Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine: Elephants love showering to cool off, and most do so by sucking water into their trunks and spitting it over their bodies. But an elderly pachyderm named Mary has perfected the technique by using a hose as a showerhead, much in the way humans do. The behavior is a remarkable example of sophisticated tool use in the animal kingdom. But the story doesn't end there.

Mary's long, luxurious baths have drawn so much attention that an envious elephant at the Berlin Zoo has figured out how to shut the water off on her supersoaking rival—a type of sabotage rarely seen among animals.

Both behaviors, reported today in Current Biology, further cement elephants as complex thinkers, says Lucy Bates, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Portsmouth not involved in the study. The work, she says, 'suggests problem solving or even 'insight.''

For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. From a report: The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people's brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists' lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit. The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants' brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world -- when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph -- but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone's brain actually initiating an action

The experiment's results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement. This momentous discovery was the beginning of a lot of trouble in neuroscience. Twenty years later, the American physiologist Benjamin Libet used the Bereitschaftspotential to make the case not only that the brain shows signs of a decision before a person acts, but that, incredibly, the brain's wheels start turning before the person even consciously intends to do something. Suddenly, people's choices -- even a basic finger tap -- appeared to be determined by something outside of their own perceived volition.

shockNZ writes "[H]ardOCP has reviewed what appears to be a first in PC watercooling - an 'open reservoir evaporative cooling system.' The Globalwin Jefi has a radically different design to most systems on the market. The reservoir is open at the top, and utilizes something akin to a showerhead in order to rain the incoming hot water from the PC down onto a floating heatsink. Perhaps surprisingly, it demonstrated excellent performance and low noise levels - and as a bonus, the reservoir can be used as an aquarium."