Sunday, December 22nd, 2013
ROBERT SANDERS, - University of California - Berkeley
Stephan: A new chapter opens on our past.
When I read reports like this one I always wonder what Creationists do with this research. It just seems very sad to me.
The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman’s toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.
Population geneticist Montgomery Slatkin, graduate student Fernando Racimo and post-doctoral student Flora Jay were part of an international team of anthropologists and geneticists who generated a high-quality sequence of the Neanderthal genome and compared it with the genomes of modern humans and a recently recognized group of early humans called Denisovans.
The comparison shows that Neanderthals and Denisovans are very closely related, and that their common ancestor split off from the ancestors of modern humans about 400,000 years ago. Neanderthals and Denisovans split about 300,000 years ago.
Though Denisovans and Neanderthals eventually died out, they left behind bits of their genetic heritage because they occasionally interbred with modern humans. The research team estimates that between 1.5 and 2.1 percent of the genomes of modern non-Africans can be traced to Neanthertals.
Denisovans also left genetic traces in modern humans, though only in some Oceanic and Asian populations. The genomes of Australian aborigines, […]
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Saturday, December 21st, 2013
ED PILKINGTON, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I think this is very good news.
Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, is injecting his first $50m into the new journalism venture he is setting up with former Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald.
The investment represents the first tranche of a total pot of $250m that the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist has promised for the new operation. A statement released from Honolulu on Thursday said that the money was being used to set up offices in New York, San Francisco and Washington.
The holding company, which has changed its name from NewCo to First Look Media, seeks to build on Greenwald’s growing following in the wake of his work on the Edward Snowden leaks of National Security Agency documents to generate what it calls ‘robust coverage of politics, government, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, arts and culture, business, technology, and investigative news
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Saturday, December 21st, 2013
Stephan: Here we see the rancid truth behind the climate denier movement which has put the Earth at risk. This is what the Rightists on the Supreme Court have in large measure made possible through Citizens United. A tiny group of Rightists are literally putting the planet at risk to assure their profits. It is completely insane.
Click through to see the chart that helps explain this story.
A new study conducted by Drexel University’s environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle, PhD, exposes the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement. This study marks the first peer-reviewed, comprehensive analysis ever conducted of the sources of funding that maintain the denial effort.
Through an analysis of the financial structure of the organizations that constitute the core of the countermovement and their sources of monetary support, Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are ‘dark money,’ or concealed funding.
The data also indicates that Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, two of the largest supporters of climate science denial, have recently pulled back from publicly funding countermovement organizations. Coinciding with the decline in traceable funding, the amount of funding given to countermovement organizations through third party pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically.
Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science in Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, conducted the study during a year-long fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The study was published today in Climatic Change, one of the […]
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Saturday, December 21st, 2013
LEAH SOTTILE, - The Atlantic
Stephan: Our social processes are not working. In every way that we can measure we, as a country, are not well and we are getting worse because so many of us are poor, aging, out-of-work, or all three. Wellness is not a national priority, and this is the result. We have to change.
We were standing at Target in an aisle we’d never walked down before, looking at things we didn’t understand. Pill splitters, multivitamins, supplements, and the thing we were here to buy: a long blue pill box-the kind with seven little doors labeled ‘S M T W T F S ‘ for each day of the week, the kind that old people cram their pills into when they have too many to remember what they’ve already taken.
My husband, Joe Preston, shook his head. ‘Do I really need this?
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Saturday, December 21st, 2013
Stephan: Can you imagine anything more clearly demonstrating the primacy in the Illness Profit System of profit over wellness? We don't even demand that the advertising promoting drugs be honest and accurate.
Make sure your skepticism antenna is fully extended when you’re watching TV commercials for both prescription and non-prescription drugs.
For six out of 10 claims made in those commercials are misleading and one in 10 is downright false, according to a study published recently in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
‘The frequency of potentially misleading claims in drug advertising is in conflict with proponents who argue the social value of drug advertising is found in informing consumers about drugs,
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