A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans’ prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought. The find may be our first glimpse of a separate, extinct, branch of the human family, collectively called hominins. It also hints that there may have been several evolutionary paths leading to feet adapted for walking upright. The fossil, a partial foot, was found in 3....
AS A PROSPECTIVE client searches for a psychotherapist, numerous questions may spring to mind. How experienced is the therapist? Has he helped people with problems like mine? Is she someone I can relate to? Yet it may not occur to clients to ask another one: What type of therapy does the clinician deliver? People often assume that the brand of therapy offered is irrelevant to the effectiveness of treatment. Is this assumption correct?...
In 1857 British novelist George Eliot wrote, “Animals are such agreeable friends. They ask no questions and they pass no criticism.” So it is no surprise that scholars have long been intrigued by the possibility that animals possess largely untapped therapeutic powers. But are animals good for our psychological and physical health, either as pets or as “therapists”? Most Americans are animal lovers; about 65 percent of U.S. households contain one or more pets, according to the American Pet Products Association....
From the heavy rains that sent the Seine into the streets of Paris last year to a parade of storms that left southern England waterlogged during the winter of 2013-2014, there have been startling examples in recent years of the heavy toll that flooding can levy in both human and economic terms. Such events also lead to questions about the role climate change is playing in altering these threats. A new study detailed Thursday in the journal Science finds that the timing of such floods has changed over the past 50 years across Europe because of changes in the climate, the first time a clear climate signal has been found in flooding on a Europe-wide scale....
Lead exposure in early childhood is associated with increased risk for sleep problems and excessive daytime sleepiness in later childhood, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania, US. The findings, which will be published in the December but are already available online, are based on data from a longitudinal study of more than 1400 Chinese children that began in 2004 to examine the influence of lead exposure on neurocognitive, behavioural and health outcomes in children and adolescents....
SAN FRANCISCO - To get a glimpse of the future, look to East Africa today. The Horn of Africa is in the midst of its worst drought in 60 years: Crop failures have left up to 10 million at risk of famine; social order has broken down in Somalia, with thousands of refugees streaming into Kenya; British Aid alone is feeding 2.4 million people across the region. That’s a taste of what’s to come, say scientists mapping the impact of a warming planet on agriculture and civilization....
Correa in 2007 asked wealthy countries to donate $3.6 billion to offset revenue lost by not drilling in the Yasuni National Park. But the initiative was scrapped in 2013 after it brought in less than 4 percent of the amount requested. Correa’s government blamed the international community for the failure of a plan once seen as a possible model for other developing countries seeking to resist the lure of oil money....
Landfills may be emitting more methane than previously reported because the Environmental Protection Agency may be drastically underestimating how much garbage is being deposited in landfills across the U.S., according to a new Yale University study. Banana peels, coffee grounds, plastic bottles and other detritus tossed in the garbage usually ends up in a landfill and emits methane as it decomposes. Methane is a greenhouse gas up to 35 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change over the span of a century, and landfills are the United States’ third largest source of methane emissions, according to the EPA....
Animals evolved gradually, from the lowly sponge to the menagerie of tentacled, winged and brainy creatures that inhabit Earth today. This idea makes such intuitive sense that biologists are now stunned by genome-sequencing data suggesting that the sponges were preceded by complex marine predators called comb jellies. Although they are gelatinous like jellyfish, comb jellies form their own phylum, known as ctenophores. Trees of life typically root the comb jellies’ lineage between the group containing jellyfish and sea anemones and the one containing animals with heads and rears — which include slugs, flies and humans....
SAN JUAN Puerto Rico (Reuters) - Hurricane Gonzalo is expected to become a major hurricane on Tuesday as it moves over the open Atlantic waters and swirls away from the northern Caribbean islands, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It said the center of Gonzalo, a Category 2 hurricane, was moving northwest, away from the British and U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, prompting storm alerts for those areas to be lifted....
Most babies born prematurely and one-third of full-term infants are exposed to chemicals found in vinyl “at a potentially harmful level,” according to new research in Finland. The study of 125 babies from the day they were born to 14 months old is the first comprehensive examination of infants’ exposure to several phthalates. The chemicals, considered hormone disruptors, have been linked to health effects in animal tests and some human studies, including altered male genitalia, attention and learning problems and asthma....
Ocean acidification threatens to cause billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy, harming everything from crabs in Alaska to coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean, NOAA researchers said in a new report. Carbon dioxide emissions and ocean acidification are occurring at an “unprecedented” rate, deteriorating valuable fisheries and tourist destinations across the United States and its territories, NOAA said in a draft research plan for ocean acidification. “Commercial, subsistence and recreational fishing [and] tourism and coral ecosystems” will likely be damaged by ocean acidification, the plan said....
A bizarre solar dance has been uncovered by researchers who spotted a giant planet orbiting one of the three suns of a triple-star system. The system was found in the constellation Centaurus, about 98 parsecs (320 light years) from Earth. As shown in an artist’s impression in this video, the planet, called HD 131399Ab, orbits the largest of the three stars. The other two stars also orbit the largest, and each other....
In 1918, the Spanish flu infected about one-third of the world’s population and killed some 50 million people. Some died within hours of the first symptoms. Nearly 100 years later, the threat of influenza still looms. “A highly virulent strain similar to 1918 could have a similar impact today,” says John Brownstein, a public health surveillance expert and professor at Harvard University. Scientists have worked for decades to speed threat detection, improve preventative vaccines, and reduce response time during an outbreak, but the question persists: A century after the Spanish flu, how far have we come in our ability to prevent and fight infectious and newly-emerging diseases?...
The iPhone and its smart phone competitors are making a big splash in areas of the world where cell and Internet connectivity are fairly reliable and people can afford to plunk down hundreds if not thousands of dollars for the latest technology. But in the vast regions of the world beset by harsh environmental, economic and political conditions, analog radio is still the most effective means of receiving and disseminating information....
An intriguing spiral structure surrounding a pulsing red giant star may be offering a preview of how the sun will behave at the end of its life. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, an international team of astronomers found the spiral structure, one never seen before, in the envelope of gas and dust around a red giant about 1,000 light-years from Earth and took a detailed three-dimensional reading of its composition....
At 87, Maxine Stanich cared more about improving the quality of her life than prolonging it. She suffered from a long list of health problems, including heart failure and chronic lung disease that could leave her gasping for breath. When her time came, she wanted to die a natural death, Stanich told her daughter, and signed a “do not resuscitate” directive, or DNR, ordering doctors not to revive her should her heart stop....
For astronomers at the Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico’s Puebla state, the new year began with disturbing news. Their work probing the formation and evolution of stars, planets, black holes and galaxies had been put on hold until further notice, after a spike in drug-cartel activity around Sierra Negra—the extinct volcano that hosts the telescope. The final straw came in December, when one of the facility’s employees was carjacked. Officials at the observatory—which is funded by the Mexican government and the University of Massachusetts Amherst—decided that it was no longer safe for people to go to work....
When I saw the statement repeated online that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge would be dead by now if he lived in the U.K. and had to depend on the National Health Service (he, of course, is alive and working in the U.K., where he always has), I reflected on something I had written a dozen years ago, in one of my first published commentaries: “The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling....
Big objects retain heat better than small objects do. Most of Earth’s internal heat is generated by four long-lived radioisotopes–potassium 40, thorium 232, uranium 235 and uranium 238–that release energy over billions of years as they decay into stable isotopes. Earth’s large size (about 12,740 kilometers across) ensures that this heat is lost relatively slowly, which explains why our planet still has a molten outer core and volcanic eruptions at its surface....
