Tag: science

Sarah Palin and TLC

Seth Anderson0 comment

The rumors are Discovery Communications1 is paying Ms. Palin $1,000,000 an episode for some Alaskan reality-esque show. Nice work if you can get it, no? But will it be worth it to the network? Will the controversy keep blue chip advertisers from sponsoring the show, ala the highly successful boycott of Glenn Beck’s show?

Wrong Bus
[Wrong bus, Juneau, Alaska]

Sarah Palin used to say the only difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom was lipstick, but now she might hope that advertisers didn’t take that line too seriously.

It’s the hockey mom, after all, that would attract more marketers to “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” the eight-part documentary series that Discovery Communications has acquired for its TLC channel.

The show will be supervised by Mark Burnett, the force behind such TV hits as CBS’s “Survivor” and NBC’s “The Apprentice,” and will strive to “reveal Alaska’s powerful beauty as it has never been filmed,” as Discovery’s chief operating officer, Peter Liguori, said in a statement today. “The deal was just concluded this week and now we begin the development and production,” a Discovery spokesperson added. “TLC is about strong characters and compelling narratives, and there is absolutely no intention of making a political program whatsoever.”

But Ms. Palin, a figure as polarizing as she is charming, will be the star attraction. Even though the show won’t be political, her central role will have an effect on its audience and ad support.

Ad buyers are already suggesting that the show may not attract advertising from big marketers that need to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Smaller players, on the other hand, may see opportunity.

[Click to continue reading Will Marketers Buy Into ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’? – Advertising Age – MediaWorks]

Testimonial Kodachrome

And as many others have pointed out, Sarah Palin on a science channel? Sarah Palin who doesn’t believe in evolution, as if evolution is just an opinion to agree or disagree with; Sarah Palin who thinks man and dinosaurs walked the earth together, slightly over 6,000 years ago? Sarah Palin the avowed hater of secular liberalism, and presumedly anti-science? She’s the one getting multiple millions of dollars to appear on TLC? Why not just piss your corporate dollars in the ear of a dead moose and film that?

In tough economic times, “a lot of cable networks are walking away from their brands and trying to get ratings,” said Mr. Berger2. “They’ll do anything they can do to get ratings and it’s a short-term fix, but I think it’s really hurting many networks in the long term,” because such stunts often draw broader audiences that don’t stick with the channel.

Critics have already pointed out that Ms. Palin’s track record on the environment doesn’t necessarily pair up with that of Discovery Communications, TLC’s parent. In 2008, the company launched Planet Green, a cable channel devoted to sustainability, and a companion website, TreeHugger.com. Ms. Palin, on the other hand, has come to be associated with the chant “Drill, baby, drill,” for advocating the drilling of natural gas and oil in her home state.

Footnotes:
  1. corporate parent of TLC [↩]
  2. Ira Berger, director-national broadcast, at Dallas independent Richards Group [↩]

High-fructose corn syrup is the Devil

Seth Anderson0 comment

Well, you know what I mean.

corn_porn.jpg

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.

“Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

[Click to continue reading Princeton University – A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain]

Curious as to why that is. Also, isn’t it nice that the federal government subsidizes high-fructose corn syrup, keeping its price artificially low? Low price means high fructose corn syrup is used as an ingredient more often than if was a specialty ingredient.

Corn

Health Benefits of Exercise

Seth Anderson0 comment

Not telling you anything you don’t already know, but perhaps the Nth+1 article about the correlation between exercise and good mental and physical health will spark a response.

Cirque Shanghai Goldfinger

Regular exercise is the only well-established fountain of youth, and it’s free. What, I’d like to know, will persuade the majority of Americans who remain sedentary to get off their duffs and give their bodies the workout they deserve? My hope is that every new testimonial to the value of exercise will win a few more converts until everyone is doing it.

In a commentary on the new studies, published Jan. 25 in The Archives of Internal Medicine, two geriatricians, Dr. Marco Pahor of the University of Florida and Dr. Jeff Williamson of Winston-Salem, N.C., pointed to “the power of higher levels of physical activity to aid in the prevention of late-life disability owing to either cognitive impairment or physical impairment, separately or together.”

“Physical inactivity,” they wrote, “is one of the strongest predictors of unsuccessful aging for older adults and is perhaps the root cause of many unnecessary and premature admissions to long-term care.”

They noted that it had long been “well established that higher quantities of physical activity have beneficial effects on numerous age-related conditions such as osteoarthritis, falls and hip fracture, cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, cancer, diabetes mellitus, osteoporosis, low fitness and obesity, and decreased functional capacity.”

One of the new studies adds mental deterioration, with exercise producing “a significantly reduced risk of cognitive impairment after two years for participants with moderate or high physical activity” who were older than 55 when the study began.

[Click to continue reading Personal Health – Studies Show Further Health Benefits of Exercise – NYTimes.com]

Going to Work

Do I exercise enough? Probably not, especially in the bleak mid-winter. Photo-strolling for an hour or so is the most I do, and I should walk more often. I take the stairs in my building a few times a day, but again, could do better at avoiding the elevator if I pushed myself. My other favorite form of exercise is biking, and I’m too much of a wimp to bike in the cold. Snow is one thing1, but what really is brutal is the bitter wind.

Footnotes:
  1. affects braking, for instance [↩]

Afternoon Naps Increases Ability to Learn

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’ll go on record as being a huge fan of napping. Even fifteen minutes is enough for me to recharge enough to have a productive afternoon.

Don't disappear in your own life

It turns out that toddlers are not the only ones who do better after an afternoon nap. New research has found that young adults who slept for 90 minutes after lunch raised their learning power, their memory apparently primed to absorb new facts.

Other studies have indicated that sleep helps consolidate memories after cramming, but the new study suggests that sleep can actually restore the ability to learn.

The findings, which have not yet been published, were presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

[Click to continue reading Vital Signs – Afternoon Naps Can Increase Ability to Learn, Study Suggests – NYTimes.com]

Side note, I’ll also wager this is one of those stories you’ll read/hear about in many outlets. Catnip for the media, in other words.

Beer Drinkers and Bone Raisers

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Books and Beer

Apologies to ZZ Top for misappropriating their title

Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, have found beer is a rich source of silicon and may help prevent osteoporosis, as dietary silicon is a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density.

These were the findings after researchers tested 100 commercial beers for silicon content and categorized the data according to beer style and source.

Previous research has suggested beer contained silicon but little was known about how silicon levels varied with the different types of beer and malting processes.

“We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer,” researcher Charles Bamforth said in a statement.

The study, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, found the beers’ silicon content ranged from 6.4 milligrams per liter to 56.5 mg per liter. The average person’s silicon intake each day is between 20 and 50 mgs.

The researchers found there was little change in the silicon content of barley during the malting process as most of the silicon in barley is in the husk, which is not affected greatly during malting.

They found pale ales showed the highest silicon content while non-alcoholic beers, light lagers and wheat beers had the least silicon.

[Click to continue reading Study toasts beer as being good for your bones | Reuters ]

House of Beer

So quaff a couple of pale ales this evening, for health reasons only.

I’m sure the real science is more complex and nuanced, but hey, beer! Billy Dee Williams would approve…

This Establishment is Billy Dee Williams Approved

Mushroom Bricks Rock

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Alice in Wonderland

Amusingly intriguing mushroom-based building material called EcoCradle.

Mycelium doesn’t taste very good, but once it’s dried, it has some remarkable properties. It’s nontoxic, fireproof and mold- and water-resistant, and it traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. It’s also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete. In December, Ross completed what is believed to be the first structure made entirely of mushroom … The 500 bricks he grew at Far West Fungi were so sturdy that he destroyed many a metal file and saw blade in shaping the ’shrooms into an archway 6 feet high and 6 feet wide. Dubbed Mycotectural Alpha, it is currently on display at a gallery in Germany.

Nutty as “mycotecture” sounds, Ross may be onto something bigger than an art project. A promising start-up named Ecovative is building a 10,000-square-foot myco-factory in Green Island, N.Y. “We see this as a whole new material, a woodlike equivalent to plastic,” says C.E.O. Eben Bayer.

[Click to continue reading Reading File – NYTimes.com]

Time Magazine adds more detail:

After the husks are cooked, sprayed with water and myco-vitamins and seeded with mushroom spores, the mixture is poured into a mold of the desired shape and left to grow in a dark warehouse. A week or two later, the finished product is popped out and the material rendered biologically inert. The company’s first product, a green alternative to Styrofoam, is taking on the packaging industry. Called Ecocradle, it is set to be shipped around a yet-to-be-disclosed consumer item this spring.

One of the beauties of Ecocradle is that unlike Styrofoam–which is hard to recycle, let alone biodegrade–this myco-material can easily serve as mulch in your garden. Ecovative’s next product, Greensulate, will begin targeting the home-insulation market sometime next year. And according to Bayer’s engineering tests, densely packed mycelium is strong enough to be used in place of wooden beams. “It’s not so far-out,” he says of Ross’s art house. So could Bayer see himself growing a mushroom house and living in it? “Well”–he hesitates–“maybe we’d start with a doghouse.”

[Click to continue reading Industrial-Strength Fungus – TIME]

According to the EcoCradle website, the stuff will be available pretty soon

Food Allergy False Positives

Seth Anderson0 comment

So the common test of determining food allergy has questionable results, why is it still being used then? I always suspect the profit motive – pediatricians need that second condo in Aspen too…

vegetables

Grayson Grebe started getting eczema on his cheeks when he was just 4-weeks-old. At 6 months, he was diagnosed with allergies to wheat, dairy, eggs, nuts, oats, rice, barley, chicken, pork, corn and beans; his mother, who was breast-feeding him, had to stop eating them all. At 10 months, doctors cut out 20 more foods, including all fruits and vegetables, and put Grayson on a hypoallergenic formula. Even so, his eczema was so bad that his parents put him in mittens, long-sleeved shirts and long pants so no skin was exposed. “Otherwise, he’d scratch himself until he would bleed,” says his mother, Amy Grebe of Albuquerque, N.M.

At wit’s end, the Grebes took Grayson to National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver that specializes in allergies and respiratory diseases. Doctors there suspected that his food allergies might not be causing the eczema—and that some might not be food allergies at all. After carefully supervised “food challenges”—giving him tiny amounts and monitoring him closely for signs of a reaction—a number of foods went back in his diet. “We came home with 12 foods he could eat,” says Amy Grebe. “It’s made so much difference in our lives.”

For parents of children with food allergies, this may be both welcome and unsettling news: Many kids whose allergies were diagnosed on the basis of blood or skin tests alone may not be truly allergic to those foods, experts say.

Blood tests measure the level of antibodies, called immunogloblin E (IgE), a body makes to a particular food. But having IgE antibodies doesn’t mean that a person will actually have an allergic symptom when he encounters it.

…

The only way to know for sure—short of encountering the food in real life—is with a food challenge test in a doctor’s office or hospital. But those can be time consuming, expensive and nerve wracking, especially for parents who have seen a child encounter an anaphylactic shock, a life-threatening reaction in which multiple organs quickly shut down.

[Click to continue reading When Is Your Kid’s Food Allergy Really a Food Allergy? – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link to read the whole article]

Big Pot of Smiley Faces

Not that doctors are being malicious, they just are erring on the side of caution, using tools that are notoriously imprecise, responding to worried parents.

“Are these blood tests being overused? Possibly. Misinterpreted? Absolutely,” says Robert Wood, director of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who is part of a task force writing guidelines for diagnosing and managing food allergies. “A lot of these kids truly have food allergies, just not to all the foods that they are being told they have allergies to.”

In some cases, the blood or skin tests reveal antibodies to a food that the child has already been eating without problems. It’s easy to dismiss those results. It’s harder to know what to make of IgE antibodies to foods a child hasn’t yet tried. Children with eczema, like Grayson Grebe, tend to have IgE antibodies to a large number of foods, and it can be difficult to sort out which really do pose problems.

Blame it On the Brain

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“Proust Was a Neuroscientist” (Jonah Lehrer)

Fat Blak n Happy

Jonah Leher, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist1 posits an interesting thought regarding will power, and cognition

The brain area largely responsible for willpower, the prefrontal cortex, is located just behind the forehead. While this bit of tissue has greatly expanded during human evolution, it probably hasn’t expanded enough. That’s because the prefrontal cortex has many other things to worry about besides New Year’s resolutions. For instance, scientists have discovered that this chunk of cortex is also in charge of keeping us focused, handling short-term memory and solving abstract problems. Asking it to lose weight is often asking it to do one thing too many.

In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates were divided into two groups. One group was given a two-digit number to remember, while the second group was given a seven-digit number. Then they were told to walk down the hall, where they were presented with two different snack options: a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit salad.

Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Prof. Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain—they were a “cognitive load”—making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.

This helps explain why, after a long day at the office, we’re more likely to indulge in a pint of ice cream, or eat one too many slices of leftover pizza. (In fact, one study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that just walking down a crowded city street was enough to reduce measures of self-control, as all the stimuli stressed out the cortex.) A tired brain, preoccupied with its problems, is going to struggle to resist what it wants, even when what it wants isn’t what we need.

[Click to continue reading The Science Behind Failed Resolutions – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

Probably why during certain times of the year, like right now, when my brain is over-stimulated by work, I tend to keep my liver busy cleaning wine and other inebriants out of my blood stream. I knew there had to be a scientific reason.

In a 2002 experiment, led by Mark Muraven at the University at Albany, a group of male subjects was asked to not think about a white elephant for five minutes while writing down their thoughts. That turns out to be a rather difficult mental challenge, akin to staying focused on a tedious project at work. (A control group was given a few simple arithmetic problems to solve.) Then, Mr. Muraven had the subjects take a beer taste test, although he warned them that their next task involved driving a car. Sure enough, people in the white elephant group drank significantly more beer than people in the control group, which suggests that they had a harder time not indulging in alcohol.

The implications of this muscle metaphor are vast.…

In a 2007 experiment, Prof. Baumeister and his colleagues found that students who fasted for three hours and then had to perform a variety of self-control tasks, such as focusing on a boring video or suppressing negative stereotypes, had significantly lower glucose levels than students who didn’t have to exert self-control. Willpower, in other words, requires real energy.

Footnotes:
  1. which I own, but haven’t gotten a chance to read yet [↩]

Reading Around on December 18th through December 23rd

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected December 18th through December 23rd:

Reading Around on December 11th through December 12th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected December 11th through December 12th:

  • No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded) » Squidgate. Update. – I have three comments about the allegations therein. Firstly, the story claims that I was entering the US, not leaving it: this is empirically false. Secondly, I find it interesting that these guys characterise “pulling away” as “aggressive” behavior; I myself would regard it as a retreat. And thirdly, I did not “choke” anyone. I state this categorically. And having been told that cameras were in fact on site, I look forward to seeing the footage they provide.

  • Chicago Eats | Travel | Smithsonian Magazine – In 1951, author Nelson Algren wrote of Chicago streets “where the shadow of the tavern and the shadow of the church form a single dark and double-walled dead end.” Yet President Barack Obama’s hometown is also a city of hope. Visionaries, reformers, poets and writers, from Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg to Richard Wright, Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek, have found inspiration here, and Chicago has beckoned to an extraordinary range of peoples—German, Irish, Greek, Swedish, Chinese, Arab, Korean and East African, among many, many others. For each, food is a powerful vessel of shared traditions, a direct pipeline into the soul of a community. Choosing just a few to sample is an exercise in random discovery.


  • Butchers trimming pork bellies for bacon at Swift meat packing Packington Plant -1930

  • Earth’s Atmosphere May Have Alien Origin | Wired Science | Wired.com – krypton and xenon now present in the air — and many other atmospheric components as well — may be remnants of gas clouds swept up by the newly forming Earth. Or, they suggest, the gases may have been delivered to Earth by comets, in which the proportions of light isotopes for xenon and krypton are relatively higher.

Treatments for the Winter Blues

Seth Anderson0 comment

Melinda Beck discusses a topic of keen interest to me, living as I do in The Big Potato1, where the sun sets around 4:40 pm.2

Fading Blues, Winter Light

Seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, affects an estimated 6% of Americans, causing depression, lethargy, irritability and a desire to avoid social situations. It can also create an urge to overeat, particularly carbohydrates. As many as 15% of people in the U.S. may have a milder version that includes only some of these symptoms. The incidence rises along with the distance from the equator: Roughly 8% of Canadians, 10% of Britons and as many as 20% of Scandinavians suffer from SAD this time of year.

Light therapy, using beams many times more intense than normal light, is the most common treatment. But a host of new therapies—from simulating dawn in your bedroom and changing your thoughts through cognitive-behavioral therapy to taking mega doses of vitamin D—are having success in some patients.

Despite decades of study, experts still aren’t sure exactly what causes SAD, which is officially recognized as a form of major depression that remits in spring and summer. The seasonal and geographic patterns provide strong clues that it’s related to the diminishing daylight in the fall and winter. One theory suggests that the reduced light disrupts peoples’ circadian rhythms, the 24-hour biological clock that governs waking, sleeping and many other body functions. Another theory holds that the darkness wreaks havoc with neurotransmitters—brain chemicals that affect mood. Some experts believe the reduced sun exacerbates vitamin D deficiencies. It may also be that SAD has several different causes.

[Click to continue reading Treatments for the Winter Blues or Seasonal Affective Disorder Now Exist – WSJ.com]
[non-WSJ subscribers use this link]

We bought a goLite Blue last year (Feb 2008)


“Philips goLITE BLU Light Therapy Device” (Philips)

but there are cautions now being issued about degenerative eye problems. Yikes. Don’t know if the cautions are scary enough to get rid of the thing (seemed to help a lot last year), but perhaps I’ll have to curtail the device’s usage a bit.

A controversy is brewing over blue light, which some other experts believe can reset circadian clocks more efficiently than white light. Last year, Philips Electronics NV introduced portable models, the goLITE BLU, which uses shortwave blue light ($199), and the briteLITE, which uses white light with added blue spectrum ($230). A study of 18 moderately depressed patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, supported in part by the manufacturer, found that both types of lights used for 45 minutes a day for three weeks lifted depression in 82% of subjects. The study was published in September in a Scandinavian journal.

But some ophthalmologists worry that exposure to blue light could damage retinas and exacerbate age-related macular degeneration. Philips says the goLITE BLU is safe when used according to instructions, but anyone with eye disease should consult an ophthalmologist before using it.

Side effects to light therapy are usually minimal. Some users get headaches or mild nausea initially, and a few feel restless or have trouble sleeping. But the main downside is the time and daily diligence required.

so now what? I’ll have to look into the other treatments suggested by Ms. Beck: Dawn Simulation, Negative Air Ions, Vitamin D, Exercise outdoors, and others. Outdoors exercise is most likely to happen, but when the temperatures drop, we tend to stay inside more than we should. I’ll have to make a concerted effort to go on sub-zero photostrolls this year. Though, I don’t know what happens when the sun is hidden behind grey skies for weeks on end…

Golden Splashed Ice

Footnotes:
  1. Chicago, duh [↩]
  2. lovely grammatical construction, huh? Whatever, too pressed for time to write well [↩]

Conflicts of Interest Inherent in the System

Seth Anderson0 comment

No wonder the US model of pharmaceutical research is so fracked up.

The Hunt Club

In a report expected to be made public on Thursday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, said 90 percent of universities relied solely on the researchers themselves to decide whether the money they made in consulting and other relationships with drug and device makers was relevant to their government-financed research.

And half of universities do not ask their faculty members to disclose the amount of money or stock they make from drug and device makers, so the potential for extensive conflicts with their government-financed research is often known only to the researchers themselves, the report concluded.

[Click to continue reading Researchers’ Financial Interests Often Not Reported to U.S. – NYTimes.com]

Don’t ask, don’t tell, right? You keep your money, and we keep you on staff so that our university can use your name in our PR materials.

Most of the reported conflicts involved equity ownership in companies that could be affected by the results of government-financed research. In only a third of the cases did the universities specify to the government the size of the financial conflict and, among those, six had equity stakes valued at greater than $100,000. But in only 29 of the cases did the universities require researchers to reduce or eliminate their stakes. In most cases, the universities deemed that some sort of the disclosure of the conflict was enough to manage it.

Can you imagine this sort of arrangement for any other industry? Well, besides maybe defense contractors and Congress, but they at least have a couple of years of cushion between action and reward.

Fossils Shed New Light on Human Origins

Seth Anderson0 comment

Amazingly cool. I’m sure Sarah Palin and her partners in error1 think these fossils are planted fakes, but I don’t.

Evolutionary Moment

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today’s apes and chimpanzees.

The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind’s beginnings.

[Click to continue reading Fossils Shed New Light on Human Origins – WSJ.com]

Skull and Concrete

I don’t subscribe to the journal, Science, but I might look for this particular issue

Documented in 11 research papers to be published Friday in the journal Science, the fossils offer a detailed look at a species of sturdy, small-brained creatures that dwelled in an ancient African glade of hackberry, fig and palm trees, by a river that long ago turned to stone. Despite their antiquity, their bodies were already starting to presage humanity, the scientists said.

Indeed, unlike apes and chimps, they had supple wrists, strong thumbs, flexible fingers and power-grip palms shaped to grasp objects like sticks and stones firmly. They were primed for tool use, even though it would be another two million years or so before our ancestors began to fashion the first stone blades, choppers and axes.

But they were still evolving the ability to walk upright, with a big toe better suited for grasping branches than stepping smartly along, an analysis of their anatomy shows. They made their home in the woods, not on the open savannah grasslands long considered the main arena of human development. Yet their upright posture, distinctive pelvis and other toes suggest they walked easily enough. Most importantly, they showed no sign they walked on their knuckles, as contemporary chimps and apes do.

“They are not what one would have predicted,” said anthropologist Bernard Wood at George Washington University. Although the differences between humans, apes and chimps today are legion, we all shared a common ancestor six million years or so ago. These fossils suggest that creature–still undiscovered–resembled a chimp much less than researchers have always believed.

Note, these photos are mine, and have nothing to do with the new fossil discoveries.

From the Ann Gibbons article at Science:

Researchers have unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a putative human ancestor–and it is full of surprises. Although the creature, named Ardipithecus ramidus, had a brain and body the size of a chimpanzee, it did not knuckle-walk or swing through the trees like an ape. Instead, “Ardi” walked upright, with a big, stiff foot and short, wide pelvis, researchers report in Science. “We thought Lucy was the find of the century,” says paleoanthropologist Andrew Hill of Yale University, referring to the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton that revolutionized thinking about human origins. “But in retrospect, it was not.”
Researchers have long argued about whether our early ancestors passed through a great-ape stage in which they looked like protochimpanzees, with short backs; arms adapted for swinging through the trees; and a pelvis and limbs adapted for knuckle-walking (Science, 21 November 1969, p. 953). This “troglodytian,” or chimpanzee, model for early human behavior (named for the common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes) suggests that our ancestors lost many of the key adaptations still found in chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, such as daggerlike canines and knuckle-walking, which those apes were thought to have inherited from a common ancestor.

[Click to continue reading Ancient Skeleton May Rewrite Earliest Chapter of Human Evolution — Gibbons 2009 (1001): 1 — ScienceNOW]

Footnotes:
  1. the Creationists [↩]

Drinking May Lower Dementia Risk

Seth Anderson0 comment

Of course this is a superficial analysis, but still, pour me one!

Cocktail Lounge BW

People over 60 who consume moderate amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, according to a large review of studies.

The analysis, which appeared in the July issue of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, reviewed 15 studies that together followed more than 28,000 subjects for at least two years. All the studies controlled for age, sex, smoking and other factors. The studies variously defined light to moderate drinking as 1 to 28 drinks per week.

Compared with abstainers, male drinkers reduced their risk for dementia by 45 percent, and women by 27 percent.

[Click to continue reading Vital Signs – Moderate Drinking Over 60 May Lower Dementia Risk – NYTimes.com]

Always good to have one’s personal habits reinforced by scientists. Dementia is one of my most feared afflictions, anything I could possibly do to avoid it, I will. Well, anything that I’m already doing, that is.

Alpha Male a Mistaken Trope

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation” (University Of Chicago Press)

Apparently, the study of wolf behavior has advanced since the theory of an Alpha Male was first put forth by L. David Mech:

The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book “The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species,” written in 1968, published in 1970, republished in paperback in 1981, and currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it. Although most of the book’s info is still accurate, much is outdated. We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years then in all of previous history.

One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. “Alpha” implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents, and that’s all we call them today, the “breeding male,” “breeding female,” or “male parent,” “female parent,” or the “adult male” or “adult female.” In the rare packs that include more than one breeding animal, the “dominant breeder” can be called that, and any breeding daughter can be called a “subordinate breeder.”

[Click to continue reading No more ‘alpha male’! : A Blog Around The Clock]

I’d be surprised if the term alpha male stopped being used in non-wolf literature – too much time has passed, and the phrase has its own meaning now. Hegemonic masculinity, political pyscho-babble, you name it.