1. Royal Institution Christmas lectures will unwrap the human brain
In this year's Christmas lectures on BBC Four, Professor Bruce Hood aims to reveal the brain in all its mystery and complexity
- guardian.co.uk, 25 December 2011
Prof Bruce Hood wants people to come away from his Christmas lectures with a greater appreciation of their white and grey matter. Photograph: Paul Wilkinson/BBC
Human beings are the most intelligent species on the planet because our brains have evolved to cope with complex social situations, according to this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecturer, Professor Bruce Hood. This important function takes decades to develop properly, however, and explains why we humans spend a much larger proportion of our lifespan as children than any other animal.
Whether or not they (or the millions watching at home) end up studying the brain, Hood hopes that people come away from the lectures with a deeper appreciation of the white and grey matter. "We take it for granted – the things we do every day. We don't understand how complicated they really are. I want people to come away with a sense of wonder about how a thing like the brain has such flexibility and such powerful processing capability to create this experience we have."
From a set that resembles a 1950s horror movie, Hood plans to take viewers on a trip through the capabilities of our most important organ. "The brain is seven times heavier than you would imagine for an animal our size. It's full of billions upon billions of brain cells," he says. "It's not the number of cells that's really fascinating, it's the connection between the cells because that's the secret of the processing power of the brain. It's connections that encode information."
Babies are born with almost their full complement of brain cells, so it's the increase in the number of connections between the cells that explains the change in the size and weight of the brain as it matures. All of this helps to create a representation of the external world.
"You're encoding experiences and storing that," says Hood. "When the brain brings these back to think about them, it's almost recreating the original experience. It's not a photograph captured in time, these things are constantly dynamic and changing."
Hood will also discuss a uniquely human capability that our brains have evolved: the ability to be social. "Childhood used to be thought of as a time of immaturity," he says. "But we now realize that this is the period where we're becoming social. The species which have the longest periods of childhood tend to be the ones which are more flexible or intelligent."
Not only do human children learn from others, they learn to become like others. "We spend up to 15-20 years in childhood and that's a large proportion of human lifespan and that can only be because it serves a really important process, which I think is learning from others and learning to communicate and share information," says Hood. "We don't simply read behaviours, we put ourselves in other humans' shoes, we take their perspectives, we can empathize, we can see their points of view. This is a whole area called 'theory of mind'. Without that you cannot anticipate what other people are thinking and doing."
2. Africa's burgeoning middle class brings hope to a continent
A new financial assertiveness and cultural self-confidence is growing, fuelled by technology
The Guardian Dec 25, 2011
The Kapayas in Lusaka boast all the hallmarks of a middle-class lifestyle but try to maintain their rural family values. Photograph: Georgina Smith
At the end of another of Kinshasa's potholed roads, lined with shacks and crumbling matchbox houses, comes a sudden clearing. It is a sandy patch of land surrounded by water in which bare-chested boys in dugout canoes paddle among the hyacinths. A giant pump is working day and night, reclaiming land from the sandbanks and river beds, expanding the city in defiance of nature.
Welcome to River City, or "the new Manhattan" as this multibillion-pound development has been hopefully described by newspapers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Just 15 hectares (38 acres) now, but aiming for 380, it is perhaps the most ambitious statement yet about Africa's improving fortunes – and the promise of a growing African consumer class.
River City is backed by a British hedge fund that specialises in counter-trend betting and, says the developer Robert Choudury, "a bigger counter-trend is hard to find". Ravaged by war and disease, DRC ranks bottom of the UN's human development index. More than half the population is living on less than $1.25 a day and only 2% of roads are paved.
But change is happening all over Africa and it looks possible, even here. Sitting with an iPad on his desk in the only building completed so far, French-born Choudury likens the project to Sandton, the commercial heart of Johannesburg often described as the wealthiest square mile on the continent.
His plans include a 18,000-square metre shopping mall and 100-room hotel built by South African entrepreneur Richard Moloko, plus churches, condominiums, hospitals and restaurants, "everything you need" away from the mayhem of Kinshasa's overcrowded, overpriced real estate today.
It is hoped that hydro-power from the nearby Congo River will provide more than a third of the new district's energy needs. All this could take decades, but Choudury has already sold four apartments – to Congolese buyers – for $218-250,000 each.
When Choudury, 52, was first trying to drum up interest in the development, he took out an eight-page newspaper advert with the words, "The future is Africa". The claim seems more and more credible.
Africa's middle class is a reality and widening by the day. It is a trend marked by changing lifestyles, greater spending power, more recreational time, the harnessing of technology and a new political assertiveness and cultural self-confidence.
3. The people vs. Putin
CNN Dec 18, 2011
TIME magazine announced its person of the year this week - "the protester". From the Arab Spring to Athens, from New Delhi to New York, people power is stronger than it’s ever been. And now it's reached Moscow with the protests there last week.
The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society. Historians have pointed out that the Russian nation was literally the property of the Czar, that serfs were more like slaves than simply peasant workers and that the country lacked any institutions that contested the authority of the government. The communist takeover in 1917 only enhanced these features by building a superstate that dominated every aspect of people's lives. When it collapsed in 1991, it turned out there was only chaos underneath.
But there has always been a Russian civil society, small but vibrant, espousing universal values and human rights. It is the Russia of Tolstoy and Pasternak, Sakharov and Gorbachev, and it has always believed that Russia's destiny lies with the West. This Russia has not died under Putin.
In fact, it's been growing quietly but vigorously over the past decade. In an article in Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs, Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarov describe a Russia in which civil society is having an increasingly large impact. There are more than 650,000 nongovernmental organizations in Russia today. Many of these groups are not overtly political, but they challenge governmental authority and decisions - on environmental grounds, for example - and sometimes they prevail.
Of course, the Russian state is still powerful, dominant and pervasive in politics and the economy. Despite all the stirrings of change, the power of the state, expertly wielded by Putin, should give one pause. It is not just that Putin has been able to reconstitute some of the apparatus of fear from the Soviet days. It's also about money. The Russian state has at its disposal the greatest natural resources of any country in the world: oil, gas, diamonds, nickel, copper, aluminum. Those riches give the government the ability to both repress and bribe its population.
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