First-ever Chimp Fossils Found

The first ever chimpanzee fossils were recently discovered in an area previously thought to be unsuitable for chimps. Fossils from human ancestor were also found nearby.

Although researchers have only found a few chimp teeth, the discovery could cause a shake-up in the theories of human evolution.

“We know today if you go to western and central Africa that humans and chimps live in similar and neighboring environments,” said Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences. “This is the first evidence in the fossil record that they coexisted in the same place in the past.”

It had previously been thought that chimps never lived in the arid Rift Valley—they prefer more lush environments like the Congo and jungles of western Africa. For years scientists believed that early human ancestors left the jungles and moved east to the less wooded grasslands and that this move caused the evolutionary split between the human and chimp lines.

But now, with the discovery of ancient chimps and humans in the same area, evolutionists may have to rethink what caused humans to become humans.

“For many years people have used this kind of geographic split in environment as an explanation as an origin of humans and bipedalism,” coauthor Sally McBrearty of the University of Connecticut told LiveScience. “People have still retained this idea of a split geographic distribution of chimps and humans. This shows it certainly wasn’t true half a million years ago, and may not have been true before that. We need to look for another reason for the evolutionary split.”

Read the rest here.

So much for that theory...some other mechanism for the evolutionary separation of pan and homo will have to arise it seems (if this stands up for its identification).

Another Front on the War on Terror

Bangladesh may have come in for increased levels of criticism over the past six months for failure to respond with sufficient vigour to the developing patterns of Islamist-inspired violence. But the country was unprepared for the dramatic display of organisational control and the demonstration of intent that occurred on 17 August, staged by the banned Jama'at-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) group. On this day a series of more than 300 co-ordinated bombings, all timed to go off between 10.30 and 11.30 am touched all but six of Bangladesh's 64 districts.

Read more of the extract here

300 bombings. That sounds rather ominous. Think about 300 bombings in 58 districts within one hour. It sounds to me that the Islamists have themselves a very coordinated and sophisticated nest there. Are we in danger of 'losing' Bangladesh?

The sad part is I don't remember hearing anything about this on or around the 17th.

Cassini Finds That "Tiger Stripes" On Enceladus Are Very Young

The Cassini spacecraft discovered the long, cracked features dubbed "tiger stripes" on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus are very young. They are between 10 and 1,000 years old.

These findings support previous results showing the moon's southern pole is active. The pole had episodes of geologic activity as recently as 10 years ago. These cracked features are approximately 80 miles long, spaced about 25 miles apart and run roughly parallel to each another.

Read more here.

PS That's how I found that nifty pict.

Damn kewl pict of Enceladus

Malinki Tsarina strikes again

My heirress might her papa rather proud last night. She rolled over. What you say? She's been doing that? Yeah, she has been, but in a different way. She had been putting her feet up in the air when she was slimmer, tilting them to one side, falling over, and then rolling after tucking them under. His time she went straight using her shoulders only and got her arms out from under her without a problem.

Daddy nearly cried. What a whimp I am.


:D

PS Sorry about the horribly transliterated Russian there.

Iran uses biotech to extract urananium oxide.

Read about it here.


Sounds like a case of biomining where they use microbes to extract uranium oxide and take it from them somehow. Very little details there.

If true, biotech emets nuke tech! How long until the mutant microbe kills us all? ;)

BSG The Continued Enjoyment

I really like this show. It's got a pacing that's pretty unique. Camp is not something that even is hinted at. Some of the reactions are damned good. There was one that threw me off a bit, but...

SPOILER SPACE!












You were warned, k?

I wasn't too pleased about the simple patching up between Roslin (who was deposed by Adama) and Adama. I realize that Adama had more than a few life twists since that coup and Roslin sees herself as a prophetess. Even so, it's the first time that I felt a bit cheated. If not for as good as the rest of the story was I would have been ticked.

Personal theory about Kobol, the 13 Tribes, and Earth. Kobol was settled from Earth by exiles from Earth. Either those are people that lost a war with AIs or AIs that lost a war with people. I like that latter. The exiles ended up producing their own war that fractured the people into 13 tribes. The 12 went one way and the 13th went back following the old legends of Earth....the Earth of our future.

After all, all of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

Books Finish and Started

I finished two books and launched into another in the time sicne I posted anything about my reading.

The first one about drilled pier foundations was interesting, but I suspect a bit dated. It was written in the mid 1980s,. The techniques probably still are, but I'm guessing with some certainty all the tables and appendices in the back of the book are basically worthless for costing, available equipment, and whatnot. It made it very clear though that only a specialist (sub)contractor should be trusted with doing this. It's not something that Joe Schmoe can go out and dig himself.

The second book was about Deinosuchus. This is the ubersized crocodylian from the Campanian era in the Upper Cretaceous from the so-called North American Western Interior Seaway. It was actually a fun, light read (for me). If you're familiar with paleontology, you're good to go for reading this one. It prolly should have been a paperback though because it was rather short.

The book I am reading now is about being your own contractor for building a custom home. I am not going to do this the first time around for 'Minas Tursiops'. I'd like to do this at some point. That whole philosophical angle of a man building his own home and all that. However, I'm using these books as guides to what I should be paying attention to when I do contract this to a general contractor. If you exactly know what the GC is supposed to be going to do its easier to keep tabs on him/her and see that it gets done.

Early Baby Picture this week

I missed my personal deadline of putting up a baby pict last wednesday.

So, I'm redeeming myself a bit by putting another one up early this week as well as on Wednesday.

Where have I been?!

I've been a little absent from my blog here other than posting some interesting articles I've stumbled across. There's been some good reasons.

The first one was that on Thursday my work had a power outage that was planned. We were upgrading the incoming power by 1.5 MW (yes, megawatts) for new computing resources. The whole place was down from 5 am until very, very late. We were prepping for this on Wednesday and then down the whole day. The power for everything networking related was toast. Hence no internet access and no blog entries.

On Friday I got a tooth drilled. Namely, because we concentrated on my wife's dental issues for so long, I had to have another root canal done. The dentists we go to absolutely rock. They're good people as well as damned fine dentists. I'd recommend them to anyone in the Bay Area or just passing through. However, the root that had to be canalled (so to speak) was rather longer and deeper than is normal. Dr Darryl did a good job but it took longer than planned. I didn't get home until a couple hours later than I'd expected. Hence...

I ahve a follow-up with Dr D but that's it. All I want to do after that is whiten my teeth and go to maintenance mode for a while. I'm a little tired of funneling money down the dental drain. :S It's not that Dr D and Dr R have been sucking us dry, its just that there's been so fscking much that we've had to get done in the last year. Mostly on my wife to be sure, but....

*growls about soon-to-be dead Ukrainian dentists*

Right now, my daughter is asleep. My wife is out shopping. I've just did a quick once over our apartment for cleaning up. I'm just taking a moment to spout.

Federal Judge OKs Global Warming Lawsuit

A federal judge here said environmental groups and four U.S. cities can sue federal development agencies on allegations the overseas projects they financially back contribute to global warming.

The decision Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White is the first to say that groups alleging global warming have a right to sue.

"This is the first decision in the country to say that climate change causes sufficient injury to give a plaintiff standing, to open the courthouse door," said Ronald Shems, a Vermont attorney representing Friends of the Earth.

That group, in addition to Greenpeace and the cities of Boulder, Colo., Santa Monica, Oakland and Arcata, Calif., sued Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Those government agencies provide loans and insure billions of dollars of U.S. investors' money for development projects overseas. Many of the projects are power plants that emit greenhouses gases that the groups allege cause global warming.

Read more here.

This is definitely a can of worms...

Is Mexico a Nation?

An oddball editorial from the CSM[1]:

A survey released last week by the Pew Hispanic Center found more than four in 10 Mexicans are willing to leave their country to live in the US. One in five would risk a dangerous, illegal border crossing. Most surprising, one in three college graduates wants to flee. Before Washington takes up immigration reform this fall, it needs to take a hard look at Mexico's disillusionment.

Already, one in eight adults born in Mexico now lives in the US. And the Mexican economy is kept afloat partially by an estimated $16 billion sent back by immigrants to relatives.

Such numbers reveal a people so fed up with Mexico's dysfunctional politics and stagnant economy that their nationalism is wilting. While more than half of Mexico's 106 million people are officially poor, the Pew survey found an inclination to migrate "evident across a broad swath" of the population.

Read the rest here.

*faint chants of...*

ANNEX IT! ANNEX IT! RAHRAHRAH!

;)

1. Not normally a reader, but this came across a news site I do normally read.

Poland in a pickle

Just as it is about to face both presidential and parliamentary elections, Poland has become embroiled in diplomatic disputes on two fronts, one with Belarus and a second with the Russian Federation. Despite its pleas to the European Union and the US for support, both Brussels and Washington have been reluctant to become actively involved and risk antagonising Moscow.

Read here.

The Poles have issues right now with the Russians and Belarusians. Both Russia and Belarus were already less than friendly with Poland already over the whole Orange Revolution in Ukraine (Poles supported the winning side that opposed the xUSSR states' candidate). Now with this...

The Russians had some kids of their diploamts mugged in Poland. In Russia then a Polish diplomat was killed. The Russians have been calling the mugging an 'unfriendly act' which is pretty serious in diplomatic speak. The Poles have a problem with Belarus over a group that is there to protect the rights of the Polish minority there. Belarus has been cracking down on all forms of dissent and the pro Polish group is considered one of them. It might even be a bit of petty 'payback' for the Orange Revolution.

It might be more complicated than it appears, but it does seem that way yet.

Study shows big game hunters, not climate change, killed off sloths

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Prehistoric big game hunters and not the last ice age are the likely culprits in the extinction of giant ground sloths and other North American great mammals such as mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, says a University of Florida researcher.

Determining whether the first arrival of humans or the warm-up of the American continent at the end of the last Ice Age was responsible for the demise of prehistoric sloths has puzzled scientists because both events occurred at the same time, about 11,000 years ago. But by using radiocarbon to date fossils from Cuba and Hispaniola, where humans appeared later than on the North American continent, long after the last Ice Age occurred, UF ornithologist David Steadman was able to separate the two events.

He and his colleagues found the last record of West Indian ground sloths coincided with the arrival of humans 4,400 years ago. The results are published in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper this week.

[...]

Steadman said he was not surprised to find that humans were more significant than changes in climate because most species of plants and animals can adjust to changes in temperature. However, the transition between the glacial and inter-glacial period, which resulted in shifts in habitat and the ranges of plants, may have made animal species more vulnerable than they otherwise would have been, he said.

"This is the first time it's been demonstrated for West Indian ground sloths, and West Indian ground sloths are sort of the poster child of big extinct West Indian mammals," he said. "I think this will go a long way to finally put to rest this whole idea that large extinct animals from the West Indies died out in the Ice Age during the Pleistocene Epoch."

Read more here.

Makes for a interesting commentary about the so-called 'living in haromony with nature' myth that gets tossed around wrt the Native Americans/First Nations. Anyone who looks closely can see that's not really the case. Myths, no matter which culture they're from, do more disservice than help.

Genetics of NorAm extinct great cats

DNA traces evolution of extinct sabertooths and the American cheetah-like cat

By performing sequence analysis of ancient DNA, a team of researchers has obtained data that help clarify our view of the evolutionary relationships shared by the large predatory cats that once roamed the prehistoric New World.

The work is reported in the August 9 issue of Current Biology by Ross Barnett of the University of Oxford and a team of researchers from Britain, Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Australia.

[...]

The phylogenetic tree drawn from the new data also shows that the American cheetah-like cat is genetically most closely related to the puma, rather than to the true African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). Miracinonyx and the true cheetah Acinonyx show remarkable morphological similarity, including elongated limbs and enlarged nares, but the genetic data indicate that this similarity is in fact a marvellous example of evolutionary parallelism, the development of similar body plans in response to similar ecological pressures. In light of the new DNA data and fossil information from other studies, it appears likely that a puma-like ancestor that migrated to the New World may have given rise to Miracinonyx and ancestral Puma a few million years ago, around the time that the North American prairie is thought to have undergone expansion.

Read more here.

With the proposal to reintroduce the cheetah and other 'megafauna' to NorAm, the fact that our cheetah has little or nothing in common other than niche might be another wrinkle in their plan.

More on the Kliper

Look here.

Best with flash, alas.

China sets up lunar exploration centre

China has set up a lunar exploration centre in Beijing to spearhead the country's moon probe projects in its latest bid to secure its place as a major world space power.

"The Centre for Lunar Exploration Programme, approved by the State Council (cabinet) in January 2004, will design and carry out the country's unmanned moon probe project," the China Daily cited officials as saying.

They plan on an orbiter in 2007, a lander in 2012, and a sample return in 2017.

Now what's that abouta space race again? I guess they want to get robots to the moon at least before the Americans return its surface with manned missions.

Link, of course.

SS3 would quickly follow SS2 if...

...it all works.

Orbital vehicle SpaceShipThree (SS3) will be developed by space tourism company Virgin Galactic and Mojave-based SpaceShipTwo (SS2)-developer Scaled Composites, if the planned SS2 suborbitalservice is successful, says Virgin Galactic president Will White­horn.

SpaceShipThree is planned for Scaled’s tier 2 manned space programme, while the nine-person SpaceShipTwo is part of the current tier 1b programme.

The suborbital three-crew SpaceShipOne (SS1), which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize last October, was developed within Scaled Composites’ tier 1 programme.

Read more at Flight International.

Another Duct Tape Award

This award is waaaay overdue. However, I've only been giving these out very recently.

The Future of Russia

The future of Russia is in the balance right now. huh. Pretty grandiose statement, isn't it? Pretty bombastic. Very cocky. Unfortunately, I think its true. The balancing points are the whole demographic situation and the political tight rope that Russia is trying to walk.

I've talked quite a bit about the demographic situation in Russia here and on Usenet. The current TFR of 1.27 children born/woman has actually gone down since the Yeltsin years by .13. That's not encouraging. What's worse is the HIV prevalancy has grown to 1.1% (and possibly much more) and the rampancy of very nasty variants of TB and others ( due to the fact that the (pre and ante) Soviet Union medical system prescribed antibiotics for EVERYTHING according to my wife [she's been annoyed that they don't here]). There's a possibility that Russia will have something on the order of 85 million people living in it in 25 years.

That's just one hiccup.

Russia is facing a pretty big illegal immigration problem in Siberia from China. Between 2001 and 2004, they had over 300k immigrants come across the border...permamently. Some officials, perhaps, even probably, with agendas say that its much, much higher. Given the expansive size of Siberia and the problematic censuses, it could every well be much, much higher.

In fact, Russia and China just conducted a bit of military exercises. One should note that they took place in eastern Siberia. They had 1800 Russian soldiers and over 8k Chinese soldiers. In peace time, the Russians could get less than 2k soldiers to participate on their own . Ouch. The decay of the Russian military is no secret. It might be on the upswing under Putin, but that's only a maybe. At best. There's so much for it to repair and get caught up on that it'll be decades before its one of teh foremost militaries in the world at best. With the other demographic problems, the military recovery may simply not happen.

Russia and China are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. SCO was founded initially as an antiterrorist and regional cooperative with a number of central asian xUSSR republics. However, it seems to have grown into a counterbalance for the USA. The military exercises that the Russians and Chinese conducting are under the auspices of the SCO. It ahs been strongly suggested as of recent that the SCO should become a free trade block as well as a military alliance. It would be interesting to see if the SCO becomes the 'next' EU.

On alt.history.future, I suggested that Russia with its shrinking population and great resources would become a sock puppet of China with its resource needs and growing population. If the population dip takes place as much as has been suggested, that Russia will have a hard time saying 'no' to China in its much weakened state.

It would seem that Russia's future, based on all of this, despite the Great Russian mentality, would be Chinese. Yet, Putin might be pulling yet another fast one. With the announcement of joint development with the Europeans of the Kliper, it might be that the Russians are trying to walk that tight rope of balancing with Europe and China. It might be too little too late or it might be a case where they're gambling that having access to space in the future is key to keeping their virtual independence. The problem is that Russia really doesn't need access to space in the future for any sort of resource requirements. While its possible that the US, EU, India, and China might - if the environmental regulations/necessities and trade barriers make it a necessity - Russia has a vast untapped resource base in Siberia and certainly little respect for said environment.

Russia in the EU has been tossed around a few times before. Yet that Great Russian attitude causes them serious issues. Russians have the belief their greater than their neighbors. That they are the greatest of the Slavs and that they are still the Third Rome. They have teh strong belief that they haven't, despite evidence to the contrary fallen from the position of strength that the Soviet Union had. Joining the EU while still at least as strong - large population, growing economy - as they are now would probably the best bet, but then that Velikorossiya attitude again.

So, we'll see. Russia's facing a strange future. Shrinking population, large amounts of illegal immigration, decaying military, cozying up to China, and yet keeping Europe at least moderately in play.

So what will it be? China...or Europe? Obviously not the US.