Skull Fossil Offers New Clues on Human Journey From Africa

Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By John Noble Wilford

Anthropologists exploring a cave in Israel have uncovered a rare 55,000-year-old skull fossil that they say has a story to tell of a reverberating transition in human evolution, at a point when and where some early humans were moving out of Africa and apparently interbreeding with Neanderthals.

The story is of when the Levant was a corridor for anatomically modern humans who were expanding out of Africa and then across Eurasia, replacing all other forms of early human-related species. Given the scarcity of human fossils from that time, scholars say, these ancestors of present-day non-African populations had remained largely enigmatic.

From the new fossil find, which could be closely related to the first modern humans to colonize Stone Age Europe, it appears that these people already had physical traits a bit different from the Africans they were leaving behind and many other human inhabitants along the corridor.

Could this support recent genetic evidence that modern Homo sapiens and their Neanderthal cousins interbred, perhaps in the Middle East and most likely between 65,000 and 47,000 years ago? The discovery team urged caution on the interbreeding issue, but noted anatomical features of the cranium suggesting that some human-Neanderthal mixture had presumably occurred before any encounters in Europe and Asia.

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Pareidolia in Politics: The Face of Faith’s Corrupting Influence

By Jeff Schweitzer

We gaze at the night sky and see the comforting order of constellations in the random distribution of stars. We look up and discern shapes of animals in the wispy condensation of clouds. We breathlessly share on social media images of Jesus onburnt toast or the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or Elvis as a potato chip. Welcome to pareidolia , the human brain’s amazing ability to perceive patterns, particularly the image of a human face, in what are in fact purely random phenomena.

In the Beginning…

We humans cannot turn off our instinct to see familiar shapes in the world around us; pareidolia means that our brains demand that there be order even when none exists. And just as we abhor the absence of visual order, we too are unable to accept the unsettling idea of “I don’t know” when confronted with the disorder of the unfamiliar. So we make up comforting answers to all that perplexes us, just as we create reassuring images from clouds and toast. By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world, that we see design and significance in the absence of both.

In the abyss of great uncertainty, our ancestors developed elaborate creation myths and gods of the sun rain and oceans to explain the mysteries and happenings of daily life. War gods helped in victory, or not. Fertility gods helped, or not. Religion was our first attempt to predict and manipulate the future; it was also our first stab at physics and astronomy. Ironically, as we gained knowledge about the physical world, the need for multiple gods diminished. As the gods of the gaps grew smaller, we rejected multiple deities to insist rather randomly there is only one. But as did our primitive forebears with multiple deities, we still believe we can communicate with our one god and influence his behavior, because by doing so we gain some control over, impose some order on, the chaotic mysteries of the world. So we still have one more god to go, one more to assign to the pantheon of the fallen. The early quest for knowledge led to religion; ever-greater success has obviated the need. Our very effort to understand nature ultimately undermined the means by which we sought to reveal nature’s mysteries. We are just slow to acknowledge that god is superfluous.

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Climate change could impact the poor much more than previously thought

Photograph: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images

By Dana Nuccitelli

It’s widely accepted that climate change will have bigger negative impacts on poorer countries than wealthy ones. However, a new economic modeling studyfinds that the economic impacts on these poorer countries could be much larger than previous estimates.

As a result, they suggest that we should be aiming to limit global warming to near, or perhaps even less than the international target of 2°C. This conclusion is in sharp contrast to current economic models, which generally conclude that the economically optimal pathway results in a global surface warming around 3–3.5°C.

Current economic models mainly treat economic growth as an external factor. In these models, global warming and its impacts via climate change don’t significantly affect the rate at which the economy grows. However, several economic studies have concluded that this is an inaccurate assumption, with a 2012 paper by Melissa Dell and colleagues taking the first stab at quantifying the effects of climate damages on economic growth.

The new study by Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford University calibrates the climate ‘damage functions’ in one of these economic models (DICE, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale) using the results from the Dell paper. They grouped the world into rich and poor countries, finding that while the economies of rich countries continue to grow well in a warmer world, the economic growth of poor countries is significantly impaired.

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Creating a ‘genetic firewall’ for GMOs

Image credit: Spencer Katz

By Monte Morin

Synthetic amino acids may one day allow scientists to create “genetic firewalls” that prevent GMO crops or animals from escaping into the wild and causing environmental damage, according to Harvard and Yale researchers.

On Wednesday, scientists announced that they had genetically engineered bacteria whose very survival depended on lab-formulated amino acids. By “locking in” this synthetic nutritional requirement, researchers said the bacteria would quickly die if they escaped their carefully controlled environment and entered the world at large.

“I don’t want to be alarmist or anything, but I think the point is that these organisms do spread,” said George Church, a Harvard Medical School genetics professor.

The altered bacteria, which Church and his colleagues dubbed genomically recoded organisms, or GROs, were described in a pair of studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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Atheist Parents Take On Christian ‘Good News Club’ With ‘Better News Club’

By The Jewish Week

A group of atheists in Rochester, N.Y., has bad news for the Good News Club, a Christian after-school club for children.

The group, consisting of atheists, humanists and skeptics, announced its own after-school program: a Young Skeptics club featuring science, logic and learning activities.

Young Skeptics is being sponsored by a volunteer-led group calling itself “The Better News Club.” Its members come from the Atheist Community of Rochester — the same group that offered the first atheist invocation before a town meeting in Greece, N.Y., after the Supreme Court ruled in May that public meetings could begin with sectarian prayers.

Both clubs are based at Fairbanks Road Elementary School in Churchville, N.Y.

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Chemists find a way to unboil egg whites: Ability to quickly restore molecular proteins could slash biotechnology costs

Image Credit: Steve Zylius / UC Irvine

By Science Daily

UC Irvine and Australian chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites — an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry, according to findings published today in the journal ChemBioChem.

“Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg,” said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry. “In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order.”

Like many researchers, he has struggled to efficiently produce or recycle valuable molecular proteins that have a wide range of applications but which frequently “misfold” into structurally incorrect shapes when they are formed, rendering them useless.

“It’s not so much that we’re interested in processing the eggs; that’s just demonstrating how powerful this process is,” Weiss said. “The real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes, and you want some means of recovering that material.”

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Competency-Based Degree Programs On The Rise

LA Johnson/NPR

By Anya Kamenetz

Competency-based education is in vogue — even though most people have never heard of it, and those who have can’t always agree on what it is.

A report out today from the American Enterprise Institute says a growing number of colleges and universities are offering, or soon will offer, credits in exchange for direct demonstrations of learning. That’s a big shift from credit hours — the currency of higher education for more than a century — which require students to spend an allotted amount of time with instructors.

A “competency” might be a score on a standardized exam or a portfolio of work. These are types of credit familiar to most people: think AP exams. But they are being applied to core requirements, not just used for skipping electives or introductory courses.

And in a newer, even more experimental trend, institutions such as Western Governors University are offering entire degree programs that allow students to move at their own pace, completing assignments and assessments as they master the material.

The major argument in favor of competency-based programs is that they will offer nontraditional students a more direct, more affordable path to a degree. This argument is especially made on behalf of older students who can earn college credits based on prior workplace or life experience. The AEI report, by Robert Kelchen, found that 9 out of 10 competency-based students are older than 25.

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Extremely short, sharp flash of radio waves from unknown source in the universe, caught as it was happening

Image credit: Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions

By Science Daily

A strange phenomenon has been observed by astronomers right as it was happening — a ‘fast radio burst’. The eruption is described as an extremely short, sharp flash of radio waves from an unknown source in the universe. The results have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Over the past few years, astronomers have observed a new phenomenon, a brief burst of radio waves, lasting only a few milliseconds. It was first seen by chance in 2007, when astronomers went through archival data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Eastern Australia. Since then we have seen six more such bursts in the Parkes telescope’s data and a seventh burst was found in the data from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. They were almost all discovered long after they had occurred, but then astronomers began to look specifically for them right as they happen.

Radio-, X-ray- and visible light

A team of astronomers in Australia developed a technique to search for these ‘Fast Radio Bursts’, so they could look for the bursts in real time. The technique worked and now a group of astronomers, led by Emily Petroff (Swinburne University of Technology), have succeeded in observing the first ‘live’ burst with the Parkes telescope. The characteristics of the event indicated that the source of the burst was up to 5.5 billion light years from Earth.

Now that they had the burst location and as soon as it was observed, a number of other telescopes around the world were alerted — on both ground and in space, in order to make follow-up observations on other wavelengths.

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Planets outside our solar system may be more hospitable to life than thought, research suggests

Credit: © marcel / Fotolia

By Science Daily

A study by astrophysicists at the University of Toronto suggests that exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — are more likely to have liquid water and be more habitable than we thought.

“Planets with potential oceans could have a climate that is much more similar to Earth’s than previously expected,” said Jérémy Leconte, a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto, and lead author of a study published today in Science Express.

Scientists have thought that exoplanets behave in a manner contrary to that of Earth — that is they always show their same side to their star. If so, exoplanets would rotate in sync with their star so that there is always one hemisphere facing it while the other hemisphere is in perpetual cold darkness.

Leconte’s study suggests, however, that as exoplanets rotate around their stars, they spin at such a speed as to exhibit a day-night cycle similar to Earth.

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Geophysicists find the crusty culprits behind sudden tectonic plate movements

Credit: © Mopic / Fotolia

By Science Daily

Yale-led research may have solved one of the biggest mysteries in geology — namely, why do tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface, which normally shift over the course of tens to hundreds of millions of years, sometimes move abruptly?

A new study published Jan. 19 in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciencessays the answer comes down to two things: thick crustal plugs and weakened mineral grains. Those effects, acting together, may explain a range of relatively speedy moves among tectonic plates around the world, from Hawaii to East Timor.

Of course, in this case “speedy” still means a million years or longer.

“Our planet is probably most distinctly marked by the fact that it has plate tectonics,” said Yale geophysicist David Bercovici, lead author of the research. “Our work here looks at the evolution of plate tectonics. How and why do plates change directions over time?”

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Preserved fossil represents oldest record of parental care in group of prehistoric reptiles

Image Credit: Chuang Zhao

By Science Daily

New research details how a preserved fossil found in China could be the oldest record of post-natal parental care from the Middle Jurassic.

The specimen, found by a farmer in China, is of an apparent family group with an adult, surrounded by six juveniles of the same species. Given that the smaller individuals are of similar sizes, the group interpreted this as indicating an adult with its offspring, apparently from the same clutch.

A fossil specimen discovered by a farmer in China represents the oldest record of post-natal parental care, dating back to the Middle Jurassic.

The tendency for adults to care for their offspring beyond birth is a key feature of the reproductive biology of living archosaurs — birds and crocodilians — with the latter protecting their young from potential predators and birds, not only providing protection but also provision of food.

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Do viruses make us smarter?

Credit: © Sergey Bogdanov / Fotolia

By Science Daily

A new study from Lund University in Sweden indicates that inherited viruses that are millions of years old play an important role in building up the complex networks that characterise the human brain.

Researchers have long been aware that endogenous retroviruses constitute around five per cent of our DNA. For many years, they were considered junk DNA of no real use, a side-effect of our evolutionary journey.

In the current study, Johan Jakobsson and his colleagues show that retroviruses seem to play a central role in the basic functions of the brain, more specifically in the regulation of which genes are to be expressed, and when. The findings indicate that, over the course of evolution, the viruses took an increasingly firm hold on the steering wheel in our cellular machinery. The reason the viruses are activated specifically in the brain is probably due to the fact that tumours cannot form in nerve cells, unlike in other tissues.

“We have been able to observe that these viruses are activated specifically in the brain cells and have an important regulatory role. We believe that the role of retroviruses can contribute to explaining why brain cells in particular are so dynamic and multifaceted in their function. It may also be the case that the viruses’ more or less complex functions in various species can help us to understand why we are so different,” says Johan Jakobsson, head of the research team for molecular neurogenetics at Lund University.

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Charlie Hebdo released as iPhone, Android and Windows Phone app to meet massive demand

Image credit: Reuters

By Alistair Charlton

The latest issue of Charlie Hebdo can be downloaded as a digital copy for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone.

Dubbed the ‘survivors’ edition’, the latest issue went on sale in France on 14 January and promptly sold out across Paris and beyond, as customers queued up before dawn to secure their copy of the satirical magazine.

Despite a usual print run of just 60,000, five million copies of the magazine are currently being printed, to be sold across France, the UK and beyond a week after two gunmen stormed its Paris offices, shooting dead 12 members of staff.

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Tory MP James Arbuthnot reveals pressure to hide atheism

By BBC

There is pressure on Conservative politicians to keep quiet about not being religious, a Tory MP has claimed – as he revealed his atheism for the first time in his 28-year career.

James Arbuthnot said he felt he could only now say that he is an atheist because he is not seeking re-election.

The North East Hampshire MP likened the need to keep quiet to the pressure that has been faced by people who are gay.

His was speaking in a debate on a bill to allow prayers in council meetings.

Mr Arbuthnot predicted that his public acknowledgement that he is “not in the least bit religious” was likely to “disappoint” some of his constituents and family members.

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‘Cyborg’ spinal implant could help paralysed walk again

By Sarah Knapton

Paralysed patients have been given new hope of recovery after rats with severe spinal injuries walked again through a ‘groundbreaking’ new cyborg-style implant.

In technology which could have come straight out of a science fiction novel or Hollwood movie, French scientists have created a thin prosthetic ribbon, embedded with electrodes, which lies along the spinal cord and delivers electrical impulses and drugs.

The prosthetic, described by British experts as ‘quite remarkable’, is soft enough to bend with tissue surrounding the backbone to avoid discomfort.

Paralysed rats who were fitted with the implant were able to walk on their own again after just a few weeks of training.

Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping to move to clinical trials in humans soon. They believe that a device could last 10 years in humans before needing to be replaced.

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Egyptian court sentences man to 3 years in prison following declaration of atheism

By Emir Nader

An Egyptian court handed out a three year prison sentence to a man accused of contempt of Islam and insulting the divine, on Saturday.

Karim Ashraf Mohammed Al-Banna was tried by a court in the industrial town of Idku, in the Delta governorate of Beheira.

The Idku District Misdemeanor Court allowed Al-Banna a bail of EGP 1,000 to suspend the prison time.

He is accused of using his Facebook account to publish articles that “belittle the divine”, according to the rights group Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE).

Ishaq Ibrahim, a researcher on freedom of religion and belief at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), told Daily News Egypt that Al-Banna declared his atheism on Facebook and subsequently was harassed in public. Upon seeking to file a report of the assault at a police department in Idku, Al-Banna was arrested.

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Joe Rogers: Making room for non-believers in God’s Country

By Joe Rogers

Framers of the 1890 Constitution wanted to make sure that heathens couldn’t seize control of Mississippi.

“No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this State,” Section 265 reads.

The provenance goes all the way back to the original 1817 Constitution, Article VI, Section 6: “No person who denies the being of God, or of a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State.”

With some minor wording variations, the same prohibition was in the 1832 and 1869 Constitutions, as well.

A problem – and this is not a minor problem – is that 50-plus years ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that such bans violate the United States Constitution.

Yet Mississippi and six other states still have them on the books.

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NASA’s Chandra Detects Record-Breaking Outburst from Milky Way’s Black Hole

Image Credit: NASA/CXC/Stanford/I. Zhuravleva et al.

By NASA

Astronomers have observed the largest X-ray flare ever detected from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This event, detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, raises questions about the behavior of this giant black hole and its surrounding environment.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is estimated to contain about 4.5 million times the mass of our sun.

Astronomers made the unexpected discovery while using Chandra to observe how Sgr A* would react to a nearby cloud of gas known as G2.

“Unfortunately, the G2 gas cloud didn’t produce the fireworks we were hoping for when it got close to Sgr A*,” said lead researcher Daryl Haggard of Amherst College in Massachusetts. “However, nature often surprises us and we saw something else that was really exciting.”

On Sept. 14, 2013, Haggard and her team detected an X-ray flare from Sgr A* 400 times brighter than its usual, quiet state. This “megaflare” was nearly three times brighter than the previous brightest X-ray flare from Sgr A* in early 2012. After Sgr A* settled down, Chandra observed another enormous X-ray flare 200 times brighter than usual on Oct. 20, 2014.

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Atheist group demands apology from Troy chancellor

By Carly Omenhiser

What started as a holiday message to students and faculty from Troy University Chancellor Dr. Jack Hawkins Jr., has now turned into a religious debate and the American Atheists demanding a public apology from the school’s leader.

On Dec. 30, Hawkins sent a message out to students and faculty containing a video that he said “speaks to America’s greatness and its vulnerability.”

The video, which has nearly a half million views on the video sharing website YouTube, is of Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen recalling a conversation with a Marxist from China who was completing a fellowship at Harvard.

Christensen said the economist told him before leaving that he had no idea how critical religion was to the functioning of democracy.

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Defects in solar cells made of silicon identified

Image courtesy of Investigación y Desarrollo

By Science Daily

Since he was a teenager, engineer Sergio Castellanos had the desire to study abroad to prepare and do research in the best laboratories, particularly on solar energy. With six years of stay in the United States, first at the University of Arizona and now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, his dream has come true:

“Working on defects found on silicon and their impact on the efficiency of solar cells made with this material.”

This research is carried out to obtain his doctorate from MIT.

“Dislocation is a defect that occurs at high temperatures, of 500 ° C onwards. In my research I analyze these defects and their impact on the efficiency of solar cells made from silicon, since this material is used in over 90 percent of solar panels worldwide .”

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