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  1. #776
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    I did. Oh the shame.


    One of my kids threatened to punch me if I didn't turn it off.

  2. #777
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    This vid is so cool





    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-2...filmed/6958040


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    High-speed cameras capture super speedy tap dancing cordon-bleu songbirds' courtship display
    Discovery News Jennifer Viegas
    Updated yesterday at 1:24pm


    YOUTUBE: Watch the songbirds perform courtship routines first in real time and then in slow motion. Source: Nao Ota
    PHOTO: Scientists suspect the routines are intricate courtship displays designed to unite a male and female. (Nao Ota)
    MAP: Japan
    High-speed cameras reveal that certain songbirds tap dance and sing so speedily that the fancy footwork is otherwise invisible to humans and other animals.

    A normal digital video camera cannot capture their motion, as the tapping is quicker than one frame.

    Dr Masayo Soma

    The discovery, published in the journal Scientific Reports, demonstrates how songbirds can flirt, woo, and otherwise communicate with each other completely under the radar of other animals' sensory perceptions.

    "The tap dancing is very fast and is completely invisible to the naked human eye," Associate Professor Masayo Soma of Hokkaido University said.

    "Even a normal digital video camera cannot capture their motion, as the tapping is quicker than one frame."

    Dr Soma, Ms Nao Ota and Professor Manfred Gahr observed the behaviour in the songbirds known as the blue-capped cordon-bleu and the red-cheeked cordon-bleu (from the genus Uraeginthus). They suspect that the blue-breasted cordonbleu, the purple grenadier, the common grenadier and possibly other songbirds also dance and sing in a similar manner.

    What's more, the researchers noted that the tap dancing birds would often rhythmically wave around a twig or other eye-catching object as they performed.

    The scientists suspect the routines are intricate courtship displays designed to unite a male and female.

    "We predict that fine coordination or synchronisation of dancing should relate to long-term pair bonding," Dr Soma said.

    The routines even provide intriguing clues about the evolution of dancing in birds, as well as in humans and other animals.

    As Dr Soma pointed out, loud singing can "be an advertisement" to anyone within earshot who can detect those particular sounds.

    Dancing, on the other hand, is usually much more intimate. While humans may dance on a stage for large audiences, the behaviour is usually reserved in the animal kingdom for visual and even sensual communications meant for a potential mate.





    In addition to the novel finding about super speedy tap dancing birds, the study documents the first-known female songbirds that can perform complex courtship displays with the same skill as their male counterparts.

    Both male and female cordon-bleu songbirds are extremely choosy, so the scientists suspect that could have contributed to their evolving such elaborate song and dance routines.

    Dr Sue Anne Zollinger, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, said that although the songbird dancing is invisible to human eyes without special equipment, the birds have higher visual sensitivity, which she referred to as a "higher flicker fusion threshold".

    So birds both see and hear the tap dancing moves.

    "The complex high speed foot tapping not only adds a visual component to the courtship display, but also an acrobatic element that may demonstrate how physically fit the dancer is," Dr Zollinger said.

    "In addition, the foot taps may also add to the acoustic part of the display, like a one-man band that sings while simultaneously playing the drums."

    She was very interested to learn of the female dancing and singing skill, since that finding adds to the growing body of evidence that female birds might be more vocal and visually demonstrative than once believed.

    In some other bird species, however, it appears that females lost such abilities over evolutionary time.

    Dr Zollinger wonders if feeling vibrations created by the foot tapping is an important element of the dancing, given that the birds tend to bust a move in unison when they are next to each other on a perch.

  3. #778
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    Some tech for a change



    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-2...ncerns/6981528







    Hello Barbie : WiFi enabled doll labelled a bedroom security risk
    PM By Penny Timms
    Updated about 7 hours ago



    PHOTO: The interactive Hello Barbie doll is capable of holding a conversation and telling jokes. (Mattel)
    MAP: United States
    Security experts warn the new Hello Barbie doll is a disaster waiting to happen and will make children vulnerable in their own homes.

    The latest Barbie model, which maker Mattel hope to release before Christmas, will be wi-fi-enabled, making it possible for her to have a two-way conversation with her owner.

    Those conversations are recorded and stored on the servers of ToyTalk, the company responsible for the technology.

    Parents can even choose to upload and share those conversations online.

    "You'd have to be mad to actually buy it," internet security commentator Stilgherrian said.

    "The idea is kind of fun, you give your kids something to play with and it interacts with them.

    "The problem is you are putting a device into the hands of children which they will have in their private spaces like their bedroom and you're connecting it to the internet."

    US security researcher Matt Jakubowski has already exposed a weakness in the doll, hacking into its system information and gain access to the stored audio files and microphone.

    You could have them, every time they're talking about kittens, saying 'kittens are evil, don't trust kittens' or something even more perverse.
    Stilgherrian, internet security commentator
    Mattel insists that the doll's wi-fi feature can be switched on and off, but Stilgherrian said that fact was of little comfort.

    He said hackers could intercept the Barbie and make her spurt out questionable phrases.

    "That raises almost a tin-foil hat possibility of someone listening to your children to say certain phrases and then you feed back to them the Barbie saying the phrase of your choice," he said.

    "I mean you could have them, every time they're talking about kittens, saying 'kittens are evil, don't trust kittens' or something even more perverse.

    "It sounds like fun to do almost in a way and someone might well do that as a kind of fake or a hoax or something. Now that I even think about that, if you wanted to have some sort of cyber spook spy agency indoctrination of your children happening, you could easily feed in 'capitalism is bad, tell your parents that money is evil'."

    'A spy in your child's bedroom'

    Susan Hetherington from Queensland University of Technology said parents may not have considered the doll's capacity to provide them with information they might not normally gain access to.

    "We might tell our teddy or our doll really personal stuff about our feelings and life and if somebody is hurting us or doing things that they shouldn't do, that sort of information is also being shared," she said.

    "So you basically have a spy in your child's bedroom who is listening to the little girl's innermost thoughts. And I'm not sure that all parents are really giving a lot of consideration to that."

    She said more and more products were becoming wi-fi and smart-enabled.

    "It is unsurprising that toy manufacturers are trying to muscle in on this space, because what they're really competing with is the fact that the toy of choice for most children this Christmas will be a phone or a tablet," she said.

    Stilgherrian said despite the warnings, he doubted this would stop the flow of smart toy technology.

    "I think we're going to see more and more of this kind of security vulnerability crop up, simply because we're getting companies, in this case it's a toy manufacturer, none of these organisations have a tradition or have the internal company infrastructure to constantly test and retest their devices and issue security updates for it," he said.

    "If we're having trouble convincing people they need to install the security updates on their phone, it's going to be a lot harder to convince them to update the software on their doll

  4. #779
    Senior Member animosity's Avatar
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    0/10 would not want.
    Quote Originally Posted by songbirdsong View Post
    "Say, you know who could handle this penis? MY MOTHER."

  5. #780
    Senior Member bermstalker's Avatar
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    Can you just imagine playing with your wi-fi barbie when one day she says "Hi, I'm Chucky. Wanna play? We're friends 'til the end"

  6. #781
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    It's almost New Year's Eve here. It' s only 4.30am so partying hasn't quite started yet but that's good because it means I can get one last science post in for 2015 - & I can't think of a better way to end a year than the discovery & naming of the ...





    ***Super Ninja Lanternshark ***



    http://www.iflscience.com/new-black-...ark-discovered



    The fear created by the great white shark in "Jaws" has a lot to do with it being unseen for most of the movie. So spare a thought for the prey of this*newly discovered shark, which has evolved to hunt unseen.

    The ninja lanternshark has black skin that allows it to blend*in with the depths of the ocean where it hunts. The black skin is not the only trick up the fin of this predator, as the shark also glows in the dark, a*deadly combination.

    The shark grows to about half a meter (1.6 feet)*in length and lives at a depth of about 1,000 meters (3,300 feet). Eight specimens have been discovered off the Pacific coast of Central America so far. The animal was discovered by the Pacific Shark Research Center in California and the findings have been published in the Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation.*

    The Latin name for the newly discovered shark is Etmopterus benchley, named after Peter Benchley, the author of "Jaws." According to*Hakai*Magazine, its common name was suggested by the young cousins of researcher Vicky Vasquez, who were so impressed by the sleek appearance of the new animal that they called it "super ninja shark."*

    According to Vasquez, the ninja lanternshark is almost invisible to its prey. The shark uses photophores in its skin to produce a faint glow that, in combination with its black skin, allows the shark to blend in with the limited light in the depths of the ocean. Photophores are organs that emit light, and they are more sparse in this species of lanternshark in comparison to similar species.




    *

  7. #782
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    They're going to check out some never before investigated sections of the abyss

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-1...-coast/8522498

    Scientists to journey into unknown ocean depths off southern coast of Australia

    By Claire Slattery

    Posted about 5 hours ago



    It sounds like the stuff of a Jules Verne novel ? a voyage to the bottom of the sea.

    But in a first, a team of scientists is preparing to survey the darkest depths off the coast of Australia.

    Twenty-seven scientists from seven countries and 13 support crew will spend 31 days aboard the country's only dedicated research vessel, The Investigator.

    They depart from Launceston and finish at Fraser Island, and will stop at seven marine sites along the way to take samples at a depth of 4 kilometres at each one.

    The data collected will help scientists learn more about biodiversity and the challenges such habitats face by the threats of climate change, rubbish, pollution and other human activity.

    "We know exactly what occurs at those depths in some other places like the North Atlantic, and around Japan and perhaps some other areas as well," said the expedition's chief scientist, Tim O'Hara.

    "But it's never really been investigated in the Southern Hemisphere so there will be a complete element of surprise."

    The abyss is defined as more than 3.5 kilometres deep, but in some parts of the ocean it gets as deep as 11 kilometres.

    Marine scientist Tim O'Hara 2

    Photo: Scientist Tim O'Hara says deep seas around Australia have never been properly investigated. (Supplied: Matthew Newton)

    There are about 8 million square kilometres of deep sea in Australian oceans, more area than the country's dry land.

    "Most of the very deep sea is very fine mud, but there are canyons that are so deep they could swallow Mount Everest," Dr O'Hara said.

    "There's dead and even live volcanoes that are rising from the deep sea."
    'There'll be a whole bunch of really awesome weird stuff'

    It takes the ship's sampling gear between six and eight hours to reach the sea floor at a depth of 4 kilometres.

    "It's way too deep for a person to go down, they'd just be crushed to a leaf if they went down that far," Dr O'Hara said.

    "So what we're going to do is the old-fashioned technique of putting a metal box on a long wire behind the ship, grabbing a bit of the sea floor and bringing it to the surface."

    The scientists will do 12-hour shifts between 2:00am and 2:00pm ? or the reverse ? to sort and identify the specimens.

    The conditions are so difficult in the abyss that not many creatures can survive, and many of the animals evolve without eyes because it is so dark they cannot see anyway.

    Most of them are pale or red, and some produce their own light through bioluminescence.

    Because the water pressure is so intense, many are jelly like, and quite small.


    Prickly footballfish found in deep waters off Australia

    Photo: The conditions are so difficult in the abyss that not many creatures can survive. (Supplied: David Paul)

    Dianne Bray of Museums Victoria, a self-described "fish person" who will also be on the voyage, expects one third to a half of the samples they collect will be new species.

    "There'll be a whole bunch of really awesome weird stuff," Dr Bray said.

    "Things like tripod fish, which are those fish that stand up on their fins and face into the current.

    "Things with big teeth. Deep sea lizard fishes with jaws full of snaggly teeth. Maybe rat tails, which are fishes with big pointy snouts."

    According to Museums Victoria, the voyage will be one of national significance, but it also aims to get Australians more excited about marine science.

    "I love being at sea," Dr Bray said.

    "Being out there, watching the sea birds and just seeing what comes up from the deep sea is just awesome. I love seeing these weird and wonderful things coming up."

  8. #783
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    How can worms be so adorable. They've got eyes like living cartoons

    https://www.newscientist.com/article...S|2017-Echobox

    Bioelectric tweak makes flatworms grow a head instead of a tail



    A flatworm with a head at either end of its body
    Michael Levin/Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology

    By Jessica Hamzelou

    Cut off the head of a planarian flatworm, and a new one will grow in its place. The worm is one of many creatures that have some kind of memory for lost limbs, enabling them to regenerate what was there before.

    Now it seems that this memory can be altered by meddling with the electrical activity of the animals? cells. Shifting the bioelectric current at the site of the cut changes the type of appendage regenerated ? allowing a head to be regrown in place of a tail, for instance.

    Michael Levin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have shown that after changing the electrical current of the cells once, the animals will continue to randomly regrow a head or a tail. The findings suggest that an animal?s body plan is not just down to its genes and environment ? electricity plays a key role, too. ?It?s pretty profound,? says Levin.

    His team has long been trying to understand how electric currents in the body?s cells affect health and the ability to regenerate damaged tissues ? what Levin calls the ?bioelectric code?.

    On the charge

    Charged ions are constantly moving in and out of cells, giving cells a natural electrical charge. The patterns of electrical activity are thought to have an important role in controlling how embryos develop limbs. Levin wants to find out whether they might work in adult animals ? and potentially humans ? too.

    Drugs, including commonly used anaesthetics, can destabilise the electrical charge of cells. In a recent experiment, Levin?s team took this approach to see if altering the electrical charge in worms that had had their heads and their tails cut off might encourage them to grow two heads or tails instead of one head and one tail.

    The team found that about 70 per cent of the worms regrew a second tail or head instead of the ?correct? body part. The rest appeared to be unaffected.

    To probe further, Levin?s student Fallon Durant re-cut the worms that had regenerated the normal body part without giving them any other treatment. She saw the same trend ? 70 per cent regrew the wrong part, while 30 per cent looked the same as they had originally. The team repeated the experiment, and saw the same outcome over and over again.

    After destabilising a worm?s electrical current once, it is as if each end of the worm makes its own decision ? with a preference for the wrong part ? as to whether it will develop a head or a tail whenever it is cut, says Levin. By altering the bioelectric code, the animal?s body plan can be permanently rewritten, he says.

    Electrical memory

    ?A totally normal-looking worm with a normal gene expression and stem cell distribution can in fact be harbouring a [body plan] that?s quite different,? says Levin. ?That information is stored in a bioelectric pattern ? it?s not in the distribution of tissues or stem cells, it?s electrical.?

    ?It?s provocative,? says Voot Yin at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. The findings suggest that electrical changes might somehow change the way genes work, he says.

    The next step would be to test the approach in a mammal that can regenerate to the same extent as humans. Mice and humans are both able to regrow a small amount of a digit ? such as a finger ? if it is cut off. ?We could see if we could boost mouse digit regeneration,? says Yin.

    On the other hand, the approach might also trigger the growth of other tissues at the mouse?s paw, such as a tail. ?It is likely to trigger more unexpected changes,? says Yin.

    Levin hopes his findings might one day be useful in human health. People react differently to medicines and diseases ? perhaps the electrical currents in our cells play a role in this variation, he says.

  9. #784
    Senior Member daisylane's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by blighted star View Post
    How can worms be so adorable. They've got eyes like living cartoons

    https://www.newscientist.com/article...S|2017-Echobox
    omggggggggggggggggggggggggg dats a cute wormy
    Quote Originally Posted by Lazarus View Post
    gangsta rap does not help the youth
    Quote Originally Posted by bermstalker View Post
    DONT MAKE ME FUCK YOUR BITCH THAT PUSSY POPPIN

  10. #785
    Senior Member animosity's Avatar
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    It's going to be twice as hard for me to take those guys seriously now.
    Quote Originally Posted by songbirdsong View Post
    "Say, you know who could handle this penis? MY MOTHER."

  11. #786
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    NSFA WARNING : SPIDER PIX BELOW







    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-...tulas/10430354

    Remote school students dig up the mystery of Maningrida's aquatic tarantulas

    ABC Radio Darwin By Jesse Thompson and Liz Trevaskis
    Posted 27 Oct 2018, 10:30am

    A photo of a diving tarantula coated in bubbles.

    PHOTO: The students have found a way to photograph the diving tarantulas underwater without damaging their burrows. (Supplied: Department of Education)


    RELATED STORY: Spider expert hails medicinal possibilities of NT tarantulas
    RELATED STORY: Tarantula story spins across the world wide web
    RELATED STORY: The delicate art of milking tarantulas


    In 2015, headlines describing the stuff of horror movies brought the tiny town of Maningrida, population 2,000, to world attention.

    International media outlets described the town, 500km east of Darwin, as being in the grip of a "mega cluster" of venomous tarantulas that can "rip open your skin".

    The real story was much less dramatic, but so much about the lives of the large population of tarantulas that dive underwater remains a mystery to scientists that the local school has begun investigating.

    The West Arnhem Land town sits near a floodplain believed to host the highest concentration of tarantulas in the world.

    Unique aquatic tarantulas 'more like fish'

    Queensland Museum arachnologist Robert Raven has described countless trapdoor funnel-webs and tarantulas and was gobsmacked by Maningrida.

    Dr Raven surveyed the area when the species was discovered in 2006 and photographed 66 burrows over a few paces.

    He said the spiders, which are believed to coat themselves with a thin, mercury-like layer of bubbles in order to breathe underwater, were incredibly unusual.

    "They're in the wrong family to do this. They should be among the fish," Dr Raven said.

    A student's diagram for a science project, featuring a tarantula on a piece of paper.

    PHOTO: The students are leading biological research into the mysterious spider. (Supplied: Maningrida College)



    Years after the sensational headlines, and in part because the remote floodplain lies deep within wild buffalo and pig country, knowledge of the species remains patchy.

    In fact, so little is known about the diving tarantula that the species still hasn't even been described.

    Students take up scientific challenge

    Robert Schonherr took up a post as a science teacher at Maningrida College early this year.

    Tasked with teaching pupils about food chains, adaptation and evolution, he was looking for a project where students could apply the dense concepts.

    "One of my colleagues said, 'You know what? My students actually discovered this species eight years ago'," he recalled.

    "It's still an interesting species. How about you give it a go?"

    Students now visit the habitat regularly to study the spiders.

    They have replicated floodplains in the classrooms, filling glass tanks with water to see how the creatures respond.

    A bird's eye shot of Dr Raven digging through some tarantula burrows with students.

    PHOTO: Dr Raven visits the floodplain and conducts fieldwork with the students. (Supplied: Maningrida College)


    Cameras reveal 'arachnophobe's worst nightmare'


    Students used their ingenuity to lure the nocturnal spiders out of their twisting burrows, which can be up to a metre deep.

    "[After digging the spiders out of the burrows], we found that if we dangled an insect inside, like a grasshopper on a little fishing line, the tarantula would actually grab the grasshopper and you can pull it out," Mr Schonherr said.

    Advances in cheap, mobile technology recently led the students to a possible world first.

    Using a an endoscope that attaches to Mr Schonherr's phone, students were able to feed cameras into the twisting burrows without having to destroy them.

    The footage is a nightmare for arachnophobes.

    "You have to fumble around a little bit until you find a spider, or in our case, slings ? baby spiders. Spiderlings," Mr Schonherr said.


    VIMEO: Cheap endoscopes take the students into the spiders' burrows for the first time.
    https://player.vimeo.com/video/295687537

    Pupils leading scientific research


    The students are the only researchers regularly studying the species in their natural environment.

    A photo of a student holding a plastic container that has a diving tarantula in it.

    PHOTO: The students visit the floodplain at least once a week and keep specimens in the classroom. (Supplied: Maningrida College)



    Mr Schonherr regularly reports back to Dr Raven, who said the pupils were leading biological research into the species.

    One area of concern is what happens to the young.

    "In one case we found the young in the sort of appendix in the burrow, but most of the time we didn't find anything but these big-sized females," Dr Raven said.

    "That's a really big worry, because if we're only getting adults there, we don't know what's going on with the young or whether there's been recruitment going on in the population.

    "In fact, we may come to a point in five or ten years time when all of a sudden there's none, so we have to find out what's going on."

    Venom interests pharmaceutical researchers


    The men also agree that the spider's venom is a potentially rich site of scientific research that could be used medicinally.

    "A number of the spiders, because they have toxins, they can look at various aspects of them to see how they can play roles in improving pharmaceuticals that can be developed," Dr Raven said.

    "We don't know where this could go, but it's good potential."

    Today's students, however, may be middle-aged by the time anything reaches the market.

    Such is the pace of this research that students Dr Raven supervised in 2006 now work as rangers on the same plains.

    "What they figure out in Maningrida will tell us a lot about the spiders in the rest of Australia," the arachnologist said.

    "Normally the big capital cities are leading the charge.

    "Well, in this case, the Territory's got the best population of these things so it's a good place to start."

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  13. #788
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    It's really fucking clear that this thread has nothing but legitimate science & technology in it.

    You're deliberately being a passive aggressive arsehole now just because we've tried to help you out with your posts.

    You'll 100% deserve it if you get perma-banned for shitting all over the forum.

  14. #789
    Senior Member blighted star's Avatar
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    I don't know if it'll happen in my lifetime but one day the world is going to accept that Out of Australia happened too


    https://gizmodo.com/the-human-origin...1830747304/amp



    The Human Origin Story Has Changed Again, Thanks to New Discovery in Algeria

    George Dvorsky
    Yesterday 4:55pm
    Filed to:HUMAN ORIGINS

    An Oldowan core pulled from the Ain Boucherit site.
    Image: M. Sahnouni

    The discovery of 2.4-million-year-old stone tools and butchered bones at a site in Algeria suggests our distant hominin relatives spread into the northern regions of Africa far earlier than archaeologists assumed. The find adds credence to the newly emerging suggestion that ancient hominins lived?and evolved?outside a supposed Garden of Eden in East Africa.

    This extraordinary discovery can be traced back to 2006, when Mohamed Sahnouni, the lead author of the new study and an archaeologist at Spain?s National Research Center for Human Evolution, found some intriguing artifacts at a site called Ain Boucherit in northeastern Algeria near the city of El-Eulma. These items were embedded in a sedimentary layer exposed by a deep ravine. Two years later, Sahnouni found another layer at the site, one even older. From 2009 until 2016, his team meticulously worked at Ain Boucherit, uncovering a trove of stone tools and butchered animal remains.





    The team working at Ain Boucherit.
    Image: M. Sahnouni

    Using multiple dating techniques, Sahnouni and his colleagues dated the two stratigraphic layers, dubbed AB-Up and AB-Lw, at 1.9 million and 2.4 million years old, respectively. The items within these two layers are now the oldest known artifacts in North Africa, the previous oldest being 1.8-million-year-old stone tools found in the late 1990s at a nearby site called Ain Hanech. The tools found within the AB-Lw layer, at 2.4 million years old, are 600,000 years older than the ones found at Ain Hanech, and 200,000 years younger than the oldest tools found in East Africa (and the world, for that matter)?the Oldowan tools of Gona, Ethiopia, dated to 2.6 million years ago. Scientists used to believe that early hominins evolved in this area of Africa, spreading to the north around a million years later. But this finding now suggests a much earlier dispersal date into the continent.

    To put these dates into perspective, our species, Homo sapiens, emerged 300,000 years ago. So the unknown hominins who built these tools were romping around eastern and northern Africa some 2.3 million years before modern humans hit the scene. The new discoveries at Ain Boucherit, the details of which were published today in Science, suggest North Africa wasn?t just a place where human ancestors lived and developed tools?it was a place where they evolved.



    Indeed, this new research is feeding into an emerging narrative, whereby humans evolved across the African continent as a whole, and not merely in East Africa as per conventional thinking. What?s more, it should spur increased archaeological interest in northern Africa.

    ?The evidence from Algeria has changed [our] earlier view regarding East Africa [as] being the cradle of humankind. Actually, the entire Africa was the cradle of humankind.?

    To date the layers, Sahnouni used three different techniques: magnetostratigraphy, Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) dating, and a biochronological analysis of the animal bones found intermixed with the tools.



    Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist from the University of Oxford who was not affiliated with the new study, said the researchers did a great job with the dating, saying it?s ?incredibly difficult? to accurately date ancient hominin sites.

    ?The authors have combined multiple dating methods to produce an age estimate for the early occupation of the [AB-Lw layer] to around 2.4 million years ago,? Scerri told Gizmodo. ?They did this by first reconstructing the sequence of geomagnetic reversals preserved at the locality, which are globally well dated. The researchers then found the chronological place of the... occupation layers within this sequence through a combination of the Electrospin resonance (ESR) dating of minerals in the sediments and the identification of fossil [animals].?

    Scerri said these methods nicely constrain the dates but involve some uncertainties and assumptions.



    Jean-Jacques Hublin, a researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology?also not involved with the new study?wasn?t thrilled with the dating techniques employed by Sahnouni and his colleagues.

    ?Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and one can have some reservations regarding the proposed ages for the Ain Boucherit and Ain Hanech sites,? Hublin told Gizmodo. ?Paleomagnetism is not a dating method. It helps to constrain dates obtained by other methods and is subject to various interpretations.?

    Fair enough. These are indeed extraordinary claims, so an independent effort to date these layers and the artifacts would support the study?s conclusions.



    ?If confirmed, the findings suggest that hominins were occupying North Africa almost a million years earlier than previously thought,? said Scerri. ?These dates would also make the Oldowan in North Africa only slightly younger than it is in East Africa.?


    Some Oldowan tools found at the site, including cores and flakes.
    Image: M. Sahnouni et al., 2018


    By Oldowan, Scerri is referring to the world?s oldest-known stone tool industry. This tech irrevocably altered hominin evolutionary history, setting the stage for even more sophisticated stone tools, such as the ensuing Acheulean culture. Remarkably, the stone tools found at Ain Boucherit were strikingly similar to the Oldowan tools of East Africa. Oldowan lithics feature stone cores with flakes removed from the surface, resulting in sharp edges. In addition to these tools, the researchers uncovered heavily flaked ball-shaped rocks, the purpose of which isn?t entirely clear.



    ?The Ain Boucherit archaeology, which is technologically similar to the Gona Oldowan, shows that our ancestors ventured into all corners of Africa, not just East Africa,? said Sahnouni in a statement. ?The evidence from Algeria has changed [our] earlier view regarding East Africa [as] being the cradle of humankind. Actually, the entire Africa was the cradle of humankind.?

    To explain the presence of Oldowan technology in North Africa, the researchers posit two scenarios: Either the technology was developed by hominins in East Africa around 2.6 million years ago, who quickly spread themselves and their newfangled tech to the north, or hominins living in North Africa invented Oldowan tech independently of other groups.


    Cut marks consistent with butchering.
    Image: I. Caceres

    <<snipped>>

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    Continued ...

    In terms of the animal bones discovered, the archaeologists found traces of mastodons, elephants, horses, rhinos, hippos, wild antelopes, pigs, hyenas, and crocodiles?oh my! Clearly, these ancient hominins weren?t picky eaters. Importantly, many of these animals are associated with open savanna environments and easily accessible bodies of permanent freshwater. This likely describes the landscape inhabited by these Oldowan hominins at the time.

    Analysis of the fossilized bones revealed characteristic signs of butchery, such as V-shaped gouges involved in evisceration and defleshing, and impact notches suggestive of marrow extraction. Ain Boucherit is now the oldest site in North Africa with tangible archaeological evidence of meat use in conjunction with the use of stone tools.

    ?The effective use of sharp-edged knife-like cutting stone tools at Ain Boucherit suggests that our ancestors were not mere scavengers,? Isabel Caceres, an archaeologist at Rovira i Virgili University in Spain and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. ?Not clear at this time [is] whether or not they hunted, but the evidence clearly showed that they were successfully competing with carnivores for meat and enjoyed first access to animal carcasses.?



    Unfortunately, no hominin bones were found at the site, so the researchers can only make educated guesses as to the exact species responsible for the tools. It could?ve been Homo habilis, an early human species around at the time, or even late Australopithecines, the hominin genus associated with the famous Lucy fossil.

    Scerri said this paper highlights the importance of North Africa, and also the Sahara, for archaeologists seeking to learn more about human origins. The paper, she said, also raises new questions about earlier hominin evolution, such as the origin and spread of Oldowan technology.

    ?The paper cannot answer these questions, but it changes the narrative by raising them, in effect pointing out that there could be alternatives to the dominant model of an East African origin,? she told Gizmodo. ?As the authors point out, the fossils of the 3.3 million year old Australopithecus bahrelghazali have already been found in the Saharan region of Chad. The findings reported by Sahnouni and colleagues therefore add to a growing body of evidence that North Africa and the Sahara could well yield game changing discoveries.?



    Humans Didn?t Evolve From a Single Ancestral Population

    In the 1980s, scientists learned that all humans living today are descended from a woman, dubbed?


    These findings are strikingly consistent with Scerri?s own research. In a Trends in Ecology and Evolution paper published this past July, Scerri and her colleagues claimed that Homo sapiens had a pan-African origin, and that our species didn?t evolve from a single ancestral population.

    ?In our model, human ancestors were already scattered across Africa,? she explained. ?Different populations came in contact with one another at different times and in different places, with these dynamic patterns of mixing and separation eventually leading to the emergence of the behavioral and biological characteristics of contemporary human populations. The findings from Sahnouni and colleagues fit with this view, albeit fairly loosely as they predate the earliest glimmerings of our species? divergence by about 1.8 million years.?



    Moving forward, Scerri hopes that scientists will make a more concerted effort to explore the allegedly ?less important? regions of Africa to obtain a more accurate?and real?picture of hominin evolution over time.

    ?Exploring the Sahara and other areas that are in the less glitzier corners of the human origins map will likely yield important returns, which in no way diminishes the incredibly important and valuable finds from eastern and southern Africa.?

    [Science]




    Stunning Discovery Shows Early Humans Were Hunting Rhinos in the Philippines Over 700,000 Years Ago

    Archaeologists Have Found the World's Oldest Known Drawing in a South African Cave

    Ancient Cemetery Packed With Hundreds of Bodies Discovered in Kenya

    Humans Lived in Madagascar 6,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought

    George Dvorsky
    George is a senior staff reporter at Gizmodo.




    In case anyone thinks the Out of Australia thing is bullshit -

    https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99257&page=1


    ANU anthropologist Alan Thorne said that neither ?Mungo Man?s? completely modern skeleton nor its DNA had any links with human ancestors from Africa found in other parts of the world.

    ?Neither of them [the skeleton or DNA] show any evidence that they ever were in Africa,? Thorne told Reuters. ?There?s modern humans in Australia that have nothing to do with Africa at all.?

    The findings, revealed in The Australian newspaper today, challenge the prevailing ?out of Africa? theory of evolution because ?Mungo Man? has a genetic line which has vanished yet his skeleton is completely modern.

    The ?out of Africa? theory holds that modern humans evolved from a common homo erectus ancestor in Africa.

    Homo sapiens then left Africa and spread across the world between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago.

    The ANU researchers say that because Mungo Man is modern anatomically, yet has a vanished DNA line, it means at least one group of homo erectus? descendants evolved outside of Africa


    It's not just the DNA results. Even before that there was the problem of Out of Africa modelling showing humans arriving in Australia 50-60,000 years ago. Yet Mungo Man's remains just happen to fall right on their upper limit & there's further evidence of human occupation dating to over 100,000 years.

    Most of Australia's potential pre-history excavation sites are lost due to sea level rise, who knows what could've been found around the original coastlines or under the ice sheets of Antarctica.


    Every First Nation in Australia has creation stories. They all say Aboriginal people were always in Australia. One day science will catch up verify that oral histiry

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    Spider warning, but there's only one pic this time




























    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.5b427b5aacea

    The extraordinary life and death of the world?s oldest known spider


    A female Gaius villosus Rainbow. (Courtesy of Leanda Mason)
    By Avi Selk May 1

    This is the story of the oldest known spider in the world and the people who knew her. The details are compiled largely from research conducted by Barbara Main and Leanda Mason, who knew her best over nearly half a century.

    She was born beneath an acacia tree in one of the few patches of wilderness left in the southwest Australian wheat belt, in an underground burrow lined with her mother?s perfect silk.

    Her mother had used the same silk, strong and thick, to seal the burrow?s entrance against the withering heat of the summer of 1974, and against all the flying, prodding things that prowled the North Bungulla Reserve.

    She lived like that, in safety and darkness, for the first six months of her life. Then one day in the rainy autumn months, her mother unsealed the tunnel, and she left.

    It?s likely that two or three dozen spiderlings left the burrow with her, and that nearly all of them soon died.

    The 250-acre North Bungulla Reserve was surrounded completely by farmland and roads, abutting an abandoned gravel pit. Space was scarce under the leaves' protective shade, and competition was fierce. Most of the spider?s siblings would be eaten by birds or lizards or cannibalized by each other, or would bake to death in the sun.

    But she was fortunate. She found an unoccupied patch of earth a few feet from her mother?s burrow and began to dig.

    She dug an almost perfect circle straight down into the soil, just large enough to fit her body, a small fraction of an inch across. Then she lined the tunnel with silk, as her mother had lined the one in which she hatched.

    For as long as she lived, this would be her only home.

    She wove a silken door across the burrow's mouth, attached on one side to make a hinge. She dragged hundreds of twigs to the edge of the doorway, one by one, so that they radiated out like fan blades.

    Then she went inside, closed the door and waited, likely days or even weeks, for her first real meal.

    She was essentially blind but attuned to every vibration in the earth, so when she finally felt something move along the twigs ? an ant or small beetle, maybe ? she leaped out and pulled it in.

    In this way, she caught food when it came to her, and hid from the outside when there was nothing to eat. Scientists called her Gaius villosus ? one of dozens of trapdoor spider species that lived in the vanishing wilderness of the Australian wheat belt.


    (Courtesy of Leanda Mason.)


    After a year in her burrow, in 1975, she would have felt strange, heavy vibrations on the twigs outside her door. This often meant a predator was trampling around or a large forager like a kangaroo.

    This time, though, the vibrations were caused by Barbara York Main, who was standing directly over the burrow.

    Main had grown up in the wheat belt, she would tell the Australian Broadcasting Corp. years later. Throughout the 20th century, farming and industrialization had destroyed almost all the wilderness in the region ? leaving patches like the North Bungulla Reserve as precious sanctuaries for the tiny species that held her fascination.

    ?I felt an immediate affinity with small things,? Main told the ABC. ?I didn?t have that one-on-one relationship with a kangaroo that I could with caterpillars.?

    Now she was a zoologist with the University of Western Australia. On that day in 1975, she knelt over the burrow, parted the twigs behind the spider's door and fixed a small metal sign into the soil.

    It was engraved, "16.? A few feet away, Main had marked another burrow "1,? and deduced that 1 was 16's likely mother. And 24 and 30 were her likely sisters.

    Main spent hours beneath the acacia tree, marking every burrow she could find. She was building a family tree of Gaius villosus, whose hold on the earth seemed so fragile and about which humans knew so little.

    ?It is also hoped ultimately to assemble complete case histories of several individual nests,? Main told the International Congress of Arachnology in her first report in 1977, according to her written paper. ?A life-cycle of perhaps twenty years notwithstanding.?

    But 20 years was just a guess. Among other things, she would later tell the ABC, ?I wanted to know how long the spiders lived.?



    The next years were hard for the spiders. A long, dry summer in 1977 wiped out a third of one year's generation, Main wrote. Hungry quail scratched open nests. A scorpion even invaded one burrow.

    Still, 16 survived and grew larger, expanding her burrow every year, until it was as wide as a dime, then a quarter, and larger still.

    Gaius villosus was a resilient species, Main wrote when she published her first major paper on the project, in the Bulletin of the British Arachnological Society in 1978. ?Although adult nests frequently have their doors and twig-lines torn off (presumably by birds) none appear to have been seriously affected by this. The spiders reattach their doors, sometimes upside down or back-to-front and attach new twig-lines.?

    She had tagged and mapped 101 villosus burrows by then, all within a few meters of each other, near the edge of the old gravel pit.

    Main was impressed by how long the spiders seemed to live. Based on her estimates from their tunnel diameters and sporadic observations she had made before the study, she believed two matriarchs were at least 16 years old.

    ?They might be 18 or 20!? she added.

    Main mentioned spider 16 only in passing in this early paper. She was only 4 years old and nothing special, yet.


    One day toward the end of the 1970s, spider 16 made a rare excursion to her front yard. She wove a sort of welcome mat outside her door ? a net laced with pheromones, which Main would compare to a tea doily.

    Then she went back down and closed the door ? waiting this time not for the skittering of prey, but for the knock of a male caller.

    Main wrote in her paper about the very different lives of male and female villosus spiders. The males left their burrows as soon as they were sexually mature ? around age 6 or so ? to go search for doilies and knock on doors.

    The males never return to their burrows after mating, Main wrote. They wandered until they died, and all died young.

    The female, however, went straight back to her burrow after sex. She sealed the door up extra tight with a finely contoured plug, crafted so precisely that it could seal out heat and rainwater, and spent the next year locked inside her home, to lay her eggs and shelter them.

    [VIDEO: Nightmarish, deadly spiders hatch in Australia]

    The next autumn, she unsealed the burrow and sent her children off into the world, to live or die as they could.

    These matriarchs were the secret to villosus spider?s success in such an arid environment, Main noted. In their deep bunkers, they could survive droughts and fires on the surface. They could mate every few years, and continually replenish the spider population.

    But even Main did not guess how much 16 would overachieve.

    She spun, fed, spun and fed, and probably produced many generations of young in between many hardships. A swarm of grasshoppers ravaged the reserve in 1991, according to a paper in Pacific Conservation Biology. An invasive plant species began to spread from the gravel pit. ?Biodiversity is being reduced,? the paper said.

    Over the decades, spider 16?s mother, siblings and countless cousins and children died. But her family tree kept growing, and each time 16's burrow was checked, the webbing and swirl of twigs looked immaculate as ever.

    In 2013, an Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter named Vicki Laurie became intrigued by reports that an 84-year-old zoologist had been cataloguing a family of spiders for 40 straight years.

    So Laurie traveled with Main, out to an ?an unremarkable bit of scrub? in the wheat belt, and watched her work.

    ?We spend three hours on our knees as Barbara checks each burrow to see if it?s occupied or not,? Laurie reported. ?She observes, with a mild air of concern, how few new trapdoor burrows there are and how unseasonably dry the reserve is.?

    When they reached the plaque of spider 16, Laurie was skeptical that it had really been occupied by the same spider for the last four decades. But Main explained that females never left their burrows until they died, and no other spider ever moved in.

    Main flipped open the door with a small knife, and through Laurie, 16 was introduced to the world.

    ?Inside, I can just see the spider, which has pulled a veil of silk lining half across its burrow,? Laurie recalled in her report. ?Under my breath, I introduce myself and wish her well.?

    It was around this time that an undergraduate student, Leanda Mason, began to accompany Main on her excursions to the reserve.

    To Mason, who was studying to be an ecologist, the reserve looked like an Eden in the blight of industrialized southwest Australia ? teeming with species that might not be around much longer.
    <<snipped>>

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    continued ..

    By now, Main had catalogued hundreds of spiders. Generation after generation. But on each excursion, Mason told The Washington Post, they would beeline directly to 16's door, to visit the spider that never seemed to die.

    This became a tradition. On 16's 40th birthday, Mason said, she asked if she could give the spider a mealworm.

    ?Barbara wouldn?t let me,? she said. ?It interfered with the study.?

    Main's plan of cataloguing a family of spiders having succeeded far beyond her expectations, and she began to look forward to the project's end.

    ?She was going to finish the study when number 16 died,? Mason said. ?She was going to write it up as a big thing.?

    Instead, she said, Main?s health declined before the spider?s.

    The zoologist retired last year, in her late 80s, and Mason, now studying for her doctorate in ecology at Curtin University, took over the spider study.

    On Oct. 31, 2016, she went out to the reserve with a drone, hoping to get a bird?s-eye view of how this small rectangle of bushland was holding up against the roads and fields.



    (Courtesy of Leanda Mason)
    But like her mentor before her, she went straight to 16 first.

    When she arrived at the clearing that day, she noticed that the twigs around the door had lost their meticulous spiral fan shape. They lay scattered in disarray.

    Mason looked at the silk door, and saw a tiny hole in the center, as if something had pierced it.

    She lifted the door and lowered an endoscope into the burrow, and confirmed what she already suspected. The spider was gone.

    A parasitic wasp had likely broken through the seal, and laid its eggs in 16's body.

    ?She was cut down in her prime,? Mason said. ?It took a while to sink in, to be honest.?

    On April 19, Mason, Main and Grant Wardell-Johnson co-published a paper in Pacific Conservation Biology, announcing the death of spider 16 at age 43.

    She was the oldest spider known to have existed, Mason wrote, eclipsing the previous record set by a 28-year-old tarantula.

    ?We can be inspired by an ancient mygalomorph spider and the rich biodiversity she embodied,? she wrote, beside a photo of a perfect hole beneath a tree ? nearly half a century of work: Main's, hers and the spider's.

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    Quote Originally Posted by blighted star View Post
    continued ..
    Fucking asshole wasps.

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    http://kjzz.org/content/734023/first...ical-questions

    A paper published in "The Lancet" has announced the first birth of a child from the uterus of a deceased donor.

    The 11 previous live births from transplanted uteri used organs from live donors.

    The recipient was a 32-year-old woman born without a uterus due to Mayer-Rokitansky-K?ster-Hauser syndrome, a rare disorder in which the uterus and vagina do not develop properly, although ovaries and fallopian tubes typically function normally, as do external genitalia.

    The donor, a 45-year-old woman who had given birth vaginally three times, died of a subarachnoid hemorrhage — bleeding that occurs between the brain and its surrounding membrane and is often caused by a ruptured aneurysm.

    The recipient, who took immunosuppression drugs from the time of transplantation through birth, did not have any rejection episodes.

    Doctors at Hospital das Cl?nicas, University of S?o Paulo, Brazil, implanted her in-vitro-fertilized egg seven months following the transplant. She gave birth via cesarean section to a 6-pound baby girl 35 weeks and three days later.

    Doctors removed the donor uterus during the C-section.

    As of the paper's writing, the child weighed 16 pounds and measured 24 inches tall, which researchers say is within normal growth parameters for a child 7 months 20 days old.

    Currently, live donor uteri are rare and are mainly supplied by family members. The researchers suggest harvesting the organs from deceased women would create a larger supply while also eliminating donor risk.

    But, as bioethicist Jenny Dyck Brian of Arizona State University's Barrett, The Honors College explained, such procedures also raise essential ethical questions regarding access and cost, risk and informed consent, and social pressures on parenting and reproduction.

    "We should be as wary of na?ve appeals to nature as we ought to be toward appeals to technological fixes."

    Brian went on to warn against saying "what is natural is better," as such sentiments reflect an ableist attitude and ignore the many commonplace medical modifications, such as eyeglasses and medicines, that society already finds acceptable.

    "But it's also the case — when we are pursuing very expensive, very risky technological fixes that have the potential of dramatically restructuring our many social and political norms — that we not rush in to them too quickly."

    Uterine transplants combine two of the thorniest issues in bioethics: organ transplantation and assisted reproduction. Brian says ethical discussions tend to focus on whether we should do such research at all, even as it continues to take place.

    "On the one hand we might say, 'Look, there already exist, safer, less costly and more certain ways of having children, right? Why would we undertake a procedure that has incredible risks including, but not limited to, infection, rejection of the uterus, miscarriage or stillbirth?'"

    But questions surrounding an activity as central to individual fulfillment and societal function as childbirth are not so easily answered. As Brian explained, surrogacy can be a "legal, ethical, emotionally complex minefield," while adoption lacks the genetic connection that many women find important.

    "We also see that both of those methods of creating families are often limited legally: Who can access adoption, who can access surrogacy, depends on what state you live in, and also your access to particular finances."

    The out-of-pocket cost of a uterus transplant can range from $300,000 to $500,000 dollars in the U.S., where insurance frequently does not cover treatments related to infertility.

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    https://amp.abc.net.au/article/10635134

    Blind amphibian that buries its head in the sand named after US President Donald Trump
    Posted 4 hours ago


    A photo of the newly discovered amphibian, Dermophis donaldtrumpi, with Mr Trump's hair on its head.

    IMAGE EnviroBuild added Mr Trump's hair to an image of the newly discovered amphibian.(Supplied)


    A newly discovered amphibian that is blind and buries its head in the sand has been officially named after Donald Trump in recognition of the US President's stance on climate change.

    Key points:

    EnviroBuild, a sustainable building materials company, won an auction for the naming rights

    The company said Mr Trump's was "the perfect name" for the limbless animal

    The Panamanian underground amphibians are particularly vulnerable to global warming

    Dermophis donaldtrumpi, 10 centimetres in length and belonging to group of snakelike animals called caecilians, was recently found in Panama by a group of scientists.

    Its naming rights were auctioned off in a fundraiser for Rainforest Trust, a non-profit rainforest conservation organisation.

    The winning bid of $34,478 was made by Aidan Bell, the head of a UK-based sustainable building materials company called EnviroBuild.

    "It is the perfect name," Mr Bell told The Guardian.

    In a press release authored by Mr Bell, EnviroBuild expanded on the choice, and did not hold back.

    "Caecilian is taken from the Latin caecus, meaning 'blind', perfectly mirroring the strategic vision President Trump has consistently shown towards climate change," he said.

    Mr Bell said Mr Trump's worldview resembled a caecilian's, whose eyes can only detect light and dark.

    "Capable of seeing the world only in black and white. Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese," he added.

    Caecilians lost their limbs at least 60 million years ago to better burrow in the earth, and live almost entirely underground.

    To that, Mr Bell said: "Burrowing its head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change and also appointed several energy lobbyists to the Environment Agency, where their job is to regulate the energy industry."

    Dermophis donaldtrumpi pictured next a ruler.

    IMAGE Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to climate change.(Rainforest Trust UK: Abel Batistsa)
    Mr Bell also took aim at Mr Trump's family.

    "The dermophis genus grows an extra layer of skin which their young use their teeth to peel off and eat, a behaviour known as dermatrophy," he wrote.

    "As a method of ensuring their children survive in life Donald Trump prefers granting them high roles in the Oval Office."

    Mr Bell said EnviroBuild was not political, but called the lack of progress on halting climate change, particularly at the UN's recent COP24 climate talks, "saddening".

    As an underground amphibian, Demorphus donaldtrumpi is particularly susceptible to global warming.

    "It is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake's climate policies," Mr Bell wrote.

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    Quote Originally Posted by blighted star View Post
    A worm looking amphibian sounds just like him

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    https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-...stmas/10665884

    NASA spots 'hippo-shaped' asteroid near Earth over Christmas period
    ABOUT 11 HOURS AGO

    Three grainy black and white images show an asteroid with ridges that look like a hippo's back.

    PHOTO Radar images of the asteroid 2003 SD220, taken across December 15-17.
    SUPPLIED: NASA



    An asteroid's close approach to Earth this Christmas has revealed it to be similar in shape to a "hippopotamus wading in a river", according to NASA.

    The object, called 2003 SD220, is now the closest to Earth it has been in 400 years, NASA said.

    It safely passed by the planet last Saturday at 2.9 million kilometres away ? about seven and a half times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

    It will next come back to Earth in 2070, at a slightly closer range.

    Three deep-space communications facilities gathered new data on the asteroid over three days from December 15, revealing its shape and surface and giving astronomers a better understanding of its orbit, NASA said.

    The images are 20 times more detailed than previous readings of the asteroid.

    The 'hippo' is 1.6 kilometres in length and has an "extremely slow rotation" of about 12 days, the space agency said.

    "It also has what seems to be a complex rotation somewhat analogous to a poorly thrown football," NASA said in a statement.

    The radar images of the asteroid, taken using one antenna to transmit and another to receive, are comparable in detail to a spacecraft flyby, such as when NASA's OSIRIS-REx took photos earlier this month of asteroid Bennu, the agency said.

    A NASA image shows the asteroid Bennu.

    PHOTO The asteroid Bennu was visited earlier this month.
    NASA/GODDARD/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA VIA AP

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    https://amp.smh.com.au/healthcare/ex...17-p527yx.html


    Experts debate whether kissing is to blame for gonorrhoea spread


    By Rachel Clun
    July 18, 2019 ? 2.00am


    The long-held position of sexual health experts is that gonorrhoea is transmitted by the penis, but an Australian researcher is studying the possibility the infection can be spread by kissing.

    The debate comes as Australia's gonorrhoea rates have more than tripled in the past nine years.

    At the STI and HIV World Conference in Vancouver on Thursday, Professor Kit Fairley from Monash University will be arguing his case in a debate with Professor Emeritus H. Hunter Handsfield from the University of Washington.

    Professor Fairley said his research suggests gonorrhoea can be transmitted by kissing, while
    Professor Fairley said his research suggests gonorrhoea can be transmitted by kissing, while Professor Handsfield said more research needs to be done.

    Photo: Alamy

    Professor Fairley, who is also the director of the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, said his five years of research was important given the global prevalence of the infection.

    In Australia, gonorrhoea rates have more than tripled between 2008 and 2017 from 36 to 118 notifications per 100,000 people, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.


    ?Understanding how it is transmitted is the key to understanding how to control it - if transmission by kissing is a key route of transmission then it is important to investigate new methods of control," Professor Fairleysaid.

    The rate of gonorrhoea has tripled between 2008 and 2017.


    Photo: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
    Gonorrhoea is a bacterial infection that can affect the urinary tract in the penis, as well as the throat, cervix, and anus. There are usually only symptoms for gonorrhoea in the penis, which include a pus-like discharge and irritation when urinating. Professor Fairley said this is an important aspect of his argument as those symptoms prompt swift treatment.

    ?The significance of that is that when transmission occurs people find out about it quite quickly, and so they get treated so there's not much opportunity to pass it on,? he said.

    ?The reason the rate of gonorrhoea is so high in men who have sex with men is because the transmission doesn?t always involve the penis, and so you don't always get symptoms."


    Professor Handsfield, who is an expert on sexually transmitted infections, said the accepted research showed gonorrhoea was transmitted by the penis, and transmission by kissing or saliva during oral sex was ?vanishingly rare?.

    "All of the available research or basic understanding has been that yes that occurs, but the transmission is less efficient," he said.

    However, Professor Fairley said an example of a gonorrhoea outbreak at a music festival between seven people who all had some form of sexual contact, including kissing, boosted his argument.

    ?There were six cases of throat gonorrhoea transmitted between them, with the same gonorrhoea type. Not one of those seven people had genital gonorrhoea,? he said.

    ?I don?t know how it got to six throats if it didn't get there by kissing.?


    Professor Handsfield said Professor Fairley?s research about the importance of oral transmission would probably be proven correct in the future, but not to the degree the Melbourne team says.

    ?I think they are on to something, I think they are raising questions that deserve careful research that the world needs to take seriously, but I don?t believe their research currently shows oral infection accounts for over half of men having sex with men,? Professor Handsfield said.

    Professor Fairley?s argument is being published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Thursday.

    Our health journalists abide by a set of reporting guidelines when writing about medical research. If you would like to read them click here.

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    Quote Originally Posted by blighted star View Post
    ....what?

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    Third Patient Dies in Audentes' Gene Therapy Study for Neuromuscular Disease

    https://www.biospace.com/article/thi...cular-disease/


    A third pediatric patient involved in a gene therapy trial for a rare, neuromuscular disease conducted by Audentes Therapeutics has died. The trial remains on clinical hold and continues to indefinitely delay the company?s plans to seek regulatory approval for the treatment.

    This morning, Audentes, which was acquired by Astellas Pharma late last year, announced the death of the third patient involved in the company?s ASPIRO clinical trial evaluating AT132 in patients with X-linked Myotubular Myopathy (XLMTM). The disease is a life-threatening neuromuscular disease that almost exclusively impacts males and is characterized by extreme muscle weakness, respiratory failure and early death. XLMTM is caused by mutations in the MTM1 gene that lead to a lack or dysfunction of myotubularin, a protein that is needed for normal development. The disease affects approximately 1 in 40,000 to 50,000 newborn males. X-linked Myotubular Myopathy also disrupts normal bone development and can lead to fragile bones and joint deformities. Those diagnosed with the disease usually only survive into early childhood. Audentes? gene therapy uses an AAV8 vector to deliver a working copy of the myotubularin 1 gene into the patient to correct the disease.

    According to the company, preliminary findings indicate that the immediate cause of death in this patient was gastrointestinal bleeding. In its announcement this morning, Audentes said the patient was one of three study patients previously disclosed to have received AT132 at the dose of 3x1014 vg/kg who began to demonstrate signs of liver dysfunction within three to four weeks after dosing. All three patients demonstrated evidence of pre-existing hepatobiliary disease and Audentes noted that more than half of the patient enrolled in the ASPIRO study show evidence of pre-existing hepatobiliary disease. However, the company said that has not been associated with similar progressive liver dysfunction in any of the patients who received AT132 at the 1x1014 vg/kg dose nor in the other patients who received the 3x1014 vg/kg dose.

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration placed the ASPIRO study on clinical hold in June after Audentes disclosed two pediatric patients who received the higher doses of the gene therapy developed sepsis and died.

    Audentes said it is closely monitoring all patients in the study. To date, 23 patients in the ASPIRO study have received AT132. Six patients received the gene therapy at the 1x1014 vg/kg dose and 17 patients received AT132 at the 3x1014 vg/kg dose, the company said. There are no other patients in the study known to be currently experiencing similar liver dysfunction, Audentes said.

    ?Audentes, together with the ASPIRO investigators and independent Data Monitoring Committee, continue to closely monitor all patients enrolled in the study. Additionally, Audentes? investigation regarding why these three patients developed progressive liver dysfunction is ongoing,? the company said in its announcement.

    The company plans to provide further information on the ASPIRO program based on both ongoing data collection and future regulatory status updates. Last year Audentes presented positive data from ASPIRO at the 24th International Annual Congress of the World Muscle Society. It was this data the company hoped to build upon in order to file a Biologics License Application with the FDA.

    https://medcitynews.com/2020/08/aste...therapy-trial/

    A third patient in the trial of a gene therapy for treating a rare and life-threatening neuromuscular disease that has already been placed on clinical hold has died, the company developing the therapy said Friday.

    Audentes Therapeutics ? which Japanese drugmaker Astellas acquired in December 2019 for $3 billion ? disclosed that the immediate cause of the death of a third patient in its Phase I/II ASPIRO trial of AT132 in X-linked myotubular myopathy, or XLMTM, was gastrointestinal bleeding.

    Shares of Astellas fell slightly on the over-the-counter market, where they trade in the U.S. The Tokyo-based company?s shares principally trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

    The patient was one of three in the trial who had received the gene therapy at a dose of 300 trillion viral vectors per kilogram of body weight and had begun to demonstrate signs of liver dysfunction within three to four weeks after receiving the dose. The trial is enrolling boys up to the age of 5.

    All three of the patients demonstrated signs of pre-existing hepatobiliary disease, a term referring to disease of the liver and bile ducts or gall bladder. However, more than half of the patients enrolled into the study so far showed signs of such disease, though the gene therapy has not been associated with similar complications when administered at the 100 trillion vector per kilogram dose. To date, 23 patients have received AT132, including six at 100 trillion vectors and 17 at 300 trillion vectors.

    Audentes had previously said in late June that a patient in ASPIRO had died of sepsis, a month after another patient had also died.

    The announcement marks the second significant setback this week for gene therapies. On Wednesday, San Rafael, California-based BioMarin said the Food and Drug Administration had delivered a complete response letter for its application to secure approval for valoctocogene roxaparvovec, a gene therapy for hemophilia A. The news came as a surprise to many, given that the therapy was widely expected to win approval, and the company itself said the issues raised in the CRL had not been raised previously.

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