http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/scienc...today.html
EXCERPT: [...] The scientists compared these genomes with those of living Europeans. As they reported last month in Nature, the study revealed something scientists never knew: Europeans today have genes from three very different populations.
The oldest of these populations were the first Europeans, who appear to have lived as hunter-gatherers. The second were farmers who expanded into Europe about 8,500 years ago from the Near East.
But most living Europeans also carry genes from a third population, which appears to have arrived more recently. Dr. Reich and his colleagues found the closest match in DNA taken from a 24,000-year-old individual in Siberia, suggesting that the third wave of immigrants hailed from north Eurasia. The ancient Europeans that the scientists studied did not share this North Eurasian DNA. They concluded that this third wave must have moved into Europe after 7,000 years ago.
[...] It is not until 6,400 years ago that the scientists find the first genetic evidence on the Great Hungarian Plain for light brown hair. And the milk mutation appeared even later, just 3,100 years ago.
It is possible that these new genes and others were brought to the plain by successive waves of immigrants. But natural selection probably played a role in making these genes pervasive....
http://www.livescience.com/48543-how-zom...lture.html
EXCERPT: ...the modern conception of a zombie dates back to 1968, in a movie that doesn't so much as use the word: George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." "He didn't call them zombies, and he didn't think about them as zombies," said Ozzy Inguanzo [...] "Audiences saw these lumbering dead people, and they called them zombies … therefore, they became zombies," he said. Since then, the walking undead have wormed their way into video games, comic books [...] The true zombie origin story dates back further than 1968, of course. The sad beginning of the myth harks back to Haiti during the 1600s and 1700s, when African slaves were worked to death on sugar plantations. As UC Irvine journalism instructor Amy Wilentz pointed out in the New York Times in 2012, it's not hard to see how the notion of a dead body, stripped of will and personality, forced to do the bidding of a sorcerer, would occur to an enslaved people....
http://www.livescience.com/48502-magic-m...works.html
EXCERPT: Magic mushrooms may give users trippy experiences by creating a hyperconnected brain. The active ingredient in the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, seems to completely disrupt the normal communication networks in the brain, by connecting "brain regions that don't normally talk together," said study co-author Paul Expert, a physicist at King's College London. The research, which was published Oct. 28 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, is part of a larger effort to understand how psychedelic drugs work, in the hopes that they could one day be used by psychiatrists — in carefully controlled settings — to treat conditions such as depression, Expert said....
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...103114.php
New Haven, Conn. – Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth.
Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn't flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth's surface. Animals began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 800 million years ago — but what about the billion-year stretch before that, when most researchers think there also was plenty of oxygen?
Well, it seems the air wasn't so great then, after all.
In a study published Oct. 30 in Science, Yale researcher Noah Planavsky and his colleagues found that oxygen levels during the "boring billion" period were only 0.1% of what they are today. In other words, Earth's atmosphere couldn't have supported a diversity of creatures, no matter what genetic advancements were poised to occur.
"There is no question that genetic and ecological innovation must ultimately be behind the rise of animals, but it is equally unavoidable that animals need a certain level of oxygen," said Planavsky, co-lead author of the research along with Christopher Reinhard of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We're providing the first evidence that oxygen levels were low enough during this period to potentially prevent the rise of animals."
The scientists found their evidence by analyzing chromium (Cr) isotopes in ancient sediments from China, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Chromium is found in the Earth's continental crust, and chromium oxidation is directly linked to the presence of free oxygen in the atmosphere.
Specifically, the team studied samples deposited in shallow, iron-rich ocean areas, near the shore. They compared their data with other samples taken from younger locales known to have higher levels of oxygen.
Oxygen's role in controlling the first appearance of animals has long vexed scientists. "We were missing the right approach until now," Planavsky said. "Chromium gave us the proxy." Previous estimates put the oxygen level at 40% of today's conditions during pre-animal times, leaving open the possibility that oxygen was already plentiful enough to support animal life.
In the new study, the researchers acknowledged that oxygen levels were "highly dynamic" in the early atmosphere, with the potential for occasional spikes. However, they said, "It seems clear that there is a first-order difference in the nature of Earth surface Cr cycling" before and after the rise of animals.
"If we are right, our results will really change how people view the origins of animals and other complex life, and their relationships to the co-evolving environment," said co-author Tim Lyons of the University of California-Riverside. "This could be a game changer."
"There's a lot of interest right now in a broader discussion surrounding the role that environmental stability played in the evolution of complex life, and we think our results are a significant contribution to that," Reinhard said.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...103114.php
EXCERPT: The pathogen Giardia duodenalis is present in mussels from freshwater run-off sites and from areas where California Sea Lions lounge along the coast of California, according to a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis. One of the G. duodenalis strains found is known to infect humans; the two others occur mostly in dogs and other canids. "Thus, the detection of these assemblages implies a potential public health risk if consuming fecally contaminated water or uncooked shellfish," says coauthor Woutrina Smith. The research is published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology....
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...103114.php
AUSTIN, Texas— A new analysis of geologic history may help solve the riddle of the "Cambrian explosion," the rapid diversification of animal life in the fossil record 530 million years ago that has puzzled scientists since the time of Charles Darwin.
A paper by Ian Dalziel of The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, published in the November issue of Geology, a journal of the Geological Society of America, suggests a major tectonic event may have triggered the rise in sea level and other environmental changes that accompanied the apparent burst of life.
The Cambrian explosion is one of the most significant events in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history. The surge of evolution led to the sudden appearance of almost all modern animal groups. Fossils from the Cambrian explosion document the rapid evolution of life on Earth, but its cause has been a mystery.
The sudden burst of new life is also called "Darwin's dilemma" because it appears to contradict Charles Darwin's hypothesis of gradual evolution by natural selection.
"At the boundary between the Precambrian and Cambrian periods, something big happened tectonically that triggered the spreading of shallow ocean water across the continents, which is clearly tied in time and space to the sudden explosion of multicellular, hard-shelled life on the planet," said Dalziel, a research professor at the Institute for Geophysics and a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences.
Beyond the sea level rise itself, the ancient geologic and geographic changes probably led to a buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere and a change in ocean chemistry, allowing more complex life-forms to evolve, he said.
The paper is the first to integrate geological evidence from five present-day continents — North America, South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica — in addressing paleogeography at that critical time.
Dalziel proposes that present-day North America was still attached to the southern continents until sometime into the Cambrian period. Current reconstructions of the globe's geography during the early Cambrian show the ancient continent of Laurentia — the ancestral core of North America — as already having separated from the supercontinent Gondwanaland.
In contrast, Dalziel suggests the development of a deep oceanic gateway between the Pacific and Iapetus (ancestral Atlantic) oceans isolated Laurentia in the early Cambrian, a geographic makeover that immediately preceded the global sea level rise and apparent explosion of life.
"The reason people didn't make this connection before was because they hadn't looked at all the rock records on the different present-day continents," he said.
The rock record in Antarctica, for example, comes from the very remote Ellsworth Mountains.
"People have wondered for a long time what rifted off there, and I think it was probably North America, opening up this deep seaway," Dalziel said. "It appears ancient North America was initially attached to Antarctica and part of South America, not to Europe and Africa, as has been widely believed."
Although the new analysis adds to evidence suggesting a massive tectonic shift caused the seas to rise more than half a billion years ago, Dalziel said more research is needed to determine whether this new chain of paleogeographic events can truly explain the sudden rise of multicellular life in the fossil record.
"I'm not claiming this is the ultimate explanation of the Cambrian explosion," Dalziel said. "But it may help to explain what was happening at that time."
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To read the paper go to http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early...1.abstract
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-k...epublicans
EXCERPT: In January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious one: a vision for social psychology in the year 2020. Haidt began by reviewing the field that he is best known for, moral psychology. Then he threw a curveball. He would, he told the gathering of about a thousand social-psychology professors, students, and post-docs, like some audience participation. By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.
Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and, ultimately, publications. The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. “It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,” he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)
Haidt was far from the first to voice concern over the liberal slant in academia, broadly speaking, and in social psychology in particular. He was, however, the first to do it quite so visibly—and the reactions were vocal....
Gadgets for the contemporary era:
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/317...ng-gadgets
Plus some historical devices:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles...e-spirits/
EXCERPT: "Brandon Hodge collects some very unique pieces connected to an absolutely fascinating era in history when contacting the other side was a booming business. The late 19th century and early 20th saw the spread of Spiritualism all across the world which nicely coincided with the rise of modern photography, which was seamlessly incorporated into the business of making connections to lost loved ones. Hodge has a little bit of everything in his collection from across the entire scope of early spiritualism, from spirit photography to several different types of planchettes used with Ouija boards and a lot of 'spirit trumpets'."
