Scientific American Embraces the Halloween Season

Scientific American has a number of great ghoulish stories out this week including:

Taking Wing: Uncovering the Evolutionary Origins of Bats

"Survey the sky at twilight on a summer’s eve, and you just might glimpse one of evolution’s most spectacular success stories: bats. With representatives on every continent except Antarctica, they are extraordinarily diverse, accounting for one in every five species of mammal alive today. The key to bats’ rise to prominence is, of course, their ability to fly, which permits them to exploit resources that other mammals cannot reach. But their ascension was hardly a foregone conclusion: no other mammal has conquered the air. Indeed, exactly how these rulers of the night sky arose from terrestrial ancestors is a question that has captivated biologists for decades.

Answers have been slow in coming. This past February, however, my colleagues and I unveiled two fossils of a previously unknown species of bat that provides vital insights into this mysterious transformation. Hailing from Wyoming, the species—dubbed Onychonycteris finneyi—is the most primitive bat ever discovered. These fossils and others, together with the results of recent genetic analyses, have now led to a new understanding of the origin and evolution of bats."

Factoring Fear: What Scares Us and Why

"'When you see the stock market fall 1,000 points, that's the same as seeing a snake,' says Joseph LeDoux, professor of neuroscience and psychology the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety based at New York University. 'Fear is the response to the immediate stimuli. The empty feeling in your gut, the racing of your heart, palms sweating, the nervousness—that's your brain responding in a preprogrammed way to a very specific threat.'

LeDoux adds: 'Since our brains are programmed to be similar in structure, we can assume that what I experience when I'm threatened is something similar to what you experience.'"

Are You Evil? Profiling That Which Is Truly Wicked

"The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil—or rather trying to get to the roots of evil—that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science here. He's so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person.

'I've been working on what is evil and how to formally define it,' says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). 'It's creepy, I know it is.'"