PARIS — Man’s first known trip to the dentist occurred as early as 9,000 years ago, when at least nine people living in a Neolithic village in present-day Pakistan had holes drilled into their molars and survived the procedure. The findings, being reported Thursday in the scientific review Nature, push back the dawn of dentistry by 4,000 years, to around 7000 B.C. The drilled molars come from a sample of 300 individuals buried in graves at the Mehrgarh site in western Pakistan, believed to be the oldest Stone Age complex in the Indus River valley. ‘This is certainly the first case of drilling a person’s teeth,’ said David Frayer, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas and lead author of the report. ‘But even more significant, this practice lasted some 1,500 years and was a tradition at this site. It wasn’t just a sporadic event.’ The earliest previously known evidence of dental work done in vivo was a drilled molar found in a Neolithic graveyard in Denmark dating from about 3000 B.C. All nine of the Mehrgarh dental patients were adults – four females, two males and three individuals of unknown […]
NEW YORK — World crude oil prices rose Wednesday after a U.S. weekly stockpiles report indicated lower-than-expected supplies of gasoline and diesel. New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in May, rose 47 cents to 66.70 dollars a barrel. On London’s ICE Futures exchange, the price of Brent North Sea crude for May delivery rose 21 cents to 66.60 dollars a barrel. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, the heating oil rose less than a cent to 1.8610 dollars a gallon as gasoline futures rose more than four cents to 1.94 dollars per gallon. Natural gas futures fell 4 cents to 7.03 dollars per 1,000 cubic feet. The Energy Department said in its weekly report that domestic inventories of gasoline shrank by 4.4 million barrels last week to 211.8 million barrels, or roughly in line with year-ago levels. The nation’s supply of distillate, which includes diesel and heating oil, fell by 2.6 million barrels to 121.6 million barrels, or 16 percent more than last year. Traders are still concerned about a possible halt in Iran’s oil exports if the United Nations imposes sanctions for its nuclear activities. A volatile situation in Nigeria, […]
Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago. Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action – like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds. As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: ‘Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story.’ Tiktaalik – the name means ‘a large, shallow-water fish’ in the Inuit language Inuktikuk – shows that the evolution of animals from living in water to living on land happened gradually, with fish first living in shallow water. The animal lived in the Devonian era lasting from 417m to 354m years ago, […]
BAGHDAD, Iraq — In the deadliest day for American forces since the beginning of the year, at least nine members of the military were killed in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar Province, including four in a rebel attack and at least five when their truck accidentally flipped over, the American military command said Monday. Three marines and one sailor were killed Sunday in the rebel assault, the military reported, offering no further information. It was the largest number of American deaths in a single attack in more than a month. In another part of Anbar on Sunday, a flash flood toppled a seven-ton truck, killing five marines riding inside it and wounding one, the military said. Two marines and one Navy corpsman in the truck were missing, officials said. Wrapping up a quick visit here, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, pressed Iraqi leaders for a second day on Monday to form a coalition government as quickly as possible, in order to end a power vacuum in which insurgent attacks, sectarian violence and general lawlessness have flourished. Underscoring their concerns, three car bombs exploded in predominantly Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, […]
U.S. doctors have successfully implanted bladders grown in the laboratory into patients with bladder disease. These custom bladders grew from the patients’ own bladder cells on a specially shaped mold. The surgeons hope to use the technique to repair or replace other complex internal organs. Seven youths aged four to 19 are the first beneficiaries of new bladders engineered by Dr. Anthony Atala and colleagues at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. ‘In terms of actually engineering a complex construct that we engineer outside the body and then we implant inside the body, this is really the first time we have been able to do that,’ he said. The youthful patients Dr. Atala treated had congenital bladder disease that caused unnaturally high pressures inside the organ. This problem can damage the kidney, which produces the urine passed by the bladder. Traditional bladder reconstruction usually involves grafts from the small intestine or stomach. But the use of such tissue can cause complications because it is different from bladder tissue. Intestinal or stomach tissue absorbs liquids, while the bladder is designed to excrete them. Atala’s team took an alternative approach. They extracted bladder tissue from the seven young […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
