One of the amazing (and scary) things about artificial intelligence programs is that in learning to mimic their human masters so perfectly, these wonders of computer software hold up a mirror to patterns of behavior we engage in every day but may not even notice. Beyond their extraordinary usefulness in industry, medicine and communications, these "learning" programs can lay bare the mental shortcuts we humans use to make sense of our world. Indeed, new research with artificial intelligence programs highlights the ethnic and gender biases of English speakers. In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of Princeton University computer scientists set a widely used artificial intelligence program to the task of learning English by performing a massive "crawl" of the World Wide Web. After gobbling up some 840 billion words, the software developed a vocabulary of 2.2 million distinct words, and the fluency to use them in ways that were grammatically correct.

If you are among the scant 33% of U.S. adults who believe that humans and other living things evolved solely by a process of natural selection, it might be time to put your money where your mouth is. No, this is not a political fundraising pitch. It's a notice of the impending sale, by auction, of a piece of scientific history -- a signed manuscript page from the concluding chapter of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." Written in the compressed, right-slanting script of Darwin himself, the sheet is numbered "245" in the upper right-hand corner, and would go on to become page 514 of the latest, 3rd edition of his landmark tome. It was likely written in 1859, when the English biologist was about 50 years old.

There are lots of reasons why doctors encourage new mothers to breastfeed their babies. Compared with babies who get formula, babies who are breastfed are less likely to die as a result of infections, sudden infant death syndrome or any other reason. The longer a mother nurses -- and the longer she does so exclusively -- the bigger the benefits, studies show. Another perceived benefit of breastfeeding is the possibility that it boosts a baby's brain. A clinical trial involving more than 16,000 infants in Belarus who were randomly assigned to get either special support for breastfeeding (based on a program from the World Health Organization and UNICEF) or a hospital's usual care found that babies in the first group scored an average of 7.5 points higher on a verbal IQ test and 5.9 points higher on overall IQ.

Researchers have some bad news for moms who used DHA supplements while they were pregnant in hopes of boosting their baby's brains: At age 7, kids whose mothers took DHA scored no higher on an IQ test than kids whose moms swallowed capsules that were DHA-free. The results are the latest findings from a study assessing the benefits -- if any -- of giving DHA to babies in utero. They appear in Tuesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. DHA, short for docosahexaenoic acid, is an omega-3 fatty acid that plays a key role in brain health. It's essential throughout our lives, and especially during infancy when the brain, eyes and nervous system are developing.

The making of a memory champion, it turns out, is not so different from the making of any other great athlete. To triumph in sport, athletes sculpt muscle and sinew and lash them together with head and heart to deliver optimum performance. To perform extraordinary feats of memorization, memory champions strengthen distinct groups of structures scattered throughout the brain. And then, they groove the connections that lash those groups together until the whole system works like a well-oiled machine. In short, memory champions are not born that way.

For the cognitively ambitious among us, there are always new debates to win, tests to ace, and feats of intellect to accomplish. And just as for the athletically gifted, the lure of performance-enhancing drugs is hard to resist. The question is, can drugs boost intellectual performance? New research shows that for tournament-level chess players, they can. In a series of experiments, researchers found that caffeine, the stimulant Ritalin and the stay-awake drug modafinil ever-so-slightly improved players' chances of winning a game against a computer program set to their skill level.

First they figured out how to play checkers and backgammon. Then they mastered chess, Go, "Jeopardy!" and even a few Atari video games. Now computers can challenge humans at the poker table -- and win. DeepStack, a software program developed at the University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group, took on 33 professional poker players in more than 44,000 hands of Texas hold'em. Overall, the program won by a significantly higher margin than if it had simply folded in each round, according to a new study in Science.

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists in Japan say they've managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly. The system, described in the journal Chem, is nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to developing automated pollination techniques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines. In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom's female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other.

Your dog remembers more than you might think. A new study that tested the memory of man's best friend found that dogs exhibit something akin to episodic memory -- a process that's been well documented in humans, but difficult to prove in other animals. In experiments, the dogs were able to recall human actions even when they weren't expecting to be tested on what they observed, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology. The findings show that episodic memory, thought to be linked to self-awareness, may extend well beyond humans to species outside of the primate lineage. Scientists have long wondered whether other animals have something like episodic memory, which allows us to recall specific past events even though they may not have been particularly important when they happened.

In research conducted in China, a rhesus monkey whose spinal cord was partially severed quickly regained lost control over his paralyzed leg after researchers implanted a signal-emitting electronic array below the site of the spinal injury. That pulse generator sent out electrical signals to the monkey's leg to move, and the monkey's affected leg responded as early as six days after his spinal cord was deliberately injured. The signals to move were commands collected from the motor cortex of unharmed rhesus monkeys as they freely walked and used their legs. Together, the two devices leaped over the broken connection between brain and limb, allowing the partially paralyzed monkey to mimic key walking motions. The brain-spine interface offers new hope that patients who have lost function due to spinal cord injury might be able to restore movement and prevent the degeneration of the neural wiring that is needed for an eventual return to movement.