WASHINGTON — Chimpanzees may have been using stone ‘hammers’ as long as 4300 years ago. An international research team led by archeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary, Canada, said yesterday it had uncovered the hammers, dated to that time, in the West African country of Ivory Coast. It would be the earliest known use of tools by chimpanzees. The hammers were used to crack nuts, a behaviour still seen in chimps in that area, the researchers say in a paper in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They say the finding may indicate that a ‘chimpanzee stone age’ began in ancient times. The earliest reports of stone-tool use by chimpanzees in the area date to the writings of Portuguese explorers in the 1600s. The stones are about the size of rockmelons with patterns of wear indicating use to crack nuts, the researchers say. The rocks would have been too large for human hands, but about right for the larger, stronger hands of chimpanzees. ‘It’s not clear whether we hominids invented this kind of stone technology, or whether both humans and the great apes inherited it from a […]
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA — Sixteen months after his divorce, Richard Parker made a devastating discovery. A DNA test revealed that his 3-year-old son had been fathered by someone else. Mr. Parker immediately filed a lawsuit claiming fraud by his apparently unfaithful ex-wife. He took his case all the way to the Florida Supreme Court. Last week, the Florida justices ruled 7-0 against him. They said that Parker must continue to pay $1,200 a month in child support because he had missed the one-year postdivorce deadline for filing his lawsuit. His court-ordered payments would total more than $200,000 over 15 years to support another man’s child. ‘We find that the balance of policy considerations favors protecting the best interests of the child over protecting the interests of one parent defrauded by the other parent in the midst of a divorce proceeding,’ writes Justice Kenneth Bell for the court. ‘We recognize that the former husband in this case may feel victimized,’ he writes. He then quotes a scholar to explain the ruling: ‘While some individuals are innocent victims of deceptive partners, adults are aware of the high incidence of infidelity and only they, not the children, are able […]
The White House could soon be drawn into the fallout from a Pentagon report presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Friday, which concluded that pre-war intelligence assessments used by the Bush administration contained false claims of a ‘mature symbiotic relationship’ between Iraq and al Qaeda. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the committee, said he would ask current and former White House aides to testify about the intelligence assessments prepared by Douglas Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who served under former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Those who will be called to testify include National Security Advisor Stephen Hadly and former Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. The report of the Pentagon’s acting Inspector General, Thomas Gimble, concludes that Mr Feith developed ‘intelligence products’ in 2002 which drew a link between al Qaeda and Iraq that was ‘not fully supported by the available intelligence’ and ‘more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the administration’. Senator Levin, who requested the report, said, ‘Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in […]
Taking a nap after lunch may be good for your heart. This splendid news arrived in the form of a study published Monday in The Archives of Internal Medicine. In a study of more than 23,000 Greek men and women ages 20 to 86, researchers found that napping at least three times a week for a half-hour was associated with a significantly decreased risk of death from heart disease. After controlling for factors like smoking, body mass index, physical activity and diet, the researchers found that people who regularly took a siesta had a 37 percent lower coronary death rate than those who never napped. The effect was even greater in working men. Dr. Dimitrios Trichopoulos, the senior author of the study and a professor of cancer prevention at the Harvard School of Public Health, acknowledged that the study included only a small number of people who had died of coronary artery disease, and that the results when women were analyzed separately, while suggestive of some effect, were not conclusive. Still, he said, for him a siesta is an absolute requirement. ‘If you can, you should take a daily nap,’ he said. ‘I’m Greek. I came […]
PHILADELPHIA — A mysterious disease is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops and costing beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars, industry experts said on Monday. Beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies in recent weeks, leaving many unable to rent the bees to farmers of crops such as almonds and, later in the year, apples and blueberries. ‘It’s unusual in terms of the widespread distribution and severity,’ said Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and chief executive of Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem. Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who reported the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder to researchers at Pennsylvania State University in November, said he had lost about 2,000 hives, which can each contain around 50,000 bees during the summer months. He estimated that he will lose as much as $350,000 after accounting for lost income and the cost of replacing bees. Researchers from state and federal agriculture agencies have been frustrated in their search for a cause because affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
