Stephan: Once again something we thought we knew about early man proves to be wrong.
WASHINGTON — The oldest known Neanderthal poo, uncovered in Spain, shows that cavemen ate not only meat but vegetables too, according to a study published on Wednesday.
The discovery was made at the archeological site of El Salt, where researchers have found signs that Neanderthals lived some 45,000-60,000 years ago. The study in the journal PLOS ONE is the first to analyze feces in an attempt to show precisely what kinds of foods our long-extinct kin were eating.
Researchers dug into the sediment and ground the samples to a powder for analysis at a sophisticated Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lab. They discovered biomarkers in the poo that showed coprostanol, a lipid formed when the gut metabolizes cholesterol, particularly from eating animals.
They also found 5B-stigmastanol, a substance that is made when plants are broken down in the digestive process.
That means Neanderthals ate mostly meat, as experts have believed for some time, but that there was also evidence of a considerable amount of plants in their diet, including tubers, berries and nuts. “We believe Neanderthals probably ate what was available in different situations, seasons and climates,’ said Ainara Sistiaga, a graduate student at the University of La Laguna who performed the research while […]
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ANNA LEMIND, - The Mind Unleashed
Stephan: Here is a report on a new study that I found amazing, and maybe you will too. It is just a first take, and only additional studies will prove or disprove it, but the game is afoot...
A team of Harvard scientists may have found an indication that a portion of an ancient Earth exists inside our planet’s mantle.
A study presented at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California, claims that the previously inexplicable isotope ratio from the depths of the Earth may be an ‘echo” of the ancient Earth that existed before the collision with another celestial body, which is estimated to have led to the formation of the Moon 4.5 billion years ago.
According to the authors of the study, the ratio may represent a signal from a material that existed prior to the moment of the collision.
Scientists of the Harvard University led by Associate Professor Sujoy Mukhopadhyay believe that only a portion of the Earth melted as a result of the collision, and that in the depths of our planet’s mantle there still exists a part of the ancient Earth.
Scientists have studied the isotope ratio of noble gases from the depths of the Earth’s mantle and compared it to the isotope ratio of the gases found closer to the surface. They found that the ratio of 3He to 22Ne from the surface layers of the mantle is much higher than the one of its deeper layers.
The […]
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Stephan: I knew alcohol was a dangerous drug, but really had not appreciated how deadly it is. This report may surprise you.
A new study from the Center for Disease Control released Thursday outlines some shocking statistics regarding Americans and drinking. According to the study, 10 percent of deaths for people between 20 and 64 is alcohol-related. Roughly 71 percent of those who die prematurely in those deaths are male, and over half of them die as a direct result of binge drinking. However, alcohol still remains behind tobacco use, poor nutrition, and sedentary lifestyle in terms of preventable causes of death in the U.S. The top three causes of alcohol-related deaths for those under 21 are automobile accidents, homicide, and suicide. The study defined excessive alcohol in terms of binge drinking (five or more drinks on a single occasion for men, four or more for women) or heavy weekly consumption (15 or more a week for men, eight for women).
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Thursday, June 26th, 2014
ELIAS ISQUITH, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: This is a datapoint on what is becoming the dominate trend in U.S. politics. What is not generally recognized is that for neurological reasons as well as culture, there is about 30 per cent of the country so driven by fear and anger (See: From One to the Many: The Social Implications of Nonlocal Perception. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2814%2900037-8/fulltext) that they will not be reconciled. This is a true schism forming.
In Mississippi on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a runoff election to determine who would be the state Republican Party’s nominee for Senate in the extremely conservative state. Despite the fact that the two men were more or less indistinguishable on issue positions, the race was remarkably contentious and largely defined by dueling allegations of impropriety and fraud. Indeed, while non-conservatives may consider the differences between the so-called establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP to be slight, the primary battle that reached its culmination last night is clear evidence that Republicans themselves strongly disagree.
On that front, if nowhere else, Mississippi GOPers have themselves an unlikely companion: University of Washington associate professor Christopher Parker, who is the author of 2013′s ‘Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America” and is a firm believer that the divisions within the GOP are significant and likely to endure. Hoping to gain a keener insight into the Tea Party mind, Salon recently called Parker to discuss his research, his recent Brookings Institution paper on the Tea Party and why he doesn’t think the kind of bickering and dysfunction we saw in Mississippi […]
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Thursday, June 26th, 2014
ROBERT BARNES, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Everyone has covered this which, itself, is interesting. Still I wanted it to be part of the SR archive. This is good news, a modest inhibition of the surveillance state. I think the Justices are going to be more restrictive of surveillance, because it has dawned on them -- from some bad experiences -- that they are as vulnerable as anyone else. And they have no interest whatever in seeing their private lives made public.
The Supreme Court unequivocally ruled Wednesday that privacy rights are not sacrificed to 21st century technology, saying unanimously that police generally must obtain a warrant before searching the cellphone of someone they arrest.
While the specific protection may not affect the average American, the court made a bold statement that the same concern about government prying that animated the nation’s birth applies to the abundance of digital information about an individual in the modern world.
Modern cellphones ‘hold for many Americans the privacies of life,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a court united behind the opinion’s expansive language. ‘The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
Roberts said that in most cases when police seize a cellphone from a suspect, the answer is simple: ‘Get a warrant.”
In a strong defense of digital age privacy, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police may not generally search the cellphones of people they arrest without first getting search warrants. (  / AP)
The ruling has no impact on National Security Agency data collection programs revealed over the past year or law […]
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