chimpanzee

Working along a riverbank in a West African rain forest, researchers have uncovered remnants from a chimpanzee stone age that started at least 4,300 years ago। The finds constitute the only evidence yet detected of prehistoric ape behavior।http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

Most of the more than 200 stone artifacts found at three sites in Taï National Park, Ivory Coast, were used by prehistoric chimps to crack open nuts, say archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Alberta and his colleagues। The animals placed nuts on the flat surface of one rock and smashed the tough shells with another rock। http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

"I'd predict that this type of simple bashing technology goes back to a common ancestor of chimps and humans around 6 million years ago," Mercader says.

His team presents its findings in the Feb. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers excavated a cluster of three sites in 2001 and 2003. Most of the stone artifacts came from one location, known as Noulo. Radiocarbon measurements of burned wood in the soil produced the age estimate for the finds.

To see whether the artifacts could be distinguished as implements, Mercader and two of his coauthors, both well-recognized specialists in Stone Age tools, assessed a group of 90 stones, not knowing beforehand their origins: the West African sites, a 5,000-year-old human occupation in Canada, or a location in the Canadian Rockies where the stones had been modified only by geological forces. In almost all cases, the three examiners identified just the stones from the first two groups as being intentionally modified.

Turning to the full set of specimens from the three West African sites, the scientists concluded that most represent instances of one stone being hammered forcefully against another. Those rocks weighed from 1 kilogram to 9 kilograms (2.2 to 19.8 pounds).

The team also judged that people had apparently struck flakes off 28 of the stones. People probably visited the frequently flooded riverbank sites sporadically, Mercader posits.

Other clues suggest that chimps, rather than people, had used the unflaked stones, For instance, large, heavy hammering stones at Noulo look like those that chimps at a nearby site use to crack nuts (SN: 3/30/02, p। 195: http://www।sciencenews.org/articles/20020330/fob2.asp). Both the old and modern sets of artifacts contain small pits and hollow depressions produced by bashing rocks together, as well as distinctive edge and corner damage. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

Finally, starch grains extracted from 31 stones at the West African sites came predominantly from nuts typically eaten only by chimps, according to Mercader's team. People living in that part of the rain forest mainly subsist on tubers, plants, and fruits. The sites yielded none of the pounding and grinding tools favored by foragers and farmers.

The new finds precede the emergence of farming villages in that part of Africa. Mercader notes that it's possible that chimps imitated simple stone-tool practices of human foragers. Still, he suspects that the rock-bashing activity originated deep in prehistory.

Archaeologist Alison S. Brooks of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., agrees: "There is no reason why future work should not reveal evidence of even older chimpanzee sites." Starch grains last well over 100,000 years, Brooks notes.

Although the new data make "a fairly solid case" for prehistoric nut cracking by chimps, the animals probably invented this stone-tool technique on their own rather than inheriting it from a common human-chimp ancestor, remarks archaeologist John J. Shea of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

view

We all order in the same way, no matter what language we speak। That neat trick occurs in the course of daily affairs, not in an Esperanto-only restaurant। People nonverbally represent all kinds of events in a consistent order that corresponds to subject-object-verb, even if they speak a language such as English that uses a different ordering scheme, a new study finds। http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire।blogspot।com http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com

The findings challenge the more than 60-year-old idea that a person’s native language orchestrates the way he or she thinks about the world. Instead, a universal, nonverbal preference for ordering events in a particular way exists apart from language, propose psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago and her colleagues.

“This order is found in the earliest stages of newly evolving sign languages and may reflect a natural disposition that humans exploit when creating language anew,” Goldin-Meadow says.

The new study makes a good case for a common, unspoken approach to representing sequences of events, remarks psychologist Larissa Samuelson of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. But it’s unclear whether this natural sequencing format results from hardwired brain features or emerges early in life as the brain develops, Samuelson notes.

She suspects that a shared attribute of still-unfolding brains in children at least partly shapes language structure. “An important step is to see whether young children show the same natural sequence for event representations that adults do,” Samuelson says.

Goldin-Meadow’s team studied 20 Turkish speakers in Istanbul, 20 Mandarin Chinese speakers in Beijing, 20 English speakers in Chicago and 20 Spanish speakers in Madrid. Participants came from universities in each city.

In one task, half the speakers of each language described 36 brief vignettes shown on a computer screen, first in words and then using only hand gestures. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.कॉम Vignettes included a girl waving to an unseen person, a duck walking to a wheelbarrow, a woman twisting a knob and a girl giving a flower to a man.

Verbal descriptions followed language-specific word sequencing, the researchers report in the July 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. English, Spanish and Chinese speakers used a subject-verb-object sequence, such as saying “the woman twists the knob.” Turkish speakers used a subject-object-verb sequence, saying the equivalent of “the woman the knob twists.”

Most languages worldwide employ one or the other of these ordering formats, although exceptions exist, Goldin-Meadow notes.

Yet all participants, regardless of language, produced gestures first for an actor, then for an object and finally for an action in portraying vignettes. After watching a woman twisting a knob, all volunteers nonverbally communicated a sequence of events corresponding to “woman knob twists.”

In another task, the remaining half of the speakers of each language reconstructed the same 36 vignettes by stacking sets of three transparent pictures one at a time onto a peg to form a single image. The final image looked the same regardless of the order in which transparencies were stacked, such as a woman on the left, a knob on the right and a circular-shaped arrow in the middle denoting a twisting motion.

Speakers of all languages almost always stacked images in the same order. Participants typically chose the drawing of a woman first, followed by the drawing of a knob and finally the drawing of a circular arrow, again reflecting a subject-object-verb preference.

Intriguingly, a subject-object-verb arrangement also characterizes a sign language that arose over the past 70 years in an isolated Bedouin community in Israel. As a result of a genetic condition, that community has a high incidence of deafness that develops in early childhood.

Goldin-Meadow has found deaf children elsewhere in the world who have never heard anyone talk have developed sign languages that follow a consistent object-verb order, though the placement of subject remains unclear. She plans to investigate whether these deaf youngsters display a preference for subject-object-verb sequences. She also wants to examine how these children order transparencies to describe events that they’ve seen.

In the meantime, the University of Chicago researcher suggests that it’s easier to think about distinct entities, as opposed to actions. This leads people to highlight those involved in an action before focusing on the nature of the action. Given a particularly close association between objects and actions, action sequences are at least initially represented as subject-object-verb, in her view.

As a language community grows and its speech becomes more complex, the subject-object-verb format sometimes changes for still unclear reasons, Goldin-Meadow speculates.

hydrogen

With substantial investments, hydrogen could become a competitive fuel within 15 years, but the fastest way to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles will be to pursue a wider “portfolio” of new technologies, a panel of experts asserts। http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Once hydrogen becomes competitive, it could virtually displace gasoline by mid-century, and related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would be down to 20 percent of current levels, says the National Research Council study, released on July 17। “You could potentially, in the best case, eliminate all oil from http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de U.S. transportation, and most of the carbon dioxide emissions,” said Michael P. Ramage, who was the executive vice president of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co. and chaired the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council panel. He spoke during a press briefing announcing the study.

Meanwhile, for the next 15 to 20 years, hydrogen will have little impact on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Until then, the panel says, carbon-dioxide emissions should be kept in check by a multi-pronged approach, which would include hybrid cars, biofuels, and increased fuel efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles.

Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, which scientists say is the main cause of global warming. Hydrogen-fueled cars only emit water vapor, although some carbon dioxide may be released in the energy-intensive process of producing the hydrogen fuel.

The NRC study focused on cars, light trucks, and SUVs, which together account for about 20 percent of America’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to NAS. It responded to a congressional mandate to determine whether switching from gasoline to hydrogen would be technically and financially feasible on a national scale.

The 17 experts — from private organizations and research institutions — compared the costs and carbon emissions involved with the use of different technologies, including hydrogen fuel cells, biofuels such as ethanol, and simply improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles.

Hydrogen would be most efficient when used in fuel cells, which extract energy via a chemical reaction rather than by combustion. But fuel cells are still very expensive and distributing hydrogen to consumers would require new infrastructure. Consequently, a large-scale transition to hydrogen will require help from the federal government. “There needs to be durable, substantial, sustainable government effort to make this happen,” Ramage said.

At the same time, economies of scale and technological improvements are likely to bring the cost of fuel cells down. In 10 years, the hydrogen vehicles will be commercially available, if still expensive. At that stage, the government would need to step in with subsidies. By 2023, the study concluded, hydrogen-burning fuel cells will compete with internal combustion engines.

The panel’s scenario is admittedly optimistic. It assumes that the government will invest $55 billion between now and 2023, and that private industry will invest $145 billion over the same time period. It also assumes that the government will impose a tax on carbon dioxide, which would encourage low-emission production of hydrogen for the fuel cells.

englishman

May 31, Tuesday. No special matters in Cabinet. Mr. Seward sent me on Saturday a correspondence between himself and Lord Lyons and the Treasury Department relative to a large amount of cotton which was purchased a few months since in Georgia by one John Mulholland, an Englishman, who desires to bring it out, or, if he could not do that, to have it protected. The Secretary of State wrote the Secretary of the Treasury for views. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.comThe Treasury thought the proposition to bring it out inadmissible, but when our military lines were so extended as to include this cotton the agents of the Treasury would give it the same care as the property of loyal citizens; thinks it would be well to advise the Navy and War Departments to instruct their officers. Hence the communication to me.

I decline giving any such instructions, and so have written Mr। Seward, considering it illegal as well as inexpedient, telling him it would be a precedent for transferring all the products of the South into foreign hands to pay for munitions of war which we should be bound to protect। None but Englishmen would have the presumption to make such a request. It is entitled to no respect or consideration. Not unlikely it is cotton of the Rebel government covered up. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com