Stone age remains of people with a penchant for home-cooked venison could represent a new human evolutionary line…
The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.
The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.
Named the Red Deer Cave people, after their apparent penchant for home-cooked venison, they are the most recent human remains found anywhere in the world that do not closely resemble modern humans.
The individuals differ from modern humans in their jutting jaws, large molar teeth, prominent brows, thick skulls, flat faces and broad noses. Their brains were of average size by ice age standards.
“They could be a new evolutionary line or a previously unknown modern human population that arrived early from Africa and failed to contribute genetically to living east Asians,” said Darren Curnoe, who led the research team at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
“While finely balanced, I think the evidence is slightly weighted towards the Red Deer Cave people representing a new evolutionary line. First, their skulls are anatomically unique. They look very different to all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago,” Curnoe told the Guardian.
“Second, the very fact they persisted until almost 11,000 years ago, when we know that very modern looking people lived at the same time immediately to the east and south, suggests they must have been isolated from them. We might infer from this isolation that they either didn’t interbreed or did so in a limited way.”
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Monkeys use vocalizations, facial expressions, and body movements to communicate. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein
Yoda, winner of the 2011 World’s Ugliest Dog contest, passed away Saturday at the age of 15.
Proud owner Terry Schumacher initially mistook the Chinese crested-Chihuahua mix for a rat when she found her abandoned behind an apartment building.
“I will miss her funny little ways,” Schumacher said in an email to the Hanford Sentinel. “Her memories will live on forever.”
Yoda took home the coveted World’s Ugliest Dog title at the 23rd iteration of the world-famous event, hosted annually at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California.
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Metal-on-Metal Hip Replacements More Prone to Failure
Recently, British regulators voiced concerns about the potential for metal-on-metal hip replacements to generate metallic debris that could enter into the bloodstream and damage muscle and bone. Now, a new study on the failure rates of hip replacements raises further concerns about the metal-on-metal implants. Data from over 400,000 hip replacements in England and Wales show that metal-on-metal hips have a higher failure rate than metal-on-plastic or ceramic-on-ceramic implants. In light of the findings, researchers say this type of implant should no longer be used. More …
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Martin Walser | Faith and Franz Kafka – We Cannot Retreat To Atheism
The European: You have written about man’s deep desire for justification. Where does that desire come from?
Walser: We can see the desire in everything that men have said, thought, and written to justify themselves. In earlier times, people felt they had to justify our actions before God. They did not think that they could truly speak for themselves, that they could act freely. A higher authority was invoked to judge man’s actions. From that, different religious moral codes came into being, all driven by our inability to justify ourselves.
The European: In addition to the religious component, you also mention a social component – justification of the rich vis-à-vis the poor, for example.
Walser: Yes, that was added later. However, the original desire for justification does not include a social component. In Christianity, the idea of mercy through good deeds entered history only during the time of Martin Luther. St. Augustine or St. Paul radically rejected that idea, and I was very impressed by that attitude: You were committed to a God against whom you had no powers. You were chosen, or not. That is a rather radical conception of human being, marked by a severe lack of human agency. But with Luther, religion came to be seen as a thing of the world, as practical. So you had to act in certain ways to be able to justify yourself. And the old wound of lacking justification has continued to bleed – that’s what I am interested in. The authors Franz Kafka and Karl Barth have quite a bit to say on that question.
The European: For Barth, lived religion is the “useful” religion of the church. He seeks to transcend the church to find pure religion. But isn’t religion always manifest in practice? I think that Barth was looking for something that does not exist, that he drifted towards dead ends and nihilism.
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‘The state is bankrupt, let’s face it,’ an editorial in the Greek daily Kathimerini concluded the day after a museum in ancient Olympia – left virtually unguarded owing to personnel cuts – was robbed in broad daylight. The furore over the country’s economic troubles has deflected foreign attention from the collapse of the political system, though it’s causing Greeks more anxiety than the disastrous drop in their standard of living. They know it has ceased to function and that it cannot be expected to bring about an economic recovery. Opinion abroad is that Greece has too much democracy and not enough of an economy and foreign creditors are determined to redress the balance. The terms of the latest bailout clearly recognise the critical condition of the state, but insist nonetheless on a reform programme whose aim is to squeeze as much money out of it as possible for debt repayment. According to the Independent of 19 February, ‘Greece will become an economic – and to a large extent a political – colony of Germany and its allies.’
Here is a sample of what to expect. Forced in February to accept a cut of 22 per cent in unemployment benefit – reducing it from €461 a month to €359 plus 10 per cent for each child – the government sought to stagger the cut to mask its severity. The troika, as the representatives of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund are known, insisted that the minister of labour implement the cut without delay. When he asked for time to consult his cabinet colleagues, he was told this would hold up the disbursement of funds for the latest bailout. The cut was announced the same day.
The government, devoid of legitimacy and public support, remains in power only because of its role in the continuing negotiations, which are largely fictitious since it is obliged to accept the troika’s demands. The fabric of democracy is unravelling.
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At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.
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The Man Who Broke Atlantic City
Don Johnson won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. Not long before that, he’d taken the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Here’s how he did it.
Don Johnson finds it hard to remember the exact cards. Who could? At the height of his 12-hour blitz of the Tropicana casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, last April, he was playing a hand of blackjack nearly every minute.
Dozens of spectators pressed against the glass of the high-roller pit. Inside, playing at a green-felt table opposite a black-vested dealer, a burly middle-aged man in a red cap and black Oregon State hoodie was wagering $100,000 a hand. Word spreads when the betting is that big. Johnson was on an amazing streak. The towers of chips stacked in front of him formed a colorful miniature skyline. His winning run had been picked up by the casino’s watchful overhead cameras and drawn the close scrutiny of the pit bosses. In just one hand, he remembers, he won $800,000. In a three-hand sequence, he took $1.2 million.
The basics of blackjack are simple. Almost everyone knows them. You play against the house. Two cards are placed faceup before the player, and two more cards, one down, one up, before the dealer. A card’s suit doesn’t matter, only its numerical value—each face card is worth 10, and an ace can be either a one or an 11. The goal is to get to 21, or as close to it as possible without going over. Scanning the cards on the table before him, the player can either stand or keep taking cards in an effort to approach 21. Since the house’s hand has one card facedown, the player can’t know exactly what the hand is, which is what makes this a game.
As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. That’s what Johnson did. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance.
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Today is the 15th of March, according to the ancient Romans the Ides of March.
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Ghost Riders in the Sky: Johnny Cash Great song by one of the best ever!
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Landing airplanes on moving ships is no mean feat, but this will be especially true when the airplanes are unmanned. Along with making decisions, autonomous airplanes will have to heed their human counterparts during aircraft carrier takeoff and landing — but can a robot read and understand arm-waving signals?
The problem is complicated in at least two ways — first, the airplane must determine whether the human’s hands are up or down, elbows in our out. Second, it has to red which gesture the human is making, and what it means. MIT PhD student Yale Song is trying to solve these problems.
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Broad or Dainty, Crocodile Snouts Pack Same Chomp
The plan works largely because the animals evolved a “design for generating really amazing bite forces,” said Greg Erickson, a professor of biomechanics at Florida State University. “And they didn’t mess with that. It has worked for 85 million years, and it is still working today.”
But questions have remained about the evolution of different snouts and teeth, which scientists assumed were related to bite strength.
Not so, Dr. Erickson and colleagues report in the journal PloS One. In an interesting evolutionary twist, it seems that snout shape, teeth and size evolved along separate paths. And the only factor that affects bite strength is the size of the animal.
“That was a huge surprise,” Dr. Erickson said. For animals with narrow, delicate jaws, like the fish-eating Indian gharial, he said, “everybody had just assumed they had really low bite forces.”
Mark Norell, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, said, “The bite force and shape of the muzzle are totally decoupled.”
The finding came from a decade of work in which Dr. Erickson and his colleagues measured the bite forces of all 23 living crocodilians and devised a way to calculate the bite forces of fossil animals.
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After the climax – (and other articles on sexuality)
New science offers tantalizing insights into the meaning of what we do post-sex, from sleeping to cuddling
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As many readers of the net and papers know, a man resigned his wall street job and placed a big op ed piece in the New York Times denouncing the culture of Goldman Sachs. He has been identified, and those on “the street” respond to his charges.
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