http://wamu.org/news/morning_edition/12/09/13/bird_biodiversity_could_be_key_to_stopping_west_nile raza rebel posted this in the bird watching thread. But if you're living in an area where west nile virus is thriving, you'll find this interesting.
Which is unfortunate, since they've done a tactical 180 under Jol and are actually playing creative attacking football now.
Sadly, it's starting to look like the "wall" (point at which the next level of discovery would require impossible amounts of energy) is closing in pretty quickly.
Well, it sounds like the Higgs did what it was supposed to do but supersymmetry has failed to show up when expected.
I'm glad the embedded video said it was TMBG. With the resolution on my screen it looked like Penn Gillette on drums and Steve Buscemi on accordian.
Seems We're All Part Neanderthal Well, a lot of us with European ancestry, at any rate. Ever since the discovery of the skull of an archaic human in 1856 in a cave in Germany’s Neander Valley, researchers have wondered how Neanderthals were related to us. For most of the 20th century, most scientists thought Neanderthals were our direct ancestors, one step ahead of us on what was often seen as a single, ladder-like line leading from primates to modern humans. But when researchers re-dated key fossil sites in the Qafzeh and Skhul caves in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s, they found that fossils of early Homo sapiens were 80,000 to 120,000 years old—older than the 40,000-to-60,000-year-old Neanderthal fossils in the same caves or nearby. This made it pretty clear that Neanderthals didn’t give rise to modern humans and showed they probably were contemporaries of our ancestors. We also know from fossils that modern humans arose in Africa 200,000 years ago or so and that Neanderthals lived in Europe starting at least 300,000 to 600,000 years ago and went extinct about 30,000 years ago.......in May 2010 ... researchers were able to get enough nuclear DNA from three female Neanderthals who lived in a cave in Croatia 38,000 to 44,000 years ago to splice together and publish the first draft of a Neanderthal genome. When they compared that draft genome with DNA from modern humans in Europe, Asia, and Africa, paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues found that modern Europeans and Asians—but not Africans—have inherited between 1 percent and 4 percent of their genes from Neanderthals. They proposed that we inherited this DNA from a few close encounters between our ancestors and Neanderthals, perhaps after modern humans swept out of Africa and into the Middle East but before they spread into Europe and the rest of Asia. This was not wholesale intermingling—nor was it classic multiregional continuity—but low-level interbreeding, they said. Either our ancestors had just a few hookups, perhaps as the first waves of modern humans moved into Neanderthal territory. Or, the two groups were well on their way to becoming separate species and, thus, were biologically incompatible and able to produce few offspring that survived and were fertile.
Weird, I was just reading about this yesterday while on an extended Wikipedia tangent. From what I saw it's even more complicated than that, the earliest human migrants from Africa, the Australian aboriginals and the Melanesians, share a genetic history suggesting interbreeding with Denisovans, another early human somewhat similar to Neanderthals living in Asia. And the humans showing commonalities with Neanderthals are all those that left Africa in a later migration, from Europeans to East Asians, although I'm guessing they'll tease out more details as more work is done. I love that the only human beings that it appears did not interbreed with our "primitive" cousins are the sub-Saharan Africans, who historically were considered most primitive by European culture....
Saw something about this on an episode of Horizon a year or so back. Interesting stuff. Edit: This is it I think...