We’ll see how smart you are when the K-9 comes…

“Chaser proved to be a diligent student. Unlike human children, she seems to love her drills and tests and is always asking for more. ‘She still demands four to five hours a day,” Dr. Pilley said. “I’m 82, and I have to go to bed to get away from her.‘”

The NYT tells the tale of Chaser, a border collie with a vocabulary of over 1000 words now. “Dr. Pilley said that most border collies, with special training, ‘could be pretty close to where Chaser is.’…Dr. Horowitz agreed: ‘It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention that is lavished on them,” she said.’” (Sorry, Berk…At least I taught you bacon and tacos — you know, the important stuff.)

After Hobbits, Easterlings.

“Along with modern humans, scientists knew about the Neanderthals and a dwarf human species found on the Indonesian island of Flores nicknamed The Hobbit. To this list, experts must now add the Denisovans.” Researchers discover evidence of a fourth separate species of ancient man in the caves of Siberia. “The implications of the finding have been described by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London as ‘nothing short of sensational… [W]e didn’t know how ancient people in China related to these other humans.‘”

Neutral No Longer.

“The message: the FCC Chairman caved to the most powerful interests and is adopting a rule that may end the Internet’s historic openness to all software and content as a level playing field. This will undermine the Internet’s role in as an engine of economic innovation and democratic participation. The rule was written by and for the giants like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, who are cheering the rule. And the FCC Chairman is trying to fool the public into believing they should thank him.“

After earlier explaining why the FCC’s compromise(d) stance was “garbage”, Marvin Ammori laments Julius Genachowski’s sad sell-out on net neutrality. While the president is claiming victory here — it does, after all, follow the “solomonic or moronic” splitting-the-baby approach he likes to bring to every issue — everything you need to know about it is summed up in one sentence in Wired: “There was one group, however, which seemed content with the new rules: the nation’s cable and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.“

Those Real Life Achieves.

“By one estimate, Dr. McGonigal notes, creating Wikipedia took eight years and 100 million hours of work, but that’s only half the number of hours spent in a single week by people playing World of Warcraft. ‘Whoever figures out how to effectively engage them first for real work is going to reap enormous benefits,’ Dr. McGonigal predicts.“

But, then it’d be work, would it? At any rate, scientists and game designers try to figure out ways to tap into the world-changing potential of gamers. “‘Gamers are engaged, focused, and happy’…’One of the most profound transformations we can learn from games is how to turn the sense that someone has “failed” into the sense that they ‘haven’t succeeded yet.’“

Life…But Not as We Know It.

“Our findings are a reminder that life as we know it could be much more flexible than we generally assume or can imagine,” Felisa Wolfe-Simon, an astrobiology researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey, said.“

Whoa. NASA announces it has discovered a strange new bacteria in California’s Mono Lake that use arsenic instead of phosphorus, previously considered indispensable to life. “It gets in there and sort of gums up the works of our biochemical machinery,’ ASU’s Ariel Anbar, a co-author of the Science paper, explained.

Big doings? Definitely — The existence of these viable microbes suggests new biochemical possibilities for life on distant (or even not-so-distant) planets. But Discover‘s Ed Yong advises caution: “The discovery is amazing, but it’s easy to go overboard with it…For a start, the bacteria – a strain known as GFAJ-1 – don’t depend on arsenic. They still contain detectable levels of phosphorus in their molecules and they actually grow better on phosphorus if given the chance. It’s just that they might be able to do without this typically essential element – an extreme and impressive ability in itself.“

Update: “As soon as Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. ‘I was outraged at how bad the science was,’ she told me.” Hold the champagne: Slate‘s Carl Zimmer surveys the scientific pushback, and it is considerable. “‘[N]one of the arguments are very convincing on their own.’ That was about as positive as the critics could get. ‘This paper should not have been published,’ said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.”

My God, It’s Full of Stars.

“We may have to abandon this notion of using the Milky Way as a template for the rest of the universe,” Dr. van Dokkum said. If the findings are correct, an undercount of dwarfs would mean astronomers have underestimated the masses of galaxies, and that would mean that galaxies developed earlier and faster than currently thought.“

Another big happening on the astrobiology front. As first seen at Dangerous Meta, a joint Harvard-Yale study published in Nature finds that our universe may have three times as many stars as we thought. “That suggests a universe of roughly 100 sextillion stars, with an approximate margin of error of about 10 times fewer or 10 times more.“

Glimpses of Qward.

“‘What we’d like to do is see if there’s some difference that we don’t understand yet between matter and antimatter,” Professor Hangst said. ‘That difference may be more fundamental; that may have to do with very high-energy things that happened at the beginning of the universe. That’s why holding on to them is so important – we need time to study them.‘”

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern have found a way to hold atoms of antimatter for a fraction of a second. “[T]he ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics….'[W]e need a lot more atoms and a lot longer times before it’s really useful – but one has to crawl before you sprint.’”

Guinness for Brains.

“Drinking alcohol was ‘unintentional, accidental, and haphazard until about 10,000 years ago,’ says Satoshi Kanazawaat at Psychology Today. Smart people are generally early adopters and, in the context of human history, ‘the substance [alcohol] and the method of consumption are both evolutionarily novel.‘

Two new studies find a correlation between intelligence and a thirst for alcohol. Hey, I buy it – Thank you, science, for lending support to my vices! And, as Bogey said, “The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.”

Earth Too.

“‘We’re pretty excited about it,’ admits Steve Vogt, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of the team, in a masterpiece of understatement. ‘I think this is what everyone’s been after for the past 15 years.’” And then some! Apparently, astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet yet in Gliese 581g, a relatively short 20 light years away.

“[I]t probably has a solid surface just like Earth. Much more important, it sits smack in the middle of the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at just the right distance from the star to let water remain liquid rather than freezing solid or boiling away. As far as we know, that’s a minimum requirement for the presence of life.“

Some might remember that Gliese 581c was all the rage two years ago. Apparently, this one — in the same solar system but only just discovered — is even closer to the real deal. (Good thing the NASA authorization just passed…)

Fifty Years at Gombe.

“On the morning of July 14, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of Lake Tanganyika…She had brought a tent, a few tin plates, a cup without a handle, a shoddy pair of binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and — as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence Tanganyika — her mother. She had come to study chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try.“

Fifty years after her studies began, pioneering primatologist Jane Goodall is honored (again) by National Geographic. “She created a research program, a set of protocols and ethics, an intellectual momentum — she created, in fact, a relationship between the scientific world and one community of chimpanzees — that has grown far beyond what one woman could do.”