Evil Megalomaniac Seeks to Revive Monster from Primeval Times

There are certain people who I will assume that anything they do is in furtherance of evil.

One of them is Peter Thiel, who literally has aspirations to be a vampire.

Now, he's dropping big bucks on an attempt to revive the species of the Woolly Mammoth.

I do not know how reviving the Woolly Mammoth will make life more miserable for the rest of us, but given that Thiel is funding it, I guarantee that it will make life more miserable for the rest of us.

At least he's not a one of the megalomaniacs planning on mounting a private operation to mine asteroids, which could easily be turned into a devastating weapon.

This Is What Happens When Big Pharma Takes over Research

As a result of increased corporate funding of research, and the pressure to deliver the desired results that inevitably results, the majority of current medical research is garbage that cannot be reproduced:

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests.

This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.

From his lab at the University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.

"The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results."

You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.

The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.

Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.

After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies' findings.

Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.

"It's worrying because replication is supposed to be a hallmark of scientific integrity," says Dr Errington.

………


According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments.

Marcus Munafo is one of them. Now professor of biological psychology at Bristol University, he almost gave up on a career in science when, as a PhD student, he failed to reproduce a textbook study on anxiety.

………

The problem, it turned out, was not with Marcus Munafo's science, but with the way the scientific literature had been "tidied up" to present a much clearer, more robust outcome.


………


"The issue of replication goes to the heart of the scientific process."

You said it. 

The problem is that research has increasingly become a zero sum game in which corporate funders dictate results before the first experiment is fully designed.

It is a petri dish for corruption.

Still a Few Bugs in the System

Some neuroscientists decided to see if the latest neuroscience tools could handle a simpler case than the human brain.

They chose a 40+ year old CPU, and they failed abysmally:

In 2014, the US announced a new effort to understand the brain. Soon, we would map every single connection within the brain, track the activity of individual neurons, and start to piece together some of the fundamental units of biological cognition. The program was named BRAIN (for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), and it posited that we were on the verge of these breakthroughs because both imaging and analysis hardware were finally powerful enough to produce the necessary data, and we had the software and processing power to make sense of it.

But this week, PLoS Computational Biology published a cautionary note that suggests we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Part experiment, part polemic, a computer scientist got together with a biologist to apply the latest neurobiology approaches to a system we understand far more completely than the brain: a processor booting up the games Donkey Kong and Space Invaders. The results were about as awkward as you might expect, and they helped the researchers make their larger point: we may not understand the brain well enough to understand the brain.

On the surface, this may sound a bit ludicrous. But it gets at something fundamental to the nature of science. Science works on the basis of having models that can be used to make predictions. You can test those models and use the results to refine them. And you have to understand a system on at least some level to build those models in the first place.

 ………

That's where Donkey Kong comes in.

Games on early Atari systems were powered by the 6502 processor, also found in the Apple I and Commodore 64. The two authors of the new paper (Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording) decided to take this relatively simple processor and apply current neuroscience techniques to it, tracking its activity while loading these games. The 6502 is a good example because we can understand everything about the processor and use that to see how well the results match up. And, as they put it, "most scientists have at least behavioral-level experience with these classical video game systems."

So they built upon the work of the Visual 6502 project, which got ahold of a batch of 6502s, decapped them, and imaged the circuitry within. This allowed the project to build an exact software simulator with which they could use to test neuroscience techniques. But it also enabled the researchers to perform a test of the field of "connectomics," which tries to understand the brain by mapping all the connections of the cells within it.

To an extent, the fact that their simulator worked is a validation of the approach. But, at the same time, the chip is incredibly simple: there is only one type of transistor, as opposed to the countless number of specialized cells in the brain. And the algorithms used to analyze the connections only got the team so far; lots of human intervention was required as well. "Even with the whole-brain connectome," Jonas and Kording conclude, "extracting hierarchical organization and understanding the nature of the underlying computation is incredibly difficult."

Remember, in a microprocessor, a transistor is a transistor is a transistor, in the brain, neurons and ganglia vary from cell to cell.

This is a valid test of the software, the 6502 is arguably the most thoroughly understood CPU in existence, and Donkey Kong is arguably one of the best understood pieces of software in existence.

And they still could not do it on a  processor that can access only 64K of RAM.

We are much further from mapping the brain in any detail than is implied in the mainstream media reports.

The Eskimo Word is Oosic

Most mammals, though not humans, a penis bone.

These range in size from tiny to "heroic" in size, with the aforementioned "Oosic" coming from an Walrus, and being rather large.

There is now some question as to why humans do not have this bone, even though some of our closer relatives, like the Chimpanzee, do:

The baculum, also called the os penis or penis bone, is a puzzling thing. It sits in the tip of the organ, not connected to any larger skeletal structure. Your pet cat has one if it is a he, as does your male dog. Many male mammals do — chimpanzees, gorillas, weasels and bears. The walrus has a particularly impressive baculum, up to 22 inches in length. The bone was even larger in the past. A fossilized, 4.5-foot os penis of an extinct walrus species fetched $8,000 at auction in 2007.

But humans, curiously, do not have penis bones. One reading of Genesis offered an explanation for the disappearing bone by way of creation myth. It was the penis bone, not a rib bone, a pair of biblical scholars argued in 2015, that God removed to fashion Eve from Adam. (This interpretation went over about as well as one might expect.)

As to why humans lack the bones, a study published on Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B offered a possible explanation. By the standards of primate reproduction, humans do not need to do the deed for a long enough time to warrant an os penis. Plus, our breeding habits are, in the context of our great ape cousins, fairly low-pressure.

A pair of researchers at the University College London examined several sexual characteristics of primates and mammal carnivores, including features like polygamy, testes mass, seasonal mating and intromission time (how long an act of penetration lasts). For primates, the best predictor for whether the male had a penis bone was if intromission lasted three minutes or longer. There was also a correlation between long intromission and length of the bone for both primates and carnivores.

Study author Matilda Brindle wrote at the Conversation that “humans don’t quite make it into the ‘prolonged intromission’ category. The average duration from penetration to ejaculation for human males is less than two minutes.” These long bouts of primate intromission are not exactly romantic. The end goal is gestation, not gesture. They are insurance to a male mammal, Brindle pointed out, that a female does not mate “with anyone else before his sperm have had a chance to work their magic.”

Less than 2 minutes for humans? Seriously?

Damn! I barely have her shoes untied in 2 minutes.^*

As an aside, if you Google Oosic, the almost all first links are for knife handles made from Walrus baculi.

^*It's not that I don't know how to untie shoes, it's that I am not using my hands.

The 3rd Worst Job on Earth

Tasmanian Devil Milker:

Milk from Tasmanian devils could offer up a useful weapon against antibiotic-resistant superbugs, according to Australian researchers.

The marsupial's milk contains important peptides that appear to be able to kill hard-to-treat infections, including MRSA, say the Sydney University team.

Experts believe devils evolved this cocktail to help their young grow stronger.

The scientists are looking to make new treatments that mimic the peptides.

They have scanned the devil's genetic code to find and recreate the infection-fighting compounds, called cathelicidins.

Milking a Tasmanian Devil is not high on my list of career options.

Amazon is a Petri Dish for Sociopaths

In 1996, an evolutionary biologist attempted to create an improved chicken by separating out the hens that outperformed their fellow hens.

It was an unmitigated disaster, and it bears notice in companies which use a similar process, "Stack Ranking", to manage their employees.

Amazon is the most notable, and most aggressive adherent of this philosophy:

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, recently took some heat when the New York Times exposed working conditions and the corporate culture at his firm. ‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of the working environment, sink or swim. Amazon is not alone. Some of the leading recent startups have competitive employment requirements, a survival of the fittest approach. They want the best and push out the rest. It’s a simple notion to strengthening your company and the most efficient way to assemble optimally performing groups, organizations, and sports teams. Or at least that has been the dominant rhetoric behind models of group productivity within both the business and sporting industries. Stack-ranking and other business practices of individual selection have been widespread, from General Electric to Microsoft, and is a standard modus operandi in sports teams including the focus of this piece, the European soccer team, Real Madrid. However, the wisdom behind the application of these models, both in business and sport, is under scrutiny. To begin to see why, we turn to evolutionary biology.


In 1996, evolutionary biologist William Muir conducted a series of unusual experiments at Purdue University. Muir was looking to explore the various methods of group productivity with regards to egg production. He wanted to create a group of ‘Super-Chickens’ who would produce more eggs than any other coop. He followed the logic that many employers today tout: take the best individuals, put them in a group together, and then let the magic happen. Muir selected the most productive hens from each cage and bred the next generation from them. Muir also identified the cages that collectively were more productive at laying eggs in comparison to other cages. He then continued to selectively breed using these two separate groups and observed the levels of production.

The outcome of this study was striking; selecting the best group cages produced hens that thoroughly outperformed the line of individually more productive ‘Super-Chickens’. For the cage-selected line, after just five generations, the number of eggs per hen catapulted from 91 to 237, the mortality rate of the group crashed from 68% to 9%, and the hens also displayed improved wellbeing as a function of the reductions of pecking and negative social interactions.

The Super-Chicken group did not fare so well. In fact, this line of hens had some other, rather less desirable qualities. They presented signs of aggression, violence, dysfunction and waste. There was an extremely high prevalence of fatal cannibalistic pecking within the group and general agonistic behaviors. Those in the cage who did not die from these cannibalistic attacks (there was an 89% mortality rate) were left with severe feather loss, life-threatening abrasions and other serious physical injuries. The hens were more intent on fighting amongst each other than doing anything productive! Hopefully that doesn’t sound like any workplaces you know…

So what happened? Why did the best egg-layers from the first generation yield something akin to the Gremlins of the eponymously named 80s movie? What Muir realized was that instead of identifying the most efficient hens, he had identified the hens that successfully conveyed the appearance of being the most productive. Those hens that individually produced the most did so by being adept at aggressively suppressing the other hens from laying eggs
. Taking the more productive individuals meant taking the more aggressive hens. Breeding repeatedly from those which were most productive actually favored those which were most aggressive. Placing these hens together in cages led to extreme violence (only three of these psychotic hens actually survived!). Muir ended up running out of the Super-Chickens and had no choice but to end monitoring them and only continue with the other group. Ultimately, the process of selecting at the individual level took to an extreme the challenge of cooperation arising from individuals selected for selfishness.

The behaviour of the psychotic hens fits rather well with the normative assumptions of classical economic and game theory, which suggest that individuals will act selfishly in situations that afford them the opportunity. In group situations, individuals are consistently expected to identify, and act on, the dominant Nash strategy—the strategy that cannot be beaten. Just think of the classic ‘tragedy of the commons’, where people are predicted to free-ride on and exploit the contributions of others to a shared resource. Furthermore, the selfish actions of the Super-Chickens also support the theme of much evolutionary psychology from the 1960’s, which was based on the principle that individual interests will always outweigh the interests of the group.Given an opportunity to benefit from the efforts of others, selection will favor those which seize the day.

 ………

Some companies have begun to pay heed. Recently, Microsoft abandoned its longstanding stack-ranking approach. It recognized that stack-ranking was undermining team cooperation, employees withheld information to avoid damaging their own rank, sought teams where they could rank better, and ensured new team members failed. As an outcome to stack-ranking, it seems obvious. Yet many companies pursued it, just as breeders choose super-chickens. For Jeff Bezos, he may not agree. Amazon is a hugely successful company, at least in sales and turnover. It is not a particularly profitable company. When Microsoft was the behemoth of its domain, its aggressive policies eventually led it into trouble, barely avoiding being broken apart. Enron thought it had the smartest guys in the room. It’s endemic corruption ultimately crumbled the company. A company led by super-chickens may not be the best long-term strategy.

Much of the American management class, and Jeff Bezos in particular, seem to see Lord of the Flies as a model for how to manage employees.

They are selecting for narcissistic sociopaths in their organization, and in the long run that is not a good thing.

Peter Parker, Eat Your Heart Out

The US army is looking at using spider silk generated from genetically modified silkworms:

Spider silk is one of nature’s toughest substances, similar in strength to the Kevlar plastic found in bulletproof vests but much more flexible. Kraig Biocraft, a company out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, genetically altered silkworms to produce a fiber that’s similar to pure spider silk. Today, they announced an Army contract to test this so-called Dragon Silk for possible use in body armor.

There’s a reason that silk from worms is cheap but you can’t buy pajamas made from spider fabric: spiders are territorial and cannibalistic, which makes farming them for fabric production almost exorbitant.

………

The technology behind Dragon Silk is based in part on the work of Malcolm J. Fraser, Donald L. Jarvis, and their colleagues. As they explain in this paper, they introduce specific pieces of spider DNA into silkworm eggs, creating an entirely new type of silkworm that can spin spider silk.

………

Rice doesn’t anticipate that Dragon Silk will be a direct replacement for Kevlar, which has a strength of 3 gigapascals. [425,000 psi] Spider silk has a strength of 2 gigapascals, [290,000 psi] only about two-thirds as strong.

“But Kevlar has an elasticity of 3 percent,” says Rice. “If you have a Kevlar fiber, it’s not going to move at all. Our fibers have a 30 to 40 percent elasticity before they break.”

FWIW, the additional deformation that spider silk can take means that it is absorbing a lot more energy than the Kevlar.  (The very crude sketch depicts energy as the area under the various curves)

I am not sure of how spider silk could be used in a structural context, but given my experience with the material, it's relatively low modulus would indicate that any design would be driven by stiffness issues rather than strength issues, which would make it rather similar to handle to fiberglass.

I am Unreasonably Stoked About This

I don't know why, but the taxonomic resurrection of the species Brontosaurus has me pleased to a completely unreasonably degree:

The brontosaurus, loved by kids the world over but cruelly snubbed by paleontologists for more than a century, is back. British and Portuguese fossil boffins have concluded the dinosaur existed as a separate genus after all.

It was back in 1879 that paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh named a collection of bones a brontosaurus, or Thunder Lizard, and described a massive herbivore with a long neck and tail that wandered across the plains of what is now America.

But within a couple of decades the existence of the Thunder Lizard was called into question, and the scientific community decided that the stumbled-upon brontosaurus was just an adolescent apatosaurus. There then followed a 100-year campaign to expunge the word brontosaurus from textbooks, but the name proved just too popular.

Now a study looking at the largest range of fossils of the genus has shown that the brontosaurus was a distinct genus. While the dino does have strong similarities to the apatosaurus, there are enough differences to separate the two, the study's authors concluded.

Our research would not have been possible at this level of detail 15 or more years ago", explains Emanuel Tschopp, a Swiss national who led the research from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, "in fact, until very recently, the claim that Brontosaurus was the same as Apatosaurus was completely reasonable, based on the knowledge we had."

The initial argument for the non-existence of the brontosaurus was down to its sacrum bones, which link the tail to the base of the spine. The first Thunder Lizard found had five of these, compared to the apatosaurus' three, but it was assumed that the brontosaurus bones were young and would have merged together to form these three bones.

But as more and more specimens were found, this theory started to look a little off. That was reinforced by other fossil evidence, so the new study turned to statistics to find out what was going on.

"The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species," explained Roger Benson, a co-author from the University of Oxford.

I have no clue why I am so giddy over this news, but I am incredibly happy about this.

Never Underestimate the Benefits of Some Good Beaver

It looks like one the consequences of the California drought is that the state will be aggressively reintroducing beavers to mitigate problems from the current lack of rainfall:

Californians are crossing their fingers for more rain after three punishing years of drought have left streams, rivers and wetland parched.

One animal has the potential to restore these dry landscapes.

With their industrial buck teeth and flat tails, beavers and their dams offer a defense against drought, a solution to reversing the effects of climate change. The rodents are known as ecosystem engineers. And they once populated most of California (and the Bay Area) until fur traders nearly wiped them out in the 19th century,

“This state has lost more of its wetlands than all other states, and beavers can rebuild those wetlands,” said Rick Lanman of the Institute for Historical Ecology in Los Altos. “Knowing that it is native should help guide restoration efforts.”

Beaver dams bestow benefits to the environment that we humans can’t easily copy. They turn land into a sponge for water. Their gnawing and nesting promotes richer soil and slows down water, improving imperiled fish habitat. Their dams raise water tables, nourishing shrubbery alongside streams that stabilize eroding banks and add habitat for birds and deer. They also help the endangered California Red-legged frog.

After beavers move to a new area, at night, they drag a tree across a shallow stream to start a dam. They carry rocks and mud with their paws and branches with their big incisors. Water in these beaver ponds would otherwise flow away. So it’s no surprise that thirsty western states are turning to the furry critters with open arms.

………

Government agencies are hosting a workshop series in a few western states and writing a guide on how to use beavers for restoration. California Fish and Wildlife is starting to embrace the beaver, a shift beaver advocates applaud.

“Our effort now is to show its many sides, sides that have always existed,” said Kevin Shaffer, a fisheries manager for state Fish and Wildlife. “We are investigating how beaver promote habitat and water conservation through their habitat manipulation. We are also creating public and scientific information about the beaver, its ecological role and current regulations and laws affecting its management and conservation.”

In addition to being highly effective, they work without pay.

It's a win-win.

If Not an Explanation, At Least It Gives Us Some Context

It turns out that Robin Williams was suffering from early stage Parkinson's Disease:

Patients with Parkinson's disease often suffer from depression, medical experts said Thursday, after Robin Williams' widow revealed that the comedian was in "early stages" of the neurological disease at the time of his apparent suicide.

The same biochemical changes in the brain that cause the hallmark physical symptoms of Parkinson's -- tremors, slowed movement, rigidity, balance loss -- can also affect mood, said Dr. Jeff Bronstein, a neurologist in the Movement Disorder Program at UCLA.

"Obviously getting the diagnosis can make people depressed," he said. "But we also know that there's a much higher incidence of depression even before the disease is recognized. We think it's one of the early symptoms."

I don't think that anyone can truly understand what was going on in his head, but the fact his limbic system was being short circuited from a lack of dopamine was certainly a major contributing factor.

I Honestly Do Not Know if this is Cute or Terrifying

But a 2 m tall penguin weighing 115 kg could play outside linebacker in the NFL:

A penguin species that lived millions of years ago would have dwarfed today’s biggest living penguins and stood as tall as most humans, according to analysis of fossils by a team of researchers from the La Plata Museum in Argentina.

Palaeeudyptes klekowskii has already been dubbed the “colossus penguin”, and is the most complete fossil ever uncovered from the Antarctic. The unearthed bones are 37m years old and include the longest recorded fused ankle-foot bone as well as parts of a wing bone.

From those bones, researchers estimated the species would have stood 2m tall from toe to beak tip, and weighed as much as 115kg. Standing normally, beak down, the penguin would have be around 1.6m tall, the team reported in the journal Geobios.

By comparison, the tallest and heaviest living species, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands 1.1m high and weighs just under 50kg.

This is like Ted "The Mad Stork" Hendricks in a tuxedo.

Unreal.

My Hunch Seems to Have Been Vindicated

I have always felt that the Black Death in Europe was from something significantly different from the Bubonic Plague as we know it now, if just because the speed of the spread was astonishingly fast (something more than 20 miles a day in Britain).

Well, a study now indicates that it was likely a variant of Yersinia pestis that was genetically predisposed to go pneumonic, meaning that the transmission would have been far faster than the flea borne variants that we see today:

It was already known as perhaps the bleakest episode in British history.

Now, new research suggests the Black Death was even more lethal than was previously thought.

The findings go further to exonerate rats as being responsible for the outbreak, which swept the country in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing vast swathes of the population.

Instead, the study claims the disease was passed directly from human to human and was, in fact, pneumonic plague – a more virulent and infectious form than bubonic plague, which has historically been blamed.

………

The same bacteria – which is almost identical to the strain still found on four continents – is responsible for both bubonic and pneumonic plague, but the experts taking part in the show concluded that the latter, which is spread by the fleas of infected rats, would not have been able to have the devastating impact caused by the Black Death.

Dr Tim Brooks, an expert in infectious diseases from Public Health England who is based at Porton Down – the Wiltshire site used by the government for dealing with biological threats – said: “As an explanation, for the Black Death in its own right, it is simply not good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next, to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”

Instead, he identified what he considers was a mutation from the bubonic plague, borne on rats, to the pneumonic variant, whereby it spread to the lungs of sufferers, who then passed it on to others, by coughing.

This makes sense, though there are alternate ways for it to spread so quickly, such as it being carried by bird borne parasites.

It is almost certain that it was Y. pestis though.

For F%$#'s Sake, Why?

It appears that France is more evil than I had been believed.

Some scientists in Bordeaux have found a way to block the euphoric effects of marijuana:

Leave it to science to find a way to harsh the mellow of marijuana.

A French research team has discovered a natural chemical brake that can tamp down the effects of THC, the main intoxicant in marijuana. They believe it could lead to ways to protect against memory loss, torpor and other side-effects better known as being stoned.

“We have this built-in negative feedback mechanism, a brake” on cannabis intoxication, said University of Bordeaux neurobiologist Dr. Pier Vincenzo Piazza, principal author of a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The researchers were investigating the role of neurosteroids in addiction. These are a class of hormones produced in the brain, and they have been implicated in regulating mood and cognitive activities.

After getting rats and mice high on the active ingredients of cocaine, morphine, nicotine, alcohol and marijuana, the researchers measured the increase in pregnenolone, a precursor to all steroid hormones that was thought to be otherwise inactive.

Getting mice stoned is not as easy as you think. They tend to Bogart that joint.

But more seriously, marijuana is not physiologically addictive, so why are harshing our buzz?

What the f%$# is wrong with you guys?

A joke in a related vein after the break:


Dr. Calvin Rickson, a scientist from Ohio State University, has invented a bra that keeps women’s breasts from jiggling and prevents the nipples from pushing through the fabric when cold weather sets in.

At a news conference, after announcing the invention, a large group of men took Dr. Rickson outside and beat the sh%$ out of him.

Our Loquacious Neanderthal Progenitors

And yes, Neanderthal genes are in all of us, so they are in part our ancestors.

One of the enduring myths about Homo neanderthalensis (some would argue Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) is that they lacked the vocal structures to have our fluidity of speech.

30 years ago, the model that showed this was debunked because it was shown that it also prevented H neanderthalensis from swallowing.

The theory only barely passed the laugh test for about 5 years, but you still hear it coming up all the time.

One of the reasons for this is that the bone at the base of the tongue, the Hyloid is unattached to the rest of the skeleton, and fragile, so the fissile record is meager.

Well, they have found a Neanderthal hyloid, and it was very similar to ours, and now a group of scientist have modeled the Hyloid, and the surriounding soft tissues, and determined that they were very chatty folk:

An analysis of a Neanderthal's fossilised hyoid bone - a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck - suggests the species had the ability to speak.

This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human's.

But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.

Writing in journal Plos One, scientists say its study is "highly suggestive" of complex speech in Neanderthals.

The hyoid bone is crucial for speaking as it supports the root of the tongue. In non-human primates, it is not placed in the right position to vocalise like humans.

An international team of researchers analysed a fossil Neanderthal throat bone using 3D x-ray imaging and mechanical modelling.

This model allowed the group to see how the hyoid behaved in relation to the other surrounding bones.

Stephen Wroe, from the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia, said: "We would argue that this is a very significant step forward. It shows that the Kebara 2 hyoid doesn't just look like those of modern humans - it was used in a very similar way."

Personally, I think that it is difference in fecundity that led to Neanderthals being supplanted by modern humans, but I am not a paleoanthropologist.

Oh, Crap

Have you heard about MERS?

I don't mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers -- so far -- are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means "to visit a populated place," and it's the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent -- a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.

Hed of the Day

PLAGUE of SEX CRAZED MONSTER GRASSHOPPERS to hit East Coast

From El Reg, of course.

In the Ocean, No One Can Hear You Scream

This critter does have an H.R. Giger thing going on.

H/t Vonners at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I'm Thinking that T Rex Was a Largely A Scavenger

Some scientist simulated the bite of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and determined that it had one of the strongest ever:

The tyrant lizard, also known as Tyrannosaurus rex, had the strongest bite of any known land animal, new research suggests.

"Our results show that the T. rex had an extremely powerful bite, making it one of the most dangerous predators to have roamed our planet," study researcher Karl Bates, of the University of Liverpool, said in a statement.

………

The new estimate of bite force is higher than past estimates that relied on indent measures in which they pressed down the skull and teeth onto a bone until they got the imprints that matched those on fossils. In the new study, the researchers created a computer model of the dinosaur's jaw by first digitally scanning skulls from an adult and juvenile T. rex, an allosaurus, an alligator and an adult human. They used these scans to model each animal's bite.

"We took what we knew about T. rex from its skeleton and built a computer model," Bates said. "We then asked the computer model to produce a bite so that we could measure the speed and force of it directly."

The force exerted at one of T. rex's back teeth would have been between 7,868 and 12,814 pounds-force (35,000 and 57,000 newtons). This force would be akin to having a medium-size elephant sit on you.

There has always been a debate about T. Rex, and whether they were primarily predators or scavengers.

The interesting thing is that, at least amongst today's mammals, scavengers have stronger jaws, the hyena, for example, despite being less than half the size of a lion, has a stronger bite.

Basically, when you come late to the party, you need jaws that can pulverize bone to get the table scraps.^*

So, I'm thinking that this extreme jaw strength, and the associated costs of maintaining that capability to the species, imply that the king of the dinosaurs was frequently dining on someone else's left-overs.

^*Yes, I am aware that the Hyena is actually a highly successful predator, and frequently, when you see them circling when the lions are eating, the hyenas have made the kill, and the lions have taken it over. It still means that they are going to eat what the lions leave after they have had their fill.