Ice cores drilled last year from the summit of a Himalayan ice field lack the distinctive radioactive signals that mark virtually every other ice core retrieved worldwide. That missing radioactivity, originating as fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests during the 1950s and 1960s, routinely provides researchers with a benchmark against which they can gauge how much new ice has accumulated on a glacier or ice field.

Using fMRI, researchers have identified clear differences in the areas of the brain involved in belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. This finding has implications for the detection of deception, for the control of the placebo effect during drug design, and for the study of any higher cognitive phenomenon in which the differences among belief, disbelief and uncertainty might be relevant.