TODDLERS JUDGE GOOD AND BAD INTENT, STUDY SAYS Understanding another's intent is an important skill for lawyers, and perhaps politicians and businessmen as well, but according to a new study, it is an ability that even toddlers have. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany report that children as young as 3 are less likely to help a person after they have seen them harm someone else -- in this case adult actors tearing up or breaking another adult's drawing or clay bird. More intriguing is that the toddlers judged a person's intention. When one person tried to harm someone else but did not succeed, the youngsters were less likely to help that person at a later time. But when they observed a person accidentally cause harm to another, they were more willing to help that person. 'It had been thought for a long time that it was at a later age, only around age 5 or 6, that children become conscious of other people's intentions,' said Amrisha Vaish, one of the study's authors and a developmental psychologist at the Max Planck Institute. 'To help those who help others is actually a very sophisticated ability.' It is a form of cooperation that is thought to have enabled the emergence and sustenance of human society as it is today, she said. The research appears in the journal Child Development. RESEARCHERS DISPUTE REPORT ON EARLY BUTCHERS A report in August that the early ancestors of humans used stone tools to butcher meat at least 3.4 million years ago is being challenged by other researchers, who say that the study misinterpreted cut marks in animal bones. 'They look like cut marks made from stone tools, but they are not,' said Manuel Dominquez-Rodrigo, an archaeologist at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and one of the authors of the new report, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'They look very different when you look at them microscopically.' Microscopic analysis and comparisons with other bones revealed that the markings were more likely scratches caused by animals trampling across the bones, he said. The first study, by an international team of paleoanthropologists, archaeologists and geologists, including Shannon P. McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Zeresenay Alemseged, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences, proposed that the species Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, used stone tools. The species is best known for a skeleton named Lucy. Because of its large teeth, it was assumed to be primarily vegetarian. But scientists who found the animal bones, a fossilized rib and thighbone, said that the cut marks on it were indisputable evidence that Australopithecus was using stone tools to butcher meat about 800,000 years earlier than previously thought. Though the bones with cut marks were uncovered, no remnants of stone tools were found in the area, Dominquez-Rodrigo said. This made him and some of his colleagues suspicious. A microscopic analysis of the bones validated their doubts, he said. That means that scientists must revert back to the previous date for when stone tools were first used to butcher meat, about 2.5 million years ago, he said. 'We must go back to this later date that we had,' Dominquez-Rodrigo said. 'That is the oldest evidence that we can identify for meat consumption by humans.' BATS GAUGE SOUNDS WITH NEURAL TEAMWORK One of the keys to the keen ability of bats to process sound is that the neurons in a bat's brain work as a team to convey the importance of certain signals -- like an anger call or a distress call -- while diminishing the effect of less-important sounds, researchers at the Georgetown University Medical Center reported this past weekend in San Diego at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. 'It's like a basketball team,' said Bridget Queenan, a neuroscientist involved in the study. 'There are neurons in the brain with these roles -- like five guys on the court.' In different instances, depending on the particular signal that urgently needs to be processed, the neurons act in different ways. For example, it could be that 'one neuron processes the sound, another 'shushes' nearby neurons, and another helps boost the first neuron's activity,' Queenan said. She and her colleagues studied the bats by inserting electrodes into their brains and recording their neural activity after a series of tones and calls. They used this to identify how individual neurons responded to calls in various instances, like when it was noisy or quiet. 'So now we start to see a little a bit how these players are working together in a specific context,' she said. 'It's as if we get snapshots of a game at different points of action.' Studies like this one may help researchers better understand how the human auditory system works. In humans, ambient noise, like traffic or background chatter, can be heard but ignored, whereas as important noises, like a baby's cry or an alarm, can trigger immediate reactions. 