Free Republic

Family may provide evolution clue Five siblings from Turkey who can only walk on all fours could provide science with an insight into human evolution, researchers have said. The three sisters and two brothers could yield clues to why our ancestors made the transition from four-legged to two-legged animals, says a UK expert. But Professor Nicholas Humphrey rejects the idea that there is a "gene" for bipedalism, or upright walking. A BBC documentary about the family will be shown on Friday 17 March. Professor Humphrey, from the London School of Economics (LSE), says that our own species' transition to walking...

<p>The modeling suggests that the disappearance of Neanderthals cannot be attributed solely to a physical inability to make tools as successfully as their modern human cousins, researchers said.</p> <p>Instead, the reason for the Neanderthals' demise seems to be more complex, said Wesley Niewoehner, an anthropologist at California State University-San Bernadino who developed the computer model. Results of his comparisons appear in the current issue of the journal Nature.</p>

The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science By ROBERT L. PARK The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist's antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state,...

Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate By DENNIS OVERBYE Long ago in the dawn of the computer age, college students often whiled away the nights playing a computer game called Spacewar. It consisted of two rocket ships attempting to blast each other out of the sky with torpedoes while trying to avoid falling into a star at the center of the screen. Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off...