A hardy band of Neanderthals may have made a last stand for their species at a remote outpost in subarctic Russia, a newfound prehistoric ‘tool kit’ suggests.

The Ural Mountains site ‘may be one of the last [refuges] of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting,’ said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France’s Université de Toulouse le Mirail.

Neanderthals dominated Europe for some 200,000 years until modern humans began moving into the region about 45,000 years ago. The two human species likely shared space for a while, but it’s a mystery what happened during that period, how long it lasted, and why Homo sapiens prevailed in the end.

(Related: ‘Neanderthals, Humans Interbred-First Solid DNA Evidence.’)

Previous archaeological evidence had placed the last known Neanderthal refuges on the Iberian Peninsula, home to current-day Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. (See ‘Neanderthals” Last Stand Was in Gibraltar, Study Suggests.’)

‘Not surprisingly, it was in the peripheral areas’-Iberia and perhaps northwestern Europe-’that Neanderthals remained the longest as discrete populations,’ said Neanderthal expert Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who wasn’t part of the new study.

But now hundreds of stone tools found at Byzovaya-a Russian site at the same chilly latitude as Iceland-could redraw the […]

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On Christmas Day, December 25th, the temperature at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole site soared to an all-time record high of 9.9°F (-12.3°C) eclipsing the former record of 7.5°F (-13.6°C) set on December 27, 1978. The low temperature on December 25th was a mild (relatively!) 4°F (-15.5°C). Records at the site began in January 1957. Its elevation is 9,301 feet (2,835 meters).

This infrared satellite animation shows how a tongue of relatively warm air intruded inland over the Antarctic continent to the South Pole (identified by the red square). Temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit are displayed for the time period of the animation (from December 24th through December 25th). Two other AWS sites near the South Pole (100 kilometers to the north-along the prime meridian-and east of the pole) also broke their all-time heat records with Nico and Henry AWS sites reporting 17.2°F (-8.2°C) and 16.0°F (-8.9°C) respectively.

The normal high temperature for December at the South Pole is -15.7°F (-26.5°C).

The coldest temperature on record for the South Pole site is -117.0°F (-82.8°C) set on June 23, 1982. The pole is one of the driest places on earth with an estimated total annual precipitation of just .20

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How long do working mothers stay home after having their first child? If you guessed the answer might be 12 weeks (not an unreasonable assumption, since that’s the amount of time allotted by our national family leave law), you’d be sadly mistaken. According to recently released census numbers, a majority of mothers who worked during pregnancy go back before that, some way before. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth and one in 10-more than half a million women each year-go back to their jobs in four weeks or less.

Let’s take a moment to think about what’s going on just four weeks after birth. Babies haven’t even cracked their first real smiles yet. Mothers are still physically recovering from birth, particularly if they’ve had C-sections. They’re both probably getting up several times during the night to nurse. In fact, they’ve barely begun what’s supposed to be half a year of exclusive breast-feeding, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Yet going back to work in such a short amount of time isn’t just tiring or unpleasant, new research demonstrates that it’s bad for both women and children. We now have enough evidence to blame the […]

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One of the most exciting products of a ten year study, commended for its originality and innovation, is a set of five practical principles, to enhance community development and project management. These principles might make development practitioners’ work clearer. The application of the principles in a series of diverse case studies reveals wider reaching implications for future research and practice.

One of these is the generation of ‘inhabit-ability’, a state of being which allows a particular place to be better inhabited, following an intervention. By intervention, we mean the act that modify (or hinder) a place, event or set of social circumstances. The concepts offer the potential to move beyond the cynicism and sense of dilution evoked by the word ‘sustainable’.

The overarching aim is simple; to assist the design of efforts to make living in a particular place better for those who are actually there. How can we deeply consider the impact on human and non-human stakeholders, and acknowledge the voices in the community of people and species affected, especially those at the margins?

The principles are a set of five short statements. Grounded in an extensive theoretical analysis, the principles have been analyzed in four differing contexts; community health, […]

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Just in time for the holidays, as many among us prepare to sit down to turkey or ham at the dinner table, FDA has taken a big step backwards on the public health threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria in our meat and in our everyday lives. The agency has chosen to go back on its nearly 35-year-old promise to stop the use of certain antibiotics in animal feed. Today, it essentially announced to the American citizens it is supposed to protect that they are on their own when it comes to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

As I’ve written before, leading medical and health experts agree that the widespread and unnecessary practice of giving healthy animals low doses of antibiotics endangers public health-by increasing antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Rising resistance renders antibiotics less effective for treatment of human diseases and makes treatment riskier and more prone to side effects. In some cases, treatment is no longer possible. In the US, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold are for use in livestock. Public health advocates have repeatedly asked FDA to address the looming crisis of untreatable infections, but FDA has repeatedly evaded the issue.

In November, I wrote about FDA punting on its obligations to […]

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