Abigail Tucker

Researching the moral decisions of infants:

“The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there. ‘When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,’ Charles Darwin wrote in ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,’ his classic study of his own son. Babies don’t reliably control their bodies or communicate well, if at all, so their opinions can’t be solicited through ordinary means. Instead, researchers outfit them with miniature wire skullcaps to monitor their brain waves, scrutinize them like shoplifters through video cameras and two-way mirrors, and conduct exceedingly clever and tightly controlled experiments, which a good portion of their subjects will refuse to sit through anyway. Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.”

How 19th Century American farmers became convinced that dead relatives could rise from their graves and feed on them as vampires:

“The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. ‘It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like it,’ Bellantoni recalls.

“Subsequent analysis showed that the beheading, along with other injuries, including rib fractures, occurred roughly five years after death. Somebody had also smashed the coffin.

“The other skeletons in the gravel hillside were packaged for reburial, but not ‘J.B.,’ as the 50ish male skeleton from the 1830s came to be called, because of the initials spelled out in brass tacks on his coffin lid. He was shipped to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington, D.C., for further study. Meanwhile, Bellantoni started networking. He invited archaeologists and historians to tour the excavation, soliciting theories. Simple vandalism seemed unlikely, as did robbery, because of the lack of valuables at the site.

“Finally, one colleague asked: ‘Ever heard of the Jewett City vampires?'”

“Dr. Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3400 B.C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5400 B.C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago.

Can scientists build a machine that learns as it goes and plays well with others? A new robot design draws on ways human babies learn about the world