December 18, 2006, 9:20 PM CT

Top 10 Myths About Evolution

Though the United States is the world leader in science and technology, many of its citizens display a shocking ignorance regarding basic scientific facts. Recent surveys have revealed that only about half of Americans realize that humans have never lived side by side with dinosaurs, and about the same number reject the idea that humans developed from earlier species of animals. This lack of knowledge in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution springs from a number of negative influences in contemporary society: poor secondary education in some regions of the country, misinformation in the mass media, and deliberate obfuscation by supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design.

In The Top 10 Myths About Evolution, educators Cameron M. Smith and Charles Sullivan clearly dispel the ten most common myths about evolution that continue to mislead average Americans. Using a refreshing, jargon-free style, they set the record straight on claims that evolution is "just a theory," that Darwinian explanations of life undercut morality, that Intelligent Design is a legitimate alternative to conventional science, that humans come from chimpanzees, and six other popular but erroneous notions.

Smith and Sullivan's reader-friendly, solidly researched text will serve as an important tool, both for teachers and laypersons seeking accurate information about evolution.........

Posted by: Ashley      Permalink         Source

December 12, 2006, 4:56 AM CT

Excavating Site Around First Baptist Church

Providence's First Baptist Church is the oldest Baptist church in America - but how was the area and its grounds used before The Meeting House was built in 1775? A group of Brown University students enrolled in Anthropology 160 are investigating that question while learning archaeological techniques, as they excavate the property surrounding this historical site.

Students at Brown University are conducting an archaeological dig on the property surrounding the First Baptist Church in Providence, at the invitation of the congregation. In addition to providing undergraduate students an opportunity to participate in hands-on archaeological research and excavation training without leaving campus, the project may document an important part of city history.

The excavations are part of Anthropology 160, sponsored by Brown University's Anthropology Department and the Artemis A.W. and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. The field directors are Zachary Nelson, a postdoctoral research associate in anthropology, and Katherine Marino, a doctoral candidate at the Joukowsky Institute.

"Archaeological practice can not be wholly described with words," Nelson said. "There is a necessary experiential element to archaeological work that can only be achieved through actual practice".........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

December 5, 2006, 8:37 PM CT

Measuring Carbon Without Destroying Trees

USDA Forest Service (FS) scientists have provided the first proof of concept for a method that allows researchers to study below-ground carbon allocation in trees without destroying them. In the latest issue of the journal Plant, Cell and Environment, Kurt Johnsen and fellow scientists at the FS Southern Research Station unit in Research Triangle Park, NC, describe a reversible, non-destructive chilling method that stops the movement of carbon into root systems.

The photosynthetic process of plants has been estimated to account for almost half of the carbon circulating in the Earth's systems. Reliable data has been developed on carbon cycling in the above-ground processes of trees, but how much carbon is actually moved and stored below the ground has not yet been determined. Most methods to study below-ground processes involve destroying the roots as well as the mycorrhizal communities that live symbiotically with root systems.

"Below-ground carbon allocation is one of the least understood processes in tree physiology," says Johnsen. "Being able to accurately measure it is essential for modeling forest and ecosystem productivity and carbon sequestration, but most methods disturb the root-mycorrhizal continuum that plays an essential role in nutrient transport".........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

November 30, 2006, 9:33 PM CT

Importance of Archiology

Often archaeology provides the only means to learn of the existence and behaviors of people in the past. A number of thousands of cultures and societies and millions of people have come and gone across the millennia of which there simply is little or no written record - no history - or for which written records may be misrepresentative or incomplete. Writing as it is known and understood today did not exist anywhere in the world until about 5000 years ago, and only spread among a relatively small number of technologically advanced civilisations. In contrast Homo sapiens have existed for at least 200,000 years, and other species of Homo for millions of years (see Human evolution). These civilisations are, not coincidentally, the best-known; they have been open to the inquiry of historians for centuries, while the study of pre-historic cultures has arisen only recently. Even within a civilisation that is literate at some levels, a number of important human practices are not officially recorded. Any knowledge of the formative early years of human civilisation - the development of agriculture, cult practices of folk religion, the rise of the first cities - must come from archaeology.

Even where written records do exist, they are invariably incomplete or biased to some extent. In a number of societies, literacy was restricted to the elite classes, such as the clergy or the bureaucracy of court or temple. The literacy even of an aristocracy has sometimes been restricted to deeds and contracts. The interests and world-view of elites are often quite different from the lives and interests of the rest of the populace. Writings that were produced by people more representative of the general population were unlikely to find their way into libraries and be preserved there for posterity. Thus, written records tend to reflect the biases, assumptions, cultural values and possibly deceptions of a limited range of individuals, commonly only a fraction of the larger population. As such, written records cannot be trusted as a sole source. The material record is nearer to a fair representation of society, though it is subject to its own inaccuracies, such as sampling bias and differential preservation.........

Posted by: William      Permalink

November 30, 2006, 4:53 AM CT

World's Oldest Ritual Discovered

A startling archaeological discovery this summer changes our understanding of human history. While, up until now, scholars have largely held that mans first rituals were carried out over 40, 000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place.

Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, can now show that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankinds oldest known ritual.

The archaeologist made the surprising discovery while she was studying the origin of the Sanpeople. A group of the San live in the sparsely inhabited area of north-western Botswana known as Ngamiland.

Coulson made the discovery while searching for artifacts from the Middle Stone Age in the only hills present for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. This group of small peaks within the Kalahari Desert is known as the Tsodilo Hills and is famous for having the largest concentration of rock paintings in the world.

The Tsodilo Hills are still a sacred place for the San, who call them the Mountains of the Gods and the Rock that Whispers.

The python is one of the Sans most important animals. As per their creation myth, mankind descended from the python and the ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:35 AM CT

New Meaning To Term 'Older Than Dirt'

A especially resilient type of carbon from the first plants to regrow after the last ice age and that same type of carbon from all the plants since appears to have been accumulating for 11,000 years in the forests of British Columbia, Canada.

It's as if the carbon, which comes from the waxy material plants generate to protect their foliage from sun and weather, has been going into a bank account where only deposits are being made and virtually no withdrawals.

Modelers of the Earth's carbon cycle, who've worked on the assumption that this type of carbon remains in the soils only 1,000 to 10,000 years before microorganisms return it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, will need to revise their thinking if findings published in the Nov. 24 issue of Science are typical of other northern forests.

"Our results about the resilience of this particular kind of carbon suggest that the turnover time of this carbon pool may be 10,000 to 100,000 years," says Rienk Smittenberg, a research associate with the University of Washington School of Oceanography and lead author of the paper. He did the work while at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research.

Soils harbor the third-largest pool of carbon in the world behind the carbon locked deep in the Earth as fossil fuel oils and coal and the carbon that is dissolved in the world's oceans.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

November 21, 2006, 8:32 PM CT

The Smell Of Money

It's not hard to recall the pungent scent of a handful of pocket change. Similar smells emanate from a sweat-covered dumbbell or the water emerging from an old metal pipe. Yet no one has been able to identify the exact chemical cause of these familiar odors.

Now, scientists supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) MUSES award and the UFZ Environmental Research Center in Gera number of have shown that these odor molecules come not from the penny or the pipes, but from metal-free chemicals erupting into the air when organic substances like sweat interact with the metallic objects.

The researchers--Andrea Dietrich, Dietmar Glindemann, Hans-Joachim Staerk and Peter Kuschk, all from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg--published their findings in the Oct. 20, 2006, Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

"We are the first to demonstrate that when humans describe the 'metallic' odor of iron metal, there are no iron atoms in the odors," said Dietrich. "The odors humans perceive as metallic are really a body odor produced by metals reacting with skin".

Because the makeup of byproduct molecules depends on which organic substances are reacting, the scientists believe the findings could help identify problem odors in potable water or aid doctors searching for disease markers in sweat or other body fluids.........

Posted by: Sarah      Permalink         Source

November 16, 2006, 4:21 AM CT

Neanderthal Genome Sequencing

The veil of mystery surrounding our extinct hominid cousins, the Neanderthals, has been at least partially lifted to reveal surprising results. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) have sequenced genomic DNA from fossilized Neanderthal bones. Their results show that the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals are at least 99.5-percent identical, but despite this genetic similarity, and despite the two species having cohabitated the same geographic region for thousands of years, there is no evidence of any significant crossbreeding between the two. Based on these early results, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis last shared a common ancestor approximately 700,000 years ago.

In a paper reported in the November 17, 2006 issue of the journal Science, a team of scientists led by Edward Rubin, director of both JGI and Berkeley Lab's Genomics Division, reports the development of a "Neanderthal metagenomic library," which they used to characterize more than 65,000 DNA base pairs of Neanderthal origin. Their results not only provide new information about Neanderthals, but also point the way to a new strategy for studying aspects of Neanderthal biology that would never be evident from archaeological artifacts and fossils.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source

November 13, 2006, 9:07 PM CT

Where Chimp And Human Brains Diverge

Six million years ago, chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor and evolved into unique species. Now UCLA researchers have identified a new way to pinpoint the genes that separate us from our closest living relative and make us uniquely human. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports the study in its Nov. 13 online edition.

"We share more than 95 percent of our genetic blueprint with chimps," explained Dr. Daniel Geschwind, principal investigator and Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine. "What sets us apart from chimps are our brains: homo sapiens means 'the knowing man.'

"During evolution, changes in some genes altered how the human brain functions," he added. "Our research has identified an entirely new way to identify those genes in the small portion of our DNA that differs from the chimpanzee's." .

By evaluating the correlated activity of thousands of genes, the UCLA team identified not just individual genes, but entire networks of interconnected genes whose expression patterns within the brains of humans varied from those in the chimpanzee.

"Genes don't operate in isolation each functions within a system of related genes," said first author Michael Oldham, UCLA genetics researcher. "If we examined each gene individually, it would be similar to reading every fifth word in a paragraph you don't get to see how each word relates to the other. So instead we used a systems biology approach to study each gene within its context." .........

Posted by: Ashley      Permalink         Source

November 7, 2006, 10:04 PM CT

Spectacular dinosaur skull comes back to Alberta

A "spectacular beast" is coming back to its original stomping grounds and making a new home at the University of Alberta--a coup that will allow its scientists to study the rare dinosaur skull up close.

"This is a very dramatic beast," said Dr. Michael Caldwell, a palaeontolgist who was instrumental in getting the skull to the U of A. "What we will have is a cast, but the specimen is one of a kind in the world. This is the last cast from the original mould and when you have a research quality cast where it is duplicated right down to a freckle, it doesn't get any better than that".

The fossils from this large herbivorous dinosaur were first found by the Sternberg family, who were hired by the Geological Survey of Canada to compete with Americans coming to Alberta to collect fossils. The Sternbergs gathered all kinds of bones, including the skull of Styracosaurus albertensis. "The specimen waccording tofect," says Caldwell. "And it's a big one--the skull is two metres long".

Styracosaurus had six long horns extending from its neck frill, a smaller horn above each of its eyes and a single horn protruding from its nose. It was a large dinosaur that could reach lengths of five metres and weigh as much as three tonnes. For almost a century, the original skull of Styracosaurus albertensis has been at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Now a cast of that specimen is on its way to Edmonton in a huge wooden crate on the back of a flatbed truck.........

Posted by: William      Permalink         Source