It's because they're forced to eat human leftovers. The mercury might be rising in the thermometer, but not in these bears. Alan D. Wilson Imagine: vast expanses of frozen sea, stretching from the northern coast of Alaska into the Arctic horizon. Welcome to the Southern Beaufort Sea—or at least, the Southern Beaufort Sea as it used…
They show signs of stress, but also resilience. A diver explores healthy coral reefs in Guam. Kiho Kim Coral reefs are home to a vast array of ocean creatures. They provide food, protection against storm damage, sustain tourism and inspire wonder. “If we lose corals, we lose a vital piece of our planet,” said Kiho Kim.…
By Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Professor of Anthropology, University of Maryland and Joseph B. Richardson, Professor of African American studies, University of Maryland. Reggie Batiste with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Atlanta administers an HIV test. David Goldman/AP Increased funding, targeted prevention efforts and better treatment have helped to slow down the HIV epidemic in the United States.…
A giant temple to the Aztec god of the wind and a court where the Aztecs played a deadly ball game have been discovered in the heart of Mexico City.
Archaeologists unveiled the rare finds Wednesday after extensive excavations, giving journalists a tour of the semi-circular temple of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl and nearby ball court.
Records indicate that Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes first watched the ritual Aztec ball game at the court in 1528, invited by the last Aztec emperor, Montezuma -- the man whose empire he went on to conquer.
Historians believe the game involved players using their hips to keep a ball in play -- as well as ritual human sacrifices.
Archaeologists uncovered 32 sets of human neck bones at the site, which they said were likely the remains of people who were decapitated as part of the ritual.
Only part of the structure remains -- a staircase and a portion of the stands. Archaeologists estimate the original court was about 50 meters (165 feet) long.
The temple, meanwhile, is a giant semi-circle perched atop an even larger rectangular base. The whole thing once measured some 34 meters across and four meters high, archaeologists said.
The ancient structures stand in startling contrast with the sprawling mega-city that now surrounds them, which was built atop the ruins of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan.
They are just the latest ancient vestiges to be discovered in the historic city center, at what is known as the Great Temple site.
"The discovery we are looking at is a new chance to immerse ourselves in the splendor of the pre-Hispanic city of Tenochtitlan," Culture Minister Maria Cristina Garcia said.
A hotel formerly stood on the site of the newly discovered ruins until 1985, when it collapsed in a catastrophic earthquake that killed thousands of people.
The hotel's owners then noticed the ancient remains and alerted the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Archaeologists believe the temple celebrated the god of the wind and was built between 1486 and 1502.
Officials said they plan to open the site to the public, although no date has been set.
This technique can even identify the drink’s origin, blend, age, and taste. Sometimes science means sacrifice. Other times, it means buying 1,000 euros worth of whiskey. That’s what one team of scientists in Europe did to test their high-tech new technique for telling whiskies apart. Of course, “we had to use our own money,” says study…
A small U.S. biotech has successfully regenerated skin and stimulated hair growth in pigs with burns and abrasions, paving the way for a scientific breakthrough that could lead to the regeneration of fully functional human skin.
Salt Lake City-based PolarityTE Inc's patented approach to tissue engineering is designed to use a patient's own healthy tissue to re-grow human skin for the treatment of burns and wounds.
Despite recent advances in reconstructive surgery, plastic surgeons cannot give burn victims what they require the most — their skin.
Current approaches to treat serious burns are "severely limited" in their effectiveness and in some cases, are rather expensive, PolarityTE's founder and CEO Denver Lough said in an interview.
Epicel, a skin graft widely used in burn units that is sold by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vericel Corp, does not result in fully thick and functional skin — which is PolarityTE's objective.
PolarityTE conducted its pre-clinical study on wounded pigs at an animal facility in Utah. The use of therapy resulted in scar-less healing, growth of hair follicles, complete wound coverage and the progressive regeneration of all skin layers, the company said.
As pig skin is more complex and robust than human skin, successful swine data is typically seen as a precursor to effectiveness in human trials.
PolarityTE expects to begin a human trial later this year and the cell therapy could hit the market 12 to 18 months thereafter, said Lough, who served as senior plastic surgery resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital before creating PolarityTE last year.
"If clinically successful, the PolarityTE platform could deliver the first scientific breakthrough in wound healing and reconstructive surgery in nearly half a century," Lough said.
The technology also has the potential to develop fully-functional tissues, including bone, muscle, cartilage and the liver, PolarityTE said.
The company said it would "be opportunistic with financing," to fund upcoming trials but declined to provide details.
PolarityTE is backed by pharma industry veteran Phil Frost, currently the chief executive of OPKO Health Inc, and a small number of other industry executives.
Shares of the company rose as much as 16.5 percent to $20.98 on the Nasdaq, but pared most gains to trade up 1.6 percent in the midday session on Thursday.
(Reporting by Natalie Grover in Bengaluru; Editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar)
The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on Wednesday with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.
Scientists determined that skulls, limb bones and teeth representing at least five individuals were about 300,000 years old, a blockbuster discovery in the field of anthropology.
The antiquity of the fossils was startling - a "big wow," as one of the researchers called it. But their discovery in North Africa, not East or even sub-Saharan Africa, also defied expectations. And the skulls, with faces and teeth matching people today but with archaic and elongated braincases, showed our brain needed more time to evolve its current form.
"This material represents the very root of our species," said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who helped lead the research published in the journal Nature.
Before the discovery at the site called Jebel Irhoud, located between Marrakech and Morocco's Atlantic coast, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils were known from an Ethiopian site called Omo Kibish, dated to 195,000 years ago.
"The message we would like to convey is that our species is much older than we thought and that it did not emerge in an Adamic way in a small 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in East Africa. It is a pan-African process and more complex scenario than what has been envisioned so far," Hublin said.
The Moroccan fossils, found in what was a cave setting, represented three adults, one adolescent and one child roughly age 8, thought to have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
These were found alongside bones of animals including gazelles and zebras that they hunted, stone tools perhaps used as spearheads and knives, and evidence of extensive fire use.
An analysis of stone flints heated up in the ancient fires let the scientists calculate the age of the adjacent human fossils, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Shannon McPherron said.
There is broad agreement among scientists that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. These findings suggest a complex evolutionary history probably involving the entire continent, with Homo sapiens by 300,000 years ago dispersed all over Africa.
Morocco was an unexpected place for such old fossils considering the location of other early human remains. Based on the shape and age of the Moroccan fossils, the researchers concluded that a mysterious, previously discovered 260,000-year-old partial cranium from Florisbad, South Africa also represented Homo sapiens.
The Jebel Irhoud people had large braincases that lacked the globular shape of those today. Max Planck Institute paleoanthropologist Philipp Gunz said the findings indicate the shape of the face was established early in the history of Homo sapiens, but brain shape, and perhaps brain function, evolved later.
But given their modern-looking face and teeth, Hublin said, these people may have blended in today if they simply wore a hat.
Homo sapiens is now the only human species, but 300,000 years ago it would have shared the planet with several now-extinct cousins in Eurasia - Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east - and others in Africa.
Hublin did not hazard a guess as to how long ago the very first members of our species appeared, but said it could not have been more than 650,000 years ago, when the evolutionary lineage that led to Homo sapiens split from the one that led to the Neanderthals.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Paul Simao)
The risk is growing that Earth will be hit by an asteroid from a meteor stream known as the Taurids, Czech astronomers said on Tuesday.
The astronomers, from the Czech Academy of Sciences, drew their conclusion after analysing 144 bolides -- large meteors that explode in the atmosphere -- from the Taurids and detecting a new branch with at least two asteroids measuring 200-300 metres (220-330 yards) in diameter.
"Most probably, the branch also includes many undetected asteroids which are dozens of metres in diameter or larger," the Czech academy said in a press release.
"Hence, the danger of a crash with an asteroid grows markedly once every few years that the Earth encounters this stream of inter-planetary material."
The new branch comprises objects moving together around the Sun, and the Earth encounters it once every few years for a period of about three weeks.
"During this period, the probability of a collision with a larger object (of about dozens of metres in diameter) is markedly higher," the Academy said.
The asteroids are very fragile, but when they are this large they may penetrate deep into the atmosphere and pose a real threat of collision with Earth, it added.
The study urges further research to obtain "a better description of this real source of potentially hazardous objects large enough to cause a local or even continental disaster."
The paper is available on the Astronomy & Astrophysics website (https://www.aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/201730787) pending publication in its renowned journal.
A recent case study is scary, but tattoos aren't really to blame. Think after you ink. Pexels Tattoos are, to use a scientific term, flippin' sweet. And they're increasingly popular: more than a third of U.S. adults ages 18 to 40 have at least one. But side-eye from your old-school boss isn't the only thing you…
To figure out if a headache or a stomach twinge is something insidious, millions of people head to a search engine first. More than a third of all American adults have gone online to find a diagnosis, according to a 2013 Pew survey, and half of those people wound up discussing what they found with their…
Most Americans believe the United States should take "aggressive action" to fight climate change, but few see it as a priority issue when compared with the economy or security, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.
The June 2-4 opinion poll suggests American voters may not penalize President Donald Trump too harshly for walking away from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, even if they would have preferred he keep the country in the deal.
The poll found 68 percent of Americans want the United States to lead global efforts to slow climate change, and 72 percent agree "that given the amount of greenhouse gases that it produces, the United States should take aggressive action to slow global warming." (For a link to the poll, see: https://reut.rs/2sKOxqU)
Even so, Americans rank the environment near the bottom of their list of priorities for the country. Only about 4 percent of Americans believe that the "environment" is a bigger issue than healthcare, the economy, terrorism, immigration, education, crime and morality, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows.
"I just kind of feel helpless about it," Dana Anderson, 54, of Mesa, Arizona, said about climate change. "If something happens to the environment, it is what it is, right?"
Anderson, who has multiple sclerosis, said that whatever Trump says about healthcare will matter to her much more than his thoughts on global temperatures.
The poll was conducted after Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would abandon the landmark agreement with 195 countries to slash carbon emissions and curb global warming. The Republican president, who had previously called climate change a "hoax" despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, said he thought the pact would harm the U.S. economy without providing a tangible benefit.
The decision drew anger and condemnation from world leaders and business chiefs, many of them worried a U.S. exit would put the planet at risk and leave the United States behind in a global shift away from fossil fuels.
The poll found the U.S. public split along party lines over the move to withdraw from the global climate pact, with most Republicans supporting it and most Democrats opposing it.
Overall, 38 percent agreed with Trump's decision, 49 percent disagreed and 13 percent were undecided.
The poll also showed 50 percent of Americans believe global temperatures will rise faster as a result of the U.S. withdrawal from the climate deal, and 64 percent think U.S. relations with other countries will suffer.
The public was split over the decision's economic impact, too, with 41 percent saying it will strengthen the economy and 44 percent saying it will not.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,398 Americans, including 459 Republicans and 635 Democrats. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points for the entire group and 5 percentage points for the Republicans and Democrats.
For more on the polling methodology, questions and credibility intervals, see https://tmsnrt.rs/2qYVdR6
(Reporting by Chris Kahn; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
A team of excavators in Bulgaria has resumed a search for fossils of an ape-like creature which may be the oldest-known direct ancestor of man and whose discovery has challenged the central hypothesis that humankind originated in Africa.
The Graecopithecus freybergi, who lived 7.2 million years ago, is known only from a lower jawbone, unearthed in 1944 in Greece, and an isolated tooth, found in 2009 near the Bulgarian town of Chirpan, where excavations have now restarted.
"It would be great to find a whole skeleton but a thigh would also help us a lot," Professor Nikolai Spassov, head of Bulgaria's National Museum of Natural History, told Reuters.
The scientific consensus long has been that humanity's ape-like ancestors, known as hominins, originated in Africa. Until now, the oldest-known hominin was Sahelanthropus, which lived 6-7 million years ago in Chad. [L1N1IO0IT]
But Spassov hopes new fossils will back up the theory that hominins originated in the Eastern Mediterranean.
"They have most probably migrated to Africa due to climate change," he said.
Surrounded by dangerous predators in a savannah-type environment, life would have been hard for a Graecopithecus freybergi. A male would have weighed around 40 kg and a female around 30 kg, Spassov said.
Scientists in Greece are also expected to resume the search for remains of the hominin, and excavation work will begin in neighboring Macedonia in September.
(Reporting by Angel Krasimirov; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
By Jorge Alberto Angulo-Valdes, Visiting Research Scholar, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Florida. U.S. Navy diver off the coast of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. MC2 Kori Melvin, U.S. Navy/Wikipedia Cuba is the ecological crown jewel of the Caribbean. It harbors thousands of the region’s endemic species and about half of its coastal ecosystems. It…
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