Christopher Stringer is one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists. He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning our evolution: Recent African Origin or ‘Out of Africa’. He has worked at The Natural History Museum, London since 1973, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and currently leads the large and successful Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB), His most recent book is The Origin of Our Species (titled Lone Survivors in the US).

Rethinking ‘Out of Africa’

[CHRISTOPHER STRINGER:] At the moment, I’m looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans-the leading idea over the last 20 years. This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa. But we’re having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia.

If this is so, then we are not […]

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Children raised by lesbian parents fare as well as they would in heterosexual households, new research suggests.

The finding, which comes from a review of essentially all studies on the topic of same-sex parents and the health of their children, helps to tease out politics and science on this highly divisive issue. In general, kids in both heterosexual and lesbian households had similar levels of academic achievement, number of friends and overall well-being.

Whether or not kids from homosexual households are more likely to have a non-heterosexual orientation is still unknown. But if there is a genetic component to sexual orientation, it would make sense that kids born to a lesbian mom, say, would be more likely than other kids to be homosexual, scientists say.

At the end of the day, what matters to kids is far deeper than parents’ gender or sexual orientation, the research suggests.

‘The family type that is best for children is one that has responsible, committed, stable parenting,’ said study researcher Judith Stacey of New York University. ‘Two parents are, on average, better than one, but one really good parent is better than two not-so-good ones.’

Here are some highlights of the findings:

In a study of […]

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It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman’s ‘Chicago Boys’ as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.

Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn’t a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent. As Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom in 1982 – and as Klein so eloquently describes in her book:

‘Only a crisis – […]

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NEW YORK — New York City’s war on freedom could be adding a new weapon to its arsenal, especially if NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly has his say.

The head of the New York Police Department is working with the Pentagon to secure body scanners to be used throughout the Big Apple.

If Kelly gets his wish, the city will be receiving a whole slew of Terahertz Imagining Detection scanners, a high-tech radiation detector that measures the energy that is emitted from a persons’ body. As CBS News reports, ‘It measures the energy radiating from a body up to 16 feet away, and can detect anything blocking it, like a gun.

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Researchers claim a newly discovered molecule found in the Earth’s atmosphere holds the potential to help offset global warming by actually cooling the planet. The molecule is a Criegee biradical or Criegee intermediate, which are chemical intermediaries that are powerful oxidizers of pollutants produced by combustion, such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide. They have the ability to naturally clean up the atmosphere by helping break down nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide to form sulfate and nitrate, which ultimately leads to cloud formation that could help cool the planet.

Criegee biradicals are carbonyl oxides that were first hypothesized in the 1950s by Rudolf Criegee but had not been able to be directly detected until now. Using a unique apparatus designed by Sandia Lab researchers, researchers from the University of Manchester, Bristol University and Sandia Labs were able to detect the Criegee biradical – in this case formaldehyde oxide (CH2OO) – and measure how fast it reacts.

The apparatus used the intense, tunable light from a third-generation synchrotron facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source to discern the formation and removal of different isomeric species, which are molecules that contain the same toms but arranged in different combinations.

The researchers found […]

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