Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia
During the last Ice Age, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass, called Sahul. It was a strange and often hostile place populated by a bizarre cast of giant animals. (Source: ScienceDaily Headlines)
Source: ScienceDaily Headlines - January 27, 2017 Category: Science Source Type: news
Start The Year With A Social Detox
This article first appeared on QuietRev.com
We don’t do all that much for the holidays. We don’t travel great distances while lugging presents or have Hollywood-level, tension-filled dinner chat with relatives who love to start loud conversations about sensitive, personal subjects. But even without the drama, I still end up exhausted from socializing by the time it’s the New Year.
My strategies for self-preservation at any celebration or family get-together are generally successful because I get some alone time by volunteering for things. I organize pickups, I run errands—anything that ...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - January 27, 2017 Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news
Life as Our Ancestors Lived It
January 11, 2016
In most of the time human beings have lived on Earth, it was in circumstances very different from those we encounter now. I learned about how people might have lived in Stone Age cultures when I lived in one fifty years ago. I chose to do so in order to examine facial expressions and gestures that could not have been influenced by contact with outsiders or the media. Would they be the same as I had observed in many literate cultures, or would there be new expressions I had never seen before? (They were the same.) Even if I saw familiar expressions and gestures, might they signal entirely different emotion...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - January 11, 2017 Category: Science Source Type: news
18 Diseases The World Has Turned Its Back On
This article is part HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to eliminate them.
More than 1 billion people on the planet suffer from illnesses that the world pays little attention to.
Neglected tropical diseases are a group of at least 18 diseases that primarily affect people living in poverty in tropical regions of the world and are virtually unknown elsewhere, according to the World Health Organization.
These are diseases like river blindness, which has infected 18 million people worldwide and caused blindness in 270,000 people; or...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - December 6, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: news
18 Diseases The World Has Turned Its Back On
This article is part HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to eliminate them.
More than 1 billion people on the planet suffer from illnesses that the world pays little attention to.
Neglected tropical diseases are a group of at least 18 diseases that primarily affect people living in poverty in tropical regions of the world and are virtually unknown elsewhere, according to the World Health Organization.
These are diseases like river blindness, which has infected 18 million people worldwide and caused blindness in 270,000 people; or...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - December 6, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news
Ocean acidification accelerates erosion of coral reefs
Scientists studying naturally high carbon dioxide coral reefs in Papua New Guinea found that erosion of essential habitat is accelerated in these highly acidified waters, even as coral growth continues to slow. The new research has important implications for coral reefs around the world as the ocean become more acidic as a result of global change. (Source: ScienceDaily Headlines)
Source: ScienceDaily Headlines - November 22, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: news
Private Interests Valued over Human Lives in Flint, Michigan
Flint water tower. Credit: George Thomas / Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0By Phoebe BraithwaiteNEW YORK, Oct 16 2016 (IPS)When the water in Flint, Michigan was found to be eroding the engines of cars at a General Motors’ (GM) factory, government officials agreed to change the factory’s water source, yet the same water source continued to poison the residents of Flint for another year.From 17 to 20 October governments will meet in Quito, Ecuador, for HABITAT III, the UN’s most important conference about cities, which only occurs once every 20 years. HABITAT III looks to inaugurate a new urban agenda and set down goa...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - October 16, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Authors: Phoebe Braithwaite Tags: Editors' Choice Environment Featured Headlines Health Water & Sanitation Source Type: news
Do Humans Need Meat?
Environmentalists encourage us to cut down on meat consumption in favor of vegetable foods that are less damaging to the environment. Given that our ancestors likely had plenty of meat in their diet, is going meatless a good idea?
The History of Eating Meat
Our chimpanzee-like ancestors were mostly vegetarian, judging from the diet of modern chimpanzees that subsist mainly on fruit, leaves, and nuts, with a rare morsel of hunted meat.
After they left forests in favor of open grasslands, hominids likely increased the proportion of meat in their diet given that they would have encountered large herds of game animals.
Init...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - October 14, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: news
[In Depth] First Polynesians launched from East Asia to settle Pacific
It was only 3000 years ago that humans first set foot on Fiji and other isolated islands of the Pacific, having sailed across thousands of kilometers of ocean. Yet the identity of these intrepid seafarers has been lost to time. They left a trail of distinctive red pottery but few other clues, and scientists have confronted two different scenarios: The explorers were either farmers who sailed directly from mainland East Asia to the remote islands, or people who mixed with hunter-gatherers they met along the way in Melanesia, including Papua New Guinea. Now, the first genome-wide study of ancient DNA from prehistoric Polynes...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 6, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Ann Gibbons Tags: Human Evolution Source Type: news
Facial Perception: The Human Superpower
Recognizing faces happens so naturally and swiftly that we rarely give it a second thought.
However, a simple scratch of the surface reveals that facial recognition and perception are wildly complex tricks.
If you glimpse a photo of a friend, parent, or celebrity, you don't need to spend any time assessing the creases and folds of their nose before you can definitively say who they are.
Recognizing a face is instant and effortless. It is so effortless that it is forgivable to have never considered how we manage it.
If you take a moment to think how complex a face is, yet how similar each face is to each other - two ey...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - October 5, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news
Domestic violence in PNG
Everyone back home wants to know what Papua New Guinea is like. “Is it true that cannibals still exist?” is the usual question to spring from their lips. (The answer is no. Well, not really. Actually, maybe. I still haven’t got a straight answer on that one.) (Source: MSF News)
Source: MSF News - September 27, 2016 Category: Global & Universal Source Type: news
[In Depth] Aborigines and Eurasians rode one migration wave
Australian Aborigines have long been cast as a people apart. Although Australia is halfway around the world from our species's accepted birthplace in Africa, the continent is nevertheless home to some of the earliest undisputed signs of modern humans outside Africa, and Aborigines have unique languages and cultural adaptations. Some researchers have posited that the ancestors of the Aborigines were the first modern humans to surge out of Africa, spreading swiftly eastward along the coasts of southern Asia thousands of years before a second wave of migrants populated Eurasia. Not so, according to a trio of genomic studie...
Source: ScienceNOW - September 22, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Elizabeth Culotta Tags: Human Origins Source Type: news
DNA Evidence Sheds Light on When Humans First Left Africa
Researchers have found evidence to suggest that the ancestry of all non-Africans can be traced back to a single migration out of Africa at least 50,000 years ago.
Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago, but the question of how our species went on to populate the rest of the globe has mystified scientists for decades. In a series of genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer.
In analyses published in the academic journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists surveyed DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and concluded that ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - September 22, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Suyin Haynes Tags: Uncategorized Africa DNA migration Science Source Type: news
Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms
Clues left in genes of modern populations in Australian and Papua New Guinea enable scientists to trace remarkable journey made by first human explorersClaims that Indigenous Australians are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth have been backed by the first extensive study of their DNA, which dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago.Scientists were able to trace the remarkable journey made by intrepid ancient humans by sifting through clues left in the DNA of modern populations in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The analysis shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to cross an ocean, ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - September 21, 2016 Category: Science Authors: Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Tags: Indigenous Australians Science Indigenous peoples Australia news Genetics Evolution Source Type: news
When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged
For decades, a rare disease crawled across Papua New Guinea. When scientists realized what was behind kuru, it caught everyone by surprise. But similar diseases can still be transmitted through food. (Source: NPR Health and Science)
Source: NPR Health and Science - September 6, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Rae Ellen Bichell Source Type: news
