Poor Mojo's Newswire

The scientists watched the Abdopus aculeatus octopus, which are the size of an orange, for several weeks, in research published recently in the science journal Marine Biology. They witnessed picky, macho males carefully select a mate, then guard their newly domesticated digs so jealously that they would occasionally use their 8-to-10-inch tentacles to strangle to death a romantic rival.

The researchers also observed smaller "sneaker" male octopuses put on feminine airs, such as swimming girlishly near the bottom and keeping their male brown stripes hidden in order to win unsuspecting conquests.

This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don't.

One important thing to bear in mind is that our brains did not evolve to read. They evolved to hunt and gather, make campfires and so on. This means that reading is an act of improvisation - when you read, you're actually using parts of the brain that were designed to do other things. You are, as it were, patching together several different technologies.

That's why lots of people can't read very well - until very recently in human history, the ability to read written language was not adaptive; it conferred no advantages. But 50,000 years ago, on the savannah or the steppes, the dyslexic brain might well have given its possessor an edge.

Takao Doi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, did the experiment while visiting the space station as part of NASA's latest space shuttle mission, which is scheduled to land on Wednesday.

The boomerang behaved no differently than on Earth, flying back to Doi after he threw it. "It flew just like on Earth, and I was really surprised and impressed," Doi told his wife in a chat from space, according to Japan's Mainichi Daily News.

People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.

“This is the first clear evidence that subliminal brand exposures can cause people to act in very specific ways,” said Greinne Fitzsimons. “We’ve performed tests where we’ve offered people $100 to tell us what logo was being flashed on screen, and none of them could do it. But even this imperceptible exposure is enough to spark changes in behavior.”

Other than their defined brand personalities, the researchers argue there is not anything unusual about Apple and IBM that causes this effect. The team conducted a follow-up experiment using the Disney and E! Channel brands, and found that participants primed with the Disney Channel logo subsequently behaved much more honestly than those who saw the E! Channel logos.