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Adam and His Eves

Marriage, we're told by the president and a lot of other people, can only be between one man and one woman. Anything else would go against thousands of years of tradition and nature itself. If the president's DNA could talk, I think it might disagree. In the 1980s, geneticists began to study variations in human DNA to learn about the origin of our species. They paid particular attention to the genes carried by mitochondria, fuel-producing factories of the cell. Each mitochondrion carries its own small set of genes, a peculiarity that has its origins over two billion years ago, when our single…

Genetic signatures of recent human evolution, continued

Pickrell, J., Coop, G., Novembre, J., Kudaravalli, S., Li, J., Absher, D., Srinivasan, B., Barsh, G., Myers, R., Feldman, M., & Pritchard, J. (2009). Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations Genome Research DOI: 10.1101/gr.087577.108 I pointed yesterday to a new paper in Genome Research taking a genome-wide look at the signatures of recent natural selection in a worldwide sample of humans. I promised a more thorough analysis of this paper today, but I see Razib at Gene Expression has already done a fine job of that. Razib's post covers the bulk of…

The "toxin gambit" on steroids and more

I had a really busy grant writing day today, and my brain is fried. What that means is that, even though there are some things that I could write about that would be really cool (as in studies), I'm just too tired to do it as I write this. So, as I settle down to my nightly ritual, I wondered what I could write about. Certainly, it had to be something amusing and something that doesn't take too much effort for me to take on. Given that blogging is a marathon and not a sprint, there are times for really applying myself and times for slumming. This is a time for slumming. Tomorrow might be too…

Comments of the Week #80: From sunlight to the most fundamental particles

“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.” -John Gribbin No matter how much you've experienced in this world, there are some properties of the Universe that will still never be intuitive. Here at Starts With A Bang, we don't shy away from any of it; we embrace it all! This past week, here's…

Comments of the Week #86: from seeing a black hole to Hubble's birthday

“Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.” -Edwin Hubble We really got into some wondrous stuff here at Starts With A Bang this past week, including: Can we see our galaxy's supermassive black hole? (for Ask Ethan), Averaging inanimate objects can produce human faces, A tribute to the greatest French nebula in space (for Mostly Mute Monday), Can we test dark energy using the Solar System?, The moon's two sides look so different thanks to 4.5 billion year old physics, and Happy birthday to the…

How to shit in space

Learn the basics from the shiny new sci-fi blog from gawker media i09.

Is James Kirchick stupid, or does he just think we are?

Normally I don't blog politics since I don't know shit really. I generally subscribe to 2-3 political feeds which I regularly rotate to keep me "hooked in." Today I saw something so so shockingly stupid, or, brazenly mendacious, that I had to take note. Red Massachusetts?: ...And a Scots-Irish war veteran as the Republican nominee complicates predictions about whom Kennedy Country will support come November. Most of the commentary seems fine, if disputable; I might not agree, but it's political pundrity, about as rooted in reality as sports predictions. James Kirchick graduated from Yale…

The Donald Trump War on Science: Pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement and other recent stories

For people who are wondering why I'm not doing more of my patented chronologies or collections of posts, the answer is pretty simple. There's so damn much going on it's hard for me to find the time and mental energy to bring it all together. I'm currently working on posts covering the Trump budget proposal as well as the story about the various issue with the Environmental Protection Agency. I'm not sure when I'll get to complete those, but in both cases the story is on-going. I'm also hoping to do an update on the March for Science post. I may also compile the story around Paris Agreement…

Check out the Famous Perseid meteor shower

Star light Star bright first star I see tonight... One thing I love about camping and getting away from the city is looking up into the night sky and seeing the vast array of stars that populate the sky. I am always amazed by how bright and how MANY stars twinkle up there, but one of the more exciting things I love to look for are 'shooting stars.' And it looks like we are in for quite a show of shooting stars! One of USA Science and Engineering Festival partners, EarthSky, reminded us that the famous c that will be taking place this week. So take some time to look up at the night sky and…

Basics: How do you sequence a genome? part III, reads and chromats

Shotgun sequencing. Sounds like fun. Speculations on the origin of the phrase I think that this term came from shotgun cloning. In the early days of gene cloning before cDNA, PCR, or electroporation; molecular biologists would break genomic DNA up into lots of smaller pieces, package DNA in lambda phage, transduce E. coli, and hope for the best. Consistent with the shotgun metaphor, we even used to store our microfuge tubes in plastic bullet boxes that my boss found at the sporting goods store. (Apparently this practice was unique to Minnesota, though. When I moved out west for graduate…

Cats, H5N1 and FAO

Cats again (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Now the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is warning that cats are susceptible to H5N1: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today that cats should be monitored for signs of bird flu or avian influenza. They said that cats, like humans, can become infected with the deadly strain of the H5N1 virus that causes avian flu, possibly from eating infected birds, or from being in very close contact with infected birds or their feces. But they emphasize there is no evidence of a sustained cat to…

Circadian Rhythm Degeneration Syndrome?

OK, it is a premise of a new SF novel. The book description does not look too promising, though I guess I should read it for professional reasons (I put it on my amazon wish-list for now): Last call from Earth -Stage I, Biological Survival (also available for download on Lulu.com). This is what Newswire says about it: Successful Soul Transplant Operation Featured in New Sci-Fi Book 'Last call from Earth' Soul transplant operation is the last recourse for human survival in new trilogy, Last call from Earth - People affected with CRDS loose their DNA controls and become repugnant: The body…

“No dust, no silica”: OSHA Silica Hearings Week #2

That simple phrase “No dust, no silica,” was the way that Donald Hulk characterized his firm’s attitude about controlling respirable crystalline silica. Hulk is the corporate safety director for Manafort Brothers based in Plainville, CT. His presentation was one of the highlights during last week’s nearly 40 hours of testimony. The other memorable moment came from six workers who traveled from Houston, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia to speak personally about working in silica dust. Their participation interjected a dose of reality. More below about their testimony. Manafort’s Don Hulk…

Serious Things Day Part I: Staniford on the Economic Costs of Adapting to Climate Change

To make up for yesterday's frivolity, today I am going to be very, very serious, and deal with weighty serious things. There will be no levity - not from me, and certainly not from my very serious readers. In fact, if I detect signs of levity from any of you, especially those of you with sad proclivities towards levity (Risa, Edson, Lora...I'm talking to you!), you will be publically denounced from my pulpit (I have to go build a pulpit now.) More practically, I'm going to try and catch up on some things people have asked me to write about, many of which are more serious and require more…

Why are Pakistan's Floods Getting Less Attention than Haiti's Earthquake?

Flooding in Pakistan has killed 1,600 and is affecting an estimated 20 million people. Six million lack access to food, shelter, and water. The report of a single confirmed cholera case (in the Swat valley) is generating some headlines, but the important point is that a lack of clean water makes the spread of any diarrheal disease far more likely. UNICEF warns that "more than 3 million children are at high risk of deadly water-borne diseases in Pakistan," and cites a WHO projection of up to 1.5 million cases of diarrheal diseases that could occur over the next three months. These aren't just…

Is stopping E. coli O157 contamination as easy as changing cattle diet?

That's certainly the claim in a new New York Times editorial (via The Frontal Cortex). The author, Nina Planck (author of Real Foods: What to Eat and Why), claims that it's as easy as just feeding cattle grass, and poof!--E. coli O157 will vanish. More on this and why organic farming won't necessarily stop such outbreaks after the jump. Planck writes: Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It's not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new -- that is, recent in the history of…

Spiritual wanderlust highlights gaps in evolution, claims author

Though much of the attention to and reports of intelligent design/creationist shenanigans come from the United States, we're certainly not the only ones inundated with deniers of evolution and other sciences. A self-described UK evolution "sceptic" is journalist Melanie Phillips, who writes for The Daily Mail. She's annoyed many scientists in the country due to her views not only on evolution, but also on vaccination (such as this article from earlier this year), drawing the ire of many who point out that she doesn't understand the underlying science. She's proven her critics correct…

PROTOBATS: visualising the earliest stages of bat evolution

Reconstructions of the earliest phases of bird evolution - of 'near-birds' or 'protobirds', if you will - are pretty familiar, and hypothetical 'proto-pterosaurs' are also relatively familiar thanks to their appearance in the mainstream literature (Wellnhofer 1991, Unwin 2006). However, have you ever seen a reconstruction of a proto-bat? Such creatures must have existed, of course, but I'm only aware of one published effort to visualise them. Reproduced here, these reconstructions were originally published in Smith (1977) and were later reproduced in John Hill and James Smith's excellent…

Are anthracotheres alive and well and living on Sulawesi? No, but it was a nice idea. Babirusas, part II

More on babirusas! Go here for part I. While babirusas look pig-like and are classified as part of Suidae, they're distinctive and unusual [image above from wikipedia]. Combining rather slender legs with a barrel-shaped body, they can exceed 1 m in length and have a shoulder height of 65-80 cm. Some individuals weigh as much as 100 kg. Babirusas are odd in having particularly remarkable canines (more about those soon), but less well known is that they differ from other pigs in several details of their anatomy, and in fact resemble peccaries and other artiodactyls in a few features. The…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Brine-Loving Microbes Reveal Secrets To Success In Chemically Extreme Environments: Scientists have completed the first study of microbes that live within the plumbing of deep-sea mud volcanoes in the Gulf of Mexico, where conditions may resemble those in extraterrestrial environments and early Earth. The study, which was partially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), was conducted in an area where clusters of seafloor vents spew mud, oil, brine and gases that support food chains independently of the Sun. Women May Be Sniffing Out Biologically-relevant Information From Underarm…

Boston trip - Part 1

OK, back home and rested - it's time for a pictorial report, in two parts. This one is social, the other part will be about the conference itself. All of it under the fold... Day 1 On Thursday morning I got up early, took the kids to school, loaded my luggage and got started for the airport. As my car was on empty I had to stop at the nearest gas station to fill up and, who stops behind me and start pumping gas? John Edwards. In jeans. Elizabeth was in the car. He recognized me and said Hello. I said Hello. A regular guy, in a regular car, wearing regular clothes, doing something we…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 16 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Sibling Competition and Conspicuousness of Nestling Gapes in Altricial Birds: A Comparative Study: Nestlings of altricial birds capture parents' attention through conspicuous visual displays, including…

Could DIY biologists tackle problems with pollutants?

Some of the things that are attracting people to DIY biology are: the idea of doing science with others for fun the possibility of doing something that might be beneficial to society being part of larger movement All of those notions appeal to me and since I've been involved with biotech for many years, I have lots of project ideas. After thinking about the yogurt and melamine detection project, I started to wonder if a DIY project could even have a bigger impact, and say, develop a cheap test for heavy metals like arsenic or lead. In Seattle, it costs between $30 and $50 to test water…

Snapshot of call centre workers in Bangalore, India

"Never say where you're calling from" is one lesson learned by journalist Andrew Marantz during his summer working at a Delhi, India call center.   Before getting the job, Marantz and the estimated million job seekers in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry complete weeks of training.  The classroom sessions include pronunciation drills to shed their "mother tongue influence" and culture training. Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be…

No economic recovery for kids: Childhood poverty higher than during Great Recession

Technically, the recession is over. So it may come as a surprise to learn that more U.S. children are living in poverty right now than during the Great Recession. To be more specific: About 1.7 million more children live in low-income working families than just a few years ago. The new and troubling numbers come from the 2015 Kids Count Data Book, which was released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation earlier this week. The book measures four domains of child well-being in the post-recession years: economic well-being, education, health, and family and community. It also ranks states by overall…

Courtney, Stephanie and Paul: three too many asbestos disease stories

Standing in her wedding gown, Courtney Davis held this sign: "Message2Congress: If you had banned asbestos, maybe my dad would have been here to give me away." Her father, Larry W. Davis, 66, died in July 2012 of pleural mesothelioma---a cancer caused by asbestos exposure. Stephanie Harper was a daddy's girl. She told reporter David McCumber, her father was a jack of all trades--repairing vehicles, fixing HVAC--and when he came home at night, "I'd sit on his feet and grab his pants leg." The 37 year-old mother from Texas now suffers from mesothelioma and agonizing pain that goes along with it…

Ron Wyatt: Collosal Fraud

And out come the wingnuts. Here's the email I just received from someone named James Albright: Dear Ed, Noah's ark was discovered by Ron Wyatt, whose ministry is named Wyatt Archeological Research. The news media is only taking attention away from the real ark through your ministry. Please stop this approach in the name of Jesus. Thank you. Bro. James D Albright Oi vey. Are there people out there who still take Ron Wyatt seriously? Con men simply don't get much more transparent than this guy. Wyatt was a nurse anesthetist (now deceased) who claimed not only to have found Noah's Ark, but to…

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 2: Begin at the Beginning

She kneels on the dirt and watches the elder study the rocks she brought. Five fist-sized chunks of red stone, laboriously hacked from an outcrop. Half a day walking there and back, and half a day pounding rocks against rocks to yield this offering. The elder's hands are stained the same red as the stone, from years of grinding and mixing the paint that is her people's sign. Behind him in the cave, she can see others banging, grinding, and mixing. The summer festivals are coming soon, and a great deal of paint will be needed. He turns her rocks round and round, studying all sides. Finally,…

Can Dogs Transmit Ebola? And, should Excalibur be put down? they put down Excalibur.

UPDATE: They killed the dog. UPDATE: I'm adding this here because it is my current post on Ebola. Thomas Eric Duncan, the person who became symptomatic with Ebola in Dallas, had died at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital (according to news alerts). A nurse's assistant in Spain caring for Spanish nationals returned with Ebola from West Africa contracted the disease, gaining the dubious distinction of being the first person to be infected with Ebola outside of that disease's normal range in West Africa, Central Africa and western East Africa. There is speculation that she contracted the…

The Energy Limit of the Universe

If people around you aren't going anywhere, if their dreams are no bigger than hanging out on the corner, or if they're dragging you down, get rid of them. Negative people can sap your energy so fast, and they can take your dreams from you, too. --Earvin "Magic" Johnson As far as science goes, we all have our own dreams. For me, it's to understand the largest scales in the Universe: the most massive structures, the highest energies, and the earliest times of existence. Particle physicists are also after understanding the Universe at its highest energies, and that's one of the primary goals…

Climate Trends in the Arctic as Observed from Space: It's melting. Fast.

Earth’s northern ice cap is heating up and melting down at an alarming, not previously predicted, rate. A paper just out in Wiley Interndisciplary Reviews: Climate Change, by Josefino Comiso and Dorothy Hall looks at recent historic transformations in the Arctic using satellite imagery, mainly from 1979 to the present. The decline of Arctic ice is so extreme that ice thought to have existed for over 1450 years is melting now. (None of the sea ice is really ancient, even the “old” ice recycles over geologically short time periods. But in the near future there will be virtually no “old” ice…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 03

... continuing from earlier news News, blog, and other items: Singaporeans in Fukushima and Miyagi prefectures told to evacuate Language used to describe atomic meltdown borders on reckless hyperbole Know Nukes: The Japanese Earthquake & Anti-Nuclear Hysteria: Explaining how the Japan Nuke Disaster is not melt down, there will be no radiation leaks, and it is not Chernobyl. Japan tries air, land tactic to quell nuclear disaster Northrop Drone Set to Overfly Japan Reactor, Seek Data on Damage Japanese choppers dump water on stricken reactor Japan relies on the Fukushima 50's bravery…

What I said about Exxon

I want to write about some new stuff, but in the course of it I need to rehearse what I've said about Exxon over the years. So I'll do it here, for reference. Some of it is so far in the past it predates blogging. sci.env: 1997 1997? Were there really such years? Exxon Chairman puts Climate Change in Perspective. Me, responding to someone quoting "Exxon Chairman Calls Poverty Most Pressing Environmental Problem in Developing Countries"(mmm... a theme that never dies. Notice also cameo appearance from John McCarthy: It would take a lot to induce the chairman of Exxon to promote nuclear energy…

Randy Barnett on Miers

Randy Barnett has an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal that absolutely shreds Bush for nominating Harriet Miers. He begins by quoting a passage from Federalist Paper 76, written by Alexander Hamilton, on why the consent of the Senate is required for appointments: "To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from…

Bad Creationist Letter in Michigan

A small newspaper in Michigan, the Argus Leader, has had quite a series of letters to the editor over the last few weeks after printing an article about Dick DeVos and his position that ID ought to be taught. You'll get a good laugh out of this one from a youth minister named Jerod Jordan. He talks about how much research he's done to conclude that evolution is wrong while simultaneously proving his utter ignorance even of the standard creationist nonsense as he trots out the tried-and-false Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man. In 1912, a scientist named Charles Dawson, a medical doctor and…

A 300 million year old fish brain ...

... has been found. Inside the fish's skull, in fact. This is from a chimaeroid fish, which today are fairly rare but during the Carboniferoius were quite common and diverse. There are really two aspects of this find that are especially interesting. One is the 3D imagery that was obtained of the ancient fossilized brain, and the other is the analysis of the fish's ear canals. The brain is cool just because it is cool (and shows some interesting morphology). The ear canal study is interesting because it shows a pattern different than expected for a fish: This creature was probably…

A Quick Note on Skeptical Theism

Rereading my post from Monday, I see there was one aspect of Vincent Torley's post that I neglected to address. Recall that Torley was at pains to explain why God might be innocent of the charge of hypocrisy, for demanding that we behave in ways that He does not Himself practice. Torley made two suggestions in that regard, and in Monday's post I gave reasons for thinking that those suggestions do not solve the problem. Perhaps aware of the inadequacies of his arguments, Torley tries another gambit: It appears that Loftus's argument from evil, like Dr. Sean Carroll's, is a powerful prima…

Flu survivors still immune after 90 years

They say that memory declines as age marches on, but that only applies to neurons - the immune system has a very different sort of memory and it stays fresh till the end of life. To this day, people who survived the 1918 flu pandemic carry antibodies that can remember and neutralise the murderous strain. The 1918 influenza virus was the most devastating infections of recent history and killed anywhere from 20 to 100 million people in the space of two years. Ironically, it seems that the virus killed via the immune system of those infected. It caused immune cells to unleash a torrent of…

More scary scenarios from the arctic

Last week it was the disappearing polar ice cap. This week it's the melting permafrost, which contains a heap big quantity of greenhouse gases, which, if released to the atmosphere, "the Kyoto Protocol will seem like childish prattle," according to one expert. But how worried should be really be about melting tundra? The new warning comes from one Sergei Zimov, chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Science's North Eastern Scientific station, which Reuters describes as "three plane rides and eight times zones away from Moscow." Here's the essence of his scary scenario: For millenniums [sic…

Interference - on the moon!

Wow, lots of moon posts these days.  This one is going to talk about a question left by commenter ppnl a couple posts back: ppnl: So could you use a pair of one meter telescopes a kilometer apart to create a point of constructive interference on the moon as small as what would have been created by a kilometer size telescope? Me: I don’t think so. The whole thing about interferometers having the resolution of a telescope the size of the baseline is sort of a hand-waving way of sweeping of lot of technical detail under the rug. You could make some pretty closely spaced interference fringes on…

Virus and bacteria team up to save aphid from parasitic wasp

Viruses and bacteria often act as parasites, infecting a host, reproducing at its expense and causing disease and death. But not always - sometimes, their infections are positively beneficial and on rare occasions, they can actually defend their hosts from parasitism rather than playing the role themselves. In the body of one species of aphid, a bacterium and a virus have formed a unlikely partnership to defend their host from a lethal wasp called Aphidius ervi. The wasp turns aphids into living larders for its larvae, laying eggs inside unfortunate animals that are eventually eaten from…

Five-month-old babies prefer their own languages and shun foreign accents

Discriminating against people who do not speak your language is a big problem. A new study suggests that the preferences that lead to these problems are hard-wired at a very young age. Even five-month-old infants, who can't speak themselves, have preferences for native speakers and native accents. The human talent for language is one of our crowning evolutionary achievements, allowing us to easily and accurately communicate with our fellows. But as the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel relates, linguistic differences can serve to drive us apart and act as massive barriers between…

The signals of life - ants use chemical messages to avoid getting trashed

We recognise dead people by the absence of signals that indicate life - movement, responsiveness, pulses, brain activity, and so on. The Argentine ant does the same, but its signal is a chemical one. Throughout its life, an ant uses chemicals in its skin to automatically send out a message to its nest-mates, saying "I'm alive. Don't throw me out." When it dies, these "chemicals of life" fade away, and their bodies are evicted. Social insects like ants and honeybees are fastidious about their colony's tidiness. If any individuals die, they're quickly removed and thrown away in one of the…

Sea anemones keep on stinging swallowed fish to digest them

Pity the small fish snagged by a sea anemone. Blundering into the waving tentacles, the fish is stung by hundreds of tiny harpoons shot out from stinging cells, each one loaded with potent venom. It is paralysed and moved towards the anemone's 'mouth', which lies in the centre of its tentacles and also doubles as its anus. The fish is swallowed and , but its ignominious fate doesn't end there. The anemone's internal cavity (which passes for its stomach) is also lined with thousands of stinging cells so that even after it's been swallowed, the fish continues to be stung. The sea anemone is a…

The Big Picture

This article in the New York Times is a pretty useful overview of the political and financial support behind the Discovery Institute, the main anti-evolution think tank. It describes how the Institute has spent $3.6 million dollars to support fellowships that include scientific research in areas such as "laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics." So what has that investment yielded, scientifically speaking? I'm not talking about the number of appearances on cable TV news or on the op-ed page, but about scientific achievement. I'm talking about how many papers have…

Found on Amazon.de -- another Lott review

After finding some clues on Amazon's Canadian site that revealed three more of Lott's reviews, I decided to check their other sites. On their German site I found the review below. This review seems to have also been deleted when the Mary Rosh review was deleted. I think that was because this review was posted anonymously from Mary Rosh's Amazon account (it's from Philadelphia, just like Mary's one). and when Amazon deleted all of Mary Rosh's reviews they also deleted the anonymous ones. Very well written, solid researched book, 30. Januar 2000 Rezensentin/…

Exploring Oahu: Craters

For blog newcomers: On top of being a graduate student and blogging about science, I, on occasion, actually get to go out in the world and enjoy where I live. When I get some good pictures or go somewhere neat, I pass on my experiences with my readers. This is that kind of post. When you drive around Oahu, there are two craters that stick out. The more famous is Diamond Head, whose noticeable profile marks the backdrop of the beaches in Waikiki. If you continue further southeast, the landscape is dominated by the facade of another, perhaps even more daunting tuff: Koko Crater. Both of these…

In The Womb: Extreme Animals

In The Womb: Extreme Animals Premiering Sunday, May 10th at 9 PM on National Geographic Channel I first heard about this weekend's amazing special, In the Womb: Extreme Animals way back in October of last year. It was my interest in the incredible images that come from In The Womb that made me stand out to National Geographic in the first place, allowing me to preview all the other awesome specials. So it's with great pleasure that I annouce that finally, after waiting since October, you can see In The Womb: Extreme Animals this weekend, on Sunday, May 10th at 9 PM! The first In The Womb was…

Researchers watch brain rewire itself after stroke

During a cerebrovascular accident (or stroke), the blood supply to part of the brain is interrupted. This is often caused by a blood clot which blocks an artery that carries blood to the brain. Consequently, neurons in the affected region of the brain die because they are deprived of oxygen. Stroke has several characteristic symptoms: slurred speech, paralysis and weakness on the right side of the body, and weakness and drooping of the face. These typically develop within minutes, and occur because stroke often affects the motor cortex in the left hemisphere, which controls the movements of…

The Flores Hobbits Were Members of a Separate Species

... according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study compares skull measurements of Flores material with a wide range of other hominid data and concludes that Flores cannot be clustered with Homo sapiens. This is the first published study that takes into account how size affects shape. By correcting for size, this study makes, the authors claim, a more valid comparison between measurements taken on the Flores material and other comparative data. We show that whether or not the effects of its small cranial size are accounted for, the…