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Venezuela police scramble to squash pumpkin threat CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan security services scrambled on Monday to tackle a new threat on the streets of Caracas: Halloween-style pumpkins carrying messages of rebellion against President Hugo Chavez. Local media showed heavily armed police and bomb experts surrounding one orange squash with a Halloween face and covered with stickers; others sprouted cables and wires making authorities wary they could be home-made explosives

Contact: Oris Sanjur sanjuro@naos.si.edu 202-786-2094 x8824 Smithsonian Institution Genetic marker tells squash domestication story In the January 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), The Cucurbit Network and the University of Puerto Rico establish mitochondrial DNA analysis as a powerful tool for understanding relationships among flowering plants. A comparison of mtDNA from cultivated squash, pumpkins, gourds and their wild ancestors strongly supports hypotheses based on archeological and ethnobotanical evidence for six, independent domestication events in the New World. Even Oris Sanjur, who conducted the genetic analysis was "surprised by the resolution" ...

The gourd, originally used to store gunpowder, was extensively decorated on the outside with a flame tool. Burned into its surface is the text: "Maximilien Bourdaloue on January 21st, dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his beheading. It is described in contemporaneous accounts that there was a lot of blood in the scaffold after the beheading and that, in fact, many people went there to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood," Carles Lalueza-Fox, lead author of the study and a researcher at Spain's Institute of Evolutionary Biology, told Discovery News. The handkerchief is now missing from...

Contact: Steve Bradt steve_bradt@harvard.edu 617-496-8070 Harvard University Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to the Americas from AsiaPlants widely used as containers arrived, already domesticated, some 10,000 years ago CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 13, 2005 -- Thick-skinned bottle gourds widely used as containers by prehistoric peoples were likely brought to the Americas some 10,000 years ago by individuals who arrived from Asia, according to a new genetic comparison of modern bottle gourds with gourds found at archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere. The finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended...