Amazonian hunter-gatherers who lack written language and who have never seen a maths book do well on basic geometry tests, researchers say in a study that suggests geometry may be hard-wired into the brain.

Adults and children alike showed a clear grasp of concepts such as where the centre of a circle is and the logical extension of a straight line.

This was despite not having words for these concepts, the researchers report today in the journal Science.

Professor Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris and colleagues tested 14 children and 30 adults of an Amazonian group called the Munduruku, and compared their findings to tests of US adults and children.

“Munduruku children and adults spontaneously made use of basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, or right angles to detect intruders in simple pictures, and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to locate hidden objects,” they write.

“Our results provide evidence for geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experience with graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometrical terms.”

Geometry is an ancient field and Dehaene’s team postulated that it may spring from innate abilities.

“Many of its propositions — that two points determine a line, or that three orthogonal axes localize a point — are judged to be self-evident and yet have been questioned on the basis of logical argument, physical theory, or experiment,” the researchers write.

There was no way the Munduruku could have learned these ideas, they add.

“Most of the children and adults who took part in our experiments inhabit scattered, isolated villages and have little or no schooling, rulers, compasses, or maps,” they write.

“Furthermore, the Munduruku language has few words dedicated to arithmetical, geometrical, or spatial concepts, although a variety of metaphors are spontaneously used.”

Playing by the rules
They designed arrays of six images, each of which contained five conforming to a geometric concept and one that violated it.

“The participants were asked, in their language, to point to the weird or ugly one,” the researchers write.

“All participants, even those aged 6, performed well above the chance level of 16.6%.”

The average score was nearly 67% correct, identical to the score for US children.

“The spontaneous understanding of geometrical concepts and maps by this remote human community provides evidence that core geometrical knowledge, like basic arithmetic, is a universal constituent of the human mind,” they conclude.

Vatican newspaper (L’Osservatore Romano) condemns “intelligent design” considering it only confuses children if corroborated with evolutionary theory

The author of the article in the Vatican newspaper “L’Osservatore Romano”, Fiorenzo Facchini, is teaching evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna:

“This isn’t how science is done. If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science. It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”

Intelligent design “doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified.”

“In a vision that goes beyond the empirical horizon, we can say that we aren’t men by chance or by necessity, and that the human experience has a sense and a direction signaled by a superior design.”

“God’s project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events, without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction.”

The Vatican article comes after a judge in Pennsylvania decided that it is unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, as it advances “a particular version of Christianity.”

Rev. George Coyne, chief astronomer in Vatican, also backed Fiorenzo Facchini’s opinion on the “intelligent design’s” deviation from science:

“Intelligent design isn’t science, even though it pretends to be. Intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”

Tesco is launching an internet phone and hopes to bring broadband calls to a mass market.

The phones plug into computers with a broadband connection and work like standard handsets.

Users pay a fixed price for the phone and a pay as you go rate for all calls made, plus their usual broadband charge.

Retailer DSG international plc, the parent company of Dixons, Currys, The Link and PC World, launched its own internet call service called Freetalk last year and both companies have claimed it is the beginning of the end for the traditional landline.

Tesco Telecoms chief executive Andy Dewhurst said the supermarket chain’s new product would push Voice over Internet Protocol (VoiP) into the mainstream.

He said: “Tesco internet phone is the future for fixed line calls. It is so easy to use that people will see this as a pay as you go landline. It will become a service rather than a gizmo.”

The handset and start-up pack costs £19.97, including £5 of free airtime. Users then register online and choose a non-geographic phone number.

This means they may pick an area code from any part of the UK, regardless of where they live, and take it with them if they move house.

Customers pre-pay online using their credit or debit account details. Calls to UK landlines cost 2p per minute at all times and 10p per minute to UK mobiles at any time to any network.

International calls cost upwards of 2p per minute and calls to other Tesco internet phone users are free.

Tesco Telecoms said the quality of its new calls service was equivalent to that of traditional landlines.

It will compete with other internet calls services such as Skype, now owned by online auction site eBay.

BT already has an internet call service called Broadband Voice.

The Tesco internet phones are available in some stores from today and will be rolled out nationally over the coming months.

Around eight million households in the UK have broadband internet access.

The supermarket chain’s existing telephone services include Tesco mobile, Tesco home phone and Tesco broadband.

According to a report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries, digital music sales brought in $1.1 billion US for record companies.

The report included a comprehensive review of the development of the digital music market internationally showing that Germany and the UK had more legal music downloads than illegal showing that the market is getting to a point where it is affordable enough that the cost of legal downloads outweigh the threat of legal action.

420 million single songs were downloaded last year marking a 2000% increase from only 2 years ago. This probably owed in part to the increased number of digital music being licensed, now up to 2 million songs.

Surprisingly mobile music (as in extra short ring tone music) makes up about 40% of digital music profits, either showing that is a service which more people are subscribing to, or the profit greatly outweighs

NASA is set to launch a probe Tuesday afternoon on a nine-year one-way trip to explore Pluto, the most remote and smallest planet of the Solar system that has never been visited by a spacecraft.

The piano-sized New Horizons was scheduled for a liftoff at 1:24 p.m. EST (1824 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Scientists expect the 700 million-U.S. dollar mission could help them further understand how the Solar system formed.

The probe, lifted up to the sky by an Atlas 5 rocket, which is one of the largest rockets in the United States, will fly into space at a speed of about 58,400 kph, the highest for a spacecraft ever launched from the earth.

New Horizons, of 454 kg in weight, is expected to reach the Moon in about nine hours and arrive at Jupiter in 13 months. It will approach the icy Pluto around mid-2015 after the 4.8 billion km space trip.

Its tasks also include studying Pluto’s large moon Charon and two other newly discovered moons orbiting the planet. The fast flying New Horizons does not carry enough fuel to make slowdowns that allow it to enter the orbit of Pluto.

After the flybys to Pluto and its moons, the probe will visit the surrounding Kuiper Belt, and continue to fly and will not comeback. The Kuiper Belt is believed to consist of remainders from the early formation of the Solar system.

The probe is equipped with seven scientific instruments that together consume less energy than a night light. Since Pluto is too far away from the sun, the probe cannot use solar energy and will rely on the power from the radioactive decay of 24 pounds of plutonium pellets.

If the probe cannot be launched by Feb. 2, it will miss the opportunity to get a boost in its velocity from Jupiter’s gravity field. Scientists estimate a direct flight to Pluto would take at least three more years.

Just a few days after its fall to Earth last weekend, NASA says the Stardust sample is a huge success.

The Stardust capsule that returned to earth last weekend is a huge success, says NASA. The Johnson Space Center in Houston
opened the capsule and said it exceeds all expectations.

A preliminary estimation is that there might be more than a million microscopic specks of dust embedded in Stardust’s aerogel-laden collector. Furthermore, it appears — from the size of the carrot-shaped impact tracks in the aerogel — that there are about 10 particles of 100 microns in size. (A typical human hair is about 100 microns thick.)

The largest is around a millimeter, Brownlee added, and the biggest track is nearly large enough to insert your little finger. In the largest aerogel tracks, investigators can see the black comet dust at the end of the track.

Johnson Space Center will be the curator of the samples collected by Stardust from Comet Wild 2, as well as the interstellar dust particles that Stardust snagged during its nearly seven-year voyage. As many as 150 scientists worldwide are awaiting samples to study.