A technique used to produce stone tools that were first found 500,000 years ago is likely to have needed a modern human-like hand, according to new research.

The technique is called 'platform preparation' - preparing a striking area on a tool to remove specific stone flakes and shape the tool into a pre-conceived design - and without the ability to perform highly forceful precision grips, our ancestors would not have been able to produce advanced types of stone tool like spear points. 

Platform preparation is essential for making many different types of advanced prehistoric stone tool, with the earliest known occurrence observed at the 500,000-year-old site of Boxgrove in West Sussex, UK.

One hundred years after the Great Influenza pandemic of 1918, global health leadership stands at a crossroads. The United States continues to expand its policy of isolationism at a time when international cooperation in health could not be more important. The state of pandemic preparedness and the necessary steps for protecting the people throughout the world was the topic of The Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs’ 2nd Annual White Paper.

Does your base personality change over time? Psychologists are conflicted over that, but Galileo once claimed the Moon did not impact the tides, so without a science foundation, or with poor data gathering, anything is possible. 

And we get both in surveys, which is why a new paper by social psychologists does little to advance psychological science - it declares personality is somewhat hard-wired and somewhat shaped by environment. Which everyone knew 4,000 years ago.

Some exoplanets with masses two to four times the size of Earth can be explained by large amounts of water - and they may be more common than previously thought, say researchers.

The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth's 0.02% (by weight) water content.

Urban poor people live in areas where there is more population density and higher pollution and more crime, that is no surprise. But pollution is relative in 2018, American air is so incredibly clean(1) that epidemiologists and activists have tried to define harmful smog all the way down to 2.5 μm (microns) in diameter in hopes of showing air quality is still a worry.

Particles to small you need an electron microscope to know they exist. Yet they try to same it is th same as real smog, an actual carcinogen. 

Do you know the works of Tim Blais, the guy behind "A Capella Science"? I sincerely hope you do, but otherwise this post is for you. Tim has a youtube page where he publishes his amazing works.

Tim sings modified lyrics of famous songs, and mixes them with multiple tracks of his own voice imitating each of the instruments of the underlying orchestra, or other choral voices. Until here you could well say there's nothing new under the Sun, except that Tim has been capable, through amazing mixing and editing skills as well as awesome vocal gift, of producing quite entertaining videos. But there is more.

A mummy dating from 3700-3500 B.C. housed in the Egyptian Museum in Turin since 1901 has never undergone any conservation treatments - and that provided a unique opportunity for some science.

And the results were a surprise. It was assumed the Turin mummy had been naturally mummified by the desiccating action of the hot, dry desert sand but chemical analysis showed that the mummy had undergone an embalming process, with a plant oil, heated conifer resin, an aromatic plant extract and a plant gum/sugar mixed together and used to impregnate the funerary textiles in which the body was wrapped.

DDT was banned by a politician in the US in 1972 and was banned a few years later in Finland, so how can it be causing autism now?

The answer is statistics. The same curve that can show autism is linked to organic food can link autism to anything and if you are at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health you are very much against corporations and in need of a way to get in the New York Times, so a recent paper links DDE, a metabolite of DDT, in the blood of pregnant women to autism.

Secondhand smoke remains controversial because it takes statistical manipulation to link it to any deaths. Yes, it can be harmful to asthmatics, just like perfume or a wine cellar, but a whole advocacy industry has not been built up talking about how wine cellars must be killing people. And the most comprehensive study ever done on secondhand smoke and mortality has never been shown to be flawed. 

About 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the gas in deep space was highly opaque to ultraviolet light and its transparency varied widely from place to place, obscuring much of the light emitted by distant galaxies. This opaque quality contains tantalizing mysteries about the universe.

That's because now the gas between galaxies is almost totally transparent thanks to being kept ionized-- electrons detached from their atoms--by an energetic bath of ultraviolet radiation.