It was reported that Barack Obama's grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the British in 1949 during the Mau Mau uprising. "They would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods," said Sarah Onyango, 87, called "Granny Sarah" by the president-elect. "That was the time we realized that the British were actually not friends." Tony Blair praised Obama's choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Aleksy II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, died at 79, and after nearly 28 years in a coma Sunny von Bulow died at 76. Psychiatrist Robert Zajonc–who correlated birth order with I.Q.–died at 85, and Oliver Selfridge, a student of Norbert Wiener and an artificial-intelligence researcher who invented "intelligent agents," which he called "demons," died at 82. Scientists at Berkeley found that as compared to rich-child brains, the brains of poor children are often more like those of stroke victims, with less response in the prefrontal cortex. "This is a wake-up call," said a
neuroscientist. Researchers studying Canadians found that older brains are less efficient at filtering out distractions, while researchers in Brazil found that medical students are often depressed. A statistician in California said that humans would soon reach their maximum running speed. "Men are still on the upward trend," said Mark Denny of Stanford University, but "they are getting near that plateau." Horses and dogs are already running as fast as they can.