The Daily Brain If I offered to sell you a liquid extract made from the velvety coating of deer antlers, claiming that it will catalyze muscle growth, slow aging, improve athletic performance and supercharge your libido – I’d expect you'd be a little skeptical. But what if I added that a huge percentage of professional athletes are using the stuff and paying top dollar, $100 or more an ounce, and swear up and down that just a few mouth sprays a day provides all benefits as advertised? Would you be willing to give it a try? Ever since former Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis admitted a few months ago that he used deer antler spray (though subsequently denied it), the market for the stuff has exploded. Some estimates say that close to half of all professional football and baseball players are using it and a hefty percentage of college players as well, to say nothing of the army of weightlifters and bodybuilders that have made the spray a daily part of their routines.
Do the Eyes Have It? Dog domestication may have helped humans thrive while Neandertals declined Pat Shipman We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend. And we’ve all heard heartwarming stories about dogs who save their owners—waking them during a fire or summoning help after an accident. One of the classic conundrums in paleoanthropology is why Neandertals went extinct while modern humans survived in the same habitat at the same time. A stunning study that illuminates this decisive period was recently published in Science by Paul Mellars and Jennifer French of Cambridge University. Because not all the archaeological sites in the study contained clearly identifiable remains of modern humans or Neandertals, Mellars and French made a common assumption: that sites containing stone tools of the Mousterian tradition had been created by Neandertals, and those containing more sophisticated and generally later stone tools of the Upper Paleolithic were made by modern humans. Germonpré, M., M.
Groundwater Dropping Globally Groundwater levels have dropped in many places across the globe over the past nine years, a pair of gravity-monitoring satellites finds. This trend raises concerns that farmers are pumping too much water out of the ground in dry regions., says Science News Water has been disappearing beneath southern Argentina, western Australia and stretches of the United States. The decline is especially pronounced in parts of California, India, the Middle East and China, where expanding agriculture has increased water demand. “Groundwater is being depleted at a rapid clip in virtually of all of the major aquifers in the world's arid and semiarid regions,” says Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling in Irvine, whose team presented the new trends December 6 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. China, for example, has been shown to underestimate groundwater use. In some areas, short-term climate variability may be to blame.
Neuroskeptic Evolution of sight traced back 700m years to jelly-fish which first developed the ability to detect light By Daily Mail Reporter Published: 19:00 GMT, 29 October 2012 | Updated: 19:00 GMT, 29 October 2012 Sight developed 700million years ago, a study found. The exact point in time when ancient species developed the first rudimentary ability to see light has been hotly contested. Scientific opinion was divided over which sponges or jellyfish types species first possessed opsins, a group of light-sensitive protein-coupled receptors in photoreceptor cells of the retina. Fresh faced for 700million years old: The evolution of our sense of sight has been traced back to prehistory Bristol's School of Earth Sciences and colleagues looked at a newly sequenced group of sponges named Oscarella carmela, and the jellyfish type Cnidarians, a group of animals thought to have possessed the world's earliest eyes. Using computer modelling to provide a detailed picture of how and when opsins evolved. Dr Davide Pisani performed a computational analysis to test every hypothesis of opsin evolution proposed to date.
Amid Economic Strife, Greeks Look to Farming Past Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times Vassilis Ballas and his wife, Roula Boura, extracted the gum from a mastic tree on their 400-tree farm in Chios, Greece. As Greece’s blighted economy plunges further into the abyss, the couple are joining with an exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich rural past as a guide to the future. They acknowledge that it is a peculiar undertaking, with more manual labor than they, as college graduates, ever imagined doing. But in a country starved by austerity even as it teeters on the brink of default, it seemed as good a gamble as any. Mr. “When I call my friends and relatives in Athens, they tell me there’s no hope, everything is going from bad to worse,” Ms. Unemployment in Greece is now 18 percent, rising to 35 percent for young people between the ages of 15 and 29 — up from 12 percent and 24 percent, respectively, in late 2010. Enrollment in agricultural schools is also on the rise. Mr.
Modha's Cognitive Computing Researcher Explains Mysterious Evolution of Flatfish Eyes CHICAGO _ Some dusty fossil fish spotted by a sharp-eyed University of Chicago doctoral student as he rummaged through forgotten corners of museum collections in Europe have solved a question that has long vexed scientists. The puzzling question was: How did flatfish, a bizarre, highly specialized group of bottom-feeding fish that are some of nature’s most delicious creatures _ sole, plaice, turbot, flounder and halibut among them _ end up with both of their eyes on one side of their faces? Scientists have until now largely assumed the asymmetrical, one-sided eye arrangement was a trait that must have arisen suddenly in flatfish because they could not see a benefit for the fish if it took millions of years for an eye to migrate from one side to the other. Even Charles Darwin had trouble answering critics who used flatfish and their strange eyes as an argument against his evolutionary theory after he published it in 1859. “Matt’s (Nature) article is extremely significant,” said Thomas J.
A Punch to the Mouth: Food Price Volatility Hits the World Perfect Storms 2011 was an abysmal year for the global insurance industry, which had to cover yet another enormous increase in damages from natural disasters. Unknown to most casual observers is the fact that during the past few decades the frequency of weather-related disasters (floods, fires, storms) has been growing at a much faster pace than geological disasters (such as earthquakes). This spread between the two types of insurable losses has moved so strongly that it prompted Munich Re to note in a late 2010 letter that weather-related disasters due to wind have doubled and flooding events have tripled in frequency since 1980. The world now has to contend with a much higher degree of risk from weather and climate volatility, and this has broad-reaching implications. And critically, it has a particular impact on food. Commodity observers will note the rough correspondence with oil prices, and of course that’s no mistake. Food Stamp Nation The above chart of L.A.
Neurdon Mystery Of The Flatfish Head Solved June 25, 2012 Image Caption: This is a skull of the primitive flatfish Heteronectes, with views of the left- and right-hand sides. The left-hand side shows an eye that has migrated toward the top of the skull, but not reached the other side, in this adult specimen. Credit: Image by M. Those delicious flatfishes, like halibut and sole, are also evolutionary puzzles. A new fossil discovery described in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Oxford University researcher Dr Matt Friedman finally solves the mystery. “This fossil comes from Bolca in northern Italy, a site that has literally been mined for hundreds of years for its fossil fishes. Friedman noted that “The specimen itself was discovered–with no identification–in a museum collection in Vienna. On The Net: Source: Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
Indian Government Files Biopiracy Lawsuit Against Monsanto Source: Jonathan Benson – Natural News Representing one of the most agriculturally bio-diverse nations in the world, India has become a primary target for biotechnology companies like Monsanto and Cargill to spread their genetically-modified (GM) crops into new markets. However, a recent France 24 report explains that the Indian government has decided to take an offensive approach against this attempted agricultural takeover by suing Monsanto for “biopiracy,” accusing the company of stealing India’s indigenous plants in order to re-engineer them into patented varieties. Brinjal, also known in Western nations as eggplant, is a native Indian crop for which there are roughly 2,500 different unique varieties. And in an attempt to capitalize on this popular crop, Monsanto has repeatedly tried to commercially market its own GM variety of brinjal called Bt brinjal. “This can send a different message to the big companies for violating the laws of the nation,” said K.S.
Brain Waves