The popular hypothesis is that Neanderthals ruled Northern Europe until Homo Sapiens showed up 40k years ago and drove them out over the next 10k years, but new fossils reveal that, before Homo Sapiens arrived, the Neanderthals drove two other hominid species out themselves.
Precursor to Homo Sapiens that Vanished
Credit: Mauricio Anton
With the evidence appearing to show that Neanderthals were smart, had culture, cave paintings, and tool use, the reason humans beat them out appears to be dumb luck, as environmental changes, a warmer world and less vegetation, favored homo sapiens’ Olympic runners over Neanderthals’ stocky wrestlers.
Serving oversized portions, getting into television, and being fat yourself are just a few ways to make your friends fat.
Research on gamers who played the game Doom, which monitored their EEG activity, found that players who dreamt about Doom got better at the game than those who dreamt about other subjects or not at all.
It was previously assumed that sperm whales ate giant squids from the sucker-mark scars left on the whales from the fight, but now, for the first time, we have photographic evidence of a sperm whale consuming one of these monsters of the dark depths.
Sperm Whale Catches Giant Squid
Credit: Tony Wu
People who live in individualistic cultures, like America and Western Europe, where a “Me First” attitude is more prevalent, have higher rates of depression than cultures built on collectivism.
Britain’s top drug adviser has been fired for saying marijuana, ecstasy, and LCD are less dangerous than alcohol, and siding with other scientists in protesting tougher marijuana laws in the UK.
Slideshow of fantastic images from the refurbished Hubble.
Most distant object in universe:
A gamma-ray burst from a star 3.1 billion light-years away and died 630 million years after the Big Bang is now the most distant object observed by telescopes in the cosmos.
GRB 090423 gamma-ray burst
Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
40 years ago the first message was sent across the Internet, which was two computers connected on ARPANET over 600 miles apart. The message was “lo”, the first two letters of “login”, which was the complete message, cut off after the system crashed before the rest could transfer.
A new World Health Organization report finds 15 million deaths a year are premature and preventable and the average global life expectancy would increase by 5 years if underweight children, unprotected sex, alcohol abuse, unsafe water, and high blood pressure were alleviated.
Americans could save 10 percent on their energy bills if they washed with cold water and used clothes lines, but bans on clothes lines across the country prevent exercising this option.
Gay men prefer masculine faces, while straight men prefer feminine faces, which makes the similar in their preference for dimorphism, while women are more complex, preferring different facial types depending on ovulation, contraception use, perception of their personal attractiveness, and sex drive.
masculinized (right) and feminized (left) versions of a male face
Credit: Aaron Glassenberg
Researchers have turned embryonic stem cells into germ cells, the cells that produce eggs and sperm, an innovation that will allow scientists to study the early stages of human development.
Who owns the rights to inventions developed within Universities, the inventor or the University? There’s a lot of money riding on the answer.
We carve pumpkins for Halloween because turnips weren’t introduced to the new world when we came over from Europe, where the holiday was inherited from the Pagan Samhain.
de Broglie Bohm Schrodinger’s cat:
Two gamma-ray photons traveling 7.3 billion years across the Universe, one photon possessing a million times more energy than the other, reached the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope within nine-tenths of a second of one another, further proving Einstein’s general Theory of Relativity, but leaving physicists no closer to a unified theory of everything.
Racing Gamma-Ray Photons
Credit: NASA/Sonoma State University/Aurore Simonnet
Congress has passed a resolution establishing a Computer Science Education week in December around the birthdate of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, computer genius extraordinaire.
Red wine with red meat and white wine with fish is the rule, and now science reveals that the iron in red wine causes the fishy aftertaste when paired with seafood (HT Carolyn).
A new paper out of Georgetown University argues that America needs less STEM students and more STEM jobs and that incentives to produce more students by the Federal government are going to drive down wages, which will reduce incentives for good students to go into STEM fields (HT Clint).
A newly discovered pliosaur is the largest yet at 16 meters.
Pliosaur
The sea-level rise in North Carolina has been three-times higher in the last century than in the last five centuries.
A man dying in a coma’s brain hemorage produced a ghostly image on MRI in a way the interviewer for the story calls “poetic.”
Kids taking medications for severe psychiatric problems gain substantial weight and have increased levels of LDL cholesterol in their blood.
Piano stairs – TheFunTheory.com (HT Emily):
NG has a sampling of some of the 850 underground animals found in Australia.
Phreatomerus latipes
Credit: Australian Centre for Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity, University of Adelaide
Mother Jones has a timeline of Climate Change science and politics extending back to 1800, when CO2 concentrations were 38 percent lower than today.
Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize for economics for her work investigating the Tragedy of the Commons, clarifying how small groups of local people can manage the commons better than distant bureaucracies.
Unpredictable genetic engineering: A study of cucurbita gourd plants that received a modified gene for resistance to a virus from neighboring GM crops found that when the gourd plants grew resistant to the virus, they also grew appetizing to cucumber beetles that devoured the healthy transgenetic cucurbita.
Out in the middle of nowhere, the Virgin Galactic Spaceport will either be a fantastic tourist attraction or a $200-million flop, but right now it’s a great big field still being cleared.
Terminal Hangar Concept, Spaceport America
Credit: Spaceport America Conceptual Images URS/Foster + Partners
Despite internet rumors and the book Superfreakanomics statisticians reviewing the data assure us the world is still warming, with the decade ending in December being the warmest since record-keeping began 130 years ago.
Alcohol-based hand sanitizers, which are extremely popular right now, are also extremely effective at preventing the spread of flu.
University of Alabama researchers have identified the blue crab molt-inhibiting hormone receptor, which, if they are correct, could be manipulated to have the crabs molt year-round, improving the crab industry’s output.
Supermodels Strip For Climate Change:
