"Missing Link" Between Humans and Monkeys Found

Hows that for a headline!?  You want to start a riot you can always count on this one to really come with emotional baggage big time! But still......

The "missing link" comes in from an unexpected direction when scientists discovered a link between human speech and monkey chatter.    The "chatter" in question is a distinctive lip-smacking sounds 

made by baboons in the Ethopian highlands.  Researchers  found striking similarities between these lip-smacking sounds and human speech.

The sounds that these gelada baboons make are often so human sounding that researchers often are fooled into thinking there are humans close by talking. 

What this ability demonstrates is that the ability to make complex sounds may have developed well before speech.  When  the need to communicate complex ideas, the ability was already in place.  However the need to communicate complex ideas possibly drove the evolutionary process. 

It should also be noted that monkeys in general smack their lips when eating, it seems to only the gelada who use the "sounds" for communication or the males calling to the females.

link to the Register file

The Land that Time Forgot Found!

Hey, check this out!!! Sent in by Tim Sayell is an article from The Guardian recounting biologists that discovered a world untouched by man or anything else for that matter, for 200k years!!

Discovered in a remote volcanic crater on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea were such things as fanged frogs and rats the size of...well dogs! Check out the pic! They named this monster the Bosavi woolly rat. It had absolutely no fear of humans at all.

From the article:

• (in) just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world.

More great stuff here

Are birds older than dinosaurs? New evidence!

A new analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation Mexico and Central America, and Boston University offers the strongest molecular evidence yet for an ancient origin of modern birds, suggesting that they arose more than 100 million years ago, not 60 million years ago, as fossils suggest. The question is at the center of a "rocks versus clocks" debate between paleontologists, whose estimates are based on the fossil record, and scientists who use "molecular clock" methods to study evolutionary history. Fossil record contains physical remains of ancient organisms, hence the"rock" analogy. Molecular genetic data or the "clock" method relies on the observation that although mutations occur at random in the genome, when looked at over long stretches of time they occur (or "tick") at a fairly constant rate. However, the two approaches have yielded conflicting results. Both camps insist that the other's data is incomplete.

Click here for the complete article.

Remote control brains: a neuroscience revolution

In a laboratory in Germany, a tiny worm dances to flashes of colored light. The worm is not a toy or a robot but a living creature. It has been engineered so that its nerves and muscles can be controlled with light. With each flash of blue its neurons fire electric pulses, causing the muscles they control to clench. A flash of yellow stops the nerves firing, relaxing the worm's muscles and lengthening its body once again. The worm is in the vanguard of a revolution in brain science - the most spectacular application yet of a technology that allows scientists to turn individual brain cells on and off at will. One possibility is that the technology, coupled with a method of getting light into the human skull, could create a Brave New World of neuro-modification in which conditions such as depression or Parkinson's disease are treated not with sledgehammer drugs or electrodes, but with delicate pinpricks of light.

Thanks to Shaun A. Saunders for the submission

Finns Form Fabrication Technique For Human Spare Parts

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Tampere University of Technology and Nanofoot Finland Oy have developed a direct-write three-dimensional forming method of biomaterials. The methodology enables fabrication of nano and micrometer scale structures that can be used as parts of tissue engineering scaffolds. High accuracy biomaterial structures need to be used as tissue engineering scaffolds or cell culture platforms where the fine features have to follow the dimensions of the cultured cells.

Why Aren't Humans Furry?

A prize-winning paper suggests that humans are hairless apes because Stone-Age mothers regarded furry babies as unattractive. Written by Judith Rich-Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, the article, "Parental selection: a third selection process in the evolution of human hairlessness and skin color. Harris' theory is that this kind of parental selection may have been an important force in evolution. If Stone Age people believed that hairless babies were more attractive than hairy ones, this could explain why humans are the only apes lacking a coat of fur. Harris suggests that Neanderthals must have been furry in order to survive the Ice Age. Our species would have seen them as "animals" and potential prey. Harris' hypothesis continues that Neanderthals went extinct because human ancestors ate them.