The 2006 Darwin awards winners have been announced . First place:
(August 2006, Brazil) August brings us a winner from Brazil, who tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. This technique was ineffective, so he escalated to pounding the RPG with a sledgehammer. [...]
When you watch someone do something, with the aim of later doing it yourself, then the same motor areas in your brain are activated. More at ScienceDaily
“Brain-expressed genes are known to evolve slowly in mammals. Nevertheless, since brains of higher primates have evolved rapidly, one might expect acceleration in DNA sequence evolution in their brain-expressed genes. In this study, we carried out full-length cDNA sequencing on the brain transcriptome of an Old World monkey (OWM) and then conducted three-way comparisons among [...]
National Geographic has an interesting video of some chimpanzee populations in the Congo encountering humans for the first time
“Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three [...]
Science Daily is reporting on a paper in November that shows that the maternal diet during pregnancy in mice affects not only their offspring, but their offsprings’ offspring. We’ve known for quite a while that maternal diet influences offspring via all sorts of epigenetic funkiness, but as far as I know, this is the [...]
CyArk collects the most accurate 3D models of World Heritage Sites and stores them safely in a publicly accessible archive. Currently has such models of heritage sites like Ancient Thebes, Angkor Wat, and Tikal in Gutemala.
Everyone’s favorite evoblogger PZ Myers has a tutorial on the Superclades of the Cambrian:
Allow me to introduce you to a whole gigantic superclade with which many of you may not be familiar, and some other groups in the grand hierarchy of animal evolution that I’ve mentioned quite a few times before, but would [...]
Damn Interesting on Easter Island’s Rongorongo script:
Easter Island (…)‘s lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity. (…) Known as Rapa Nui to the island’s inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised [...]
Animal song is well known to be a way of attracting mates, however, it has recently been found that a group of gibbons in Thailand sing to scare off predators. The songs appear to be combinations of distinct structural units and appear to communicate information to other group members about the type of predators [...]
