Genome sequencing of "Sunrise Girl" provides insight into migration settlement of the Americas.

There has long been disputes about how the Americas were settled. The traditional land bridge theory, often called "the Clovis First model" often comes into question when sites predating it are claimed to have been found (and there is controversy over these finds too, some are disproved, others are claimed to have been suppressed to protect the dominant hypothesis and protect academic careers, it's a real clusterf*ck) and others put forward the idea of multiple waves of migration form different areas of the world over time. The Clovis First model ties into the land bridge theory quite closely, and this find, and the genome sequence done on the remains found support the idea of a single wave of migration over the landbridge, but may not rule out other waves of migration from other areas via sea as some hypothesize. It's a significant find and lends a lot of hard evidence to back up the single migration, so we'll see how the dominant hypothesis and its rivals evolve over the next dozen years or so as this evidence gets taken into consideration.

-M

Imagine if this was mass-produced and the price of the jetpack goes down from $250,000 to more reasonable cost ... I would get one in a heartbeat!

That's really cool Rob Allen ...

Is that a Zeta Beam tracking him starting at :27?

Hawking's final paper could lay the mathematical foundation to test for the existence of parallel universes and a multiverse.

From the article:



As long as they're not testing for a Superboy Prime punch it should be ok

-M

Those are all fascinating objects, and it is a source of no little frustration that mankind fails to explore its own solar system more actively, prefering to waste its energies on petty pursuits. My hat’s off to the people of NASA, the ESA and their Russian, Chinese, Indian and Japanese counterparts for keeping up the good fight. 

The most optimistic thing I heard in Star Trek was in the movie First Contact, when Lily asks Picard how much the Enterprise cost and he answers that economics in the future work a little differently.

The most amazing thing about capitalism is how it uses imaginary money to build actual things. Banks lend money that doesn’t exist and that they do not own yet, but that is supposed to be paid in the future (as interest payments) by other borrowers. It might not take that much tweaking to engineer a financial system that would’t force us to choose between space exploration and immediate societal needs; after all, even if finances are very tight, no country ever failed to find money for a new war when the need arises.

The concept of solar energy -green, free and inexhaustible- would seem to be a panacea. Why aren’t we all working overtime on that idea? What about ensuring that mankind survives the 7navoidable death of planet Earth? That strikes me as more important than a new and snazzier phone model.

Fossil jawbone discovery reveals prehistoric "sea-monster" the giant ichthyosaur that were as big as the modern blue whale, and resembled some kind of pre-historic dolphin*


artists extraplation of the creatures based on fossil records...



they were believed to have preyed the seas some 205 million years ago, and went extinct at the end of the dinosaur age some 66 million years ago.

-M


*giant carnivorous prehistoric dolphins sounds like something out of a Grant Morrison comic book