During the late Pleistocene, which ended about 12,000 years ago, a remarkably diverse assemblage of large-bodied mammals inhabited the "mammoth steppe," a cold and dry environment that extended from western Europe through northern Asia and across the Bering land bridge to the Yukon.

Of the large predators - wolves, bears, and big cats - only the wolves and bears were able to maintain their ranges well after the end of the last ice age and a new study suggests that dietary flexibility may have been an important factor giving wolves and bears an edge over saber-toothed cats and cave lions. 

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When comparing men and women who have dyslexia to non-dyslexic control groups, researchers found significant differences in brain anatomy, suggesting that the disorder may have a different brain-based manifestation when it comes to gender.

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The greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella of the family Pyralidae) is capable of sensing sound frequencies of up to 300 kHz, making it possessor of the highest recorded frequency sensitivity of any animal in the natural world.

Humans are only capable of hearing sounds from 20 Hz up to around 20 kHz maximum and that drops as we age, while our pets can hear at higher frequencies (leading to concern about things like the hum from ballasts in CFL bulbs) but even dolphins, famous for their ultrasound, only cap out at around 160 kHz.

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If you are not an experienced baseball player, a ball coming at you 40 ar 40 miles per hour is fast. You are almost certain to swing too late and then, when you realize that is fast, you will swing too early. You are almost as certain to miss.

So how can players hit a 95 M.P.H. fastball?  Given that it can be inside or outside of the strike zone, high or low, and also is rarely straight, it can be difficult even for them.

Researchers say they have pinpointed how the brain tracks such fast-moving objects and that can help understand how humans predict the trajectory of moving objects when it can take one-tenth of a second for the brain to process what the eye sees. 

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Everyone should have a home where they feel comfortable. If you want to carry a six-shooter on the street, move to Kennesaw, Georgia, outside Atlanta - Gun Town, USA (bonus: only 4 gun murders in 30 years, so you will be safe)(1) and if you like to ban everything and hang out with anti-science crackpots, there's always San Francisco. 
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If you are toughing out harsh winter weather, snow can be a relief. It's a respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures.

But winter and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has declined in recent years, putting plants and animals that depend on the space beneath the snow to survive the blustery chill of winter at risk.

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An estimated 5 percent of the U.S. population has restless legs syndrome, a disruptive, overwhelming nocturnal urge to move the legs even while sleeping, which can lead to many sleepless nights.

Why do patients with restless legs syndrome  still have insomnia when the condition is treated successfully with medication?

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Intelligent Design is often presented as a view that runs counter to evolutionary theory.  Whether it be the concept of natural selection or ideas about speciation, Intelligent Design (ID) purports to reconcile the observed environment from the perspective of an intelligent ordering system.

Concepts like "irreducible complexity" to examples of finding a watch or a tornado spontaneously assembling a 747 in a junkyard.  All these images are invoked by Intelligent Design as an argument against evolution.
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. -->

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Bob Geldof, former singer with The Boomtown Rats, is better known today for his work with poor people. Long after it stopped being fashionable, he has continued to help starving people in Ethiopia.

It's not the only way he is unfashionable - so is his old-school liberalism, which doesn't care about labels or circling the wagons for Big Tent left-wing causes or being against anyone on the other side by default.  When he spoke nicely about George W. Bush in 2003, it was stunning because we were all told to hate George Bush. Liberals in America were not allowed to say nice things about the man or the pitchforks and "neo-con" labels came out.
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One Small Step - Two Small Strips 
 ( Or Maybe Three )


The news that Neil Armstrong's EKG is up for auction has been reported across the world.  Having more than a passing interest in how language is used, I was looking at the different ways that writers have dealt with this story when the article by PC mag caught my eye.  The image they posted was not the same as the one from RR Auction.
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Combining Medicare's hospital, physician, and prescription drug coverage with private supplemental coverage into one health plan could save the government and seniors $180 billion over a decade, according to a new analysis from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and advocacy group The Commonwealth Fund. 

Under the proposed plan, called "Medicare Essential," Medicare costs would be $63 billion lower between 2014 and 2023, with total premium and out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries estimated to be 17 percent to 40 percent lower than current costs.

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Species of gigantic animals that once roamed Australia were long gone by the time people arrived, a major review of the available evidence has concluded.

The research challenges the claim that humans were primarily responsible for the demise of the megafauna in a proposed "extinction window" between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, and points the finger instead at climate change.

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The Black Sea sediment record has a terrific variety of past plankton species that left behind their genetic makeup - the plankton paleome.

The semi-isolated Black Sea is highly sensitive to climate driven environmental changes, and the underlying sediments represent high-resolution archives of past continental climate and concurrent hydrologic changes in the basin. The brackish Black Sea is currently receiving salty Mediterranean waters via the narrow Strait of Bosphorus as well as freshwater from rivers and via precipitation.

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A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound  known as Mount Sharp is not evidence of a massive lake but might be the result of the Red Planet's famously dusty atmosphere, a new analysis has found. If correct, the research dilutes expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water and ideas about past habitability.

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You've seen it on television; a rich, older man who supports a younger, attractive spouse. And it happens in real life, but it's rare.

Instead, a new analysis by economists has found that people married to much younger or much older mates have lower average earnings, lower cognitive abilities, are less educated and even less attractive than couples of similar ages.

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British Radar in WW2 -  by Sir Robert Watson-Watt

I am pleased to be able to publish here in my blog a historical document of some importance: a short history of radar by Sir Robert Watson-Watt.  The document - reproduced below these introductory comments - includes some information and images which have not, to the best of my knowledge, been published before on the internet.  Of special interest to historians is the

first photographic record of radiolocation of aircraft, made on the 24th of July, 1935.  -->

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Hawaii does not get a lot of hurricanes, only two have made landfall in the last 30 years.

But scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa predict that Hawaii could see a two-to-three-fold increase in tropical cyclones by 2075.

How worried should Hawaii residents get?

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With the Higgs boson in the bag, the game called "global fit" that particle physicists have been playing for a couple of decades has changed significantly. The knowledge of the Higgs boson mass provided by the measurements obtained by the ATLAS and CMS experiments, added to dozens of  other measurements of critical observable properties of subatomic particles that have been measured at LEP/SLC, LEPII, the Tevatron, and the LHC itself, allow us to constrain some of the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model more than direct experimental determinations do.

But what the heck is a global fit ?
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The World Is Getting Cooler*

*  Not!

This is something of a pre-emptive strike against the quote miners of this world.  I predict that they will use a new study of cloud seeding to sell ice damage insurance or something.

If you sprinkle a cup of water on a bonfire it will have a tiny cooling effect.  It will not put out the fire or wishomagically reverse the heating effect.  Scientists know exactly what they mean by a cooling effect, and so does everyone who ever used a cooling fan in summer.  But there are some snake oil salesmen who want to convince you that a simple cooling fan can lower the air temperature.
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Bullying and violence are the latest cultural magnet for administrators in schools around the country, but the solution may not be paid commercials, more books or talks in the gym - it may be as simple as embracing team sports again.

At the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., researchers discussed their analysis of data from the 2011 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey to see if athletic participation was associated with violence-related behaviors, including fighting, carrying a weapon and being bullied. A representative sample of 1,820 high school students in the state completed the survey, which also asked adolescents whether they played any school-sponsored team sports (e.g., football) or individual sports (e.g. track).

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