Political orientation may be tied to differences in the very structures of our brain!

Your political views are formed in the brain. 

It is true, sometimes you are on an entirely different planet from the person you are talking with, as they are at the opposite end of the political spectrum from you.




Political Views Are Reflected in Brain Structure




ScienceDaily
Apr. 7, 2011



We all know that people at opposite ends of the political spectrum often really can't see eye to eye. Now, a new report published online on April 7th in Current Biology, reveals that those differences in political orientation are tied to differences in the very structures of our brains.


Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.


"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of the University College London. "Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

Kanai said his study was prompted by reports from others showing greater anterior cingulate cortex response to conflicting information among liberals. "That was the first neuroscientific evidence for biological differences between liberals and conservatives," he explained.

There had also been many prior psychological reports showing that conservatives are more sensitive to threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty, while liberals tend to be more open to new experiences. Kanai's team suspected that such fundamental differences in personality might show up in the brain.

And, indeed, that's exactly what they found. Kanai says they can't yet say for sure which came first. It's possible that brain structure isn't set in early life, but rather can be shaped over time by our experiences. And, of course, some people have been known to change their views over the course of a lifetime.

It's also true that our political persuasions can fall into many more categories than liberal and conservative. "In principle, our research method can be applied to find brain structure differences in political dimensions other than the simplistic left- versus right-wingers," Kanai said. Perhaps differences in the brain explain why some people really have no interest in politics at all or why some people line up for Macs while others stick with their PCs. All of these tendencies may be related in interesting ways to the peculiarities of our personalities and in turn to the way our brains are put together.

Still, Kanai cautioned against taking the findings too far, citing many uncertainties about how the correlations they see come about.

"It's very unlikely that actual political orientation is directly encoded in these brain regions," he said. "More work is needed to determine how these brain structures mediate the formation of political attitude."




1.Ryota Kanai, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, Geraint Rees. Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults. Current Biology, 07 April 2011 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017

































political

The Evolution of Discrimination and Racism?

Scientific American




















racism

Kids who are Geniuses

After miserable parents and bad behavior, being told America is falling behind in science and math ... comes this kid who is amazing.



Genius at work: 12-year-old is studying at IUPUI




9:32 PM, Mar. 19, 2011
Dan McFeely
indystar.com


Jake taught himself algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus in 2 weeks.

He's studying physics at IUPUI.

He's 12.

He can solve pi to 200 digits.

When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself.

For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions.

From within his 12-year-old, mildly autistic mind, there gradually flowed long strings of pluses, minuses, funky letters and upside-down triangles -- a tapestry of complicated symbols that few can understand.

He grabbed his pencil and filled every sheet of paper before grabbing a marker and filling up a dry erase board that hangs in his bedroom. With a single-minded obsession, he kept on, eventually marking up every window in the home.

Strange, say some.

Genius, say others.

But entirely normal for Jacob, a child prodigy who used to crunch his cereal while calculating the volume of the cereal box in his head.

"Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family," he said, "they just stare blankly."

So do many of his older classmates at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who marvel at seeing this scrawny little kid in the front row of the calculus-based physics class he has been taking this semester.

"When I first walked in and saw him, I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to school with Doogie Howser,' " said Wanda Anderson, a biochemistry major, referring to a television show that featured a 16-year-old boy-genius physician.

Elementary school couldn't keep Jacob interested. And courses at IUPUI have only served to awaken a sleeping giant.

Just a few weeks shy of his 13th birthday, Jake, as he's often called, is starting to move beyond the level of what his professors can teach.

In fact, his work is so strong and his ideas so original that he's being courted by a top-notch East Coast research center. IUPUI is interested in him moving from the classroom into a funded researcher's position.

"We have told him that after this semester . . . enough of the book work. You are here to do some science," said IUPUI physics Professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jake and his work.

"If we can get all of those creative juices in a certain direction, we might be able to see some really amazing stuff down the road."

"My fear was that he would never be in our world"

Teenage college student?

Developer of his own original theory on quantum physics?

Paid researcher at 13?

This is not what Jake's parents expected from a child whose first few years were spent in silence.

"Oh my gosh, when he was 2, my fear was that he would never be in our world at all," said Kristine Barnett, 36, Jake's mother.

"He would not talk to anyone. He would not even look at us."

Child psychologists assessed Jake at the time and diagnosed behavioral characteristics of a borderline autistic child. He was impaired, they said, and had a lack of "spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment," difficulty showing emotion and interacting with others.

Diagnosis: mildly autistic.

"My biggest fear," his mom said last week, with tears welling up in her eyes, "was that he had lost the ability to say, 'I love you' to us."

By age 3, Jake was the focus of a more intense evaluation from a team of psychologists, therapists and a diagnostic teacher.

Their report indicated that while Jake continued to struggle with social activities and physical development, he was showing signs of academic skills that were above his age level.

Diagnosis: Asperger's syndrome, a somewhat milder condition related to autism.

After hearing this, Jake's parents decided to pay closer attention to the things their first-born son was doing -- rather than the things he was not.

For example, Jake often recited the alphabet -- forward and then backward. He used Q-tips to create vivid geometrical shapes on the living room floor. He solved 5,000-piece puzzles (rather quickly). And he once soaked in a state road map and ended up memorizing every highway and license plate prefix.

And perhaps most amazingly, he could recite the mathematical constant pi out to 70 digits.

"I'm at 98 now," Jake said, interrupting his mom during an interview.

And then, a week later, he was up to 200 digits after the decimal point -- forward and backward.

At 3, his head was in the stars

The Barnetts decided it was time to follow Jake's lead, adopting a method that some parents of children with autism use -- floor-time therapy -- to help foster developmental growth. They let their children focus intently on subjects they like, rather than trying to conform them to "normal" things.

For Jake, that meant astronomy. As a 3-year-old, he loved looking at a book about stars, over and over again.

So off they went on a tour of the Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium at Butler University.

Kristine Barnett will never forget the day.

"We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round," she recalls. "Jacob raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?' "

The lecturer answered, and "Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet . . . is so large that (the moon's) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape."

Silence.

"That entire building . . . everyone was just looking at him, like, 'Who is this 3-year-old?' "

After that, the Barnetts began to feed Jake's hunger for knowledge, through more books and more visits to the planetarium. By the time he was 8, he got permission to sit in on an advanced astronomy class at IUPUI.

Meanwhile, his math skills were reaching astronomical levels.

By the time he was in fifth grade, Jake had become bored with elementary math. He was a student, first at Carey Ridge Elementary School and then at Westfield Intermediate School, an experience he now says he enjoyed for a while.

"The first couple of years were great, but then eventually the math started being, like, OK, we've been discussing this for a while, and it really isn't that hard," Jake said. "Can I move on to calculus now? Can I move on to algebra now?"

The boredom did not go unnoticed at home. Jake was coming home from school quiet, huddling in a safe space in the house and starting to show signs of withdrawing.

"I was really afraid we were going to lose him back into the world he was in when he was 2," his mom said.

Frank Lawlis, a Texas-based psychologist who serves as a testing supervisor for the American Mensa organization -- a society for geniuses -- said it would not have been unusual for a child with symptoms of autism to regress backward after a brief time of growth.

"One of the aspects of autism is that these kids' brains grow at an accelerated rate and then, generally speaking, there is kind of a reversal that happens," said Lawlis, who last year wrote "The Autism Answer," a book for parents of children with autism.

"The theory is that the brain reaches a certain capacity, can't grow, becomes inflamed, and then a reversal effect occurs. It's just a theory, but it's very common."

That did not happen to Jake, thanks in part to a third psychological evaluation done nearly two years ago. It showed that this fifth-grader was not regressing but was simply bored and needed to be stimulated -- in a very big way.

As in dropping out of school.

"Indeed, it would not be in Jacob's best interest to force him to complete academic work that he has already mastered," clinical neurophysiologist Carl S. Hale, Merrillville, said in a report provided by the Barnetts.

"He needs work at an instructional level, which currently is a post college graduate level in mathematics, i.e., a post master's degree. In essence, his math skills are at the level found in someone who is working on a doctorate in math, physics, astronomy and astrophysics."

The Barnetts were blown away. They knew Jake was smart, but doctorate-level smart?

"I flunked math," Kristine said with a laugh. "I know this did not come from me."

Off to college, where he tutors classmates

Encouraged by this new assessment, the Barnetts made the tough decision to pull Jake out of Westfield Washington Schools and enroll him in IUPUI's early college entrance program that caters to gifted and talented kids -- although typically they are advanced high school students, not 12-year-old whiz kids.

As he prepared for the more rigorous work of a college class, Jake decided he ought to make sure he could master all high school-level math that would be required in college.

"In one two-week period, he sat on our front porch and learned all of his high school math," Kristine said. "He tested out of algebra 1 and 2, geometry, trigonometry and calculus."

At this point, Jake's math IQ -- which has been measured at 170 (top of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) -- could not get any higher.

"You could tell right off the bat, his performance has been outstanding," said Ross, who, at age 46 with a Ph.D. from Boston University, has never seen a kid as smart as Jake.

"When he asks a question, he is always two steps ahead of the lecture," Ross said. "Everyone in the class gets quiet. Poor kid. . . . He sits right in the front row, and they all just look at him.

"He will come to see me during office hours and ask even more detailed questions. And you can tell he's been thinking these things through."

Jake is driven by Mom or Dad from his home in Hamilton County to IUPUI's campus, where he attends classes a few days each week. In between classes, he spends time at the Honors College lounge, where he has become a go-to guy for much older classmates needing tutoring.

"A lot of people come to him for help when they don't understand a physics problem," said Anderson, his class partner. "People come up to him all the time and say, 'Hey Jake, can you help me?' "

"A lot of people think a genius is hard to talk to, but Jake explains things that would still be over their head."

His professor has noticed.

"Is he a genius? Well, yeah," Ross said. "Kids his age would normally have problems adding fractions, and he is helping out some of his fellow students."

If Jake stays on track, Ross could see him working someday at a government lab or an observatory. Maybe he'll be a professor or a highly respected researcher.

"He can do anything he wants."

A normal boy, except for the numbers

Despite this new experience, his parents insist that Jake remain close with his friends in Westfield. Social activity is important, they know.

For Jake, life is not all centered on math and astrophysics.

He also likes playing video games. ("Guitar Hero" and "Halo: Reach" are his current favorites.) He plays basketball with friends, has a girlfriend and recently attended his first dance.

He likes music -- classical, which he plays by memory on a piano, but he also plays some contemporary songs he hears on the radio. He loves sci-fi movies and the Disney Channel. He watches documentaries on the History Channel.

A normal kid.

But then, late at night, when the TV is off, the homework is done and everyone in the house is sleeping, the numbers start to percolate again.

They percolate so much that he has trouble sleeping. His parents got so worried a few years ago that they took him for medical tests, but no malady was diagnosed. He just can't fall asleep easily.

"A lot keeps me awake," Jake said. "I scare people."

The numbers that keep him from snoozing are the same that led him to develop his own theory of physics -- an original work that proposed a "new expanded theory of relativity" and takes what Einstein developed even further.

His mom, still not sure whether her son was truly a genius at work or a kid at play, decided to send a video of Jake explaining his theory to the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University, one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry.

That's where astrophysics Professor Scott Tremaine does his work. Tremaine is one of the world's leading scientists and is an expert in the evolution of planetary systems, comets, black holes, galaxies -- all the stuff Jake really likes.

In a letter to the Barnetts, Tremaine confirmed the brilliance.

"I'm impressed by his interest in physics and the amount that he has learned so far," Tremaine wrote in an email, provided by the family. "The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics.

"Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize."

He then encouraged Jake to spend as much time as possible to learn more and to further develop his theory.

Contacted by The Indianapolis Star, Tremaine confirmed the exchange of notes.

"I have seen a YouTube video in which Jake describes his theory, and I have spoken with his mother and corresponded with both her and Jake by email," Tremaine said. "I hope that Jake continues his interest in physics and mathematics."

Thinking big is what he does

Meanwhile, Jake is moving on to his next challenge: proving that the big-bang theory, the event some think led to the formation of the universe, is, well, wrong.

Wrong?

He explains.

"There are two different types of when stars end. When the little stars die, it's just like a small poof. They just turn into a planetary nebula. But the big ones, above 1.4 solar masses, blow up in one giant explosion, a supernova," Jake said. "What it does, is, in larger stars there is a larger mass, and it can fuse higher elements because it's more dense."

OK . . . trying to follow you.

"So you get all the elements, all the different materials, from those bigger stars. The little stars, they just make hydrogen and helium, and when they blow up, all the carbon that remains in them is just in the white dwarf; it never really comes off.

"So, um, in the big-bang theory, what they do is, there is this big explosion and there is all this temperature going off and the temperature decreases really rapidly because it's really big. The other day I calculated, they have this period where they suppose the hydrogen and helium were created, and, um, I don't care about the hydrogen and helium, but I thought, wouldn't there have to be some sort of carbon?"

He could go on and on.

And he did.

"Otherwise, the carbon would have to be coming out of the stars and hence the Earth, made mostly of carbon, we wouldn't be here. So I calculated, the time it would take to create 2 percent of the carbon in the universe, it would actually have to be several micro-seconds. Or a couple of nano-seconds, or something like that. An extremely small period of time. Like faster than a snap. That isn't gonna happen."

"Because of that," he continued, "that means that the world would have never been created because none of the carbon would have been given 7 billion years to fuse together. We'd have to be 21 billion years old . . . and that would just screw everything up."

So, we had to ask.

If not the big bang, then how did the universe come about?

"I'm still working on that," he said. "I have an idea, but . . . I'm still working out the details."

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
science

Gone but not forever

We are, so often told how many species are near extinction and how many have gone extinct.  We are made to feel very guilty, irresponsible, and bad.  In many cases, we are justified in the guilt.  However, what we are not told, by those who scare us about extinction levels, is how many animals and plants seem to ... come back from extinction.   The quagga is but one animal that seems to have ... become unextinct.


Focus Magazine, December 2010, page 21.

"We can expect to rediscover one third of mammals we believe to be extinct, according to new researcch.  Dr. Diana Fisher of The University of Queensland has published work that questions our ideas about animals long thought to have disappeared."


What this means is not that we can go on abusing animal life on earth, rather it is possibly not as dire as we have been led to believe.

The question is then - do the prognosticators of doom know with 100% certainty that their tales of woe are accurate - in which case they are simply misled and misleading others.

Or, do they know/believe that maybe things are not as dire as they predict - in which case they are liars.











extinction

Science and Extinction

Extinction is not forever.

This fish is back and so is the Ocopy ... amazing how extinction works.  Isn't science wonderful.




Scientist says he found Japan fish thought extinct


 
AP
December 15, 2010
TOKYO – A Japanese salmon species thought to be extinct for 70 years is alive and well in a lake near Mount Fuji, a science professor said Wednesday.

The black kokanee, or "kunimasu" in Japanese, was thought to have died out in 1940, when a hydroelectric project made its native lake in northern Akita Prefecture more acidic.

Before then, 100,000 eggs were reportedly transported to Lake Saiko but the species was still thought to have died off.

But Tetsuji Nakabo, a professor at Kyoto University, said his team of researchers found the species in Lake Saiko, about 310 miles (500 kilometers) south of the native lake.

"I was really surprised. This is a very interesting fish — it's a treasure. We have to protect it and not let it disappear again," he said.

He posed for pictures and video with a specimen that was dark olive with black spots on its back. The kunimasu grow to about a foot (30 centimers) in length.

Nakabo said the lake had sufficent kunimasu for the species to survive if the current environment is maintained, though he said in interviews he hoped fishermen would not catch it.

Lake Saiko is in a region popular with tourists for its Fuji views and hot spring baths.

The salmon is still listed as extinct in the public records of the Environment Ministry. Yobukaze Naniwa, an official at the ministry, said Nakabo's claim would be investigated before records are due to be updated in 2012.

Other species, including shellfish and plants, have also been discovered in Japan after being declared extinct, Naniwa said.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
fish

Obama Administration Edits Science Reports

Making up facts and changing the evidence.  SOP or a one time act?


White House edits stain its reliance on science



Press Dina Cappiello, Associated Press
Wed Nov 10, 6:17 pm ET

WASHINGTON – The oil spill that damaged the Gulf of Mexico's reefs and wetlands is also threatening to stain the Obama administration's reputation for relying on science to guide policy.

Academics, environmentalists and federal investigators have accused the administration since the April spill of downplaying scientific findings, misrepresenting data and most recently misconstruing the opinions of experts it solicited.

Meanwhile, the owner of the rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, Transocean Ltd., is renewing its argument that federal investigators are in danger of allowing the blowout preventer, a key piece of evidence, to corrode as it awaits forensic analysis. Testing had not begun as of last week, the company says, some two months after it was raised from the seafloor.

The blowout preventer could be a key piece of evidence in lawsuits filed by victims, survivors and others. Transocean was responsible for maintaining it while it was being used on BP's well. Investigators agreed to flush the control pods with fluid on Sept. 27 to prevent corrosion. But a Transocean lawyer wrote in his Nov. 3 letter that there have been no further preservation steps on the blowout preventer since then.

The latest complaint from scientists comes in a report by the Interior Department's inspector general, which concluded that the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the administration's six-month ban on new deep-water drilling. The AP obtained the report early Wednesday.

The inspector general said the editing changes by the White House resulted "in the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed." But it hadn't been. Outside scientists were asked only to review new safety measures for offshore drilling.

"There are really only a few people that know what they are talking about" on offshore drilling," said Ford Brett, managing director of Petroskills, a Tulsa, Okla.-based petroleum training organization. "The people who make this policy do not ... so don't misrepresent me and use me for cover," said Brett, one of seven experts who reviewed the report.

In a statement issued Wednesday, the White House insisted the review was properly coordinated and pointed to the inspector general's findings.

"Following a review that included interviews with peer review experts, the Inspector General found no intentional misrepresentation of their views...The decision to implement a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was correctly based on the need for adequate spill response, well containment and safety measures, and we stand behind that decision," White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said.

Last month, staff for the presidential oil spill commission said that the White House's budget office delayed publication of a scientific report that forecast how much oil could reach the Gulf's shores. Federal scientists initially used a volume of oil that did not account for the administration's various cleanup efforts, but the government ultimately cited smaller amounts of oil.

The same report said that President Barack Obama's energy adviser, Carol Browner, mischaracterized on national TV a government analysis about where the oil went, saying it showed most of the oil was "gone." The report said it could still be there. It also said that Browner and the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Jane Lubchenco, contributed to the public's perception the report was more exact than it was by emphasizing peer review.

The new inspector general report said Browner's staff implied that scientists had endorsed the drilling moratorium, by raising a reference to peer review in the drilling safety report. At least one outside expert who was involved said he was convinced afterward that it wasn't a deliberate deception, and Interior Department officials told the inspector general they didn't deliberately make changes to cause confusion.

"There was no intent to mislead the public," said Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who also recommended in the May 27 safety report that a moratorium be placed on deep-water oil and gas exploration. "The decision to impose a temporary moratorium on deep-water drilling was made by the secretary, following consultation with colleagues including the White House."

After one of the reviewers complained, the Interior Department promptly issued an apology during a conference call, in a formal letter and during a personal meeting in June.

All seven experts asked to review the Interior Department's work expressed concern about the change made by the White House, saying that it differed in important ways from the draft they had approved.

"We believe the report does not justify the moratorium as written, and that the moratorium as changed will not contribute measurably to increased safety and will have immediate and long-term economic effects," the scientists wrote earlier this year to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter. "The secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions."

Those complaints were similar to those of other scientists.

"Their estimates always seemed to be biased to the best case," said Joseph Montoya, a biology professor at Georgia Tech. "A number of scientists have experienced a strong push back."

The inspector general's report said the administration did not violate federal rules because the executive summary did not say the experts approved of the moratorium and because the department publicly clarified what the experts said and had offered a formal apology.

















obama administration

Back from the Dead - Extinction

Back from the dead: One third of 'extinct' animals turn up again




David Derbyshire Environment Editor
29th September 2010
Daily Mail




Conservationists are overestimating the number of species that have been driven to extinction, scientists have said.

A study has found that a third of all mammal species declared extinct in the past few centuries have turned up alive and well.

Some of the more reclusive creatures managed to hide from sight for 80 years only to reappear within four years of being officially named extinct in the wild.

The shy okapi – which resembles a cross between a zebra and a giraffe – was first discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1901.

After increasingly rarer sightings, it vanished from the wildlife radar for decades from 1959, prompting fears that it had died out.

But five years ago researchers working for the WWF found okapi tracks in the wild.

Other mammals ‘back from the dead’ include the rat-like Cuban solenodon, the Christmas Island shrew, the Vanikoro Flying Fox of the Solomon Islands, the Australian central rock rat and the Talaud Flying Fox of Indonesia.

The revelations come as the world’s leading conservationists prepare for a major United Nations summit on biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, next month.

Many scientists believe the world is going through a new ‘mass extinction’ fuelled by mankind – and that more species are disappearing now than at any time since the dinosaurs vanished 65million years ago.


BACK FROM THE DEAD

•The Australian central rock rat (pictured)

•The rat-like Cuban solenodon

•The Christmas Island shrew

•The Vanikoro Flying Fox of the Solomon Islands

•The Talaud Flying Fox of Indonesia

.According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 22 per cent of the world’s mammals are at risk of extinction. In Britain, more than two plant and animal species are being wiped out each year.

But while the report does not play down the threat from deforestation, overfishing or habitat destruction, it raises questions about the way species are classified as extinct.

Dr Diana Fisher, of the University of Queensland, Australia, compiled a list of all mammals declared extinct since the 16th century or which were flagged up as missing in scientific papers.

‘We identified 187 mammal species that have been missing since 1500,’ she wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

‘In the complete data-set, 67 species that were once missing have been rediscovered.

More than a third of mammal species that have been classified as extinct or possibly extinct, or flagged as missing, have been rediscovered.’

Mammals that suffered from loss of habitat were the most likely to have been declared extinct and then rediscovered, she said.

Species spread out over larger areas were also more likely to be wrongly classified as extinct.

The mistakes cannot be blamed on primitive technology or old fashioned scientific methods.

‘Mammals missing in the 20th century were nearly three times as likely to be rediscovered as those that disappeared in the 19th century,’ Dr Fisher added.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
extinction

Asteroid: Global Warming, Meteors, Asteroids ... end of the world

Astronomers spot 'potentially hazardous' asteroid just ONE month before it is due to pass close to Earth




By Daily Mail Reporter
28th September 2010



Astronomers have spotted a 'potentially hazardous' asteroid less than one month before it is due to pass close to Earth.

The object, given the name '2010 ST3', is 150 metres in diameter and will pass within four million miles of Earth in mid-October.

It was discovered using the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope in images taken on September 16th, when it was about 20 million miles away.

It is the first 'potentially hazardous object' (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey, using a new telescope designed to scan the skies for dangerous asteroids.

'Although this particular object won't hit Earth in the immediate future, its discovery shows that Pan-STARRS is now the most sensitive system dedicated to discovering potentially dangerous asteroids,' said Robert Jedicke, a University of Hawaii member of the PS1 Scientific Consortium, who is working on the asteroid data from the telescope.


'This object was discovered when it was too far away to be detected by other asteroid surveys,' Jedicke noted.

Most of the largest PHOs have already been catalogued, but scientists suspect that there are many more under a mile across that have not yet been discovered.

These could cause devastation on a regional scale if they ever hit our planet. Such impacts are estimated to occur once every few thousand years.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center (MPC), said, 'I congratulate the Pan-STARRS project on this discovery.


'It is proof that the PS1 telescope, with its Gigapixel Camera and its sophisticated computerized system for detecting moving objects, is capable of finding potentially dangerous objects that no one else has found.'

Pan-STARRS expects to discover tens of thousands of new asteroids every year with sufficient precision to accurately calculate their orbits around the sun.

Any sizable object that looks like it may come close to Earth within the next 50 years or so will be labeled 'potentially hazardous' and carefully monitored.

NASA experts believe that, given several years warning, it should be possible to organize a space mission to deflect any asteroid that is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.

PS1 and its bigger brother, PS4, which will be operational later in this decade, are expected to discover a million or more asteroids in total.

They will also spot more distant targets such as variable stars, supernovas, and mysterious bursts from galaxies across more than half the universe. PS1 became fully operational in June 201.





















space

The End of Times (really, or 50% chance)

The end really is nigh... but don't panic, there's only a 50% chance of it coming in the next 3.7BILLION years




By Niall Firth
30th September 2010
Daily Mail






There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new study.

Some physicists believe that our universe - and everything in it - will continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate, splitting into newer universes as it goes.

This is known as theory of 'eternal inflation' and has spawned the idea of the 'multiverse' in popular science-fiction.

But a group of scientists have argued that the laws of physics do not work in a universe that is never-ending and continues to expand – it must end at some point.

A star explodes in a Hubble space image. Some scientists believe that our universe is not never-ending and will finish suddenly one day in the future

And Raphael Bousso, at the University of California, Berkeley, has worked out when this is most likely to happen.

His team’s argument is that in an infinite universe any event that can happen, will happen. Furthermore it will happen an infinite number of times.

The problem with this is that if there are an infinite number of instances of everything happening it is then impossible to determine the probability of them happening at all.

This means that the laws of physics, as we know them, no longer work.

We're stuck between a rock and a hard place,' says Bousso. 'If you don't like the cut-off, then you have no way of making predictions and deciding what's probable in eternal inflation.'

The only way to make our current universe work is to include a catastrophe at some point in the future which ends time - and takes us with it.

Using complicated theoretical physics and advanced mathematics the team calculated when this is most likely to occur.

Bousso says: in the study: ‘Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years.’

This means that time and the universe would end before our own Sun has died.

Other physicists give us slightly longer, calculating the end of time to occur within the next five billion years.

But there is some good news. The research team say that, due to physics, we will not know when the end of time is approaching before it actually takes place.













 
 
 
universe

The End is Coming: Space 2013, The Space Storm is Coming.

Nasa warns solar flares from 'huge space storm' will cause devastation


Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.



By Andrew Hough
Published: 1:00PM BST 14 Jun 2010
The Telegraph



Link to this video National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013.

Scientists start work on high-tech mission to Mars instruments In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” said Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he added: “Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

“I think the issue is now that modern society is so dependant on electronics, mobile phones and satellites, much more so than the last time this occurred,” he said.

“There is a severe economic impact from this. We take it very seriously. The economic impact could be like a large, major hurricane or storm.”

The National Academy of Sciences warned that power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications could “all be knocked out by intense solar activity”.

It warned a powerful solar storm could cause “twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina”. That storm devastated New Orleans in 2005 and left an estimated damage bill of more than $125bn (£85bn).

Dr Fisher said precautions could be taken including creating back up systems for hospitals and power grids and allow development on satellite “safe modes”.

“If you know that a hazard is coming … and you have time enough to prepare and take precautions, then you can avoid trouble,” he added.

His division, a department of the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, which investigates the Sun’s influence on the earth, uses dozens of satellites to study the threat

The government has said it was aware of the threat and “contingency plans were in place” to cope with the fall out from such a storm

These included allowing for certain transformers at the edge of the National Grid to be temporarily switched off and to improve voltage levels throughout the network.

The National Risk Register, established in 2008 to identify different dangers to Britain, also has “comprehensive” plans on how to handle a complete outage of electricity supplies.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
space storm

Matter and Anti-Matter: The Origin of the Universe

May 17, 2010

A New Clue to Explain Existence

By DENNIS OVERBYE
The New York Times



Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from Lancaster University, in England, said in a talk Friday at Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill. Over the weekend, word spread quickly among physicists. Maria Spiropulu of CERN and the California Institute of Technology called the results “very impressive and inexplicable.”

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review.

It was Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident and physicist, who first provided a recipe for how matter could prevail over antimatter in the early universe. Among his conditions was that there be a slight difference in the properties of particles and antiparticles known technically as CP violation. In effect, when the charges and spins of particles are reversed, they should behave slightly differently. Over the years, physicists have discovered a few examples of CP violation in rare reactions between subatomic particles that tilt slightly in favor of matter over antimatter, but “not enough to explain our existence,” in the words of Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia, who is a member of the DZero team.

The new effect hinges on the behavior of particularly strange particles called neutral B-mesons, which are famous for not being able to make up their minds. They oscillate back and forth trillions of times a second between their regular state and their antimatter state. As it happens, the mesons, created in the proton-antiproton collisions, seem to go from their antimatter state to their matter state more rapidly than they go the other way around, leading to an eventual preponderance of matter over antimatter of about 1 percent, when they decay to muons.

Whether this is enough to explain our existence is a question that cannot be answered until the cause of the still-mysterious behavior of the B-mesons is directly observed, said Dr. Brooijmans, who called the situation “fairly encouraging.”

The observed preponderance is about 50 times what is predicted by the Standard Model, the suite of theories that has ruled particle physics for a generation, meaning that whatever is causing the B-meson to act this way is “new physics” that physicists have been yearning for almost as long.

Dr. Brooijmans said that the most likely explanations were some new particle not predicted by the Standard Model or some new kind of interaction between particles. Luckily, he said, “this is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider.”

Neal Weiner of New York University said, “If this holds up, the L.H.C. is going to be producing some fantastic results.”

Nevertheless, physicists will be holding their breath until the results are confirmed by other experiments.

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”
















Close

Aliens and Obama

Two bits for today -

Stephen Hawking says there are aliens and maybe they will come to conquer us.  My thought - please, come, and take me away.  I would rather be a slave to a superior alien race than stay and suffer the indignity of being told I am doing well, but am actually a slave.  At least in the alien system I would be a slave to a far superior being.  The article is from the Times of London.  Click here.  April 25, 2010 London Times Online.

The other bit of insight is about Obama and pennies.  I rather like the effort this guy has made in showing exactly what Obama's 100 million cut will look like.  Click here.  The video link is up at wimp.com








Misc

Big Heads, Little Brains

The Times
March 13, 2010




Cro Magnon skull supports theory that human brains have begun to shrink



Humans like to portray themselves as a sophisticated life form driven by brain rather than brawn. So they may be surprised by a project to reconstitute a 28,000-year-old skull from remains found in France.

This has provided evidence to support a theory that our brains have begun to shrink.

[We are shrinking.  And that does not bode well for us, given that we are all intellectual giants I suppose it will not have any effect on us for a very long while!!]

The French team that claims to have produced one of the best replicas yet of an early modern human skull say that it is 15 to 20 per cent bigger than ours. No one suggests that we are 15 to 20 per cent more stupid than Cro Magnon 1, the best preserved of five skeletons discovered in 1868 in the Cro Magnon cave in the Dordogne, because there is only a minor link between brain size and intelligence.

It may be that, rather like computers, our brains are becoming more efficient even as they grow smaller. But the project could shed light on a human evolutionary question that has divided and bemused the specialists: if indeed our heads have started to shrivel, why is this happening?

Cro Magnon 1 has been kept in the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. He is believed to have been a well-built, elderly man about 6ft tall. Already known to scientists worldwide, Cro Magnon 1 will become even more famous next week when a mold of his skull will be shown at the American National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

The endocast was made by scanning the interior of the skull at the Quinze-Vingts Hospital in Paris to obtain a picture of the impression left by the brain on the neurocranium.

Antoine Balzeau, of the French Museum of Natural History, transformed this into a 3D image that was in turn made into a mold by a specialist software prototyping firm.

“It’s one of the most beautiful endocasts ever,” Mr Balzeau told The Times. He said that an initial assessment of Cro Magnon 1’s skull confirmed the belief that brains had grown "slightly smaller over tens of thousands of years”, reversing an earlier trend towards bigger brains.

However, he said that the cerebellum — a brain structure linked to language and concentration — appears to take up a larger proportion of the head now than in the time of Cro Magnon 1. This suggests that some parts of the brain are more “compressible” than others, he said.

Several theories have been advanced to explain the mystery of the shrinking brain. One is that big heads were necessary to survive Upper Paleolithic life, which involved cold, outdoor activities.

A second theory is that skulls developed to cope with a chewy diet of rabbits, reindeer, foxes and horses. As our food has become easier to eat, so our heads have stopped growing, according to supporters of this theory.

[Small favors.  Imagine.  We could all be walking around with heads like the Queen from Alice!]

Other experts say that with high infant mortality, only the toughest survived — and the toughest tended to have big heads.

UN Nonsensical Crap: Ban Moon

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Incheon (Republic of Korea)
11 August 2009

Remarks to the Global Environment Forum

[...]

It should make itself a model of international engagement on climate change. Climate change, as all previous speakers have already stated, is the fundamental threat to humankind.

It exacerbates all of the problems we face: poverty, disease, hunger and insecurity. It impedes progress toward the Millennium Development Goals. It deepens the food and energy crises.

That is the harsh reality.

But there is an upside: if we combat climate change with a sustainable, low-emissions approach, just like we see around us in Songdo, we can change the way countries develop.

[...]

We can fight hunger and poverty while protecting the environment.

The downside is equally dramatic.

If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters.
Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest – even violence – could follow.

The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable.

We have the power to change course. But we must do it now.

As we move toward Copenhagen in December, we must “Seal a Deal” on climate change that secures our common future. I'm glad that the Chairman of the forum and many other speakers have used my campaign slogan “Seal the Deal” in Copenhagen. I won't charge them loyalty.

Please use this “Seal the Deal” as widely as possible, as much as you can. We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the future of humanity.

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The science is clear. We know what to do and we know how to do it. Songdo shows us the way.
What is needed is the political will. We have the capacity. We have finance. We have the technology. The largest lacking is political will. That is why I will convey some meetings focused on climate change. I have invited all the leaders of the world including President Lee.

Two years ago, only a handful of world leaders could talk about climate change.

Today, leaders of all the world, all the countries on every continent are aware of the threats we face now.

[...]

When the leaders of the G-8 agreed in July to keep the global temperature increase within two degrees centigrade by the year 2050, that was welcomed and I welcome that statement.
But I also said again, it was not enough.

[...]

There are four points [of] very important key political issues.

First industrialized countries must lead by committing to binding mid-term reduction targets on the order of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels.

Unfortunately, the mid-term emission targets announced so far are not close enough to this range. This must change. That is why I am urging at this time, that the Korean government should take more ambitious targets.

Second, developing countries need to take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in order to reduce the growth in their emissions substantially below business as usual.

Their actions must be measurable, reportable and verifiable.

Third, developed countries must provide sufficient, measurable, reportable and verifiable financial and technological support to developing countries.

This will allow developing countries to pursue their mitigation efforts as part of their sustainable green growth strategies and to adapt to accelerating climate impacts.

Significant resources will be needed from both public and private sources.

Developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, will collectively need billions of dollars in public financing for adaptation.

I am talking here about new money – not re-packaged Official Development Assistance. This is one of the most important issues which we are going to discuss on September 22nd in New York, and this year again at the G20 Summit Meeting in Pittsburgh on September 24th.

Fourth, we need an equitable and accountable mechanism for distributing these financial and technological resources, taking into account the views of all countries in decision-making.
Accomplishing all of this requires tough decisions. It will take flexibility and hard work to negotiate the most difficult issues.

[...]

The city of Incheon has a remarkable history.
Here, in 1950, the Korean war came to a famous turning point, following a daring landing by UN forces.

Against all the odds, the operation succeeded. Courage and leadership turned the tide.
Today, we need to turn a different tide – the tide of climate change. We need bold “outside of the box” thinking.











UN

The Hobbit (for reals)

Studies say 'hobbit' previously unknown species

by Marlowe Hood Marlowe Hood – Thu May 7, 2009
AFP

PARIS (AFP) – The tiny ancient humans dubbed hobbits, whose remains were discovered on an Indonesian island in 2003, were a previously unknown species altogether, according to two new studies.

Debate has raged in the scientific community since the fossils were found on the island of Flores, with some experts insisting they were descended from Homo erectus and others saying evolution could not account for their small brains.

About a metre (three feet) tall and weighing 30 kilos (65 pounds), the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the remote island as recently as 8,000 years ago. Their fossils are about 18,000 years old.

Many scientists have said Homo floresiensis, as the creature is now formally known, was a prehistoric human stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.

Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well documented in island-bound animals, could not account for the chimpanzee-sized brain -- just a third the size of that in a modern human being.

The only plausible explanation, they insisted, was that the handful of specimens found had a genetic disorder resulting in an abnormally small skull or that they suffered from "dwarf cretinism" caused by deficient thyroids.

Two new studies in the British journal Nature go a long way toward settling the debate.
A team led by William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York tackled the problem by analysing the hobbit's foot.

In some ways it is very human. The big toe is aligned with the others and the joints make it possible to extend the toes as the body's full weight falls on the foot -- attributes not found in great apes.

But in other respects it is startlingly primitive: far longer than its modern human equivalent and equipped with a very small big toe, long and curved lateral toes, and a weight-bearing structure closer to a chimpanzee's.

Recent archaeological evidence from Kenya shows that the modern foot evolved more than 1.5 million years ago, most likely in Homo erectus.

So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time -- considered extremely unlikely -- they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.

For Jungers and colleagues, this suggests their ancestor was not Homo erectus "but instead some other more primitive hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented."
Companion studies published by the Journal of Human Evolution bolster this theory and conjecture that these more ancient forebears may be the still poorly understood Homo habilis.
In any case, Homo floresiensis would be confirmed as a separate species.

But what still has not been explained the hobbit's inordinately small brain.

That's where hippos come into the picture.

Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister of the Natural History Museum in London compared fossils of several species of ancient hippos found on the island of Madagascar with the mainland ancestors from which they had evolved.

They were surprised to find that insular dwarfing -- driven by the need to adapt to an island environment -- shrank their brains far more than had previously been thought possible.

"Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of H. floresiensis relative to its body size, our evidence suggests that insular dwarfing could have played a role in its evolution," they conclude.
While the new studies answer some questions, they also raise new ones sure to spark fresh debate, Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman said in Nature.

Only more fossil evidence will indicate whether the hobbits of Flores evolved from Homo erectus, whose traces have been found throughout Eurasia, or from an even more ancient lineage not yet found outside Africa, he said.






humans

Genetics: I'll take a blonde female and a boy with brown hair. Wrap em up.

The day has arrived. Actually, it arrived some time ago, but was not as public as it is today.

Goodbye father, goodbye mother ... goodbye family ... hello spawn of science.




Designer baby row over US clinic
BBC News
March 2, 2009


A US clinic has sparked controversy by offering would-be parents the chance to select traits like the eye and hair colour of their offspring.

The LA Fertility Institutes run by Dr Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF in the 1970s, expects a trait-selected baby to be born next year.

His clinic also offers sex selection.

UK fertility experts are angered that the service will distract attention from how the same technology can protect against inherited disease.

The science is based on a lab technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD.
“ I would not say this is a dangerous road. It's an uncharted road ” Dr Steinberg.

This involves testing a cell taken from a very early embryo before it is put into the mother's womb.

Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes - or in this case an embryo with the desired physical traits such as blonde hair and blue eyes - to continue the pregnancy, and discard any others.

Dr Steinberg said couples might seek to use the clinic's services for both medical and cosmetic reasons.

For example, a couple might want to have a baby with a darker complexion to help guard against a skin cancer if they already had a child who had developed a melanoma. But others might just want a boy with blonde hair.

His clinic is offering this cosmetic selection to patients already having genetic screening for abnormal chromosome conditions in their embryos.

“ This is the inevitable slippery slope of a fertility process which results in many more embryos being created than can be implanted ” Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics.

"Not all patients will qualify for these tests and we make NO guarantees as to 'perfect prediction' of things such as eye colour or hair colour," says the clinic's website.

Dr Steinberg said: "I would not say this is a dangerous road. It's an uncharted road."

He said the capability to offer such services had been around for years, but had been ignored by the medical community.

"It's time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand."

Slippery slope

But Dr Gillian Lockwood, a UK fertility expert and member of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' ethics committee, questioned whether is was morally right to be using the science in this way.

"If it gets to the point where we can decide which gene or combination of genes are responsible for blue eyes or blonde hair, what are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger with green eyes?"

She warned against "turning babies into commodities that you buy off the shelf."

Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics said: "This is the inevitable slippery slope of a fertility process which results in many more embryos being created than can be implanted. Choices will always have to be made. Do you choose octuplets or the ones with the prettiest noses?"

In the UK, sex selection is banned and choices are currently permitted only in relationship to the baby's health.

Italian fertility law does not permit the creation of surplus embryos or selective testing. Ms Quintavalle said that was "one sure way to avoid the slippery slope".

Meanwhile, new legislation in the UK, due to come in on 6 April, will allow IVF mothers to name anyone as "father" on the birth certificate - even another woman.

The only restriction on naming a second parent will be if they are close blood relatives or if the second person does not agree.







genetics

Neanderthal: Homo Sapiens Sapiens killed them, so bring them back.

Scientists create genetic blueprint of Neanderthal

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
February 12, 2009

An international team Thursday said it has completed a draft of the genome (or genetic blueprint) of Neanderthals, which shows that our extinct cousins made "very little, if any" contribution to human genes.

Team chief Svante Pääbo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig described the work as a 63% complete gene map. This genome was stitched together from fossil DNA samples taken from four Neanderthals found in Europe.

Neanderthals occupied Europe from about 800,000 to 30,000 years ago. Scholars have long argued over their extinction, and their relationship to people.

"We still have lots of gaps, but we also now have a good overview of the (Neanderthal) genome," said Pääbo, in a webcast from Germany. The announcement previews a presentation scheduled for Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. "We see this as a tool for future biologists (looking for) what's really unique to modern humans."

"I think it is spectacular, to get something out of bones 40,000 years old, absolutely stunning," says anthropological geneticist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah, author of The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.


[to read the rest of the article, click the title link]

3000 BC - The Flintstones in Central Europe

The Flintsteins? Germans unearth Stone Age family
4,600-year-old grave yields genetic evidence of family life (and death)

By Randolph E. Schmid
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A Stone Age burial in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family.

The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children.

"Their unity in death suggests unity in life," researchers said in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While tools and remains from the Stone Age have long been studied, there are few clues to the social relationships between people.

"By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe — to our knowledge the oldest authentic molecular genetic evidence so far," lead author Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide, Australia, said in a statement.

The researchers studied four multiple burials at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, all dated to the same time and containing adults and children carefully buried facing each other.

Several of the skeletons showed evidence of injuries, suggesting a violent attack. There was a stone projectile point in the vertebra of one woman, and another had a skull fracture. Several had forearm and hand injuries, indicating attempts to protect themselves, the researchers said.

The scientists suggested that survivors of the raid later returned to bury the dead.

Besides the nuclear family in one grave, a second grave held three children, two of which were siblings, buried with a woman to whom they were not maternally related. The researchers think she may have been a paternal aunt or stepmother.

The team also looked at the strontium levels in the teeth of the skeletons. Strontium builds up in teeth during childhood and can be a clue where someone was raised.

Alistair Pike, head of archaeology at the University of Bristol, said the strontium levels showed that the females grew up in a different area from the males and children. That is an indication of marriage between different groups, with women going to join their husbands, which would have been important to avoid inbreeding and to forge kinship networks with other communities.







stone age men

Fire!

Proto Humans Mastered Fire 790,000 years ago

October 27, 2008
Quaternary Science Reviews


The charred remains of flint from prehistoric firesides suggest our ancient ancestors had learned how to create fire 790,000 years ago.

Previous research had shown that early humans - probably Homo erectus or Homo ergaster - from this period could manipulate and use fire, but it wasn't clear whether they had the ability to create the fire themselves, or whether they stole fire from natural occurrences like lightning strikes.

To investigate, Nira Alperson-Afil from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, analysed archaeological remains from the shore of an ancient lake near the river Jordan.

The site includes 12 layers of remains from different groups of early humans covering a 100,000 year span, and has been dated back to 790,000 years ago, long before modern Homo sapiens evolved. As each society left the region, water from the lake washed over the site and buried the remains, preserving their tools for archaeologists to analyse.

The remains included 500,000 chips of broken flint, produced as the early humans crafted their stone axes and knives. Roughly 2% of these chips were cracked and charred by fire, and the team mapped where each burnt fragment came from.

The analysis revealed that the charred remains were tightly clustered around certain areas, suggesting the flint chips had fallen into a campfire as early humans honed their tools by the fireside.

Because these charred remains exist in all 12 layers of the site, every society must have had access to fire. It's unlikely that all 12 societies would have been lucky enough to find a natural source of fire, says Alperson-Afil, so they must have been able to create it themselves.

"It seems the ability to create fire was embedded within their culture, together with their stone tools," she says. "If they were relying on nature, we wouldn't find these remains in such a repetitive way."

This ability would have been essential for man's eventual migration from Africa to cold Europe. However, the exact technique still remains unclear, since no obvious means of ignition were found at the site.

Journal reference: Quaternary Science Reviews (DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.06.009)





Fire

Extinct? Nothing can or will ever be.

NEW YORK TIMES

November 20, 2008

Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million

By NICHOLAS WADE

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this long time staple of science fiction were a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.

The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years. Though the stuffed animals in natural history museums are not likely to burst into life again, these old collections are full of items that may contain ancient DNA which can be decoded by the new generation of DNA sequencing machines.

If the genome of an extinct species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with the genome of its nearest living relative. There are now discussions of how to modify the DNA in an elephant’s egg so that generation by generation it would progressively resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The final stage egg could then be brought to term in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but ethically more challenging.

A scientific team headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller at Pennsylvania State University report in today’s issue of Nature that they have recovered a large fraction of the mammoth genome from clumps of mammoth hair. Mammoths were driven to extinction toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago, after the first modern humans learned how to survive and hunt in the steppes of Siberia.

Dr. Schuster and Dr. Miller said there was no technical obstacle to decoding the full mammoth genome, which they believe could be achieved for a further $2 million. They have already been able to calculate that the mammoth’s genes differ at around 400,000 sites on its genome from that of the African elephant.

There is no present way to synthesize a genome-sized chunk of mammoth DNA, let alone to develop it into a whole animal. But Dr. Schuster said a short-cut would be to modify the genome of an elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or more sites necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s genome. The cell could be converted into an embryo and brought to term by an elephant, a project he estimated would cost some $10 million.

Such a project would have been judged entirely impossible a few years ago and is far from reality even now. Still, several technical barriers have fallen in surprising ways. One is that ancient DNA is always shredded into tiny pieces, seemingly impossible to analyze. But a new generation of DNA decoding machines uses tiny pieces as their starting point. Dr. Schuster’s laboratory has two, known as 454 machines, each of which costs $500,000.

Another problem has been that ancient DNA in bone, the usual source, is heavily contaminated with bacterial DNA. Dr. Schuster has found that hair is a much purer source of the host’s DNA, with the keratin serving to seal it in and largely exclude bacteria.

A third issue is that the DNA of living cells can be modified, but only very laboriously and usually at one site at a time. Dr. Schuster said he had been in discussion with George Church, a well known genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School, about a new method Dr. Church has invented for modifying some 50,000 genomic sites at a time.

The method has not yet been published and until other scientists can assess it they are likely to view genome engineering on such a scale as being implausible. Rudolph Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said the proposal to resurrect a mammoth was “a wishful thinking experiment with no realistic chance for success.”

Dr. Church, however, said there had recently been enormous technical improvements in decoding genomes and that he expected similar improvements in genome engineering. In his new method, some 50,000 corrective DNA sequences are injected into a cell at one time. The cell would then be tested and subjected to further rounds of DNA modification until judged close enough to that of the ancient species.

In the case of resurrecting the mammoth, Dr. Church said, the process would begin by taking a skin cell from an elephant and converting it to the embryonic state with a method developed last year by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for reprogramming cells.

Asked if the mammoth project might indeed happen, Dr. Church said that “there is some enthusiasm for it,” although making zoos better did not outrank fixing the energy crisis on his priority list.

Dr. Schuster believes that museums could prove goldmines of ancient DNA because any animal remains containing keratin, from hooves to feathers, could hold enough DNA for the full genome to be recovered by the new sequencing machines.

The full genome of the Neanderthals, an ancient human species probably driven to extinction by the first modern humans that entered Europe some 45,000 years ago, is expected to be recovered shortly. If the mammoth can be resurrected, the same would be technically possible for Neanderthals.

But the process of genetically engineering a human genome into the Neanderthal version would probably raise many objections, as would several other aspects of such a project. “Catholic teaching opposes all human cloning, and all production of human beings in the laboratory, so I do not see how any of this could be ethically acceptable in humans,” said Richard Doerflinger, an official with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dr. Church said there might be an alternative approach that would “alarm a minimal number of people.” The workaround would be to modify not a human genome but that of the chimpanzee, which is some 98 percent similar to that of people. The chimp’s genome would be progressively modified until close enough to that of Neanderthals, and the embryo brought to term in a chimpanzee.

“The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it,” Dr. Church said.







Mammoth