Seven Ways to Trick Your Brain

Seven Ways to Trick Your Brain - By some accounts, the human brain is the most complex object in the universe. But it is also surprisingly easy to trick. 

Mental shortcuts and shortcomings, which allow us to be tricked, also show us how the brain works, said Jerry Kolber, the head writer and executive producer of "Brain Games," a new show on the National Geographic Channel that debuts today (April 22) at 9 p.m. ET/PT. 

Here are some simple games designed to trick your mind and teach you more about what's going on upstairs. 

This publicity image released by the National Geographic Channel shows the four of the captains from the series, "Wicked Tuna," posing on a pier in Gloucester, Mass. The channel faces the challenge of trying to build a successful network in the era of Honey Boo-Boo and "Duck Dynasty" without damaging a National Geographic brand that has stood for quality since the magazine was first published in 1888. The first three months of 2013 was the network's most popular quarter since its launch in 2001. The National Geographic Channel averaged 554,000 viewers in prime time, propelled by "Doomsday Preppers," the "Wicked Tuna" series about fishermen in Gloucester, Mass., and a movie dramatization of Bill O'Reilly's book, "Killing Lincoln." (AP Photo/National Geographic Channel)

1. Biblical question 

Here's a simple question to put your Biblical knowledge to the test. But don't worry, you don't have to go to church or temple every day of the week to get it right: How many of each kind of animal did Moses bring on his ark? 

If you answered "two," you're like most people … and you're incorrect. It was Noah who took animals on his craft. 

Most people get this question wrong because the brain is primed by the words "biblical," "ark" and "animals," and goes straight into accessing its Bible-related knowledge to answer, said Jason Silva, the host of the show. This allows the brain to gloss over the fact that Moses is not the right guy. 

2. Mary's mother 

Mary's mother has four children: April, May, June and …? 

If you answered "July," you've been tricked. The correct answer is Mary. Your brain is built to be efficient and looks for patterns in everything, Silva said. Even though the answer is contained in the first two words of the riddle, your brain automatically goes to "July," because that's the next month. This riddle reveals your automatic, or system 1, brain processes at work. This system uses shortcuts in an effort to save the brain energy needed to do other things, like running the body and keeping a person alive. 

3. Notice anything weird? 

Look at the above photo. Does anything about it appear off to you? If not, look again. And again. As you may or may not notice, the word "you" is repeated. Your brain doesn't notice this because it is unnecessary to comprehend the sentence, Kolber told LiveScience. This glossing-over reveals another automatic process that literally blinds a person to certain unnecessary, extraneous information, Kolber added. 

4. Motion-induced blindness 

If you focus your eyes on a blinking red dot in the center of a spinning circle, you will notice something strange: the yellow dots disappear. That's because attention is like a spotlight that can only shine on one thing at a time, Silva said. In this case, the eyes (and, ultimately the brain) assume that the dots are part of the background, and thus adapt to the dots' presence and disregard them as unimportant, Kolber said. 

"Seeing is not believing," Kolber said. "The eye truly can un-see things." 

5. Flash lag 

The flash lag experiment illustrates this gap between perception and reality. Follow the instructions to the game and click on the spot where you think the dot is at the time of the flash. You will likely think the dot is well ahead of where it actually is. 

The experiment shows the "difficulty in accurately detecting the position of an object at the time of another event," according to researcher and author Dean Buonomano. That's due in part to the delay between when something happens and when you fully see and realize the event has happened, Kolber said. 

6. School bus 

Quick: which way is this bus headed? (The image shows a bus without any markings on its side.) The correct answer is to the left — the entrance on a bus is always on the right side, which must be facing away. Children, with more recent experience on buses, are much better at answering this question than adults. It illustrates how important cues and former experience are in interpreting a sight or situation. 

7. Money grab 

Here's a simple game that you can play with a friend. Hold out a dollar bill to your companion and have him or her place a pointer finger and thumb a few inches away from the money, ready to grab it. Then drop the bill. The person won't be able to snatch the cash before it falls (your subject isn't allowed to move his or her whole arm, just the fingers). 

The reason has to do with time and mental processing speed. Everything you see happens basically one-tenth of a second before it registers in your brain, the amount of time needed to assemble the vast amount of information coming in through the eyes and other senses, and made sense of by the brain, Silva said. Moreover, your eyes can only see in two dimensions; 3D vision is a product of the brain, he added. Besides seeing the bill drop, your brain also has to tell your fingers to move to catch the bill. By the time this happens, the bill is already out of reach. 

Given all that, it's actually a wonder how quickly our brains can function — but sometimes we overestimate our reaction time, Kolber said. 

This knowledge has led Kolber to drive slower and put more distance between him and cars in front of him on the road — many accidents can be avoided by taking these kinds of precautions and giving yourself more time. Indeed, one point of the "Brain Games" show is to apply brain science to everyday life. 

"We start with a game, we blow your mind, we explain the science and then talk about how it could be applied to your life," Silva said. ( LiveScience.com )

Blog : The Sensitivities | Seven Ways to Trick Your Brain

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History's Biggest Scientific Fraud Goes Under the Microscope

History's Biggest Scientific Fraud Goes Under the Microscope - It's a detective story with a century-old crime: The forgery of a supposed "missing link" in human evolution that went undetected for decades.

Now, researchers are set on identifying the long-dead culprits responsible for the famous Piltdown Man hoax — involving forged bones said to belong to an early human — and teasing out their motives.

Writing in this week's issue of the journal Nature, Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London, explains why he and his colleagues are still investigating a mystery that began 100 years ago.

"Personally, I am intrigued by the question of whether the hoax was driven by scientific ambition or by more jocular or vindictive motives," Stringer wrote. He and his colleagues plan to test the forged bones from the Piltdown case with modern methods, aiming to find out who most likely made them and why.

History of a hoax

The Piltdown Hoax is one of the most successful scientific frauds in history. In December 1912, British paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced to the world that they'd found an amazing early human fossil in Piltdown, England. The curious specimen had a humanlike skull with an apelike jaw. Given the scientific name Eoanthropus dawsoni, it was more commonly called Piltdown Man.

Dawson and Woodward also reported that alongside Piltdown Man were a number of other stunning finds: stone tools, fossilized mammals and even an elephant bone. In 1916, Dawson claimed to have found more remains at a second site nearby.

According to Stringer's telling, some scientists did question the Piltdown Man bonanza discovery. They didn't immediately cry fraud, but suspected the fossil deposits had simply been mixed together over time, suggesting the ape jaw and humanlike skull weren't actually associated.

But it wasn't until the 1950s that Piltdown Man was exposed for the fraud it was. Chemical studies found the fossil to be less than 50,000 years old, not 1 million years as Dawson and Woodward claimed. Further testing showed the skull was likely from a modern human and the jaw probably from a modern orangutan.

Whodunnit?

The question is, who stained the bones to match each other and filed the teeth to appear more human?

That's the mystery Stringer and his colleagues hope to solve with radiocarbon dating, DNA testing and other molecular studies. If the researchers can pin down the origins of the bones used to make the faked fossils, Stringer wrote, they may be able to figure out which archaeologist on the project was responsible.

For example, if faked fossils from both the Piltdown site and Dawson's second site match up, the amateur probably did it, as he was the only discoverer of the second site, Stringer said. Dawson's motivation likely would have been scientific ambition and the desire to be accepted among the elite, Stringer added.

Though 12 suspects in total have been accused in the hoax, there are three particularly likely suspects, other than Dawson. Woodward is one, as is Woodward's assistant Martin Hinton, a zoologist who was found after his death in 1961 to possess a collection of stained and altered bones. A Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, who discovered a tooth at Piltdown, may also have been involved.

Even the famous have not escaped suspicion. British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries, has been accused of being mixed up in the hoax, according to the BBC. Doyle lived near Piltdown and was an archaeological society member. He wrote about ancient apes in his novel "The Lost World" and could have been inspired to fool the scientific community because of their mockery of one of his great passions, spiritualism. (Doyle also believed in fairies.)

A century-old mystery may hardly seem fresh, but Stringer sees the case as an important milestone in the history of science. The Piltdown hoax likely made scientists less willing to accept real early hominin fossils such as Astralopithecus africanus, also known as "Lucy," Stringer wrote. But the hoax also shows that even if it takes time, science will eventually ferret out the truth, he said.

"Regardless of who was responsible, the Piltdown hoax is a stark reminder to scientists that if something seems too good to be true, then perhaps it is," Stringer wrote. ( LiveScience.com )

Blog : The Sensitivities | History's Biggest Scientific Fraud Goes Under the Microscope

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Rover, is that you? Mars orbiter captures traces of Nasa's retired Martian explorer, gathering (red) dust on the planet surface

Rover, is that you? Mars orbiter captures traces of Nasa's retired Martian explorer, gathering (red) dust on the planet surface - A camera on board Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image of the lander from one of Nasa's retired Martian explorers, peaceful on the surface of the Red Planet.

It's the orbiter's first colour image of the lander, which helped carry Mars Rover Spirit to the surface. It now has a red colour - probably due to a coating of Martian dust.

The red dot is the lander from Mars Rover Spirit, now with a reddish colour from a coating of Martian dust. The rover drove off the lander platform in 2004 and spent six years exploring and sending data from nearby craters and hills

Spirit stopped sending signals in 2010. The image was captured on January 29.

Spirit drove off the platform in 2004 for a six-year mission exploring nearby hills and craters.

The view covers an area about 2,000 feet wide, dominated by Bonneveille Crater.

On the northern edge of Bonneville Crater, there is a bright spot - a remnant of Spirit's heat shield.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the view.

The camera is the largest ever sent into deep space, and has recorded tens of thousands of images.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining Mars with six science instruments since 2006.

This mission has returned more data about Mars than all other orbital and surface missions combined. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Coping with allergy symptoms

Coping with allergy symptoms - Can the allergy march be stopped halfway if I notice symptoms in my child, and what should I do?

An allergy march basically illustrates the potential natural history or outcome of having an allergic disease. If a child has eczema, whilst this may start to disappear in terms of symptoms, at some point in the future, he may start to develop respiratory allergies such as asthma or allergic rhinitis.

It is likely that whilst the symptoms or signs of eczema have disappeared, the allergy may persist, and present itself in other ways. The child may develop persistent sneezing, itchiness of the nose, and blocked and running nose on waking up in the morning, which is suggestive of house dust mite allergy, or allergy towards other indoor allergens.

In this scenario, conventional anti-allergic medications such as oral anti-histamines and nasal spray (corticosteroids) may offer symptomatic relief, but may not necessarily prevent the allergy march.

In this situation, the role of allergen-specific immunotherapy (ASIT) is the only treatment shown to prevent or change the natural outcome of the allergic reaction.

This treatment can be thought of as a re-education process for the immune system, which in allergy, has gone into a hypersensitive mode when encountering harmless organisms such as dust mites.
The ASIT will likely induce a state of tolerance towards these harmless organisms or other aero-allergens. Thus the individual could well revert to his original state of tolerance before the allergy started (for which the actual cause is not known). ( thestar.com.my )

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Ancient world dictionary finished — after 90 years

Ancient world dictionary finished — after 90 years – It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries — and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.

The year: 1921. The place: The University of Chicago. The project: Assembling an Assyrian dictionary based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, written in a language that hadn't been uttered for more than 2,000 years. The scholars knew the project would take a long time. No one quite expected how very long.

Decades passed. The team grew. Scholars arrived from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London, joining others from the U.S. and Canada. One generation gave way to the next, one century faded into the next. Some signed on early in their careers; they were still toiling away at retirement. The work was slow, sometimes frustrating and decidedly low-tech: Typewriters. Mimeograph machines. And index cards. Eventually, nearly 2 million of them.

And now, 90 years later, a finale. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete — 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language (with several dialects, including Assyrian) that endured for 2,500 years. The project is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more.

Why is there a need for a dictionary of a language last written around A.D. 100 that only a small number of scholars worldwide know of? Gil Stein, director of the university's Oriental Institute (the dictionary's home), has a ready answer:

"The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world's first urban civilization," he says. "Virtually everything that we take for granted ... has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it's the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing.

"If we ever want to understand our roots," Stein adds, "we have to understand this first great civilization."

The translated cuneiform texts — originally written with wedged-shaped characters — reveal a culture where people expressed joy, anxiety and disappointment about the same events they do today: a child's birth, bad harvests, money troubles, boastful leaders.

"A lot of what you see is absolutely recognizable — people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love," says Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who worked on the project on and off over three decades. "There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren't so great. ... There's also lot of ancient versions of `your check is in the mail.' And there's a common phrase in old Babylonian letters that literally means `don't worry about a thing.'"

There were omens, too — ways of divining the future by reading smoke patterns, the stars, the moon and sheep livers.

"Like all people at all times, they wanted to try to find some way of controlling their world," says Martha Roth, the dictionary's editor-in-charge and dean of humanities. "It's very difficult to draw the line between actually believing and being superstitious."

Robert Biggs, professor emeritus at the university, devoted nearly a half century to the dictionary, sometimes uncovering tablets on digs in the Iraq desert, sometimes poring over texts in museums in London and Baghdad. His specialty is Babylonian medicine. For almost an entire year, he studied thousands of references to sheep livers.

For example: If a sheep's gallbladder — part of the liver — was long and pointed, it meant the defeat of the enemy king. If there was a certain kind of crease on the liver, it could mean the king was going on a journey. A lunar eclipse could mean danger for a king.

But the tablets reached far beyond royalty. Biggs says they included everything from a disputed paternity case to agricultural loans to famine, where desperate people sold their children for cash. "Life was very fragile ... it was much more risky that it is now," he says.

Making sense of it all was painstaking work. Some of the wedge-shaped characters changed over the thousands of years, and the tablets excavated from ancient temples, palaces and cities were frequently crumbling. Often there was no punctuation, so it was hard to know where one word ended and the other began.

"You'd sit in a room with a good light and turn the tablet in various directions to see as much as possible," Biggs explains. "Quite often the tablets were broken so you might see part of a sign. And different people looking at the same thing would see something different because of the way you'd hold it."

"Sometimes it got to be very tedious," he adds. "Other times there was a sense of exhilaration if you could solve some problem or figure out what a rare word means."

Regardless, the work continued.

"You always saw the light at the end of the tunnel," Biggs says. "But the end of the tunnel kept getting further and further away."

An early 10-year completion deadline was soon deemed unrealistic. "Scholars always underestimated how difficult it would be," Roth says. "People always expected the project would end in their lifetime. What can I tell you? That's not always the way it goes."

There was much to research, much to record. By 1935, scholars already had 1 million index cards. It would take more than 30 years before the first of the 21 volumes was published. Most cover a single letter. The entire collection spans about 10,000 pages and 28,000 words. The definitions are more fitting for an encyclopedia; they provide cultural and historical context, similar to those in the Oxford English Dictionary.

"It's not such a word means king," Roth says. "It's a matter of understanding the thousands and thousands of references to the word king in every document in every period."

Roth notes that after arriving at the university in 1979, she asked to work on the word witness or witnessing. That took four to five years. On the other hand, there might be just a dozen references to a jar holding grain and that research could be complete in an afternoon.

Now that the dictionary is finished, Roth says there's a feeling of tremendous accomplishment and "a little bit of a sense of loss.... This has occupied my waking and sleeping moments for 32 years. You dream this stuff."

The end also brings a realization as more tablets are unearthed, more discoveries will be made.

"It's like driving a Porsche off the lot and looking in the Blue Book (listing a car's worth) and seeing how much value it's lost," Stolper says. "The moment it's done, it's out of date."

Biggs says the scholars are satisfied with the final version, but there is that lingering temptation.

"It might be nice to start over," he says, "but no one has the courage to do it anymore." ( Associated Press )

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Prostate Cancer Studies Find Benefit in Daily Acetaminophen and Brisk Walks

Prostate Cancer Studies Find Benefit in Daily Acetaminophen and Brisk Walks - Pop a Tylenol and take a brisk walk for protection against prostate cancer? That's what the findings of two new studies published this week suggest.

In the first study, published Monday in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, scientists found that men who took a daily dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol) for five years had a 38% lower risk of developing prostate cancer, compared with other men. Additionally, daily acetaminophen was associated with a 51% reduced risk of developing an aggressive form of the disease. Men who took acetaminophen for less than five years saw no protective benefit.

Previous research has shown that taking aspirin or other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) every day may help reduce prostate cancer risk. The authors theorize that the same may be true of acetaminophen; while not an NSAID, it does have anti-inflammatory properties.

For the study, the researchers looked at data from 78,485 men who participated in the longitudinal Cancer Prevention Study II Nutrition Cohort, answering questions about diet and drug use every two years starting in 1992. During the follow-up, there were 8,092 cases of prostate cancer - significantly fewer in the group who took acetaminophen daily for five years.

The second study, published online Tuesday by Cancer Research, involved 1,455 men who had already been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and Harvard School of Public Health followed the men from 2004 to 2009 and found that those who engaged in regular brisk walking after diagnosis were significantly less likely to see their disease progress.

Men who walked briskly - at a pace of about 3 miles per hour or faster - at least three hours per week were 57% less likely to experience disease progression (including elevated PSA levels, secondary treatment, bone metastasis or prostate cancer-related death), compared with men who walked less and more slowly.

"The important point was the intensity of the activity," Erin Richman, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, said in a statement. "The walking had to be brisk for men to experience a benefit."

The researchers said the effect of brisk walking persisted independent of age, diagnosis, type of treatment and characteristics of disease. The patients' average age at diagnosis was 65. The findings are in line with previous research suggesting that physical activity may help reduce the risk of disease-related death in certain cases of prostate cancer.

Why the association? MedPage Today reports:

Richman and colleagues noted that the brisk walks may reduce insulin resistance, which decreases bioavailable insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF1) and increases adiponectin levels, which are all associated with decreased risk of advanced or fatal prostate cancer in vitro and in vivo.

Another potential source of the associated reduction was reduced inflammation due to a lower circulation of interleukin-6, high levels of which "predicted a 73% increased risk of dying from prostate cancer among normal-weight men," the researchers wrote.

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men. According to the National Cancer Institute, about 32,050 men died from prostate cancer in 2010 and 217,000 new cases were diagnosed. More than 2.2 million men in the U.S. are living with prostate cancer. ( time.com )

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Woolly Mammoths, Huge Elephants May Have Interbred

Woolly Mammoths, Huge Elephants May Have Interbred - The woolly mammoth may surprisingly have regularly interbred with a completely different and much larger elephant species, researchers now find.

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) roamed the planet for more than a million years, ranging from Europe to Asia to North America. Nearly all of these giants vanished from Siberia by about 10,000 years ago, although dwarf mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until 3,700 years ago.

Although woolly mammoths lived in the cold of the tundra, the Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) preferred the more temperate regions of southern and central North America. The Columbians were much larger than woollies, with Columbian males reaching one-and-a-half to two times that of woolly males.

"We are talking about two very physically different species here," said researcher Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. "You have roughly 1 million years of separation between the two, with the Columbian mammoth likely derived from an early migration into North America approximately 1.5 million years ago, and their woolly counterparts emigrating to North America some 400,000 years ago."

Poinar and his colleagues investigated the evolution of Columbian mammoths by analyzing DNA retrieved from the tusks, bone and teeth of two approximately 11,000-year-old fossil specimens, one found in the Huntington Reservoir in Utah and the other found near Rawlins, Wyo. The researchers concentrated on the genomes of the mitochondria, the "powerhouses" of the cells, which have their own unique DNA and are inherited from the mother.

Surprisingly, they discovered the mitochondrial genome of the Columbian mammoth was nearly indiscernible from that of its northern woolly counterparts.

"At first I thought, 'Oh crap, there's contamination of some sort,'" Poinar said.

However, any minor contamination they found could not explain the extensive genetic evidence they uncovered, and they replicated their results in an independent lab. "I think we were very lucky," Poinar told LiveScience.

"We think we may be looking at a genetic hybrid," said researcher Jacob Enk, a graduate student in the McMaster Ancient DNA Center.

When glacial times got nasty, woollies likely moved to more pleasant conditions southward, where they came into contact with the Columbian mammoths.

"Living African elephant species hybridize where their ranges overlap, with the bigger species out-competing the smaller for mates," Enk added. The offspring are perfectly fertile, Poinar added.

Since woollies and Columbians overlapped in time and space, it is not unlikely that they interbred in much the same manner.

"It reminds me a bit of high-school days — the larger males are more successful at meeting women across the dance floor than the rest of us," Poinar said.

These findings could explain why some mammoth fossils had features intermediate between woollies and Columbians, although the genomes of both species should be sequenced to tell for sure. The researchers also want to look at Columbian mammoth specimens from farther south where no woollies ever ventured, to get an idea of what nonhybrid samples might look like. ( LiveScience.com )

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Eastern wolves are hybrids with coyotes

Eastern wolves are hybrids with coyotes – Wolves in the eastern United States are hybrids of gray wolves and coyotes, while the region's coyotes actually are wolf-coyote-dog hybrids, according to a new genetic study that is adding fuel to a longstanding debate over the origins of two endangered species.

The study is unlikely to impact the management of the endangered red wolf in North Carolina and the eastern Canadian wolf in Ontario, but it offers fresh insight into their genetic makeup and concludes that those wolves are hybrids that developed over the last few hundred years.

Some scientists have argued that the red wolf, Canis rufus, and the eastern Canadian wolf, Canis lycaon, evolved from an ancient eastern wolf species distinct from the larger gray wolf, Canis lupus, that is found in western North America.

Wolf experts who adhere to that theory say the new study is interesting but falls short of proving anything. They say it doesn't explain why hybrids appear only in some places and note that western wolves don't hybridize with coyotes but often kill them.

In the study, published online earlier this month in the peer-reviewed journal Genome Research, 16 researchers from around the globe led by Robert Wayne of the University of California-Los Angeles, used information from the dog genome — the animal's entire genetic code — to survey the genetic diversity in dogs, wolves and coyotes.

It was the most detailed genetic study of any wild vertebrate species to date, using molecular genetic techniques to look at over 48,000 markers throughout the full genome, said Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum and a co-author.

In a previous study of the dog genome published last year in the journal Nature, a Wayne-led international team of scientists reported that domestic dogs likely originated in the Middle East and shared more genetic similarity with Middle Eastern gray wolves than any other wolf population.

The recent study showed a gradient of hybridization in wolves.

In the West, wolves were pure wolf, while in the western Great Lakes, they averaged 85 percent wolf and 15 percent coyote. Wolves in Algonquin Park in eastern Ontario averaged 58 percent wolf.

The red wolf in North Carolina, which has been the subject of extensive preservation and restoration efforts, was found to be 24 percent wolf and 76 percent coyote.

Northeastern coyotes, which only colonized the region in the past 60 years, were found to be 82 percent coyote, 9 percent dog and 9 percent wolf.

In a study co-authored by Kays last year in the journal Biology Letters, museum specimens and genetic samples were used to show that coyotes migrating eastward bred with wolves to evolve into a larger form that has become the top predator in the Northeast, filling a niche left when native eastern wolves were hunted out of existence. The hybridization allowed coyotes to evolve from the scrawny mouse-eaters of western grasslands to robust deer-hunters in eastern forests.

The genetic techniques used in the recent study allowed researchers to estimate that hybridization, in most cases, happened when humans were hunting eastern wolves to extinction, Kays said.

"The few remaining animals could find no proper mates so took the best option they could get," Kays said.

L. David Mech, senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Prairie Research Center in St. Paul, Minn., and founder of the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minn., is skeptical of the theory that eastern wolves are hybrids.

"How do you reconcile this with the fact that gray wolves typically don't breed with coyotes, but kill them?" Mech said. "We have no records in the West of wolves hybridizing with coyotes, even in areas where single wolves looking for mates have dispersed into the middle of coyote country."

Mech also questioned whether the study tested enough Canadian and North Carolina wolves and whether those specimens were true representatives of those populations.

Although 48,000 genetic markers sounds like a lot, it's actually a relatively small part of the entire genetic code, Mech said. So the evidence of a unique eastern wolf ancestor could simply be in another part of the code that wasn't analyzed, he said.

Several researchers who consider the eastern wolf species separate from the gray wolf weighed in recently in an online discussion of the new study.

Brent Patterson, a genetics researcher at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, called the study "an important step forward." But until more samples are analyzed, the hypothesis that a North American wolf evolved independently from the gray wolf was still viable, he said.

"It's an academic issue," Mech said. "It's nice to know what the origins are from the standpoint of curiosity, but from a conservation standpoint, it shouldn't make any difference."

David Rabon, coordinator of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Red Wolf Recovery Program in North Carolina, said the federal agency has taken the position that the red wolf is a unique species that warrants protection. The new study, while interesting, won't likely change management decisions, he said. ( Associated Press )

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