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Oct. 5th, 2010
Neanderthals’ Big Loss in Battle of the Elements
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Homo sapiens may not have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, as some scientists have hypothesized; it may have been the weather that did them in.
Volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago devastated Neanderthals in Western Asia and in Europe, anthropologists report in Current Anthropology.
Naomi Cleghorn, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, and colleagues studied a Neanderthal site in the Caucasus Mountains of southwestern Russia. They were able to identify volcanic ash from two separate eruptions that occurred in the area between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago.
( Read more... )
Blue Whales With Pearly Whites, Once Upon a Time
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Blue whales are enormous, magnificent creatures. The largest mammals known to have existed, they can grow to be more than 100 feet in length and weigh more than 100 tons, and they don’t even have teeth.
They capture prey using a giant sieve in their mouth of baleen or whalebone.
Made of keratin, like fingernails, baleen allows whales to swallow large amounts of food while filtering out seawater.
At one time, however, baleen whales did have teeth. Now, scientists have found the first genetic evidence for the loss of teeth in the common ancestor of all baleen whales.
The research appears in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The scientists found that a single gene, called the enamelysin gene, which is critical to the formation of enamel in all mammals, and in some other creatures, was inactivated in the common ancestor of baleen whales.
( Read more... )
U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.
Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.
The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.
Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.
( Read more... )
Rediscovering the First Miracle Drug
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Every few months some miracle drug or other is rolled out with bells and confetti, but only once or twice in a generation does the real thing come along.
These are the blockbuster medications that can virtually raise the dead, and while the debuts of some, like the AIDS drugs, are still fresh in memory, the birth of the first one is almost forgotten. It was injectable insulin, long sought by researchers all over the world and finally isolated in 1921 by a team of squabbling Canadians. With insulin, dying children laughed and played again, as parents wept and doctors spoke of biblical resurrections.
Visitors to a new exhibition opening Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society will find a story made particularly vivid by dramatic visuals, for insulin’s miracle was more than a matter of better blood tests. As in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, it actually put flesh on living skeletons.
( Read more... )
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Homo sapiens may not have pushed Neanderthals to extinction, as some scientists have hypothesized; it may have been the weather that did them in.
Volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago devastated Neanderthals in Western Asia and in Europe, anthropologists report in Current Anthropology.
Naomi Cleghorn, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, and colleagues studied a Neanderthal site in the Caucasus Mountains of southwestern Russia. They were able to identify volcanic ash from two separate eruptions that occurred in the area between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago.
( Read more... )
Blue Whales With Pearly Whites, Once Upon a Time
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Blue whales are enormous, magnificent creatures. The largest mammals known to have existed, they can grow to be more than 100 feet in length and weigh more than 100 tons, and they don’t even have teeth.
They capture prey using a giant sieve in their mouth of baleen or whalebone.
Made of keratin, like fingernails, baleen allows whales to swallow large amounts of food while filtering out seawater.
At one time, however, baleen whales did have teeth. Now, scientists have found the first genetic evidence for the loss of teeth in the common ancestor of all baleen whales.
The research appears in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
The scientists found that a single gene, called the enamelysin gene, which is critical to the formation of enamel in all mammals, and in some other creatures, was inactivated in the common ancestor of baleen whales.
( Read more... )
U.S. Military Orders Less Dependence on Fossil Fuels
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, The New York Times, October 4, 2010
With insurgents increasingly attacking the American fuel supply convoys that lumber across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the military is pushing aggressively to develop, test and deploy renewable energy to decrease its need to transport fossil fuels.
Last week, a Marine company from California arrived in the rugged outback of Helmand Province bearing novel equipment: portable solar panels that fold up into boxes; energy-conserving lights; solar tent shields that provide shade and electricity; solar chargers for computers and communications equipment.
The 150 Marines of Company I, Third Battalion, Fifth Marines, will be the first to take renewable technology into a battle zone, where the new equipment will replace diesel and kerosene-based fuels that would ordinarily generate power to run their encampment.
Even as Congress has struggled unsuccessfully to pass an energy bill and many states have put renewable energy on hold because of the recession, the military this year has pushed rapidly forward. After a decade of waging wars in remote corners of the globe where fuel is not readily available, senior commanders have come to see overdependence on fossil fuel as a big liability, and renewable technologies — which have become more reliable and less expensive over the past few years — as providing a potential answer. These new types of renewable energy now account for only a small percentage of the power used by the armed forces, but military leaders plan to rapidly expand their use over the next decade.
( Read more... )
Rediscovering the First Miracle Drug
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D., The New York Times, October 4, 2010
Every few months some miracle drug or other is rolled out with bells and confetti, but only once or twice in a generation does the real thing come along.
These are the blockbuster medications that can virtually raise the dead, and while the debuts of some, like the AIDS drugs, are still fresh in memory, the birth of the first one is almost forgotten. It was injectable insulin, long sought by researchers all over the world and finally isolated in 1921 by a team of squabbling Canadians. With insulin, dying children laughed and played again, as parents wept and doctors spoke of biblical resurrections.
Visitors to a new exhibition opening Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society will find a story made particularly vivid by dramatic visuals, for insulin’s miracle was more than a matter of better blood tests. As in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, it actually put flesh on living skeletons.
( Read more... )