50,000 year old woman's toe reveals Neanderthals had sex with everyone
According to an international team of anthropologists and geneticists at the University of California, Berkeley, our ancient Neanderthal cousins were a randy and apparently not very picky conglomerate of sexual deviants. Thanks to their remarkable research, in which DNA was extracted from a 50,000-year-old woman's toe, the team at Berkeley discovered Neanderthals had a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at the time. The team compared the Neanderthal genomes with those of modern humans and a recently recognised group of early humans called Denisovans, discovering that Neanderthals and Denisovans are very closely related, with their common ancestor splitting off from the ancestors of modern humans around 400,000 years ago. The research team estimates that between 1.5 and 2.1 percent of the genomes of modern non-Africans can be traced to Neanderthals.
An Act to Provide for Surveying the Coasts of the United States; February 10, 1807
An Act to Provide for Surveying the Coasts of the United States; February 10, 1807 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States shall be, and he is hereby authorized and requested, to cause a survey to be taken of the coasts of the United States, in which shall be designated the islands and shoals, with the roads or places of anchorage, within twenty leagues of any part of the shores of the United States; and also the respective courses and distances between the principal capes, or head lands, together with such other matters as he may deem proper for completing an accurate chart of every part of the coasts within the extent aforesaid. SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to cause such examinations and observations to be made, with respect to St. SEC. 3. SEC. 4.
10 More Common Faults in Human Thought
Humans This list is a follow up to Top 10 Common Faults in Human Thought. Thanks for everyone’s comments and feedback; you have inspired this second list! It is amazing that with all these biases, people are able to actually have a rational thought every now and then. There is no end to the mistakes we make when we process information, so here are 10 more common errors to be aware of. The confirmation bias is the tendency to look for or interpret information in a way that confirms beliefs. The Availability heuristic is gauging what is more likely based on vivid memories. Illusion of Control is the tendency for individuals to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly have no influence on. Interesting Fact: when playing craps in a casino, people will throw the dice hard when they need a high number and soft when they need a low number. The Planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete tasks. Bonus Attribute Substitution
Floodplain
Paraná River Floodplain, at its confluence with the Verde River, Brazil. Astronaut photo, 2012. View of the flood plain following a 1 in 10 year flood on the Isle of Wight Gravel floodplain of a glacial river near the Snow Mountains in Alaska, 1902 Formation[edit] Flood plains are made by a meander eroding sideways as they travel downstream. Geologically ancient floodplains are often represented in the landscape by fluvial terraces. Sections of the Missouri River floodplain taken by the United States Geological Survey show a great variety of material of varying coarseness, the stream bed having been scoured at one place and filled at another by currents and floods of varying swiftness, so that sometimes the deposits are of coarse gravel, sometimes of fine sand or of fine silt. The floodplain is the natural place for a river to dissipate its energy. Ecology [edit] Floodplains can support particularly rich ecosystems, both in quantity and diversity. Interaction with society[edit] Notes[edit]
Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative
Scientists are using eye-tracking devices to detect automatic response differences between liberals and conservatives.University of Nebraska-Lincoln You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary. Click here to read more from Mooney on the science of why people don't believe in science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. That's a big deal. The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative.
ridgeline
Etymology[edit] ridge + line Noun[edit] ridgeline (plural ridgelines)
Wheeler's delayed choice experiment
Wheeler's delayed choice experiment is actually several thought experiments in quantum physics, proposed by John Archibald Wheeler, with the most prominent among them appearing in 1978 and 1984.[1] These experiments are attempts to decide whether light somehow "senses" the experimental apparatus in the double-slit experiment it will travel through and adjusts its behavior to fit by assuming the appropriate determinate state for it, or whether light remains in an indeterminate state, neither wave nor particle, and responds to the "questions" asked of it by responding in either a wave-consistent manner or a particle-consistent manner depending on the experimental arrangements that ask these "questions."[2] This line of experimentation proved very difficult to carry out when it was first conceived. Nevertheless, it has proven very valuable over the years since it has led researchers to provide "increasingly sophisticated demonstrations of the wave–particle duality of single quanta
You Can Look It Up - Geologic Words
When you get into geology, as opposed to rockhounding, the first thing you need is a dictionary. There are so many different things to keep track of—landforms, minerals, fossils and the parts of fossils—and so many of the words aren't English. Great language though it is, English just isn't up to the task. First, Go Native Lots of non-English words stand for geologic things that English speakers never knew about. Nevertheless there are still many examples of geology borrowing from native languages. A Coalescence of Traditions English speakers were not the only early geologists; most of the European nations have long traditions in Earth science. The combined lexicon from the geologists of Europe can be a formidable thing, especially when the languages overlap. But what if there isn't a word for something because it's never been seen before? The Latin/Greek Connection It was an accident of history that modern science began with Latin. Latin Largely Lapses
