If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings. - Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal's Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center conducted the study with his colleagues. They determined some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals, but only in people of non-African heritage. "This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," Labuda was quoted as saying in a press release. His team believes most, if not all, of the interbreeding took place in the Middle East, while modern humans were migrating out of Africa and spreading to other regions. The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. They evolved over the millennia mostly in what are now France, Spain, Germany and Russia. They went extinct, or were simply absorbed into the modern human population, about 30,000 years ago.

Controversial climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton is currently in Australia on a lecture tour. He spoke not once, but twice to Adam Spencer this morning...because Mr. Spencer hung up on him. Download the audio files here: Part 1 + Part 2

An international team of scientists based in Scotland has decoded the full DNA sequence of the potato for the first time. - The breakthrough holds out the promise of boosting harvests of one of the world's most important staple crops. Researchers at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee say it should soon be possible to develop improved varieties of potato much more quickly. The genome of an organism is a map of how all of its genes are put together. Each gene controls different aspects of how the organism grows and develops. Slight changes in these instructions give rise to different varieties. Each individual has a slightly different version of the DNA sequence for the species. Professor Iain Gordon, chief executive of the James Hutton Institute, said decoding the potato genome should enable breeders to create varieties which are more nutritious, as well as resistant to pests and diseases.

A study released this week shows that when a person is peer pressured, they can form false memories, convincing themselves of different recollections of the past to fit what others insist is true. The study was published in Science this week.

Study subjects watched a movie in groups, then were questioned individually about it afterward. Four days later, subjects were questioned again. In 70 percent of cases, the researchers found, participants changed their recollection of the film to match their groupmates' incorrect memories. This held true even for questions that the subjects had initially felt very strongly that they had answered correctly.

The researchers called these "socially induced memory errors" because they found conclusive evidence that it was the group that caused the change in answers: Participants were hooked up to an MRI while answering questions, and their hippocampus and amygdala lit up when changing their answers after being told the group's memory differed from theirs, but not when a computer told them they were wrong. In other words, peer pressure convinced people they were wrong, as opposed to cold facts. In half of the socially induced memory errors, the false memory actually replaced the person's initial, true memory.

Mother Jones points out that the results of this study could explain why poll numbers show such high levels of support for statements such as "Obama is a Muslim" and "Obama is not a U.S. citizen" — statements proven to be wrong by evidence, but vocally supported by some groups.

A joint Norwegian-American report claims that 71 percent of alcoholics have inherited the condition genetically, a far higher total than expected or previously put forward. - The results of the project, which comes from cooperation between Virginia Commonwealth University and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, contradict previous findings that suggested genetic causes lay behind half of cases. The study, carried out in Virginia, conducted two intervals with a year’s gap between them of 4,203 identical and non-identical white male twins aged 18 to 56. Based on the research, it is believed that some genes involved in inheriting alcoholism control how the body breaks down alcohol, while others deal more generally with people’s predisposition to addictive behaviour.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has forever changed our view of the moon, literally bringing it into sharper focus and showing us the whole globe in unprecedented detail. - This rich new portrait has been rendered by LRO's seven onboard instruments, which together have delivered more than 192 terabytes of data, images and maps -- the equivalent of nearly 41,000 typical DVDs. "This is a tremendous accomplishment," says Douglas Cooke, Associate Administrator of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "The exploration phase of the mission delivered a lot more than it originally promised, and that's been just the beginning for LRO."

After the indignity of seeing its economy overtaken by China's earlier this year, Japan has clawed back a little pride, beating its east Asian rival to produce the world's most powerful computer for the first time in seven years. - The machine, nicknamed K – a play on the Japanese word kei, meaning 10 quadrillion, the number of operations per second it is designed to perform when it is completed next year – crushed the opposition when the latest rankings were announced at the International Supercomputing conference at Hamburg. It harnesses more power than the next five supercomputers combined, and is mush faster than its closest rival, designed by China's National University of Defence Technology. About 1m desktop computers would have to be linked up to replicate its performance.

A study found that whining is the most effective way of distracting people carrying out elementary cognitive tasks. - The sound of fingernails on a blackboard, people having loud conversations on mobile phones in public - the list of things that annoy us is extensive. But, as has long been suspected, the sound of a child whining is the most irritating in the world to adults, according to scientists. Participants who were asked to do simple subtraction while listening to a range of noises - including machine noise, infant cries and neutral speech - made more mistakes and completed fewer problems while listening to the whines of a child. 'You’re basically doing less work and doing it worse when you’re listening to the whines,' said study co-author Rosemarie Sokol Chang, a professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz. The results weren't affected by the gender of participants, or whether or not they had children of their own. 'It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, everybody’s equally distracted,' said Chang.

Lord Christopher Monckton appears in a powerful new video by CFACT in which he exposes the deceptions involved in Climategate, scientist by scientist. These scientists received more than $21 million in public funding, yet used deception to ensure that real world data did not interfere with the selling of global warming.

“When you listen to Chris Monckton clearly, logically and succinctly take you through what transpired at the University of East Anglia, it's like having a bucket of cold water thrown in your face,” said CFACT's Executive Director, Craig Rucker. “This will surely wake people up. Monckton holds nothing back.”

The video was shot at Berlin's Melia Hotel on Friday, December 4th during a climate conference co-sponsored by CFACT and several European think tanks. The conference included top scientists and experts, including Fred Singer, Nils Axel Mörner, Horst-Joachim Luedecke, and Henrik Svensmark.

“These scientists whom Lord Monckton exposes using tricks in place of science are no bit players,” Rucker said, “these are founding fathers of global warming and their credibility now lies in tatters. Sound science requires no sleight of hand. They have left their entire global warming argument more suspect than ever.

U.S. space shuttle Endeavour blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, kicking off its 25th and final mission. The event was important to the eyes of media and scientists in China because the shuttle carries the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) particle detector, mankind's most ambitious effort to date to explore the universe' origin with Nobel laureate physicist Samuel Ting as the program's principal scientist. The 7,000-kg AMS worth 2 billion U.S. dollars will be placed in the International Space Station (ISS) and an international team of more than 600 scientists, including many from China's mainland and Taiwan, have joined Ting's exhausting but respectable AMS program.

China's scientists have played a crucial role in designing and manufacturing some core parts of the device. However, Chinese journalists who hoped to cover the launching of Endeavour were simply denied entry to the site by a ban initiated by Frank Wolf, chairman of the Committee of Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in the House of Representatives.

Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.

More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings. Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings, including two suspected pyramids. The work has been pioneered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham by US Egyptologist Dr Sarah Parcak. She says she was amazed at how much she and her team has found.

"We were very intensely doing this research for over a year. I could see the data as it was emerging, but for me the "Aha!" moment was when I could step back and look at everything that we'd found and I couldn't believe we could locate so many sites all over Egypt. "To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist," she said.

The team analysed images from satellites orbiting 700km above the earth, equipped with cameras so powerful they can pin-point objects less than 1m in diameter on the earth's surface.

In a project carried out out by an international team of astronomers with a telescope in New Zealand , a new class of planets has been found out in the universe: planets that do not orbit stars, but float freely out in space.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Japan-New Zealand survey, which was conducted in 2006 and 2007. The survey looked at the galactic bulge at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. For their search, the astronomers used the 1.8-meter (5.9-foot) Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand. What the astronomers discovered were a new class of planets around the size of the planet Jupiter. They are called isolated orbs, orphan planets, or free-floating planets. A free-floating planet is any object in the universe that has an equivalent mass to a planet, in this case the planet Jupiter, but is not gravitationally bound to any star, brown dwarf, or other such object, Instead, it orbits a galaxy directly. They also found that these planets are floating freely in space, without orbiting a star. Astronomers conjecture that they are outcasts from developing planetary systems.

Heart disease is supposedly a modern affliction, the result of a diet rich in animal fat and too many hours spent on the sofa. But recent discoveries suggest that strokes and heart attacks may have been bedeviling humans for millenia.

Dr. Greg Thomas is part of a team of scientists that recently discovered the earliest known case of atherosclerosis — clogged arteries — in ancient Egyptian mummies. The startling findings mean scientists may not understand heart disease as well as they think they do.

Thomas tells Weekend All Things Considered host Linda Wertheimer that his team began by running mummies through a CT scanner.

"Our hypothesis was that they wouldn't have [heart disease], because they were active, their diet was much different, they didn't have tobacco," he says. But they were wrong.

One of the mummies the team scanned was a princess in her 40s, who presumably ate fresh food and wasn't sedentary. "That she would have atherosclerosis," Thomas says, "I think we're missing a risk factor. Right now we know that high blood pressure, smoking, cholesterol, inactivity and other things cause athersosclerosis, but I think that we're less complete than we think." Ancient Egyptians did have access to meat, though Thomas says their diet consisted mostly of grains, fruits and vegetables.

The Raptor Resource Project brings you the Decorah Eagles from atop their tree at the fish hatchery in Decorah, Iowa. The live video feed is streamed online 24/7. At night an infrared light provides night vision to viewers through the cam. Infrared light is not visible to eagles, they do not see it or know it is there.

First hatch 4/2/11.
24-hour collage of first egg pip and hatch
Second hatch 4/3/11.
First glimpse of second hatchling
Third hatch 4/6/11.
Close-ups of the third hatch

Spider Refuge [Photograph courtesy Russell Watkins, U.K. Department for International Development]

Trees shrouded in ghostly cocoons line the edges of a submerged farm field in the Pakistani village of Sindh, where 2010's massive floods drove millions of spiders into the trees to spin their webs.

Beginning last July, unprecedented monsoons dropped nearly ten years' worth of rainfall on Pakistan in one week, swelling the country's rivers. The water was slow to recede, creating vast pools of stagnant water across the countryside. (See pictures of the Pakistan flood.)

"It was a very slow-motion kind of disaster," said Russell Watkins, a multimedia editor with the U.K.'s Department for International Development (DFID), the organization tasked with managing Britain's overseas aid programs.

According to Watkins, who photographed the trees during a trip to Pakistan last December, people in Sindh said they'd never seen this phenomenon before the flooding.

Researchers say morality treatments could be used instead of prison and might even help humanity tackle global issues. A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries - these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that reviews scientific developments in the field. Drugs such as Prozac that alter a patient's mental state already have an impact on moral behaviour, but scientists predict that future medical advances may allow much more sophisticated manipulations.

Scientists have created genetically modified cattle that produce "human" milk in a bid to make cows' milk more nutritious The scientists have successfully introduced human genes into 300 dairy cows to produce milk with the same properties as human breast milk. Human milk contains high quantities of key nutrients that can help to boost the immune system of babies and reduce the risk of infections. The scientists behind the research believe milk from herds of genetically modified cows could provide an alternative to human breast milk and formula milk for babies, which is often criticised as being an inferior substitute. They hope genetically modified dairy products from herds of similar cows could be sold in supermarkets. The research has the backing of a major biotechnology company. The work is likely to inflame opposition to GM foods.

Berechnete Vertikalbewegung des Meeresbodens beim Sendai-Beben

She has spent hours on her hair and make up, bought a new outfit and done her nails. So perhaps it is only fair that her date should pay for dinner. Pretty women are less likely than plain Janes to offer to contribute towards the bill on a first date, research shows. But they are not worried about the expense - it is likely to be because they believe their date should pay for the pleasure of being with them, according to researchers at St Andrews University. The intriguing finding comes from a study of 416 men and women who were asked to rate themselves for attractiveness, ahead of going on a series of hypothetical dates.

Being low mouse on the totem pole is tough on murine self-esteem. It turns out it has measurable effects on brain chemistry, too, according to recent experiments at Rockefeller University. Researchers found that mice that were bullied persistently by dominant males grew unusually nervous around new company, and that the change in behavior was accompanied by heightened sensitivity to vasopressin, a hormone involved in a variety of social behaviors. The findings suggest how bullying could contribute to long-term social anxiety at the molecular level.

After wondering for some time whether it was possible to image the sky from one morning to the next where I live in Athens Greece, I decided to give it a try. After hours of planning and preparation, and a full day of shooting, the image above is the result of this labor of love. It took me about 12 hours to pull together and process a single image that included over 500 star trails, 35 shots of the Sun and 25 landscape pictures. My plan was to make the image on the day of the solstice (December 21) when the Sun’s stay in the sky was short (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the star trail durations were long. Of course, trying to find clear weather for a given 24-hour period is not an easy chore. However, I was patient, and the weather eventually cooperated (on December 30-31, 2010). I had to stay at the same place for approximately 30 hours. In addition, I was on location 2-3 hours before sunrise in order to make the preparations and test shooting. I also needed to stay an extra 2-3 hours the second day so as to shoot part of the Sun's sequence that I lost the first morning due to clouds. I chose Sounion (Temple of Poseidon) as the setting for this project.

I began the shooting the morning of December 30, 2010, taking photos with my camera on a tripod facing east. The day portion of this shoot is composed of a dozen shots covering the landscape from east to west as well as the Sun's course across the sky, from sunrise to sunset. I recorded the Sun's position exactly every 15 minutes using an intervalometer, with an astrosolar filter adjusted to the camera lens. In one of the shots, when the Sun was near its maximum altitude, I removed the filter in order to capture a more dramatic shot that showed the Sun's “glare.” After sunset, I took various shots with the camera facing west-northwest in order to achieve a more smooth transition from the day portion to the night portion of the image. The night portion is also composed of a dozen landscape shots but this time from west to east. After the transition” shots, I took a short star trail sequence of approximately half an hour duration, with the camera facing northwest. At 7:30, I turned the camera to the north and started taking the “all-night” star trail shots -- lasting almost 11 hours. After accomplishing this, I then turned the camera to northeast and shot another short half an hour star trail sequence, and then finally, with the camera now facing east-northeast, I took a series of night-to-day transition shots.

Guatemalans subjected to U.S. syphilis experiments in the 1940s are suing federal health officials to compensate them for health problems they have suffered. The lawsuit comes after revelations that U.S. scientists studying the effects of penicillin in the 1940s deliberately infected about 700 Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and orphans. None was informed or gave consent. Attorneys representing the Guatemalans asked the Obama administration to set up an out-of-court claims process similar to those established in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the 9/11 terror attacks. But they say they got no response by a Friday deadline and so filed the suit Monday morning. The Guatemalan experiments were hidden for decades, until a medical historian uncovered the records in 2009.

AWIP: Inquiry into US STD experiment launched
AWIP: US infected Guatemalans with syphilis in 1940s, Wellesley professor finds

Following explosions in at least two reactor cores at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant - and as the developing crisis is rated at level 6 of seven levels on the International Nuclear Events Scale - attention is turning to just what is happening inside the 40-year-old power plant in north-east Japan. Al Jazeera's Dan Nolan explains the ongoing situation.

BBC: Japan nuclear leak - health risks
RealNewsReporter: Fallout map
NYT: In Fuel-Cooling Pools, a Danger for the Longer Term

When Adlène Hicheur, a French-Algerian physicist working on antimatter at CERN’s enormous particle collider outside Geneva, was arrested on Oct. 8, 2009, on suspicion of conspiring with an Algerian branch of Al Qaeda, fears of doomsday plots rippled through the tabloid press. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, felt obliged to reassure the public that Dr. Hicheur did not have access to anything dangerous and that antimatter bombs as featured in the Dan Brown novel “Angels and Demons” were for all practical purposes flights of fancy.

Last fall, the Swiss government closed its investigation of Dr. Hicheur, saying it had found no evidence of wrongdoing, but in France, Dr. Hicheur’s detention was extended. Last month, it was extended again, by four months. Press officers for France’s interior minister, Claude Guéant, did not respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment on the case. So, more than 500 days after his arrest, Dr. Hicheur, now 34, remains in preventive detention in a Paris prison without having been charged with any crime. Nor, say his lawyers and his family, has any evidence been produced that he did anything more than browse Islamic political Web sites. No trial has been scheduled.

The refurbished Grant Museum of Zoology in London opened recently, allowing visitors a peek into a variety of their archived materials — including a the bones of a number of now-extinct species, including the dodo. Watch the video above, first aired on the BBC on March 14, 2011.

Researchers say they might have found the lost city of Atlantis, which is believed to have been swallowed by a tsunami thousands of years ago.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher and Hartford University professor Richard Freund told Reuters. "It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," he added.

The US-led team used deep-ground radar, digital mapping and underwater technology to survey the site the mud flats in southern Spain where the legendary city is said to have disappeared. The equipment that Freund describes as "an MRI for the ground," can determine what's in the ground down to about 60 feet.

"It's translated into color-coded maps and tells us what's there," Freund explained. "For example, the resistance of fired pottery is different than resistance of sand; the resistance of bone is different than the resistance of metal. And it all comes up in different colors."

The international team also used a satellite photo which shows a submerged city buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park north of Cadiz, Spain. [English]

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A NASA scientist's claim that he found tiny fossils of alien life in the remnants of a meteorite has stirred both excitement and skepticism, and is being closely reviewed by 100 experts. Richard Hoover's paper, along with pictures of the microscopic earthworm-like creatures, were published late Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Cosmology, which is available free online. Hoover sliced open fragments of several types of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which can contain relatively high levels of water and organic materials, and looked inside with a powerful microscope. He found bacteria-like creatures that he calls "indigenous fossils," which he believes originated beyond Earth and were not introduced here after the meteorites landed. "He concludes these fossilized bacteria are not Earthly contaminants but are the fossilized remains of living organisms which lived in the parent bodies of these meteors, e.g. comets, moons, and other astral bodies," said the study. "The implications are that life is everywhere, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets."

[This figure shows 12 consecutive states of a system driven by the model, with one unit of time equaling one update for every agent. In the first picture, a new idea is dominating but small specks of color represent a finite innovation rate. A new state dominates between the third and fourth pictures, and in the fourth, fifth, and sixth pictures, two coherent states coexist. New individual dominant states arise in pictures nine and twelve. Image credit: S. Bornholdt, et al. ©2011 American Physical Society.]

Scientific concepts such as climate change, nanotechnology, and chaos theory can sometimes spring up and capture the attention of both the scientific and public communities, only to be replaced by new ideas later on. Although many factors influence the emergence and decline of such scientific paradigms, a new model has captured how these ideas spread, providing a better understanding of paradigm shifts and the culture of innovation.

The model shows how a system with one dominating scientific paradigm transitions into a system with small clusters of ideas, some of which continue to grow until one dominates, and the process repeats with new ideas. The dynamics of the rise and fall of scientific paradigms depends on the system’s innovation rate. Systems with high innovation rates tend to contain a high degree of noise, along with many small domains of ideas that are constantly generated and replaced. In contrast, systems with low innovation rates tend to have low noise and a state that remains dominant for a long time until a single event replaces it.

Have you ever really looked someone in the eye? Unless you are an ophthalmologist, you have probably never seen the human eye this close.

While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, one of the most mysterious writings ever found – penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands – a research team at the UA solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?

University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript" – the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody has been able to make sense of to this day. Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in the UA's department of physics has found the manuscript's parchment pages date back to the early 15th century, making the book a century older than scholars had previously thought.

This tome makes the "DaVinci Code" look downright lackluster: Rows of text scrawled on visibly aged parchment, flowing around intricately drawn illustrations depicting plants, astronomical charts and human figures bathing in – perhaps – the fountain of youth. At first glance, the "Voynich manuscript" appears to be not unlike any other antique work of writing and drawing.

Wikimedia: Voynich manuscript