Interesting Articles: Sep 5th-11th 2005

By happenstance, lots of science-related articles this week:

* Political Science. Somewhat interesting piece on how the position of science advisor works in the Bush administration. Also includes some history about the position and how it has worked in other administrations. (New York Times)
* Olive Oil May Have Pain-Relieving Properties (WebMD). Note: the study only involves extra-virgin olive oil. Also see the original Nature article (Phytochemistry: Ibuprofen-like activity in extra-virgin olive oil) and the Science News (Olives Alive: Extra-virgin oil has anti-inflammatory properties) summary of it. (The latter may not be viewable.)
* Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving (New York Times). While not really news -of course we're evoluting- some of the evolution is in terms of brain size, and whenever some scientists find a genetic link between a feature of the brain/mind, one wonders how this knowledge will be used or mis-used. (Also see the article mentioned in this old post linking intelligence and genetics.)
* Some articles on non-human social learning:
       * Bumblebee 007: Bees can spy on others' flower choices (Science News). If you can't read it, the abstract of the article Flower choice copying in bumblebees (Biology Letters) summarized the experiment.
       * Chimps ape others to learn tool use (Science News). The original souce for this article is a Nature article entitled Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees.