Other than simple curiosity about our ancestors, why do we care whether an adult from 4,000 years ago could drink milk without getting a stomachache? The answers could change our ideas about the speed at which our evolution has occurred and if we are stuck with ancient genes and ancient bodies in a modern environment. It's reasonable to speculate that humans aren't suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies may have been better suited to how we spent the first 99% of our existence, the claim goes. In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, called "paleofantasies."
If your child likes playing an instrument, or you want them to be well-rounded, by all means get them music lessons; but parents who bought into social science claims that it makes kids more 'intelligent' are basically wasting money.Music is great, I have played guitar for 35 years, but I never bought into the hype that music was a contributing factor in making me much smarter than you.
Turkey is the most secular of the Muslim countries in the world - some women wear headscarves (hijab), some do not. They are optional.So when Turkish astrophysicst Rennan Pekünlü, who teaches at Ege University in Izmir, told women they could not wear headscarves in his classroom, he was bought up on criminal charges after a woman complained. He was found guilty of violating the freedoms and rights of women at the university. He argued that he was upholding the Turkish constitution, which prohibits the display of religious symbols or affiliation in government offices and institutions supported by government funding. He was also found to be taking pictures of women who entered wearing headscarves, which is a cultural no-no, but he said he had permission.
Pity Department of Energy workers. They are often demoralized; among the cynical, DOE’s motto is: “Ashamed of our past, afraid for our future.”Instead of working on clean energy for the 21st century and beyond, they are stuck subsidizing technology from the 13th century, and maybe the 1950s, and wrapping themselves in the flag of anti-nuclear environmentalism.
"In sharp contrast to past Canadian practice and current U.S. Government practice, the federal government has recently made efforts to prevent the media and the general public from speaking to government scientists,” Tyler Sommers, coordinator of Democracy Watch, wrote in a statement about a complaint they filed Wednesday, citing Canada's Access to Information Act.
If you have watched the strange, sad decline of psychology over the last decade, you may have started to wonder if any conclusions are legitimate. With evolutionary psychology claiming voting Republican is an adaptive function and social psychologists claiming people can predict the future, there is a lot of woo getting published.While scientists are sort of gracious about it - psychology departments are usually in the humanities buildings, not the science ones - the downside science is only starting to realize is that it damages the credibility of all science to have nonsense lumped in.
We're all going to die eventually, the overall mortality rate is still at 100%, but there are ways to postpone it. Coffee may be one of those ways.A large study (nearly 500,000 older adults) found a clear trend after 12 years: as coffee drinking increased, the risk of death decreased.
There are once-in-a-lifetime events and once-in-a-century ones as well. The meteor that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region in Russia was that second one; it has been confirmed as the largest such explosion in the last hundred years.The new estimates of its size make it the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. Researchers say it was about 55 feet in diameter, was composed of ordinary chondrites, like most meteors, and weighed around 10,000 tons. When it disintegrated, it unleashed nearly 500 kilotons of energy, more than 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. So far, researchers have collected 53 fragments, the largest of which was 7 millimeters.
Prof. Emlyn Hughes of Columbia University believes that in order to understand quantum mechanics, you have to get rid of everything you know - 'strip to your raw'. So he did just that, he got naked and against a backdrop of 9/11 and Nazi Holocaust images, he remained in a fetal position as two people dressed as ninjas blindfolded stuffed animals.Then one of the ninjas impaled one of the stuffed animals.Students paying $3,840 to take the course were likely thrilled that they had a whole semester of that to look forward to. Let's hope he already has tenure.Since it's New York City, half them likely thought it was pretty clever. Growing up in a place where crosses dipped in urine is considered art will do that to you.
Dartmoor is a moorland in south Devon, England and human remains and Bronze Age artifacts discovered there have been called "one of the most significant findings of at least the last 100 years" by a team of researchers.They found cremated human bones, wrapped in a type of animal hide, as well as what appear to be intricately designed jewelry and textiles. They were discovered within a granite tomb-like casing known as a cist, are made from materials not discovered in Britain at the time and hint at trading links between the area and the continent farther back then archaeologists had previously known.
