I'm a grad student. And you used to be.Gawdzilla Sama wrote:Grad students.FBM wrote:We'll find out sooner or later, I suppose, but if Stanford took their own DNA samples from the thing, it's going to be interesting to see how they screwed that up.
I got better.FBM wrote:I'm a grad student. And you used to be.Gawdzilla Sama wrote:Grad students.FBM wrote:We'll find out sooner or later, I suppose, but if Stanford took their own DNA samples from the thing, it's going to be interesting to see how they screwed that up.
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The report is not from Stanford, but from a popularisation. If Stanford writes a paper confirming it, then we can puzzle. Until then, I say hoax!FBM wrote: It may yet turn out to be a hoax, but...Stanford School of Medicine?
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Far freakin' out.Gawdzilla Sama wrote:Meteor slams into Moon.
citizenschallenge wrote:Besides political ideology, I believe another huge hurdle for most people trying to comprehend our global warming situation is that they don't appreciate how massive society's impacts on our planet have become. This series of Earth time-lapses might help in getting some to visualize the enormity of society's footprint on our planet.
TIME and Space | By Jeffrey Kluger
Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was the one that ought to matter most to us—Earth.
That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Surveillance spacecraft had done that before, of course, but they paid attention only to military or tactical sites. Landsat was a notable exception, built not for spycraft but for public monitoring of how the human species was altering the surface of the planet. Two generations, eight satellites and millions of pictures later, the space agency, along with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has accumulated a stunning catalog of images that, when riffled through and stitched together, create a high-definition slide show of our rapidly changing Earth. TIME is proud to host the public unveiling of these images from orbit, which for the first time date all the way back to 1984.
Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. Over there are the central-pivot irrigation systems turning the sands of Saudi Arabia into an agricultural breadbasket — a surreal green-on-brown polka-dot pattern in the desert. Elsewhere is the bad news: the high-speed retreat of Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska; the West Virginia Mountains decapitated by the mining industry; the denuded forests of the Amazon, cut to stubble by loggers.
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Monkey Teeth Help Reveal Neanderthal Weaning
May 24, 2013 — Most modern human mothers wean their babies much earlier than our closest primate relatives. But what about our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals?
A team of U.S. and Australian researchers reports in the journal Nature May 22 that they can now use fossil teeth to calculate when a Neanderthal baby was weaned. The new technique is based in part on knowledge gained from studies of teeth from human infants and from monkeys at the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis.
Using the new technique, the researchers concluded that at least one Neanderthal baby was weaned at much the same age as most modern humans.
Just as tree rings record the environment in which a tree grew, traces of barium in the layers of a primate tooth can tell the story of when an infant was exclusively milk-fed, when supplemental food started, and at what age it was weaned, said Katie Hinde, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and an affiliate scientist at the UC Davis Primate Center. Hinde directs the Comparative Lactation Laboratory at Harvard and has conducted a three-year study of lactation, weaning and behavior among rhesus macaques at UC Davis.
The team was able to determine exact timing of birth, when the infant was fed exclusively on mother's milk, and the weaning process, from mineral traces in teeth. By studying monkey teeth and comparing them to center records, they could show that the technique was accurate almost to the day.
After validating the technique with monkeys, the scientists applied it to human teeth and a Neanderthal tooth. They found that the Neanderthal baby was fed exclusively on mother's milk for seven months, followed by seven months of supplementation -- a similar pattern to present-day humans. The technique opens up extensive opportunities to further investigate lactation in fossils and museum collections of primate teeth.
Although there is some variation among human cultures, the accelerated transition to foods other than mother's milk is thought to have emerged in our ancestral history due, in part, to more cooperative infant care and access to a more nutritious diet, Hinde said. Shorter lactation periods could mean shorter gaps between pregnancies and a higher rate of reproduction. However, there has been much debate about when our ancestors evolved accelerated weaning.
For the past few decades researchers have relied on tooth eruption age as a direct proxy for weaning age. Yet recent investigations of wild chimpanzees have shown that the first molar eruption occurs toward the end of weaning.
"By applying these new techniques to primate teeth in museum collections, we can more precisely assess maternal investment across individuals within species, as well as life history evolution among species," Hinde said.
Authors in addition to Hinde were: Christine Austin and Manish Arora, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, Harvard School of Public Health, and University of Sydney, Australia; Tanya Smith, Harvard University; Asa Bradman and Brenda Eskenazi, UC Berkeley; Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia; David Bishop, Dominic Hare and Philip Doble, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
The work was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, U.S. National Science Foundation, Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Harvard University.
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kennyc wrote:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/scien ... c=rss&_r=01 QUIET by Susan Cain. Crown. Introverts — one-third of the population — are undervalued in American society.
2 THINKING, FAST AND SLOW by Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The winner of the Nobel in economic science discusses how we make choices in business and personal life and when we can and cannot trust our intuitions.
3 BRAIN ON FIRE by Susannah Cahalan. Simon & Schuster. A medical mystery in which doctors struggle to discover why a young reporter suddenly experiences seizures, hallucinations and eventually near catatonia.
4 THE NEW DIGITAL AGE by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Knopf. The promise and peril of the continuing information and technology revolution for people, nations and business.
5 GULP by Mary Roach. Norton. A science writer’s pilgrimage down the digestive tract; by the author of “Stiff,” “Spook,” “Bonk” and “Packing for Mars.”
6 WHOLE: RETHINKING THE SCIENCE OF NUTRITION by T. Colin Campbell with Howard Jacobson. BenBella Books. The nutrition of a whole-food, plant-based diet.
7 THE HAPPINESS PROJECT by Gretchen Rubin. HarperCollins. In a hunt for happiness, the author consulted science, ancient wisdom and pop culture.
8 THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. Crown. The story of an African-American woman whose cancerous cells were extensively cultured without her permission in 1951.
9 THE POWER OF HABIT by Charles Duhigg.
10 THE AUTISTIC BRAIN by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek.
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