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'Old man of Chad' confirmed as first hominid (Filed: 07/04/2005) New evidence shows that a seven-million-year old skull found in the African desert belonged to one of man's earliest ancestors, reports Roger Highfield A squashed, fractured and twisted skull, which has been at the centre of controversy for three years, has been confirmed as the oldest known member of mankind. The skull, between six and seven million years old, was found in the Djurab desert of northern Chad in 2002. Sahelanthropus tchadensis was described variously as "a turning point", "a small nuclear bomb" and "the most important fossil discovery in...

Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - Page updated at 01:17 p.m Kate Riley / Times staff columnist Another bone of contention over Kennewick Man Kennewick Man is poised to tell his secrets. Almost nine years after the 9,300-year-old remains were found on the banks of the Columbia River and a fierce legal battle, federal courts agreed unequivocally scientists should be able to study Kennewick Man. However, U.S. Sen. John McCain has colluded with those who want to stifle the stories of similar old bones and the light they can shed on the earliest Americans and where they came from. The Arizona...

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author. Read more at nature.com. Simply type or paste your text in the box below. Click submit for the results. Go to the link and see if you write like a chick or feller!

   Contact Your Representative Contact Your Senators Home PageTwo Bill Page Nation World Finance House Senate GovWebs State & Local Orgs Petitions Feedback 109th CONGRESS 1st Session H. R. 997 To declare English as the official language of the United States, to establish a uniform English language rule for naturalization, and to avoid misconstructions of the English language texts of the laws of the United States, pursuant to Congress's powers to provide for the general welfare of the United States and to establish a uniform rule of naturalization under article I, section 8, of the Constitution. IN THE HOUSE...

Mystery Object Encountered By Russian Phobos Spacecraft by Tom Van Flandern, Astronomer Meta Research Martian moon Phobos and "Phobos Mystery Object", photographed in 1989 by a Russian spacecraft not long before all contact was lost. March 15, 1992 was the cover date on the first issue of a new astronomy research publication, the Meta Research Bulletin (MRB). Its purpose was to draw attention to deserving astronomy findings and ideas ignored solely because they did not fit well into mainstream models of the field. Such mainstream models include the Big Bang, the primeval Destination: Space nebula, the Oort cloud, and the...

Patron Saints of Desperate, Forgotten, Impossible or Lost Causes Saint Philomena Martyred at about age 14 in the early days of the Church. In 1802 the remains of a young woman were found in the catacomb of Saint Priscilla on the Via Salaria. It was covered by stones, the symbols on which indicated that the body was a martyr named Saint Philomena. The bones were exhumed, cataloged, and effectively forgotten since there was so little known about the person. In 1805 Canon Francis de Lucia of Mugnano, Italy was in the Treasury of the Rare Collection of Christian Antiquity (Treasury...

A man who deliberately gave his lover the HIV virus has been jailed for four-and-half years. Mohammed Dica, 38, was sentenced at the Old Bailey after putting the woman through the ordeal of giving evidence at three trials. Dica, from Mitcham, south London, was convicted of biological grievous bodily harm against two women at Inner London Crown Court in October 2003. He appealed and the High Court ordered a retrial. At that hearing one of the women could not give evidence because of her health and the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Police marksmen have shot dead a man said to have been wielding a samurai sword on a busy main road. The 26-year-old was shot on the A63 near Hull, East Yorkshire, following reports of a van being driven the wrong way down the carriageway. Police said the man got out of the van and began to approach the marksmen. He was shot with baton rounds but got up and continued to make his way towards the officers, who then shot him dead. It was the first time Humberside Police had used a firearm during an operation.

<p>A man apparently enraged by a Bush-Cheney sticker on a woman's sport utility vehicle chased her for miles and tried to run her off the road while holding up an anti-Bush sign, said police in Tampa, Fla.</p> <p>"He told our officers that he just got mad at her, so he went after her," said police spokesman Joe Durkin.</p>

Asia's tallest man promotes textile exhibition Updated: 2005-03-10 09:06 Huang Changqiu, 240cm tall and said to be the tallest in Asia, promotes a textile exhibition in Shanghai March 9, 2005. Taller than the NBA superstar Yao Ming who is 226cm tall, Huang is a favorite of some companies when choosing a promoter. [newsphoto]

N.C man in Clinton probe pleads guilty to unrelated charges the associated press Tuesday, March 8, 2005 NEW YORK An Asheville, N.C., businessman involved in the investigation of alleged fund-raising violations during Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign pleaded guilty Tuesday to unrelated charges, prosecutors said. Peter F. Paul, 56, of Asheville, N.C., admitted committing securities fraud in an appearance before U.S. District Judge Leonard D. Wexler in Central Islip, on Long Island. The charge stemmed from Paul's role in manipulating the price of Stan Lee Media common stock, including transactions in which Paul secretly borrowed money using the stock...

Nation of Islam leader Rev. Louis Farrakhan is encouraging women and gay men to participate in the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March.

CHICAGO An appeals court said a man can press a claim for emotional distress after learning a former lover had used his sperm to have a baby. But he can't claim theft, the ruling said, because the sperm were hers to keep. Dr. Richard O. Phillips' accuses Dr. Sharon Irons of a “calculated, profound personal betrayal'' after their affair six years ago, saying she secretly kept semen after they had oral sex, then used it to get pregnant. He said he didn't find out about the child for nearly two years, when Irons filed a paternity lawsuit. DNA tests confirmed...

Wednesday, February 16, 2005 · Last updated 8:04 a.m. PT Tribes appeal Kennewick Man ruling, seek role in future finds THE ASSOCIATED PRESS KENNEWICK, Wash. -- Indian tribes that failed to block the scientific examination of the 9,400-year-old remains known as Kennewick Man are appealing a court ruling in hopes of gaining a role in future discoveries. The appeal of a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was brought Monday by the Nez Perce Tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and Yakama Indian Nation, which claim Kennewick Man as an aboriginal ancestor. "It's a fundamental...

The other project cut was the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. JIMO - recently renamed Prometheus 1 - had been intended as the first mission under Project Prometheus, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe's pet project to encourage the use of nuclear-power propulsion to explore the outer solar system. Washington (UPI) Feb 08, 2005 Despite fears by many in the scientific community that President George W. Bush's initiative to re-invigorate the American manned space program would cause deep cuts in NASA's science budget, the administration's proposed 2006 budget - announced with great fanfare on Monday - left almost all of the agency's present...

NASA 2006 Budget Presented: Hubble, Nuclear Initiative Suffer While NASA fared better than many federal agencies in U.S. President George W. Bush's 2006 budget request, the White House is not seeking as much money for the U.S. space agency as previously planned. The White House is seeking $16.45 billion for NASA in the 2006 budget. That's an increase of 2.4 percent over what the U.S. space agency has in its 2005 budget, but still about $500 million less than what the agency had been expecting. When Bush gave NASA a new space exploration vision last year, he also pledged to...

Space Future - http://www.spacefuture.com/pr/archive/on_the_practical_and_sporting_aspects_of_football_in_zero_gravity.shtml O Thornton & P Collins, 19 September 2001, "On the Practical and Sporting Aspects of Football in Zero-Gravity", Presented at Symposium on The Popular Commercialisation of Space, British Interplanetary Society, 19 September 2001. Also downloadable from http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/on_the_practical_and_sporting_aspects_of_football_in_zero_gravity.shtml Presented at Symposium on The Popular Commercialisation of Space, British Interplanetary Society , 19 September 2001 On the Practical and Sporting Aspects of Football in Zero-Gravity Oliver Thornton & Patrick Collins Introduction: Association Football, or 'soccer', is the major spectator sport in the world, as well the most widely-played. When space becomes a practical living space for the...

Raising CainsLost in the mist of time are his gold-crowned walking cane and the silver platter given to him by Adm. Raphael Semmes. But Joe Cain, the man who revived Mardi Gras in 1866, left something more tangible behind. In Bayou La Batre and elsewhere, generations of Cains live on. Sunday, February 06, 2005 By ROY HOFFMAN Staff Reporter When Norwood Cain, 75, was a boy in Bayou La Batre, his grandfather, Oliver , and paraded through Mobile streets, reviving Carnival in 1866; the next year he rode in a decorated wagon with a group of ex-Confederates, The Lost Cause...

THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW O'Reilly's law of the kitchen: Cleanliness is next to impossible. Lieberman's law: Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens. Denniston's law: Virtue is its own punishment. Gold's law: If the shoe fits, its ugly. Conway's law: In any organization, there will always be one person who knows what is going on. This person should be fired. Finster's law: A closed mouth gathers no feet. Lynch's law: When the going gets tough, everyone leaves. Muir's law: When we try to separate anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the...

The two most abundant things in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity. (not necessarily in that order) If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. He who hesitates is probably right. For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. No one is listening until you make a mistake. Finding a job is easy, if you already have one. Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view. To steal ideas...