The Great Caspian Arms Race: Caspian Oil Fuels Military Tensions
Learn more: http://pulitzercenter.org/projects/caucasus-caspian-azerbaijan-kazakhstan-tur...
The Caspian Sea has been a strategic backwater with little relevance to the rest of the world for most of its history. But recent discoveries of large oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian Sea has set the stage for a Caspian arms race. Russia, the most powerful player in the Caspian region, has announced a plan to add 16 new ships to its navy. Iran is strengthening its second largest naval force i
Science Bulletins: New Fossils Extend Branches of Family Tree
Interpretation of fossil finds and what they imply about human evolution often mean different things to different scientists. To many, evidence shows that the sequence of species in the Homo genus followed a linear route, from Homo habilis to Homo erectus and eventually to Homo sapiens. To other scientists, the Homo fossil record points to a bushy, branching tree rather than a single stem. Two new finds from the rich deposits around Koobi Fora ridge in Kenya's Lake Turkana basin add more conclus
Science Bulletins: Ancient "Kitchen" Reveals Modern Hunting Skills
How early humans hunted and ate their food can be a gauge of cognitive ability. It takes more strategic planning to capture large, healthy, adult game, transport it home, and butcher it than it does to scavenge what other predators have already killed.
An Israeli cave excavated by archaeologists from the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University has yielded a veritable banquet of remains: flint tools, a hearth, and the butchered, roasted bones of deer, gazelle, and aurochs, an extinct type of
Science Bulletins: Duplicate Genes Set Primates Apart
Duplicate genes are becoming a powerful tool to investigate what makes us human. Sometimes one chromosome will acquire more than one copy of a particular gene during cell division and other genetic processes. Over many generations, gene duplications—also called copy-number variants—can accumulate in the DNA of a species.
Now that the genomes of humans and other primates have been sequenced, scientists can spot, count, and compare gene duplications among primates and explore how copy-number
Science Bulletins: Did Climate Change Guide Early Migrations?
An international team of scientists has completed analysis of sediment cores pulled from several African lakes, providing the first long, continuous record of climate change in East Africa. The cores reveal a series of severe droughts in the region between 135,000 and 70,000 years ago, which then gave way to substantially wetter conditions. This Human Bulletin shows how these ancient fluxes in climate agree with genetic data on the successive migrations of early modern humans.
Science Bulletins: Signs of Speech Ability Seen in Neanderthals
Could Neanderthals speak? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany—the same team that sequenced large portions of the Neanderthal genome last November—have uncovered a clue. After sequencing the DNA of a Neanderthal bone freshly excavated from a Spanish cave, the scientists found that the code for a gene implicated in speech, FOXP2, is identical in Neanderthals and humans. While many genes play a part in language capabilities, FOXP2 is the only one s
Science Bulletins: Human Stems Cell Breakthrough
A long-sought milestone has been reached in stem cell research: transforming adult cells directly into stem cells without having to use an embryo as a vehicle.
Research teams from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Kyoto University in Japan each achieved the feat by modifying the genetic code of adult skin cells so that they converted into what appear to be stem cells. The cells have been shown to multiply in culture and are pluripotent: they can differentiate into various types of body
Science Bulletins: Tracing the First Americans
When and where did humans first enter the Americas—and what routes did they travel to colonize the continents? These are big questions for scientists studying human evolution, and scientific consensus is still a ways off. Evidence from various fields points to first entry along the Bering land bridge. This stretch of land between Siberia and Alaska was exposed during the last glacial period, when more seawater was locked up in ice than is now. Geological research suggests the Bering land bridg
Science Bulletins: Unraveling the Origins of the Flores Fossils
Since the diminutive hominid fossils—the so-called "hobbits"—were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, scientists have debated where to place them in the human family tree. Although a few researchers have proposed they are Homo sapienswith a growth defect, evidence is mounting that the fossils represent a separate species that resembles earlier hominins. This Bio Bulletin highlights recent research that supports the "distinct species" hypothesis.
Science Bulletins: New Fossil Show Ancient Disease
Tuberculosis has a long history in humans. While Egyptian mummies a few thousand years old show evidence of the disease, a new fossil find traces the pathogen's presence back 500,000 years to an ancestral species in the Homo genus. Workers cutting deposits of travertine, a white rock used for building construction, in the Denizli province of western Turkey chanced upon a skull embedded in a block they were slicing into tiles. The top of the skull—which was sliced off from the remainder, which
Science Bulletins: How Old is "Old"?
The human population in the U.S. and Canada is getting older—meaning that the proportion of elderly people is growing year by year. By 2050, researchers have projected, a third of the population of these countries will be 60 years old and older. This could pose a strain on socioeconomic systems such as healthcare, retirement benefits, and social security.
An international group of researchers publishing in the journal Nature has proposed a new measure of "old age." Projections using the met
{Suresh 344} Proverbs
Master Your Vocabulary. Take a look at: Vocabulary Quiz - Hindi->English; Picture->Hindi; Recording->Hindi; and more!Vocabulary List - Easy to study list with pictures and recordings for some wordsSuresh 344} Proverbs...
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12.07.2012 – Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten
Trainiere dein Hörverstehen mit den Nachrichten der Deutschen Welle von Donnerstag – als Text und als verständlich gesprochene Audio-Datei.
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Der UN-Sondergesandte Kofi Annan hat den Weltsicherheitsrat aufgerufen, Druck auf die Konfliktparteien in Syrien auszuüben. Die Mitglieder des Rates sollten ihre nationalen Interessen beiseite stellen, erklärte Annan in einer nicht-öffentlichen Sitzung des mächtigsten UN-Gremiums. Die, die sich nicht an seinen Friedensplan hielten, müssten Ko
Cariology, Restorative Sciences, and Endodontics (CRSE) Materials
Dr. Stephen Bayne's course on dental materials, including gold alloys, composites, amalgams, glass ionomers, ceramics, waxes, etc. for operative dentistry, fixed and removable prosthodontics.
Infectious Disease / Microbiology
This sequence introduces students to medical microbiology, infectious diseases, and antimicrobial therapy, and focuses on pathogenesis and clinical manifestations of various infectious diseases.
Science Bulletins: Scientists Peer Inside "Superbug" Genome
For decades MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, has been afflicting hospital patients and prison inmates with life-threatening and difficult-to-treat skin infections. In recent years this bacteria has emerged in the general population. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is now causing 19,000 human deaths in the United States per year—more even than HIV. A recent study of the pathogen by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infect
Science Bulletins: Scientists Pinpoint Genetic Link to Asthma
For several decades, researchers have been collecting medical and genetic data on the Hutterites, a rural communal population that lives in small communities in the north-central United States and central Canada. Because the isolated Hutterite communities have uniform environmental and lifestyle conditions, the data are enabling researchers to isolate the genetic contributors of disease.
A team led by Carole Ober of the University of Chicago recently found distinct genetic mutations that increa
Science Bulletins: Genes in the Urban Environment
Much of who we are biologically is determined by an interplay between our genes and the environment we live in. To learn how the transition of human populations from rural to urban lifestyles may be affecting the body's susceptibility to disease, researchers from North Carolina State University traveled to Morocco to study the genetic makeup of three communities living in three distinct environments: nomadic, rural, and urban.
Although the genes among the groups were quite similar, the expressi
Science Bulletins: Peking Man—Older Times, Colder Climes
In the 1930's, scientists discovered a rich collection of Homo erectus fossils near Zhoukoudian, China. The site of "Peking Man" is still yielding new surprises. A team of Chinese and American scientists recently used a new method to date the sandy rock layers in which the fossils were buried. The scientists argue that this species lived at the site as far back as 770,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The discovery raises intriguing questions concerning how Peking Man survived
