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

influenced

http://louis-j-sheehan.कॉम Other variations include so-called "mass-hypnosis," in which crowds are simultaneously influenced, and autosuggestion in which subjects persuade themselves। However, these phenomena are unlike those typically associated with the classical phenomena of hypnosis. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Although we can speak of a "history of hypnosis" prior to the 19th century, it should be clear that the word itself is the invention of 19th century Scottish physician James Braid. It is not clear if what is discussed as hypnosis prior to the 19th century in histories of hypnosis is in actual fact what we mean today by "hypnosis."

During the Middle Ages and early modern period, hypnosis began to be better understood by physicians such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina).

supreme

The U।S. Supreme Court Thursday, in a 5-4 ruling, for the first time in U.S. history declared the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution contains a specific right to individual gun ownership and rejected Washington, D.C., handgun restrictions, which were the strictest in the nation. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

"There seems to us no doubt on the basis of both text and history that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 64-page majority ruling. "This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment."

The ruling significantly restricts the ability of D.C. to tightly control gun ownership and flatly rejects its existing gun laws, enacted in 1976 as the strictest gun control law in the country.

"The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns," Justice Scalia said, adding the Constitution bars an absolute handgun ban.

But the Supreme Court majority fully rejected an absolute bar of individual handgun ownership and invalidated regulations requiring that all guns -- handguns, rifles and shotguns -- be dismantled and outfitted with a trigger lock.

"We hold that the District's ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense," the majority held.

Justice Scalia's opinion, which thoroughly discusses the legal history of gun ownership going back to the 1600s, said the individual right to own firearms is limited. "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited," Justice Scalia wrote. "Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places."

The majority said laws barring guns in schools and government buildings and laws placing "conditions and qualifications" on the commercial sale of arms are valid.

The issue split the court along conservative and liberal ideological lines, with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in the majority. Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter dissented.

Justice Stevens, reading from the bench, took point-by-point issue with the sweeping holdings contained in the majority opinion. "There is no indication that the framers of the amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution," Stevens wrote in his dissent.http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

The Supreme Court had not ruled directly on the Second Amendment in almost 70 years. It also, over time, has offered little guidance on the extent to which the amendment covers individual gun ownership for self-defense, hunting and recreational shooting.

The D.C. law, on the books since 1976, bans handguns, bars concealed weapons possession and requires shotguns and rifles to be registered and then kept unloaded and disassembled or locked.http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

The law was challenged by six D.C. residents who said they wanted to legally possess handguns in their homes for self-protection. A U.S. District Court threw out the challenge, but a panel of the Washington-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived one of the claims and ruled a special police officer, the now-retired Dick Heller, was wrongly denied a handgun permit.

The decision affirms a lower court ruling that reached a similar conclusion based on the Second Amendment.

The case is D.C. v. Heller, 07-290.

Court Strikes Down 'Millionaire's Amendment'

The court by a 5-4 vote invalidated a federal campaign finance law that attempts to blunt the advantage wealthy self-financed candidates have in a congressional election.

The justices, splitting along ideological lines, said the so-called millionaire's amendment, part of 2002 campaign finance reforms, violates free speech rights guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"The unprecedented step of imposing different contribution and coordinated party expenditure limits on candidates vying for the same seat is antithetical to the First Amendment," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision reverses a lower-court holding that had allowed the campaign-finance restriction.

Under the provision, the opponent of a wealthy candidate can solicit larger individual contributions and receive unlimited funding from party coffers when the wealthy congressional candidate spends more than $350,000 of his own money. The law raises the individual contribution limit to $6,900 from $2,300 and requires a self-financed candidate to file reports every time he spends $10,000 or more.

The case grew out of a self-financed bid by Jack Davis, who spent $1.2 million of his own funds in a 2004 race against Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R., N.Y.). Mr. Davis lost the campaign and was fined $251,000 for failing to report that he had surpassed the millionaire amendment's threshold.

Mr. Davis sued the FEC over the law in 2006, claiming it violates the First Amendment because it gives his opponent an advantage of knowing his strategy.

The FEC has argued that the provision doesn't restrict the wealthier candidate's speech because it doesn't limit how much he can spend but simply gives an opponent access to more campaign resources.

Mr. Davis is running for the same U.S. House position; Reynolds has retired.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted with Alito in the majority. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented on the court's primary holding.

The case is Davis v. Federal Elections Commission, 07-320.

Court Calls for Review of Western Power Contracts

Justices asked federal courts and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take another look at the terms of long-term wholesale energy contracts several Western utilities signed during the 2000-2001 energy crisis.

In a 5-2 opinion, the high court said FERC acted within its authority to, in a balanced analysis, determine reasonable wholesale power rates but made mistakes in its regulatory review. The opinion also faults court analysis by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, deciding the appeals court ruling didn't adequately protect the power contracts from alteration.

Under the ruling both the Ninth Circuit and FERC must review how conclusions were reached but the opinion does not suggest that the power contracts at issue in the case should be changed.

The case involves the terms of numerous power contracts purchased by utilities in California, Nevada and Washington state when energy markets were in turmoil. The decision will prolong uncertainty over contracts between the utilities and power sellers, including the power marketing unit of Morgan Stanley, a unit of Allegheny Energy Inc. and other energy companies that were sued over power contract terms.

At issue in the appeals were long-term agreements that provided power at prices set during chaos in the spot electricity markets. After the crisis subsided, the utilities decided the contracts were set at unreasonably high prices that violated federal law. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees electricity prices, declined to order changes in the contracts.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in the majority opinion, said FERC must engage in a thorough review when it oversees wholesale power contracts. "Balancing the short-term and long-term interests of consumers entails difficult judgment calls, and to the extent FERC actually engages in this balancing, its reasoned determination is entitled to deference," Justice Scalia wrote. "But FERC cannot abdicate its statutory responsibility to ensure just and reasonable rates through the expedient of a heavy-handed presumption."

Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted in the majority. Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter dissented. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Stephen Breyer, who both have significant stock portfolios, were recused from the case.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in December 2006 ordered FERC to reconsider its decision to leave the power contracts intact and suggested guidelines the agency should use in doing so.

The two appeals before the high court cover only a small amount of the refunds being sought by utility districts. But the ruling will also affect a separate case where the California Public Utilities Commission is seeking $1.4 billion in refunds from Sempra Energy.

The cases are Morgan Stanley Capital Group v. Snohomish County Washington Public Utility District No. 1, 06-1457, and American Electric Power Service Corp. v. Snohomish County Washington Public Utility District No. 1, 06-1462

oddysey

On April 16, 1178 B.C. a total eclipse blotted out the sun at high noon; astronomers know that much for certain. The other events of that day are considerably less definite, but researchers say the date may also figure large in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic tale of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. http://louis-j-sheehan.usUsing astronomical clues from the text, researchers say that Homer may have indicated that the day of the eclipse was also the day that Odysseus finally reached home–arriving just in time to slaughter his wife’s persistent suitors.

While the researchers believe they’ve arrived at the proper date for Odysseus’s homecoming in the Odyssey, they don’t claim to have proven that all the events in the epic are real; it is, after all, packed with gods, monsters, and magic. But researcher Marcelo Magnasco says his findings could at least demonstrate Homer’s astronomical erudition. “Under the assumption that our work turns out to be correct, it adds to the evidence that he knew what he was talking about,” Magnasco said. “It still does not prove the historicity of the return of Odysseus,” he said. “It only proves that Homer knew about certain astronomical phenomena that happened much before his time” [AP].

Researchers looked for references to constellations and planetary positions in the text, and tried to make them match up with known astronomical patterns of past centuries. As they report in the forthcoming issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required], they found references to the positions of Mercury and Venus during the final months of Odysseus’s journey, as well as a description of two constellations, Pleiades and Bootes, being both visible at sunset. Magnasco and his coauthor, Constantino Baikouzis, says these conditions all existed in the early spring of 1178 B.C.http://louis-j-sheehan.us

The evidence that Odysseus’s homecoming occurred on the day of the eclipse is somewhat circumstantial. The researchers note that there are references to a new moon on the day of Odysseus’s return, which is a precursor for a solar eclipse. But the poem contains no direct reference to an eclipse on the day when Odysseus returned to his faithful wife, Penelope, and struck down the suitors.

Instead, there’s a literary flourish that could be interpreted as a reference to the sun’s disappearance. As the suitors are sitting down for their noontime meal, the goddess Athena “confounds their minds” so that they start laughing uncontrollably and see their food spattered with blood. Then the seer Theoclymenus prophesies their death and passage to Hades, ending with the phrase: “The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world.” The Greek historian Plutarch interpreted this as signifying a total solar eclipse, and many others have agreed [Los Angeles Times].

Trying to reconcile ancient literature with historical fact is a risky proposition, and even the researchers advise taking their hypothesis with a grain of salt. “The notion that the passage could refer not just to an allegorical eclipse used by the poet for literary effect but actually to a specific historical one,” they agreed, “seems unlikely because it would entail the transmission through oral tradition of information about an eclipse occurring maybe five centuries before the poem was cast in the form we know today” [The New York Times]. Homer is thought to have put the legends of Odysseus into poetry around 850 B.C.http://louis-j-sheehan.us