Scintilla

Nature's year-long celebration of Charles Darwin's life and achievements continues in the current (19 November) issue, marking the anniversary of the publication of On The Origin Of Species 150 years ago, with a special issue on biodiversity, focusing on the dire challenges to Earth's biodiversity — and finding some reason for hope. The Darwin-related content from this issue, plus further discussion on this week's free Nature Podcast, can all be accessed within the journal's Darwin 200 special, an extensive collection of news, research and analysis commemorating Darwin's life, his science and his legacy.

Interesting study from Harvard found that a smaller corpus callosum (bundle that connects the right and left hemispheres), especially the posterior part was associated with higher levels of creativity on the Torrance Figural Creativity test. The latter test involves making pictures and stories from shapes or lines. Very interesting. Especially with evidence that dyslexics and children with ADHD have been shown as a group to have lower posterior corpus callosum areas than age-matched controls. Excerpt from Dr. Moore's paper:"The results of this study provide evidence for the relationshipbetween visual–spatial divergent thinking and the size of the CC....smaller CC size in ratio to total WMV is associated with higher divergent-thinking scores.

JCO has a paper looking at prognostic acceptance in cancer patients, and its relationship with well-being. It's a Canadian study, involving 380 patients with advanced cancer (enrollment criteria including having an expected prognosis of under 6 months and being aware of the incurable nature of their cancer; this number is out of 920 who met enrollement criteria - the rest declined or died before the interview could occur; about 40% declined from the beginning and one wonders if these were disproportionately people who weren't doing well). They were interviewed about a lot of things, including whether they accepted their incurable cancer vs. not (based on answers to a question, in a semi-structured interview, of 'Do you feel you can accept your situation and come to terms with all that is happening?' They compared patients who endorsed acceptance (most of them; 74%) with those who didn't.The results are relatively straight-forward.