Headline of the Day
Trebek Not In Jeopardy From Heart Attack
Survey Shows Chimps Are Champs With Us Chumps
Survey: People know much about chimps
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- A Humane Society of the United States survey determined that people know more than they thought about chimpanzees, including the fact they are endangered.
The survey of 1,500 people, however, showed few knew the animals' lifespan is 60 years.
About 90 percent of the participants initially said they knew little or nothing about chimpanzees. However, more than 70 percent correctly responded that chimps can use sign language, use tools, count objects and have strong familial bonds. And, when shown photos of animals, including macaques, gorillas, baboons and chimps, 75 percent correctly identified the chimps.
"We are pleasantly surprised and excited about the knowledge that the humans have about chimps," said Humane Society spokeswoman Kathleen Conlee. "Our goal is to turn that knowledge into power to help chimpanzees who are subjected to harmful research and have been confined in laboratories for decades."
The Humane Society said approximately 1,300 chimpanzees live in nine U.S. laboratories today, with nearly half of them owned by the U.S. government. The chimps might spend their entire lives being used in experiments.
Love stinks all right
Body Odor Called Key Romantic Attraction
DNA Dating Service Comes To Boston
If body odor is a key to romantic attraction, a Florida company claims to have the first scientific way of finding true love.
A new dating service that says it's the first to use DNA matching to find that "perfect someone" is scheduled to launch in Boston Tuesday.
ScientificMatch.com promises its technology will use DNA to find a date with "a natural odor you'll love, with whom you'd have healthier children and a more satisfying sex life."
In analyzing DNA, the company said it looks at immune system genes and identifies compatible mates from people with different immune systems.
"Nature attracts us to our genetic matches with our noses. The fact is, we love how other people smell when their immune systems are different from ours—they smell sexier," the company wrote in a release on its Web site.
The DNA collection technique will look familiar to viewers of "Law & Order" and "CSI". The company sends sealed cotton swabs and instructs customers to swab the insides of their cheeks. The company promises to keep the genetic information private by giving its labs only customer numbers, not names.
The Boston area could be a fertile market for the service. With its large numbers of college students and recent graduates, 39 percent of the population is single, according to Sperling's Bestplaces.com Web Site.
Woman who take birth control pills, use hormonal patches or implants aren't good candidates. The hormones, the company said, leads women to be attracted to different people than those using other forms of contraception.
Finding one's soul-mate doesn't come cheap. The service costs $1,995, which includes the DNA matching and a background check on prospective dates.
The company said it will not allow anyone who's been convicted of a sexual offense, a violent crime or an Internet crime to be a member.
All is pheromones in love and war.
This morning I couldn't walk upright. By the middle of the afternoon I had mastered both long division and Latin.
Rapid acceleration in human evolution described
By Reuters
Tuesday December 11, 04:40 AM
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday.
In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.
The genetic changes have related to numerous different human characteristics, the researchers said.
Many of the recent genetic changes reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases that became mass killers following the growth of human civilizations, the researchers said.
For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults. In Asians, there is a gene that makes ear wax more dry.
The changes have been driven by the colossal growth in the human population -- from a few million to 6.5 billion in the past 10,000 years -- with people moving into new environments to which they needed to adapt, added Henry Harpending, a University of Utah anthropologist.
"The central finding is that human evolution is happening very fast -- faster than any of us thought," Harpending said in a telephone interview.
"Most of the acceleration is in the last 10,000 years, basically corresponding to population growth after agriculture is invented," Hawks said in a telephone interview.
Beneficial genetic changes have appeared at a rate roughly 100 times higher in the past 5,000 years than at any previous period of human evolution, the researchers determined. They added that about 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, relatively recent evolution.
Even with these changes, however, human DNA remains more than 99 percent identical, the researchers noted.
Harpending said the genetic evidence shows that people worldwide have been getting less similar rather than more similar due to the relatively recent genetic changes.
Genes have evolved relatively quickly in Africa, Asia and Europe but almost all of the changes have been unique to their corner of the world. This is the case, he said, because since humans dispersed from Africa to other parts of the world about 40,000 years ago, there has not been much flow of genes between the regions.
Terrence McKenna, meet novelty. Novelty, meet Mr. McKenna.
Other Headline of the day
Cave will serve cheeseheads, not potheads
Wisconsin firm buys ex-marijuana grotto for 'tasty' enterprise
(Tennessean.com)
Other other headline of the day
Turkey trots through third-story window
(Traverse City Record-Eagle)
That’s good writtin’ :Music edition
(From CNN/AP)
"But Page showed he still has the touch as well. Besides ripping out his patented riffs all night, he put the spotlight on himself when the band played the bluesy "In My Time of Dying."
With his left hand moving freely up and down the neck of his guitar and the metal slide wrapped around one of his fingers, Page effortlessly played a song that's not easy to master."
Wow, Jimmy Page played just like.. Jimmy Page. Get out
Maybe they just want to go antiquing
In Fruit Flies, Homosexuality Is Biological But Not Hard-wired, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2007) — While the biological basis for homosexuality remains a mystery, a team of neurobiologists reports they may have closed in on an answer -- by a nose.
The team led by University of Illinois at Chicago researcher David Featherstone has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies' homosexual behavior on and off within hours.
Featherstone, associate professor of biological sciences at UIC, and his coworkers discovered a gene in fruit flies they called "genderblind," or GB. A mutation in GB turns flies bisexual.
Featherstone found the gene interesting initially because it has the unusual ability to transport the neurotransmitter glutamate out of glial cells -- cells that support and nourish nerve cells but do not fire like neurons do. Previous work from his laboratory showed that changing the amount of glutamate outside cells can change the strength of nerve cell junctions, or synapses, which play a key role in human and animal behavior.
But the GB gene became even more interesting when post-doctoral researcher Yael Grosjean noticed that all the GB mutant male flies were courting other males.
Antarctica believed to be one big fossil
Massive dinosaur discovered in Antarctica
CHICAGO, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- U.S. and Argentine scientists working in Antarctica have discovered a new genus and species of massive dinosaur from the Jurassic period.
Field Museum researchers in Chicago said the giant plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190 million years ago.
The partial skeleton of the dinosaur was found on Mt. Kirkpatrick near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet.
Nathan Smith, a graduate student at the Field Museum, said the discovery is important because it helps establish that primitive sauropodomorph dinosaurs were more broadly distributed than previously thought, coexisting with their cousins, the true sauropods.
Glacialisaurus hammeri was about 20-25 feet long and weighed about 4-6 tons, Smith said. It was named after William Hammer, a professor at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., who led the two field trips to Antarctica that uncovered the fossils.
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