, the fatality rate was 0.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In AIDS patients, the rate is 30 percent.)

The eastern Congo basin has serious shortages of medical workers and of drugs. While there is no treatment for measles itself, antibiotics can save those who develop pneumonia, meningitis or other secondary infections. Measles can also cause blindness by scarring the eyeball.

The outbreak is taking place despite enormous success against the disease worldwide. According to a study released earlier this year, deaths from measles have dropped by almost 75 percent since 2000.

Most of the lives saved were in Africa and India. Measles shots are often cited as one of the chief reasons that deaths of children under age 5 around the world have fallen steadily.

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Measles: Measles Epidemic Is Spreading in Central Africa

Jehad Nga for The New York Times

An internally displaced persons camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to recent violence in the country, a spreading measles epidemic is further endangering the lives of thousands of children there.

A large measles epidemic is spreading in Central Africa, endangering the lives of thousands of children, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned last week.

Since October, the charity has vaccinated more than 226,000 children in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization has also treated nearly 13,000 Congolese for the effects of the disease.

Measles is very contagious. In places where many children are malnourished and vitamin-deficient, it kills 1 percent to15 percent of those who don’t receive medical care, Doctors Without Borders estimated. (Even in the United States in the 1990s, although cases were rare, the fatality rate was 0.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In AIDS patients, the rate is 30 percent.)

The eastern Congo basin has serious shortages of medical workers and of drugs. While there is no treatment for measles itself, antibiotics can save those who develop pneumonia, meningitis or other secondary infections. Measles can also cause blindness by scarring the eyeball.

The outbreak is taking place despite enormous success against the disease worldwide. According to a study released earlier this year, deaths from measles have dropped by almost 75 percent since 2000.

Most of the lives saved were in Africa and India. Measles shots are often cited as one of the chief reasons that deaths of children under age 5 around the world have fallen steadily.

Read More..

Senate Leader Says Deal Is Unlikely Before Fiscal Deadline

WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, warned Thursday that there was scant time to put together a Congressional deal to avert the impending fiscal crisis and that no resolution was in sight.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Senator Harry Reid arrived at the Capitol on Thursday in Washington.

“I have to be very honest,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened in an unusual session between Christmas and New Year’s Day. “I don’t know time-wise how it can happen now.”

Mr. Reid offered his pessimistic assessment shortly before President Obama, cutting his vacation short, arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. White House officials said that before leaving Hawaii, Mr. Obama had spoken separately by phone with each of the four Congressional leaders about the status of negotiations, but they gave no details of the discussion.

Mr. Obama is expected to invite all four lawmakers to meet on Friday. In a related development, House Republicans were told to return to Washington on Sunday. Republican senators were planning to convene at the Capitol — normally somnolent during Christmas week — to strategize.

On the Senate floor Thursday, Mr. Reid excoriated House Republicans for failing to consider a Senate-passed measure that would extend lower tax rates on household income up to $250,000. He urged House members to return to the Capitol to put together at least a modest deal to avoid the more than half-a-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to begin in January.

“The American people are waiting for the ball to drop,” Mr. Reid said, “but it’s not going to be a good drop.”

A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, confirmed that he had spoken with the president, and said that Mr. McConnell was “happy to review what the president has in mind.” But the spokesman, Don Stewart, said Senate Democrats had not come ahead with a plan.

“When they do, members on both sides of the aisle will review the legislation and make decisions on how best to proceed,” Mr. Stewart said.

Mr. Reid said that absent a move from Republicans, the Senate would move forward this week on a national security measure concerning espionage, as well as a bill to help states that have suffered hurricane damage, with multiple votes possible.

“We are here in Washington working,” Mr. Reid said, “while the members of the House of Representatives are out watching movies and watching their kids play soccer and basketball and doing all kinds of things. They should be here.”

Senators, frustrated, pessimistic and in some cases downright miserable, returned to Washington with no clear fiscal agenda. Senator Ben Nelson, a retiring Democrat of Nebraska, arrived shortly after midnight on Thursday on a flight that was delayed more than four hours. As he walked through the airport, he lamented the deteriorating political comity that he has observed during two terms in the Senate and two terms as a Democratic governor of a conservative state.

“There are folks who are elected who have come here with an agenda to do nothing and want to stop everything,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview. “It may be the new norm – blocking everything.”

For Mr. Nelson, who decided against seeking a third term, the looming fiscal crisis would be the final legislative act of a political career built around a bipartisan voting record. He said he was not confident that a real deal could be reached that would be acceptable to both sides, considering that Congress is filled with many people “who didn’t accept the 2008 presidential election and haven’t accepted the 2012 election either.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

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United Arab Emirates Arrests Suspects in Terror Plots

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) — Security forces in the United Arab Emirates have arrested members of a cell made up of militants from Saudi Arabia and the emirates who were planning to carry out attacks in both countries and in other states, the official Emirates News Agency said on Wednesday.

The federation of seven emirates, a major oil exporter and an ally of the United States, has had no attacks by Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. But Islamist sentiment has risen in recent years, and Dubai, a business and tourism hub that attracts many Westerners, could make an attractive target for militants, analysts say.

The suspects had acquired materials and equipment for use in what the news agency called terrorist operations.

“The security authorities in the U.A.E., in coordination with the related security parties in Saudi Arabia, announced the arrest of an organized cell from the deviant group that was planning to carry out actions against national security of both countries and some brotherly states,” the agency said, without elaborating.

The phrase “deviant group” is often used by the authorities in Saudi Arabia to describe Al Qaeda.

In August, the Saudi authorities arrested a group of militants in Riyadh — mostly Yemeni nationals — suspected of having links to Al Qaeda. Thousands of people believed to be militants have been arrested since dozens were killed in terrorist attacks between 2003 and 2006 on Saudi residential compounds and offices for foreign workers and on government facilities.

The United States has poured aid into Yemen to stem the threat of attacks from the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to try to prevent any spillover of violence into Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter.

In 2010, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, formed with the merger of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches, said it was behind a plot to send two parcel bombs to the United States. The bombs were intercepted in Britain and Dubai.

Though the emirates have escaped much of the upheaval that has shaken the Arab world, the authorities have moved swiftly to stem any sign of political dissent, detaining more than 60 Islamists this year over suspected threats to state security and links to foreign groups.

Those detainees, who belong to an Islamist group called Al-Islah, have confessed to setting up a secret organization with an armed force whose aim was to take power and establish an Islamic state, the local news media reported in September. The group denied the accusations.

Many of the detained Islamists are from the more religiously conservative northern emirates like Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, which produced one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

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State of the Art: Pogie Awards for the Brightest Ideas of 2012

Good evening, and welcome to The Dalles, Ore.! Here in the cafetorium of the James A. Garfield Middle School, we meet every year for the biggest event in technology: the Pogie awards!

We don’t award these coveted trophies to the best products of the year; everybody does that. No, the Pogies celebrate the best ideas of the year: ingenious features that somehow made it past the lawyers, through the penny-pinching committees and into real-world tech gadgets — even if the products overall are turkeys.

So now, for the eighth straight year — the FedEx envelopes, please!

SMART STAY On Samsung’s Galaxy S III phone, the front-facing camera looks for your eyes. When you’re not looking at the screen, it dims to save battery power. It brightens right back up when you return your gaze. So smart.

POWER NAP Most of the world’s laptops do exactly one thing when you close their lids: sleep. All other activity stops.

But Apple asked: Why? Why can’t network activity keep chugging away even when the lid is closed? Why can’t your laptop keep backing itself up, downloading e-mail and syncing its online data (calendars, calendar notes, reminders, photos)?

That is the idea behind Power Nap, a feature of OS X Mountain Lion that works on recent MacBook models. You can wake up, grab your laptop and head out, confident that it is backed up and has all your latest mail downloaded.

SLIPSTREAM On Amazon’s 8.9-inch Kindle HD, something ingenious happens when you call up a big-name Web site: It pops onto your screen fast, all at once. It’s almost as though the Kindle’s browser is loading a JPEG screenshot of a Web page, rather than the dozens of individual graphics, text bits and other elements that constitute a Web page.

And that’s exactly what it is doing. Behind the scenes, Amazon’s servers grab frequent screenshots of the most popular Web sites; when you visit one, what you see first is that JPEG image (with live links in the right places, fortunately).

While you are studying that image, the browser continues to fetch the component pieces of the page — and after a few seconds, a blink (and occasionally a shifted element) lets you know that you are now looking at the real deal. It is a sneaky, logical, brilliant trick that saves you time and costs you nothing.

CYCLORAMIC Just when you think that nobody could possibly have another fresh idea for a phone app, Cycloramic ($1) makes 360-degree panoramic videos — without a tripod or swivel.

You stand the phone upright and tap the Go button. Incredibly, the phone, balancing on its end, begins to rotate itself. Freakiest darned thing you ever saw. Great for winning bar bets or establishing new religions.

If you’ve ever seen a phone scoot itself along a table when it is in buzz mode, you get the principle. The app triggers the phone’s vibration module at exactly the right frequencies to make the phone turn on the table. The phone’s sensors figure out how far it’s rotated.

It works only on shiny surfaces like glass, polished granite or laminated wood (like desks), and only the iPhone 5 has exactly the right balance. It’s a jaw-dropper.

ELECTRONIC LEASHES The Ciago iAlert and Cobra Tag are Bluetooth keychain fobs that communicate with your iPhone or Android phone. Once you’re 30 feet away from the phone, the keychain starts beeping, as though to say, “You’re leaving your $200 phone behind, you idiot!” It works the other way, too; the phone beeps if you leave your keys behind.

In practice, these fobs are cheaply built and, if the Amazon reviews are to be believed, not always reliable. But remember — on the night of the Pogies, it’s the idea that counts.

BLUETOOTH 4.0 Bluetooth is that wireless technology that connects gadgets within 30 feet — your phone to your headset, for example — and kills your battery charge. Right?

Actually, it doesn’t anymore. Bluetooth 4.0, built into the latest iPhone and Android phones, is also called Bluetooth LE (low energy) for a reason. For the most part, it uses power only when it has data to exchange. The rest of the time, it sleeps.

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Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongeese, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

Read More..

Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongeese, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

Read More..