Humans

Sole evidence
Most criminals know to avoid leaving fingerprints at a crime scene, but soon footprints may also be a concern. Rather than signature ridges, the sole of the foot has an identifiable pressure signature that can be used to identify an individual with 99 percent accuracy, an analysis of 104 individuals reveals. The new work examined only barefoot walkers; how shoes and different gaits might alter patterns isn’t clear. But the data are now easy to analyze, an international team reports online September 7 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, and foot-pressure devices are easy to install, so there may a future role for the identification technique in the security realm. —Rachel Ehrenberg

Belligerent breast-feeders
Mothers’ milk has a mean streak. Breast-feeding mothers act far more antagonistically toward a competitor in a lab task than bottle-feeding mothers or women who have never given birth do, say UCLA psychologist Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook and her colleagues. Like mama bears and other lactating mammals, breast-feeding moms are biologically primed to protect themselves and their babies, the researchers propose online August 26 in Psychological Science. In the lab test, lactating women delivered what they thought were especially long and loud sound blasts to vanquished opponents in another room, yet exhibited lower blood pressure while doing so than other women did. —Bruce Bower

Attention workout for babies
Babies can learn before their first birthdays to deploy their attention more effectively. After brief training on tasks such as learning to look at an animated butterfly on a computer screen in order to make the winged creature fly, 11-month-olds displayed large improvements on related attention skills, such as tracking objects of interest in a cluttered scene and visually homing in on novel items, say psychology graduate student Sam Wass of University of London, England, and his colleagues. Infants’ brains may respond readily to attention training, the scientists conclude in the Sept. 1 Current Biology. If so, such training could benefit early learning. —Bruce Bower

King Tut’s wine travels
Three wine vessels found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb more than 80 years ago were meant to fortify the boy king on his journey across the sky and into the afterlife, says archaeologist Maria Rosa Guasch Jané of New University of Lisbon in Portugal. Red wine, identified through residue analysis, was placed at the tomb’s west wall to aid Tut’s evening transformation into the god of death, Jané contends in the September Antiquity. White wine at the eastern wall enabled his morning makeover as the sun god. Special wine at the southern wall assisted Tut’s challenging sojourn through the darkened southern sky. —Bruce Bower

Take the short way home
Return trips usually seem shorter than outgoing journeys of the same distance. That’s partly because initial trips often take longer than people anticipate, creating expectations of a lengthened return trip, say psychologist Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and his colleagues. When those expectations don’t pan out, the return excursion feels short, the researchers propose online August 23 in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Van de Ven’s team documented this effect in people who went on day trips by bus and bike, and in volunteers who watched a video of someone biking to and from a friend’s house.  —Bruce Bower