People who are accustomed to listening to Western music, which is based on a system of notes organized in octaves, can usually perceive the similarity between notes that are same but played in different registers -- say, high C and middle C. However, a longstanding question is whether this a universal phenomenon or one that has been ingrained by musical exposure. This question has been hard to answer, in part because of the difficulty in finding people who have not been exposed to Western music. Now, a new study led by researchers from MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics has found that unlike residents of the United States, people living in a remote area of the Bolivian rainforest usually do not perceive the similarities between two versions of the same note played at different registers (high or low). The findings suggest that although there is a natural mathematical relationship between the frequencies of every "C," no matter what octave it's played in, the brain only becomes attuned to those similarities after hearing music based on octaves, says Josh McDermott, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

When 26-year-old Clementine Jacoby thinks back on her childhood, she remembers using printed maps to navigate strange new cities -- one of the many tools that smartphones have rendered largely obsolete. "My parents, I think, are just chronically bored," she says in a conference room at Google's New York offices. "We moved around a ton, and I was also sort of an agitated and ambitious kid and traveled a bunch on my own." It's perhaps fitting then that, after a year-long stint as a circus performer and graduating from Stanford University with a degree in symbolic systems (a program that focuses on a combination of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction), Jacoby ended up working as a product manager for Google Maps. It's a role that Jacoby feels like was made for her.

It Began in December, with CVS's proposed $69 billion buyout of insurer Aetna (aet). In January, three more corporate behemoths--Amazon (amzn), JPMorgan Chase (jpm), and Berkshire Hathaway (brk-a)--said they were forming a joint venture aimed at reducing health care costs and improving outcomes for their combined 1 million or so employees. Then, in March, Cigna (ci) said it would buy pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts for more than $50 billion. On first glance you might think it's merely the pursuit of mass itself. Of "scale," as management types like to say. But in truth, there's a more powerful catalyst--one so gargantuan and infinitesimal at the same time that it sounds like the answer to a riddle. More specifically, it's your data: your individual biology, your health history and ever-fluctuating state of well-being, where you go, what you spend, how you sleep, what you put in your body and what comes out. The amount of data you slough off everyday--in lab tests, medical images, genetic profiles, liquid biopsies, electrocardiograms, to name just a few--is overwhelming by itself.