Global Warming New York | Search results for "behavior"

In December the U.S. Air Force flew a C-17 transport plane across the country powered in part by a new propellant: natural gas transmuted into a synthetic liquid fuel. Heat and catalysts converted methane into syngas (carbon monoxide and hydrogen) which were then transformed into liquid hydrocarbons (otherwise known as oil and its derivatives): petroleum, gasoline and, in the case of aviation, kerosene. "Hitler flew Messerschmitts on it," says William Anderson, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for installations, environment and logistics, about such Fischer-Tropsch synthetic fuel, which can be made from methane, coal, plant oils--even wood waste. "We believe that having a secure domestic source of fuel makes it easier for us to do that mission [to fly and fight]. It is less likely that there would be some disruption to the fuel source that we need to fly airplanes." [More] The Skinny on the Environment When Susan Handy moved to Davis, Calif., in 2002, she immediately bought a commuting vehicle: a wheeled trailer, for toting her kids behind her bike. Handy, an environmental policy analyst at the University of California, and her husband frequently pedal to work, with two preschoolers in tow. Among locals, their commute is common. Fifty miles of bike lanes ribbon Davis, which is only about 10.5 square miles in area. Handy calls Davis “a small town that really works.” City planners, health researchers and local leaders want more U.S. communities to “really work”--and to that end, they have begun retrofitting the country, from Atlanta to Sacramento. Inspired by a new urbanism that celebrates neighborhoods and alarmed by health problems--particularly childhood obesity--these trailblazers are building paths, sidewalks and other architectural features while promoting policies and behaviors that get people moving. [More]

Tags: fuel, davis, handy, work, oil

Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Scientists have therefore been eager to learn how they evolved from their terrestrial ancestors. Until recently, however, even the oldest fossil bats still looked essentially like modern bats. New fossils have revealed a species that is helping to connect the dots between bats and their nonflying forebears. Findings from genetics and developmental biology have further illuminated bat origins, elucidating their place in the mammal family tree and the process by which the bat wing may have evolved. [More] 100 Years Ago: Engineering a City--New York City's Bridges DECEMBER 1958EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR-- “But is it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group--just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today? Yes, it is possible! Let me give an example which, while seemingly trivial, has a bearing on this question. Anyone who has watched a dog scratch its jaw or a bird preen its head feathers can attest to the fact that they do so in the same way. A bird also scratches with a hind limb (that is, its claw), and in doing so it lowers its wing and reaches its claw forward in front of its shoulder. One might think that it would be simpler for the bird to move its claw directly to its head without moving its wing, which lies folded out of the way on its back. I do not see how to explain this clumsy action unless we admit that it is inborn. --Konrad Z. Lorenz” [More]

Tags: bat, behavior, wing, claw, bird

Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Scientists have therefore been eager to learn how they evolved from their terrestrial ancestors. Until recently, however, even the oldest fossil bats still looked essentially like modern bats. New fossils have revealed a species that is helping to connect the dots between bats and their nonflying forebears. Findings from genetics and developmental biology have further illuminated bat origins, elucidating their place in the mammal family tree and the process by which the bat wing may have evolved. [More] 100 Years Ago: Engineering a City--New York City's Bridges DECEMBER 1958EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR-- “But is it not possible that beneath all the variations of individual behavior there lies an inner structure of inherited behavior which characterizes all the members of a given species, genus or larger taxonomic group--just as the skeleton of a primordial ancestor characterizes the form and structure of all mammals today? Yes, it is possible! Let me give an example which, while seemingly trivial, has a bearing on this question. Anyone who has watched a dog scratch its jaw or a bird preen its head feathers can attest to the fact that they do so in the same way. A bird also scratches with a hind limb (that is, its claw), and in doing so it lowers its wing and reaches its claw forward in front of its shoulder. One might think that it would be simpler for the bird to move its claw directly to its head without moving its wing, which lies folded out of the way on its back. I do not see how to explain this clumsy action unless we admit that it is inborn. --Konrad Z. Lorenz” [More]

Tags: bat, behavior, wing, claw, bird

Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth? Ever since Carl Linnaeus began systematically classifying all living things 250 years ago, biologists have looked at various features--color, shape, even behavior--to identify animals and plants. In the past few decades, researchers have begun to apply the genetic information in DNA to the task. But both classical and modern genetic methods demand great expertise and eat up huge amounts of time. Using just a small section of the DNA--something more akin to the 12-digit barcode on products--would require far less time and skill. [More] The X Chromosome and the Case against Monogamy Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny--the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women--was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.  [More]

Tags: dna, genetic, behavior, identify, barcode

When Susan Handy moved to Davis, Calif., in 2002, she immediately bought a commuting vehicle: a wheeled trailer, for toting her kids behind her bike. Handy, an environmental policy analyst at the University of California, and her husband frequently pedal to work, with two preschoolers in tow. Among locals, their commute is common. Fifty miles of bike lanes ribbon Davis, which is only about 10.5 square miles in area. Handy calls Davis “a small town that really works.” City planners, health researchers and local leaders want more U.S. communities to “really work”--and to that end, they have begun retrofitting the country, from Atlanta to Sacramento. Inspired by a new urbanism that celebrates neighborhoods and alarmed by health problems--particularly childhood obesity--these trailblazers are building paths, sidewalks and other architectural features while promoting policies and behaviors that get people moving. [More] Top 25 Science Stories of 2007 The past year has been both tempestuous and exciting--from pet food, E. coli and toy poisoning scares to political fireworks over embryonic stem cell research to forest fires ravaging California. A controversial Nobel scientist (James Watson) went down in a blaze of infamy, tumbling from grace after putting his foot in his mouth one time too many, whereas a former vice president and defeated presidential candidate (Al Gore) rose from the ashes to become a Nobel Peace prize (and Oscar) winner for raising awareness on the urgency of global warming. The honor came on the heels of official worldwide recognition that climate change is not only a pressing problem, but one that was almost completely caused by humans--and one, too, that humans must fix. On a related note, we discovered that the North Pole is melting, beloved freshwater dolphins are practically extinct and nuclear power--feared since the 1979 near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuke plant in Middletown, Pa.--has become the clean-energy alternative du jour that even has the backing of some enviros. For the first time, too, we enjoyed (depending on how you look at it) an extra month of daylight saving time, thanks to Congress, which made the move to save energy and, lawmakers said, to cut down on traffic accidents--and, perhaps most important, to make Halloween more special and safe. [More]

Tags: davis, time, handy, mile, work

“Wasteland” conjures up visions of dusty desolation where life is fleeting and harsh--if it exists at all. Oceans, too, have their inhospitable pockets. Scientists are discovering that climate change--and not just fertilizer from farm use--may be spurring the emergence of barren underwater landscapes in coastal waters. Expanding dead zones not only spell trouble for biodiversity, but they also threaten the commercial fisheries of many nations. Dead zones are not new; they form seasonally in economically vital ecoystems worldwide, including the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay. Agricultural runoff sparks many of these die-offs; increased use of nitrogen fertilizers has doubled the number of lifeless pockets every decade since the 1960s, resulting in 405 dead zones now dotting coastlines globally. [More] Bar Code of Life: DNA Tags Help Classify Animals Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth? Ever since Carl Linnaeus began systematically classifying all living things 250 years ago, biologists have looked at various features--color, shape, even behavior--to identify animals and plants. In the past few decades, researchers have begun to apply the genetic information in DNA to the task. But both classical and modern genetic methods demand great expertise and eat up huge amounts of time. Using just a small section of the DNA--something more akin to the 12-digit barcode on products--would require far less time and skill. [More]

Tags: dna, dead, zones, pockets, identify

Ovulating strippers make bigger tipsStrippers looking to shake their moneymakers most profitably may need only swing to the beat of their menstrual cycles. In a revealing study, University of New Mexico researchers (three altruistic guys) recruited 18 subjects (scantily clad women dancers) to log their work shifts, earnings and menstrual cycles (phone numbers, too?) on a Web site for two months, or about 5,300 lap dances. The naked truth: participants scored $335 per five-hour shift while ovulating compared with $260 per shift during the luteal phase after ovulation and $185 while menstruating. The dancers' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus--the equivalent of a baboon's bright red rump--the group reported in Evolution & Human Behavior. (Evol. Hum. Behav.) [More]

Tags: shift, ovulating, dancers, cycles, menstrual

Researchers report genetic evidence bolstering the socially contentious idea that polygyny--the mating practice where some males dominate reproduction by fathering children with several women--was the norm for sexual behavior throughout human history and prehistory. Because polygyny means other men father few or no children, the study, published today in PLoS Genetics, also shows that, on average, women bequeath more genes to their offspring than men do.  [More] Going Green to Save the Economy: A Q&A with Thomas L. Friedman Some politicians and pundits fear that addressing global warming will drain the U.S. economy and hurt the nation’s competitive edge. But going green and clean is the best way to remain an economic powerhouse, argues Thomas L. Friedman in his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). We asked Friedman, a New York Times op-ed columnist, to explain his thinking. Click here for an extended version of this inteview [More]

Tags: green, women, friedman, men, polygyny

As far as certain death in a science fiction plot line goes, being ejected into the vacuum of space is more than a pretty sure thing. A shove out of the air lock by a mutinous lieutenant or a vicious rip in a space suit, and your average movie victim is guaranteed to die quickly and quietly, though with fewer exploding body parts than screenwriters might have you believe. [More] Super Tuesday: Markets Predict Outcome Better Than Polls In late March 1988 three economists from the University of Iowa were nursing beers at a local hangout in Iowa City, when conversation turned to the news of the day. Jesse Jackson had captured 55 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, an outcome that the polls had failed to intimate. The ensuing grumbling about the unreliability of polls sparked the germ of an idea. At the time, experimental economics--in which economic theory is tested by observing the behavior of groups, usually in a classroom setting--had just come into vogue, which prompted the three drinking partners to deliberate about whether a market might do better than the polls. A market in political candidates would serve as a novel way to test an economic theory asserting that all information about a security is reflected in its price. For a stock or other financial security, the price summarizes, among other things, what traders know about the factors influencing whether a company will achieve its profit goals in the coming quarter or whether sales may plummet. Instead of recruiting students to imitate “buyers” or “sellers” of goods and services, as in other economics experiments, participants in this election market would trade contracts that would provide payoffs depending on what percentage of the vote George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis or other candidates received. [More]

Tags: polls, market, economic, space, thing

A development company controlled by Osama bin Laden’s half brother revealed last year that it wants to build a bridge that will span the Bab el Mandeb, the outlet of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. If this ambitious project is ever realized, the throngs of African pilgrims who traverse one of the longest bridges in the world on a journey to Mecca would pass hundreds of feet above the probable route of the most memorable journey in human history. Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans--a few hundred or even several thousand--crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return. The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once abundant shellfish stocks vanished. But some things are fairly certain. Those first trekkers out of Africa brought with them the physical and behavioral traits--the large brains and the capacity for language--that characterize fully modern humans. From their bivouac on the Asian continent in what is now Yemen, they set out on a decamillennial journey that spanned continents and land bridges and reached all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America. [More] No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving the Soil by Parking Their Plows John Aeschliman turns over a shovelful of topsoil on his 4,000-acre farm in the Palouse region of eastern Washington State. The black earth crumbles easily, revealing a porous structure and an abundance of organic matter that facilitate root growth. Loads of earthworms are visible, too--another healthy sign. Thirty-four years ago only a few earthworms, if any, could be found in a spadeful of his soil. Back then, Aeschliman would plow the fields before each planting, burying the residues from the previous crop and readying the ground for the next one. The hilly Palouse region had been farmed that way for decades. But the tillage was taking a toll on the Palouse, and its famously fertile soil was eroding at an alarming rate. Convinced that there had to be a better way to work the land, Aeschliman decided to experiment in 1974 with an emerging method known as no-till farming. [More]

Tags: human, continent, aeschliman, journey, soil

As far as certain death in a science fiction plot line goes, being ejected into the vacuum of space is more than a pretty sure thing. A shove out of the air lock by a mutinous lieutenant or a vicious rip in a space suit, and your average movie victim is guaranteed to die quickly and quietly, though with fewer exploding body parts than screenwriters might have you believe. [More] Super Tuesday: Markets Predict Outcome Better Than Polls In late March 1988 three economists from the University of Iowa were nursing beers at a local hangout in Iowa City, when conversation turned to the news of the day. Jesse Jackson had captured 55 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, an outcome that the polls had failed to intimate. The ensuing grumbling about the unreliability of polls sparked the germ of an idea. At the time, experimental economics--in which economic theory is tested by observing the behavior of groups, usually in a classroom setting--had just come into vogue, which prompted the three drinking partners to deliberate about whether a market might do better than the polls. A market in political candidates would serve as a novel way to test an economic theory asserting that all information about a security is reflected in its price. For a stock or other financial security, the price summarizes, among other things, what traders know about the factors influencing whether a company will achieve its profit goals in the coming quarter or whether sales may plummet. Instead of recruiting students to imitate “buyers” or “sellers” of goods and services, as in other economics experiments, participants in this election market would trade contracts that would provide payoffs depending on what percentage of the vote George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis or other candidates received. [More]

Tags: polls, market, economic, space, thing

Ovulating strippers make bigger tipsStrippers looking to shake their moneymakers most profitably may need only swing to the beat of their menstrual cycles. In a revealing study, University of New Mexico researchers (three altruistic guys) recruited 18 subjects (scantily clad women dancers) to log their work shifts, earnings and menstrual cycles (phone numbers, too?) on a Web site for two months, or about 5,300 lap dances. The naked truth: participants scored $335 per five-hour shift while ovulating compared with $260 per shift during the luteal phase after ovulation and $185 while menstruating. The dancers' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus--the equivalent of a baboon's bright red rump--the group reported in Evolution & Human Behavior. (Evol. Hum. Behav.) [More] World's Top 10 Most Polluted Places Sumqayit in Azerbaijan gained the dubious distinction this week of being added to Blacksmith Institute's top 10 list of the world's most polluted sites. Yet another heir to the toxic legacy of Soviet industry, the city of 275,000 souls bears heavy metal, oil and chemical contamination from its days as a center of chemical production. As a result, local Azeris suffer cancer rates 22 to 51 percent higher than their countrymen and their children suffer from a host of genetic defects ranging from mental retardation to bone diseases. "As much as 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released on an annual basis, including mercury," says Richard Fuller, founder of Blacksmith, an environmental health organization based in New York City. "There are huge untreated dumps of industrial sludge." [More]

Tags: ovulating, shift, cycles, dancers, bigger

When Susan Handy moved to Davis, Calif., in 2002, she immediately bought a commuting vehicle: a wheeled trailer, for toting her kids behind her bike. Handy, an environmental policy analyst at the University of California, and her husband frequently pedal to work, with two preschoolers in tow. Among locals, their commute is common. Fifty miles of bike lanes ribbon Davis, which is only about 10.5 square miles in area. Handy calls Davis “a small town that really works.” City planners, health researchers and local leaders want more U.S. communities to “really work”--and to that end, they have begun retrofitting the country, from Atlanta to Sacramento. Inspired by a new urbanism that celebrates neighborhoods and alarmed by health problems--particularly childhood obesity--these trailblazers are building paths, sidewalks and other architectural features while promoting policies and behaviors that get people moving. [More] Top 25 Science Stories of 2007 The past year has been both tempestuous and exciting--from pet food, E. coli and toy poisoning scares to political fireworks over embryonic stem cell research to forest fires ravaging California. A controversial Nobel scientist (James Watson) went down in a blaze of infamy, tumbling from grace after putting his foot in his mouth one time too many, whereas a former vice president and defeated presidential candidate (Al Gore) rose from the ashes to become a Nobel Peace prize (and Oscar) winner for raising awareness on the urgency of global warming. The honor came on the heels of official worldwide recognition that climate change is not only a pressing problem, but one that was almost completely caused by humans--and one, too, that humans must fix. On a related note, we discovered that the North Pole is melting, beloved freshwater dolphins are practically extinct and nuclear power--feared since the 1979 near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuke plant in Middletown, Pa.--has become the clean-energy alternative du jour that even has the backing of some enviros. For the first time, too, we enjoyed (depending on how you look at it) an extra month of daylight saving time, thanks to Congress, which made the move to save energy and, lawmakers said, to cut down on traffic accidents--and, perhaps most important, to make Halloween more special and safe. [More]

Tags: davis, time, handy, mile, work

A development company controlled by Osama bin Laden’s half brother revealed last year that it wants to build a bridge that will span the Bab el Mandeb, the outlet of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. If this ambitious project is ever realized, the throngs of African pilgrims who traverse one of the longest bridges in the world on a journey to Mecca would pass hundreds of feet above the probable route of the most memorable journey in history. Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans--a few hundred or even several thousand--crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return. The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once abundant shellfish stocks vanished. But some things are fairly certain. Those first trekkers out of Africa brought with them the physical and behavioral traits--the large brains and the capacity for language--that characterize fully modern humans. From their bivouac on the Asian continent in what is now Yemen, they set out on a decamillennial journey that spanned continents and land bridges and reached all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America. [More] No-Till: How Farmers Are Saving the Soil by Parking Their Plows John Aeschliman turns over a shovelful of topsoil on his 4,000-acre farm in the Palouse region of eastern Washington State. The black earth crumbles easily, revealing a porous structure and an abundance of organic matter that facilitate root growth. Loads of earthworms are visible, too--another healthy sign. Thirty-four years ago only a few earthworms, if any, could be found in a spadeful of his soil. Back then, Aeschliman would plow the fields before each planting, burying the residues from the previous crop and readying the ground for the next one. The hilly Palouse region had been farmed that way for decades. But the tillage was taking a toll on the Palouse, and its famously fertile soil was eroding at an alarming rate. Convinced that there had to be a better way to work the land, Aeschliman decided to experiment in 1974 with an emerging method known as no-till farming. [More]

Tags: human, continent, aeschliman, journey, soil

As far as certain death in a science fiction plot line goes, being ejected into the vacuum of space is more than a pretty sure thing. A shove out of the air lock by a mutinous lieutenant or a vicious rip in a space suit, and your average movie victim is guaranteed to die quickly and quietly, though with fewer exploding body parts than screenwriters might have you believe. [More] Super Tuesday: Markets Predict Outcome Better Than Polls In late March 1988 three economists from the University of Iowa were nursing beers at a local hangout in Iowa City, when conversation turned to the news of the day. Jesse Jackson had captured 55 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, an outcome that the polls had failed to intimate. The ensuing grumbling about the unreliability of polls sparked the germ of an idea. At the time, experimental economics--in which economic theory is tested by observing the behavior of groups, usually in a classroom setting--had just come into vogue, which prompted the three drinking partners to deliberate about whether a market might do better than the polls. A market in political candidates would serve as a novel way to test an economic theory asserting that all information about a security is reflected in its price. For a stock or other financial security, the price summarizes, among other things, what traders know about the factors influencing whether a company will achieve its profit goals in the coming quarter or whether sales may plummet. Instead of recruiting students to imitate “buyers” or “sellers” of goods and services, as in other economics experiments, participants in this election market would trade contracts that would provide payoffs depending on what percentage of the vote George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis or other candidates received. [More]

Tags: polls, market, economic, space, thing

When Susan Handy moved to Davis, Calif., in 2002, she immediately bought a commuting vehicle: a wheeled trailer, for toting her kids behind her bike. Handy, an environmental policy analyst at the University of California, and her husband frequently pedal to work, with two preschoolers in tow. Among locals, their commute is common. Fifty miles of bike lanes ribbon Davis, which is only about 10.5 square miles in area. Handy calls Davis “a small town that really works.” City planners, health researchers and local leaders want more U.S. communities to “really work”--and to that end, they have begun retrofitting the country, from Atlanta to Sacramento. Inspired by a new urbanism that celebrates neighborhoods and alarmed by health problems--particularly childhood obesity--these trailblazers are building paths, sidewalks and other architectural features while promoting policies and behaviors that get people moving. [More] Top 25 Science Stories of 2007 The past year has been both tempestuous and exciting--from pet food, E. coli and toy poisoning scares to political fireworks over embryonic stem cell research to forest fires ravaging California. A controversial Nobel scientist (James Watson) went down in a blaze of infamy, tumbling from grace after putting his foot in his mouth one time too many, whereas a former vice president and defeated presidential candidate (Al Gore) rose from the ashes to become a Nobel Peace prize (and Oscar) winner for raising awareness on the urgency of global warming. The honor came on the heels of official worldwide recognition that climate change is not only a pressing problem, but one that was almost completely caused by humans--and one, too, that humans must fix. On a related note, we discovered that the North Pole is melting, beloved freshwater dolphins are practically extinct and nuclear power--feared since the 1979 near-meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuke plant in Middletown, Pa.--has become the clean-energy alternative du jour that even has the backing of some enviros. For the first time, too, we enjoyed (depending on how you look at it) an extra month of daylight saving time, thanks to Congress, which made the move to save energy and, lawmakers said, to cut down on traffic accidents--and, perhaps most important, to make Halloween more special and safe. [More]

Tags:

Ovulating strippers make bigger tipsStrippers looking to shake their moneymakers most profitably may need only swing to the beat of their menstrual cycles. In a revealing study, University of New Mexico researchers (three altruistic guys) recruited 18 subjects (scantily clad women dancers) to log their work shifts, earnings and menstrual cycles (phone numbers, too?) on a Web site for two months, or about 5,300 lap dances. The naked truth: participants scored $335 per five-hour shift while ovulating compared with $260 per shift during the luteal phase after ovulation and $185 while menstruating. The dancers' scientifically gyrating pelvises provided the first direct evidence for human estrus--the equivalent of a baboon's bright red rump--the group reported in Evolution & Human Behavior. (Evol. Hum. Behav.) [More] World's Top 10 Most Polluted Places Sumqayit in Azerbaijan gained the dubious distinction this week of being added to Blacksmith Institute's top 10 list of the world's most polluted sites. Yet another heir to the toxic legacy of Soviet industry, the city of 275,000 souls bears heavy metal, oil and chemical contamination from its days as a center of chemical production. As a result, local Azeris suffer cancer rates 22 to 51 percent higher than their countrymen and their children suffer from a host of genetic defects ranging from mental retardation to bone diseases. "As much as 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released on an annual basis, including mercury," says Richard Fuller, founder of Blacksmith, an environmental health organization based in New York City. "There are huge untreated dumps of industrial sludge." [More]

Tags: ovulating, shift, cycles, dancers, bigger

When our ancient ancestors migrated out of Africa and throughout the rest of the world, telltale variations in the DNA of the people who settled along the way marked their passage. Today anthropologists and molecular biologists of the Genographic Project, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others, seek to reconstruct the forgotten migration routes by looking for those genetic “footprints,” as senior writer Gary Stix relates in his article “The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents". The unwillingness of many indigenous groups in Australia, the Americas and elsewhere to submit DNA samples has hindered progress, however. Some worry that industrialists will exploit a pharmaceutically useful detail of their genetic patrimony and pay them nothing for it. Still others worry, with good cause, that information emerging from the studies might contradict their cultural traditions about their origins (Native Americans who believe their people have always occupied certain lands do not welcome the suggestion that their ancestors came from Siberia 13,000 years ago). Given the long histories of oppression and insensitivity some of those groups have suffered, their desire for genetic privacy is understandable. [More] The Migration History of Humans: DNA Study Traces Human Origins Across the Continents A development company controlled by Osama bin Laden’s half brother revealed last year that it wants to build a bridge that will span the Bab el Mandeb, the outlet of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. If this ambitious project is ever realized, the throngs of African pilgrims who traverse one of the longest bridges in the world on a journey to Mecca would pass hundreds of feet above the probable route of the most memorable journey in human history. Fifty or sixty thousand years ago a small band of Africans--a few hundred or even several thousand--crossed the strait in tiny boats, never to return. The reason they left their homeland in eastern Africa is not completely understood. Perhaps the climate changed, or once abundant shellfish stocks vanished. But some things are fairly certain. Those first trekkers out of Africa brought with them the physical and behavioral traits--the large brains and the capacity for language--that characterize fully modern humans. From their bivouac on the Asian continent in what is now Yemen, they set out on a decamillennial journey that spanned continents and land bridges and reached all the way to Tierra del Fuego, at the bottom of South America. [More]

Tags: