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Los Angeles, CA – A new study in the journal Personal Relationships reveals that women prefer mates who are recognized by their peers for their skills, abilities, and achievements, while not preferring men who use coercive tactics to subordinate their rivals. Indeed, women found dominance strategies of the latter type to be attractive primarily when men used them in the context of male-male athletic competitions. Jeffrey K. Snyder, Lee A. Kirkpatrick, and H. Clark Barrett conducted three studies with college women at two U.S. universities. Participants evaluated hypothetical potential mates described in written vignettes. The studies were designed to examine...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California's utilities, refineries and large factories must transform their operations to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a new climate plan before state regulators. On Thursday, the California Air Resources Board was expected to adopt what would be the nation's most sweeping global warming plan, outlining for the first time how individuals and businesses would meet a landmark 2006 law that made the state a leader on global climate change. It would hold California's worst polluters accountable for the heat-trapping emissions they produce _ transforming how people travel, utilities generate power and businesses use electricity. At...

NASA and other spaceflight programs worldwide should focus on putting people on Mars, not the moon, an advocacy group for space exploration said in a new plan announced today. "The U.S. landed humans on the Moon nearly 40 years ago," said Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society. "Returning to the moon has not sufficiently excited the public and will require resources that will be badly needed elsewhere in the space program."

The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human". One thing that really bugs defence chiefs is having their troops diverted from other duties to control robots. So having a pack of them controlled by one person makes logistical sense. But I'm concerned about where this technology will end up. Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long...

Ore. Discovery Challenges Beliefs About First Humans Until recently, most scientists believed that the first humans came to the Americas 13,000 years ago. But new archaeological findings from a cave in Oregon are challenging that assumption. Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Television reports on the controversial discovery. LEE HOCHBERG, NewsHour correspondent: What archaeologist Dennis Jenkins found in the Paisley Caves in south central Oregon may turn on its head the theory of how and when the first people came to North America. Many scientists believe humans first came to this continent 13,000 years ago across a land bridge from Asia...

Humans Wore Shoes 40,000 Years Ago, Fossil SuggestsScott Norris for National Geographic NewsJuly 1, 2008 Humans were wearing shoes at least 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study. The evidence comes from a 40,000-year-old human fossil with delicate toe bones indicative of habitual shoe-wearing, experts say. A previous study of anatomical changes in toe bone structure had dated the use of shoes to about 30,000 years ago. Now the dainty-toed fossil from China suggests that at least some humans were sporting protective footwear 10,000 years further back, during a time when both modern humans and Neandertals...

As a canine, there’s something satisfying about watching this video. I have to say, these are folks that see the water bowl as half full instead of half empty. Maybe there’s hope for humanity after all. Let the games begin…Click more to watch the video....http://boknowsonline.com/2008/02/29/doody-olympians/

First Shoes Worn 40,000 Years Ago Maggie Koerth-Baker Special to LiveScience LiveScience.com Thu Jun 5, 9:05 AM ET Humans started wearing shoes about 40,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, new anthropological research suggests. As any good clothes horse knows, the right outfit speaks volumes about the person wearing it. Now, anthropologists are tapping into that knowledge base, looking for the physical changes caused by wearing shoes to figure out when footwear first became fashionable. Turns out, clothes really do make the man (and the woman), at least when it comes to feet. That's because wearing shoes changes the...

Humans May Have Come To New Zealand Later Than ThoughtHumans Arrived In New Zealand 1,000 Years Later Than Believed, New Study Finds WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Jun. 3, 2008 (AP) Radiocarbon dating of rat bones and rat-gnawed seeds reinforces a theory that human settlers did not arrive in New Zealand until 1300 A.D. _ about 1,000 years later than some scientists believe, according to a study released Tuesday. The first settlement date "has been highly debated for decades," said Dr. Janet Wilmshurst, a New Zealander who led the international team of researchers in the four-year study. The team carbon dated rat...

Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago. by Heather Pringle Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks...

Beringia: humans were hereIt was an extraordinary ancient land filled with fantastic creatures and intrepid people. ALEX ROSLIN, Special to The Gazette Published: Saturday, May 17 Beringia is thought by a handful of renegade scientists to be a prehistoric homeland for aboriginal people who later spread across the Americas and the key to one of archeology's greatest Holy Grails - figuring out how humans first got to this continent. This July, Jacques Cinq-Mars, a renowned archeologist living in Longueuil, is heading to Beringia - a vast territory that once spanned the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia - in hopes of resolving...

Abortion is back in the news yet, understandably, many women still find it difficult to talk about. Here Lucy Cavendish – who has been through it twice – offers a candid view Virtually every woman I know of my generation has had an abortion. The problem is that no one talks about it. It is hidden away as if it were a dirty secret. This week, however, every time I've opened a newspaper or turned on the radio, abortion has been the topic du jour. First, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries called for the legal limit for terminations to be...

WASHINGTON: Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers in a study said on Thursday. "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction," said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York. The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with "mitochondrial Eve," a female hominid...

Finding Pre-Clovis Humans in the Oregon High Desert An interview with Dennis Jenkins See Interview About Dennis Jenkins In this interview, conducted at Paisley Five Mile Point Caves on June 13, 2007, by Rick Pettigrew of ALI, Dr. Dennis Jenkins describes the remarkable discovery of human DNA in coprolites dated between 14,000 and 15,000 calibrated years ago. This evidence, reported in the 3 April 2008, issue of the journal Science, strongly supports the proposition that human migrants to North America arrived at least 1000 years before the widespread Clovis complex appeared. The data also support the conclusion that the first...

While diving in the harbor of a small island in Indonesia recently, husband and wife Buck and Fitrie Randolph, with dive guide Toby Fadirsyair, found a strange fish and took some pictures. The oddball creature looks like an anglerfish, but different. Its eyes, unlike those of nearly all fish, point forward and may allow the fish to gauge depth the way humans do. The flat fish has tan- and peach-colored stripes and rippling folds of skin that obscure its fins. About the size of a human fist, it is soft and pliable enough to slip into narrow crevices of coral...

Humans Have More Distinctive Hearing Than Animals, Study Shows ScienceDaily (Apr. 2, 2008) — Do humans hear better than animals? It is known that various species of land and water-based living creatures are capable of hearing some lower and higher frequencies than humans are capable of detecting. However, scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and elsewhere have now for the first time demonstrated how the reactions of single neurons give humans the capability of detecting fine differences in frequencies better than animals. They did this by utilizing a technique for recording the activity of single neurons in the auditory...

Upright Walking Began 6 Million Years Ago Newswise — A shape comparison of the most complete fossil femur (thigh bone) of one of the earliest known pre-humans, or hominins, with the femora of living apes, modern humans and other fossils, indicates the earliest form of bipedalism occurred at least six million years ago and persisted for at least four million years. William Jungers, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, and Brian Richmond, Ph.D., of George Washington University, say their finding indicates that the fossil belongs to very early human ancestors, and that upright walking is one of the first human characteristics...

Skulls Of Modern Humans And Ancient Neanderthals Evolved Differently Because Of Chance, Not Natural SelectionThe approximate locations of the cranial measurements used in the analyses are superimposed as red lines on lateral (A), anterior (B), and inferior (C) views of a human cranium. (Credit: National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (Copyright 2008)) ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2008) — New research led by UC Davis anthropologist Tim Weaver adds to the evidence that chance, rather than natural selection, best explains why the skulls of modern humans and ancient Neanderthals evolved differently. The findings may alter how anthropologists think about human evolution. Weaver's study...

Out of Africa, Not Once But Twice Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Out of Africa March 14, 2008 -- Modern humans are known to have left Africa in a wave of migration around 50,000 years ago, but another, smaller group -- possibly a different subspecies -- left the continent 50,000 years earlier, suggests a new study. While all humans today are related to the second "out of Africa" group, it's likely that some populations native to Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia retain genetic vestiges of the earlier migrants, according to the paper's author, Michael Schillaci. Schillaci, an...

Gorillas have been caught on camera for the first time performing face-to-face intercourse. Humans and bonobos were the only primates thought to mate in this manner. And while researchers have observed wild gorillas engaged in such an act, it had never been photographed. "Our current knowledge of wild western gorillas is very limited, and this report provides information on various aspects of their sexual behavior," said Thomas Breuer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "It is fascinating to see similarities between gorilla and human sexual behavior demonstrated by our observation."