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Researchers have carried out the biggest ever comparative study of stone tools dating to between 130,000 and 75,000 years ago found in the region between sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia. They have discovered there are marked differences in the way stone tools were made, reflecting a diversity of cultural traditions. The study has also identified at least four distinct populations, each relatively isolated from each other with their own different cultural characteristics. The research paper also suggests that early populations took advantage of rivers and lakes that criss-crossed the Saharan desert. A climate model coupled with data about these ancient water...

Cool it! While Hollywood has accepted the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in droves, uploading often-creative, LOL videos and nominating each other, Pamela Anderson and Carey Hart took to their social media pages to criticize the viral campaign, meant to raise funds for Lou Gehrig's disease research. On Wednesday Aug. 20, Anderson, a longtime supporter of animal rights, posted a Facebook message criticizing ALS researchers for their research practices... The next morning, on Thursday, Aug. 21, Hart similarly railed against those who have hopped on the ice bucket bandwagon...

Watson, Dawkins: What Is It with Scientists Who Become Crusading Atheists and Raging Bigots? Wesley J. Smith August 21, 2014 11:00 AM | Permalink First, there was James Watson who came out as a eugenicist and also remarked about how "some anti-Semitism is justified" (he later apologized). Now Richard Dawkins has let out his own inner bigot by claiming that women have an ethical duty to abort Down babies. From the Telegraph story: Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is "immoral" to allow unborn babies with Down's syndrome to live. The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who...

New fossil dates show our ancient cousins disappeared 40,000 years ago. The Neanderthals died out about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, new fossil dating suggests, adding to evidence that the arrival of modern humans in Europe pushed our ancient Stone Age cousins into extinction. (Read "Last of the Neanderthals" in National Geographic magazine.) Neanderthals' mysterious disappearance from the fossil record has long puzzled scholars who wondered whether the species went extinct on its own or was helped on its way out by Europe's first modern human migrants. "When did the Neanderthals disappear, and why?" says Tom Higham of the...

An entire ecosystem has been discovered under the Antarctic, raising hopes that life could exist in extreme environments, such as other planets in the solar system. Researchers have discovered that tiny life-forms are thriving in a lake under half a mile of pack ice, even though the habitat has not seen sunlight or fresh air for a million years. The discovery has led to excitement among the scientific community who had previously theorized that microorganisms may be able to survive by evolving novel ways to generate energy. And it raises the possibility that similar life could exist on Mars or...

We get closer having the ability to implement a fully automated, robotized, dehumanized society every day. Google has been testing self driving cars in select areas of the country for the last six or seven years. Only now, has the driverless car become something more than an engineers fantasy. McDonald's Restaurants and other fast food retailers are preparing themselves to be forced to offer a minimum wage that usually comes only after several skill sets have been mastered by a seasoned employee. The restaurants prepare for this change by wheeling in a few automated order taking machines. Drones may soak...

Fossil Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale Courtesy of M. R. Smith / Smithsonian InstituteThe spines along its back were thought to be legs, its legs thought to be tentacles along its back, and its head was mistaken for its tail. The animal, known as Hallucigenia due to its otherworldly appearance, had been considered an ‘evolutionary misfit’ as it was not clear how it related to modern animal groups. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered an important link with modern velvet worms, also known as onychophorans, a relatively small group of worm-like animals that live in tropical...

On Aug. 19 a burglary was reported at the Sonnenborgh Museum and Observatory in Utrecht, Netherlands, and one of the items missing is a meteorite that is thought to have originated from the asteroid Vesta. Seen above in a photo from the museum’s collection, the Meteorite of Serooskerken was recovered from a rare fall in 1925 in the province of Zeeland. Only five meteorites have ever been found in the Netherlands, making the Serooskerken specimen somewhat of a national treasure – not to mention a valuable piece of our Solar System’s history! About 5–6% of all the meteorites found on...

A new study concludes that modern humans arrived in Europe much earlier than previously believed, and clarifies more specifically the long time period they overlapped with Neanderthals. The significant overlap bolsters a theory that the two species met, bred and possibly exchanged or copied vital toolmaking techniques. It represents another twist in an enduring puzzle about human origins: why we triumphed while the better adapted and similarly intelligent Neanderthals died out. The study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Neanderthals are our closest known extinct relatives, with about 99.5% of DNA in common with humans. They had a brain...

Where It All Leads: Professor Death Supports Doctor Death Wesley J. Smith August 19, 2014 2:21 PM | Permalink It is time to start calling Peter Singer "Professor Death."The Princeton moral philosopher -- surely a misnomer in his case -- is the world's foremost proponent of infanticide. He typically uses examples of disabled babies, but the reason he believes they can be killed is that they are supposedly not "persons." Thus, Singer has refused to state that killing a baby because she was ugly would be wrong.Professor Death also supports euthanasia, both voluntary and non-voluntary against ill human non-persons, such as Alzheimer's patients.He has...

Iceland on Tuesday began evacuating areas close to its largest volcano after warnings of a possible eruption, four years after millions of air travellers were grounded by a huge ash cloud from another peak. Scientists believe the ash from an eruption at Bardarbunga, a huge volcano under Iceland's largest glacier, the Vatnajokull in the south of the country, could disrupt transatlantic and northern European air traffic. They also fear floods from melting ice could cause serious damage to the country's infrastructure. On Tuesday, police announced that they had "decided to close and evacuate the area north of Vatnajokull as a...

The 1-ton Curiosity rover had been heading for Mount Sharp - a 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain in the center of Mars' Gale Crater - via 'Hidden Valley' - a low-lying sandy landscape about the length of a football field. However, Curiosity turned back shortly after entering the valley's northeastern end earlier this month after finding that the sand surprisingly slippery, NASA officials said. 'We need to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the wheels and Martian sand ripples, and Hidden Valley is not a good location for experimenting,' Curiosity project manager Jim Erickson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

Biological information: New perspectives from intelligent design By: Robert J. Marks II A diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University in 2011 to discuss their research into the nature and origins of biological information. The symposium brought together experts in computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. The proceedings of this symposium have recently been published for public consumption in a book. There is a wrinkle, though, which may make this technical volume of unusual interest to Human Events readers. Most of these researchers, with Ph.D.’s...

I have a love-hate relationship with Whole Foods Market. On the one hand, I love their fresh produce, their baked goods, and many other food choices there. On the other hand, they have embraced anti-science positions in the interest of keeping everything "natural."

Neanderthals may have caught, butchered and cooked wild pigeons long before modern humans became regular consumers of bird meat, a study revealed on Thursday. Close examination of 1,724 bones from rock doves, found in a cave in Gibraltar and dated to between 67,000 and 28,000 years ago, revealed cuts, human tooth marks and burns, said a paper in the journal Scientific Reports. This suggested the doves may have been butchered and then roasted, wrote the researchers—the first evidence of hominids eating birds. And the evidence suggested Neanderthals ate much like a latter-day Homo sapiens would tuck into a roast chicken,...

Explanation: Both land and sky were restless. The unsettled land included erupting Mount Semeru in the distance, the caldera of steaming Mount Bromo on the left, flowing fog, and the lights of moving cars along roads that thread between hills and volcanoes in Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park in East Java, Indonesia. The stirring sky included stars circling the South Celestial Pole and a meteor streaking across the image right. The above 270-image composite was taken from King Kong Hill in mid-June over two hours, with a rising Moon lighting the landscape.

Screening older patients for cancer provided minimal benefit at considerable cost and increased use of invasive procedures, reported investigators in two separate studies. "It is particularly important to question screening strategies for older persons," Gross continued. "Patients with a shorter life expectancy have less time to develop clinically significant cancers after a screening test and are more likely to die from noncancer health problems after a cancer diagnosis."

Pharoah, let my people go: How did ancient Egypt become a land of slaves building fantastic monuments to dictatorial leaders? The land of Egypt was rich and fertile, a seeming paradise for egalitarian living. Stephanie Pappas writes in Live Science about how despots “evolved” in ancient societies, but that’s a misleading use of the term; it actually was a series of bad choices by free people. She writes how Simon Powers at the University of Lausanne came up with a mathematical model to explain the shift from egalitarianism to despotism. Whether it actually explains them could be disputed, but he...

In July 2014, the private space company's Falcon 9 rocket launched six ORBCOMM OG2 satellites. It also tested its reusable first stage technology. A chase plane was on hand to capture some of its fall through the atmosphere and the last few seconds before splashdown.

A New Video Documentary Reveals the Hidden Ideological and Scientific Roots of World War I Evolution News & Views August 18, 2014 5:55 AM | Permalink This month marks the hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War. Between 1914 and 1918, the conflict took 16 million lives in brutal combat yet its causes remain strangely cloudy to most of us. One historian titled his recent book about the origins of the war The Sleepwalkers, as if nations and leaders stumbled into the global catastrophe almost by accident, unmotivated by any particular philosophy or ideology.World War II is...