Women in foraging societies return to the same patches that yield previous successful harvests, and usually stay close to home and use landmarks as guides, he said. Foraging is a daily activity, often social, and can include young children, if necessary. When gathering, women must be very adept at choosing just the right color, texture and smell to ensure food safety and quality. They also must time harvests and know when a certain depleted patch will regenerate and yield good harvest again.
In modern terms, women are much more likely than men to know when a specific type of item will go on sale. Women also spend much more time choosing the perfect fabric, color and texture.
Men, on the other hand, often have a specific item in mind and want to get in, get it and get out, Kruger said. It’s critical to get meat home as quickly as possible. Taking young children isn’t safe in a hunt and would likely hinder progress.
A NASA team believes it has found fossil evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars – right here on earth, in a meteorite from the red planet that fell in Antarctica 13,000 years ago. The critters that are believed to have left their traces inside the rock would have been surprisingly similar to some microorganisms that live on earth.
If life really has evolved on two close-by planets orbiting the same star, I wonder what it tells us about how common life must be in the universe.
Two physicists from serious research institutions have proposed that the LHC’s problems may have been caused by time travelers sent back to our time from the future to prevent us from observing the Higgs boson.
We definitely should go on with the Higgs boson experiments. I’m dying to see what exactly got those future people so worried.
The skeletons of many dinosaurs changed so much as they grew up that scientists may have misidentified baby dinos of already known species (such as T. rex) as unique species. The video explains why it was useful for dinosaurs to have the shape of their skeletons change with age.
It’s not that difficult for a therapist to make you remember something that never happened to you, such as sexual abuse in childhood, by implanting false memories into your mind.
This can be a new and fun way of getting stem cells into the brain to treat conditions like Parkinson’s, strokes and Alzheimer’s – or maybe even boost your intelligence, if a way is found to make stem cells improve a person’s IQ:
Since proteins, bacteria and viruses can enter the brain this way, Lusine Danielyan at the University Hospital of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues, wondered if stem cells would also migrate into the brain through the cribriform plate.
To test their idea, they dripped a suspension of fluorescently labelled stem cells into the noses of mice. The mice snorted them high into their noses, and the cells migrated through the cribriform plate. Then they travelled either into the olfactory bulb – the part of the brain that detects and deciphers odours – or into the cerebrospinal fluid lining the skull, migrating across the brain. The stem cells then moved deeper into the brain.
Now all we need are stem cells suitably programmed to, for example, replace aged neurons, aged glial cells, and even aged cells in brain arteries and veins. Then snort up.
While others hunt for dinosaur DNA, a Canadian scientist is attempting to build a dinosaur inside a chicken egg by playing with chicken genes. He says he’s getting close to making a pet dinosaur for himself.
An American biologist says he could create the first synthetic species this year. Although an important breakthrough, it won’t be anything outwardly spectacular – as you’d think, they are starting out with synthetic microbes, not with new man-made species of intelligent mammals.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has a hypothesis that explains the development of bigger bodies and brains in humans not with a transition to eating meat but with a transition to eating cooked meat. Plus, why a raw diet is not healthy and how the concept of marriage began not as about power or sex, but food.
Scientists have unearthed a fascinating link between the financial status of a woman and the proportion of boys and girls she can expect to have.
The discovery adds to the increasing evidence that the sex of a baby isn’t just a matter of chance but is influenced by lifestyle and environment.
According to evolutionary theory, when conditions are good, and babies are likely to be healthy, a mother’s best chance of passing on her genes to another generation is to have boys.
Fit, healthy boys will see off rivals and can potentially father hundreds of children, ensuring the survival of the family line.
But if a mother is unfit or malnourished, a baby boy is a poor investment.
A weak, sickly male is unlikely to beat off competition from other males and may not become a father or even survive.
In these circumstances it makes more evolutionary sense to have a girl who does not face competition to become pregnant to continue the family line.
The breakthrough in stem cell science offers a potential cure for male infertility and could be used in IVF clinics in as little as five years.
It would allow thousands of men to father children that are genetically their own, possibly from just a sliver of their skin.
But the cutting-edge work is fraught with medical and ethical problems.
It raises the possibility of babies being born entirely through artificial means, and even the macabre scenario of long-dead men ‘fathering’ children from beyond the grave.
Mankind has dealt reasonably well with ethical implications of all kinds of discoveries so far, and I don’t see why that shouldn’t be the case in the future.
Trackr, the German Shepherd who helped find the last 9/11 survivor under the WTC rubble, has been cloned – not once, not twice, but five times:
A dog who was hailed for his heroism during the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been cloned.
Scientists said they have successfully produced five puppies who are genetic copies of Trackr, a German Shepherd who searched for survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Centre.
The puppies called Trustt, Valor, Prodigy, Solace and Deja Vu, are aged between two and six months.
The faithful hound died in April aged 16, but before he passed away his owner James Symington entered a contest that offered to clone a pet dog for free. It currently costs owners about £75,000 to clone their pet.
Trackr was judged to be the most ‘cloneworthy dog’ after the former police officer from Canada wrote an impassioned essay.
Five puppies cloned from Trackr, with the dog's owner James Symington
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is starting “Physical Intelligence” - a program that ”aspires to understand intelligence as a physical phenomenon and to make the first demonstration of the principle in electronic and chemical systems. A central tenet is that intelligence spontaneously evolves as a consequence of thermodynamics in open systems”. One of the program’s tasks is “building the first human-engineered systems that display physical intelligence in the form of abiotic, self-organizing electronic and chemical systems”.
Take any “paranormal” phenomenon, and as soon as people start looking for answers based in real science, they start finding them:
A newer theory suggests the arousal system is implicated, and that the near-death experience is triggered by the crisis. The idea is that rapid eye movement (or REM sleep, where most dreaming occurs, and where the sleeper is paralysed, with only the heart, diaphragm, eye muscles and the smooth muscles active) is involved. At the root of the theory is the notion that some people are more prone to a condition called REM intrusion, where sleep paralysis occurs when they are awake. It is found in people with narcolepsy, or excessive sleepiness, and it can be accompanied by hallucinations or delusional experiences that are unusually vivid and often frightening.
Research led by Dr Kevin Nelson, clinical neurophysiologist and Professor of Neurology at the University of Kentucky shows that, out of 55 people who have had near-death experiences, 60 per cent had at least one prior occasion where REM sleep state intruded into wakefulness, compared to only 24 per cent in a control group. “Instead of passing directly between the REM state and wakefulness, the brain switch in those with a near-death experience is more likely to blend the REM state and wakefulness into one another,” he says.
Researchers are identifying genes that give rise to a person’s physical traits, such as facial structure, skin color or even whether they are right- or left-handed. That could allow police to build a picture of what a criminal looks like not just from sometimes-fuzzy eyewitness accounts, but by analyzing DNA found at a crime scene.
Another use for this is designing babies: offering parents to create surplus embryos, select one with the desired traits – like blonde hair – to live, and kill the others.
