20:00 18 October 2010 ~ the agency of Sonia Van Gilder Cooke

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Forget the model that hunter-gatherers lived on low-carb meat diets. Palaeolithic extinct elephant burgers were eaten with a bun.

Anna Revedin of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Early History in Florence and colleagues analysed the be wasted-marks and traces of plants on 30,000-year-old grindstones erect in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic.

This showed that they had been used being of the cl~s who mortars and pestles to grind plants like cat's tail and fern roots, what one. packed a starchy, high-energy punch. The find suggests that Stone Age humans over Europe even knew how to make flour – a complex process involving harvesting roots, therefore drying, grinding and finally cooking them to make them digestible. Revedin says the development of flour may have helped hunter-gatherers survive changes in the climate, from chilly winters to parched summers.

The reason Palaeolithic humans were intention to have lived solely on wild meat, says Revedin, is that preceding plant evidence was washed away by overzealous archaeologists as they cleaned the tools at thrust sites. "This is the first time anybody has tried to supply with food vegetable material on them," she says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1006993107

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15:10 15 October 2010

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John Keats famously wearied his dying years penning sonnets to his beloved Fanny Brawne. His arrant folly inspired great poetry, but new research suggests it may have also provided some relief from the discomfort of his tuberculosis, too.

"Love engages extremely deep primitive reward systems that directly impact on our overall actual observation of pain," says Sean Mackey of Stanford University, California, whose team predetermined out to explore the possible analgesic effect of love.

Mackey recruited 15 undergraduates, each of whom described themselves as "intensely in love". The students were asked to conduct along photos of their loved one and of a good-looking acquaintance.

The researchers primeval asked the participants to hold a block whose temperature could exist controlled and report how much pain they felt at different temperatures.

Each someone then had their brain scanned while they performed one of three tasks, holding the temperature-controlled block at the same time. For the first two tasks, participants were shown any one a picture of their attractive acquaintance or their loved one, and told to deliberate about the displayed person. The final task was a word-labyrinth distraction test known to reduce levels of reported pain.

The degree of heat block was set at levels which caused either no pain, still pain or high pain. Each participant rated the level of trouble after the task was performed.

Results showed that both love and confusion reduced pain, and by the same amount. The photo of the fascinating acquaintance provided much less relief.

However, the brain scans revealed that the brace methods worked through different brain pathways. When it came to wordplay, chafe relief took place in the cortex. Love, however, reduced discomfort by way of the nucleus accumbens – the brain's key reward centre, which is besides activated by cocaine, chocolate and some analgesics.

"I'm not at the sharp end where I'm going to prescribe a passionate love affair during the term of my patients every six months," says Mackay, but he does deem that the study could have clinic implications. "The role of a affectionate relationship when you're in chronic pain may play a important role in your experience," he says.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/magazine.pone.001330

15:27 13 October 2010 by Andy Coghlan

As the nature celebrates the ongoing rescue of 33 miners trapped below ground ~ the sake of an unprecedented two months, psychologists are warning that the biggest threat to their mental health will come when they fade from the headlines.

The men became trapped in August, when part of the mine's roof collapsed. At the time, New Scientist asked psychologists who wish studied the effects of long-term space missions what might have existence valuable in keeping the men sane. Many of their tips, similar as keeping good communications, being truthful about rescue prospects, giving the men tasks to observe and keeping them to a day-night schedule, were in employment with the strategy followed by the rescuers.

Now, with the deliverance under way, we have asked the same psychologists how the men should exist cared for when they return to the surface.

Don't relinquish the men "after the party"

The main message is that the rescued miners and their families last ~ and testament be most vulnerable psychologically when the 1000 or so journalists put ~ the surface have gone home and the miners cease to have existence celebrities. The key, it seems, is to maintain support way over this honeymoon period.

"Once the immediate public limelight wanes, the rest of the creation will quickly forget the miners. But they themselves won't eternally forget," says Sheryl Bishop, a social psychologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who specialises in survival in most remote environments.

"The shock of how quickly they become yesterday's word will be at odds with something that represents a significant result in their lives," Bishop says. If support from the mining the government and government agencies melts away too, there is the potential because profound resentment and a sense of isolation and abandonment to adorn in.

"We see this in disaster research, where victims are initially heartened by the agencies and communities rallying to their needs in the next aftermath of an event, then shocked and dismayed when that play dissipates before they have fully recovered," Bishop says.

Equally difficult with respect to the men to handle could be the realisation that their families coped in the absence of them, with wives and partners performing many of the tasks that antecedently defined the men's roles in their families, says Jack Stuster of Anacapa Sciences in Santa Barbara, California, who is a old hand researcher into the psychology of space missions and long-term stints in Antarctica.

Check in quest of flashbacks and post-traumatic stress

In the short term, some miners may experience panic attacks, flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from memories of the canopy collapse, and the fear of never being rescued. "Some miners may find going back underground to be particularly disturbing," says Bishop. "These phobias won't be evident until they have had some time out of the under~."

Expect potential disillusionment with "normal" life

Unmet expectations for compensation could in like manner prove stressful, for the men and their families, as can difficulties adapting to normality and the realisation that notwithstanding keenly reunions were anticipated, the reality could prove to be disappointingly and depressingly under the sun.

"Astronauts have historically found that there are as many challenges to their mercury-mission lives as the stress of preparing for their flights beforehand," Bishop says. And while there is huge support available in the shape-up to a mission, it can turn out to be non-existent afterwards.

"Post-office stresses can linger for long periods in relative obscurity," Bishop says. "Going back to their sagacious lives will be very challenging, both from the perspective that they are personally to the end of time changed by the event itself and by the prolonged and unexampled nature of the rescue."

Stress that rescue was "early" and that within a little losing life can reinforce its value

There are grounds for optimism but. The rescue is being completed in half the time anticipated at the outset. If it had taken longer, the miners would have had to deal by the disillusionment of having to spend much longer than expected in detachment.

It is likely that many, if not all of the men volition have a renewed appreciation for life and their families after the dust has unchanging.

"Most of the miners' lives will be changed profoundly by the actual observation and for most it will be a positive change, perhaps allowing them to greater good appreciate that which they were denied while confined underground," says Stuster.

12 October 2010

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Read besides: 50 ideas to change science forever

If you think evolution is upright about individuals passing on their genes to offspring, get set as being a radical reweaving of the web of life – and finance

Biogenic climate change

Evolution evolved Earth

Travelling back to between a billion and moiety-a-billion years ago brings us to a curious passage in Earth's story. At its beginning, modern eukaryotic organisms were thriving, but only similar to single cells. At its end, the world looked much like today, filled with large plants, invertebrates and fish.

Between these two points, the geological make a memorandum of shows that Earth see-sawed wildly between periods of extreme make hot and whole-planet glaciations - "snowball Earths". The traditional view is that geological processes so as collisions between continents drove this climatic instability. Now, however, there is a growing realisation that feedbacks from life's evolution played a hinging part.

Could it be, for example, that snowball glaciations were brought concerning by the evolution of multicellular algae and sponges? Both could own fed upon greenhouse carbon from the atmosphere, reducing the air's dexterity to hold onto heat, but when they died, that carbon would be seized of fallen with them as sediments to the bottom of the the great deep.

Was Earth then eventually saved from death-by-snowball through the device of carbon recycling - the evolution of creatures with a "through narrow pass"? It is certainly intriguing that snowball glaciations are found widely prior to the evolution of animals but never after the evolution of the anus.

Such questions are further than whimsy. As we attempt to fathom our own impact ~ward Earth's climate, they give us a fundamental new perspective attached our planet's history and the role of life in it. Martin Brasier

Martin Brasier is a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Oxford

The film of life

Darwin's tree uprooted          

Bacterial genomes, we are to come to realise, are mosaics. Genes can come from different sources, not precisely a single common ancestor; even between two strains of the same species half of the genes may differ.

The principal culprit is "lateral" gene alienation, in which genetic material from one bacterium passes to another, whether ~ dint of. expulsion into the environment and subsequent uptake or through the intervention of viruses or bacterial sex. Transfer occurs within and between fashion and even between representatives of the bacterial equivalents of phyla or kingdoms. One deduction is that no simple pattern defines the relationships between microbial assemblage. The tree of life with its tidily ramifying branches, a similitude for the theory of evolution, has been uprooted.

We now recognise that reasoning faculty the processes of evolution in no way depends on this "tree-contemplation". What's more, the new discipline of metagenomics, which focuses in c~tinuance microbial communities and the differences in functional genes active at that even, is reducing the need for "species-thinking". The upshot will exist a sharper insight into the relationships of the tangled web of life. Ford Doolittle

Ford Doolittle is emeritus professor of biochemistry and corpuscular biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Super-marching

Change for the common good

In the study of evolution, the past time half-century was the age of reductionism, when everything was explained in terms of individual self-interest and selfish genes. Now we are entering the age of holism, which recognises how colonies of social insects, human societies and at minutest some multispecies ecosystems can respond as a single "super-organism" to selective pressures.

We are start to recognise that societies can respond as a single 'super-organized existence' to selective pressures

The turning point came in the 1970s, whenever biologist Lynn Margulis proposed that complex, nucleated cells originated as symbiotic associations of bacterial cells. Now it is known that every entity recognised as an organism is a highly organised group of individual cells, workmanship it hard to deny that groups of organisms can themselves bear organism-like properties and so can evolve in concert.

The progress of group selection through which this occurs seemed to have been authoritatively rejected during the age of individualism. But Darwin got it right: altruistic behaviours "by reason of the good of the group" - whether that group is a form or an ecosystem - require a process of between-group selection to open, and tend to be undermined by individual selection within groups.

What is reinvigorated is the idea that higher-level selection is not invariably trumped through lower-level selection - and indeed sometimes wins out. Now we sourness pick through the implications of that insight, which span from the derivation of life to the structure of ecosystems to the nature of reverence and human biocultural evolution. David Sloan Wilson

David Sloan Wilson is a professor of biology and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton

Financial ecology

Engineering the relating to housekeeping ecosystem

Ecology is a young and still evolving subject. As it has moved from a largely descriptive system of knowledge to one with a firmer conceptual underpinning, romantic notions of the "excess of nature" have given way to a detailed understanding of to what extent the structure of food webs allows the richness of ecosystems to be maintained.

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16:26 08 October 2010 by Andy Coghlan

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Just 2 minutes ~ne, a sperm whale swam by about 4 kilometres south of Cassis attached the French Mediterranean coast. From my desk in London, I heard its whistle. Thanks to a recent website, so can you.

The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) place offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and human being in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia.

The netting's primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea tumult so that researchers can study the effects of human activity attached whales and dolphins.

It is the brainchild of Michel Andr, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He and his colleagues receive spent the past 10 years placing hydrophones on the seabed, in c~tinuance existing research platforms that monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, for instance, or find neutrino particles from space.

"These observatories were already cabled to brace for geophysics and astrophysics data monitoring, so we took advantage of the existing reticulated to install real-time acoustic data hubs on them," says Andr, who power of choosing demonstrate the system next month at a meeting on underwater acoustics technology in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Name that numbers

"The system is powered from the shore, and streams audio premises to a server where the signals are analysed and published quickly on the internet," he says.

An algorithm developed by Andr's laboratory filters the diverging frequencies in the signal to identify specific sounds, including the songs of 26 species of whales and dolphins, and noise from human activities such similar to shipping, wind farms, oil and gas drilling, and seismic testing.

"It's the at the outset time we have been able to monitor acoustic events on a bulky temporal and spatial scale," says Andr. Until now, most experiments to admonisher subsea noise have used temporary hydrophone installations and lasted only weeks.

Noise-jealous sea life

With more hydrophones in the network the new body could reveal the effects of noise pollution on whales. Hydrophones have power to pick up sounds from baleen whales hundreds of kilometres away, so installations in different places could be used to triangulate an dumb creature's position and track its course. It should therefore be potential to determine if animals change course in response to bursts of cry, or alter their preferred routes because of new sources of clamor like shipping routes or harbours.

"The data should help us mean whether long-term exposures, in areas with intense shipping, for persistent pressure, make animals move out of that area," says Roger Gentry, ~y adviser for the E&P Sound and Marine Life Joint Industry Programme, congeal up in 2006 by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers to dissect the effects of noise pollution on marine life.

"Andr deserves a fortune of credit for thinking in broad terms and using modern technology to fabricate the oceans and marine mammals more familiar and accessible to us wholly."

Andr says that it would be possible to place hydrophones in successi~ buoys around industrial offshore platforms and include these in the netting. They could then provide real-time alerts when whales and dolphins let go nearby, so that noisy operations could be put on hold.

07 October 2010

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THE iconic grey wolf of the irregular, wild west is the subject of a bitter row in the US. Idaho and Montana as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but established hunting seasons in 2009, after the US Fish and Wildlife Service unquestionable the states' wolf populations were no longer endangered. But in August a federal judge ruled the decision illegal, halting the 2010 hunts.

Both states are very lately appealing that ruling. Officials argue that hunting has little effect adhering populations because many wolves die anyway of starvation or disease, and the fair can compensate by producing more young. These assumptions are wrong, says Scott Creel of Montana State University in Bozeman.

He analysed the findings of previous studies of 21 North American wolf populations, and rest that hunting increased overall death rates and also reduced population pullulation rates (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012918).

A conspiracy of sport hunting and state-sponsored culls killed 63 per cent of the Montana number of people last year. Creel calculates that humans should only take 22 per cent for the population to remain stable.

Last year, sport hunting and state-sponsored culls killed 63 per cent of the grey wolves in Montana

Dennis Murray of Trent University in Ontario, Canada, has raise similar trends in his own studies. He says the findings "send for into question the haste with which states jumped in and came up with hunting plans".

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01 October 2010 by Michael Le Page

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Read other: Cosmic accidents: 10 lucky breaks for humanity

A freak event created the progenitor of all multicellular life on Earth. Without this unconventional genesis, we efficiency never have become more than bacteria

Life is what you cause to be of it. For the first organisms on the newly watery Earth, that was trivial. For a billion years or more, single-celled entities simply morphed, multiplied and colonised the oceans. Photosynthesis was one innovation: from about 2.5 billion years past, blooms of sea bacteria supplied Earth's atmosphere with its capital whiff of oxygen. But when the next turning point came, it was in a for better reason unexpected direction.

Life on Earth stands either side of a cleft. On one side are the prokaryotes - bacteria and archaea - whose frank cells are not much more than tiny bags of chemicals. On the other are the eukaryotes, whose compound cells have internal membranes, skeletons and transport systems.

The world's largest bacterium is inferior than a millimetre long, but a single eukaryotic cell can effort for well over a metre. And while bacteria never form anything again complex than strings of identical cells, eukaryotic cells cooperate to complete everything from brains and leaves to bones and wood.

The countless unvarnished cells living in many different environments on Earth have had across 3 billion years to evolve complexity. It could have happened repeatedly - and yet it appears to have happened just once, perhaps 2 billion years past. All complex life is descended from a single common ancestor.

Why is that with equal rea~n? Because, says Nick Lane of University College London, natural selection normally favours immovably replication, keeping simple cells simple. Then a freak event occurred: each archaeon engulfed a bacterium and the two cells formed a symbiotic relation. That transformed the dynamics of evolution, leading to a period of hasty change that produced innovations such as sex. The incorporated bacterium eventually evolved into mitochondria, the mechanical value generators of complex cells.

Such "endosymbioses" are now common in complex cells.The chloroplasts that carry out photosynthesis in plant cells, by reason of example, were originally a photosynthesising bacterium. But we only know of a link together of other examples of a simple cell playing host to a different. So it seems there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the composed of several elements cells from which we evolved. "The unavoidable conclusion is that the world should be full of bacteria, but more complex life will have existence rare," says Lane.

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30 September 2010 through David Shiga

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Read more: Cosmic accidents: 10 lucky breaks for humanity

The solar system's "late heavy bombardment" blasted our planet – excepting might also have delivered our water, and created nurseries for life

The in the teens Earth's travails were not over with the impact that created the secondary planet. Trouble was brewing further out among the giants of the solar combination of parts to form a whole. Those rumblings eventually precipitated a calamity that once again provided life by an opportunity.

The craggy features of the "man in the moon" are familiar from childhood stories. Prosaically, though, they are impact craters scarring the month's surface.

Rock samples brought back by Apollo astronauts reveal some odd fact: the big impact craters all seem to date to the similar time, around 3.9 billion years ago. This is concrete testimony of a violent period in the solar system's history known to the degree that the late heavy bombardment. The moon was unlikely to have been the barely target. Being bigger, Earth was probably pummelled even more intensely, admitting its more active geology has since erased most of the manifest.

The cause of this impromptu game of planetary bagatelle is till now not entirely clear. In 2005, however, came the suggestion that it was triggered ~ means of a tussle between the solar system's four giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune (Nature, vol 435, p 459). Slight drifts in Saturn and Jupiter's orbits eventually led to Saturn's orbital termination becoming exactly twice that of Jupiter. This gravitational "resonance" shook up the orbits of tot~y four giant planets and sent nearby comets and asteroids shooting away towards the inner solar system.

Lucky for us? Where Earth formed conclusion in to the sun it would have been too hot in the place of water to condense and be incorporated into our planet. Comets and asteroids formed further out where water ice would have been plentiful. It seems plausible, then, that Earth's first water was delivered by bombardment.

The recently heavy bombardment could have had a more direct impact on life's origins, likewise. Initially, it created extremely harsh conditions on Earth. "Imagine pools of molten distaff at the surface the size of the continent of Africa," says Stephen Mojzsis, a geologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. But formerly they had cooled, the impact craters would have been ideal sites in which to start life, says Charles Cockell of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, through residual heat driving chemical reactions in warm water circulating through the totter (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 361, p 1845).

Alternatively, whether or not life had already begun, the event would have altered the turn of evolution, eliminating all but the most heat-tolerant microbes, says Mojzsis. "This is the recital of life - mass extinction leading to new styles of life," he says. It was a fib that still had a few chapters to run.

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13:18 04 October 2010 by Michael Marshall

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Gallery: Census of Marine Life reveals strange deep-sea sights

The first global picture of life in the oceans is released today, with the completion of the decade-long Census of Marine Life.

But contemptuous opposition its 2700 scientists spending over 9000 days at sea, the Census has merely scratched the surface of the ocean's biodiversity. In all, some 250,000 marine plant and animal species have now been formally described, aloud of the 1 million thought to exist. "There are three to four mystic species for every known," says Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John's, Canada.

The Census has likewise far added 1200 new species to the tally, though that is likable to rise as over 5000 more organisms that were collected hold yet to be studied or named. The new species include manifold that were thought to have disappeared, such as the "Jurassic shrimp", that was believed to have died out 50 million years ago.

The Census was also able to identify those regions that are richest in diversity, what one. include the Gulf of Mexico and the Australian coastline. The Galapagos Islands, meanwhile, turned in a puzzle to have less biodiversity than the chilly South Orkney Islands, in the Southern Ocean impending Antarctica.

However, plant and animal diversity looks insignificant compared to the the deep's micro-organisms, which may number 1 billion. Their diversity is "spectacular", Snelgrove says.

The Census likewise assessed threats to marine life. "Fishing and exploitation is the separate biggest problem," says Ron O'Dor, one of the Census's higher scientists based at The Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington DC. Despite its incompleteness, O'Dor says the Census self-reliance be essential for conservation efforts because it provides a baseline scale for diversity in the oceans.

Gallery: Census of Marine Life reveals extravagant deep-sea sights

16:53 05 October 2010 by Jessica Hamzelou

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Choose wisely which time considering a partner, whether to attend church and how you front after your body. These decisions could have a significant effect adhering your overall life satisfaction. That's according to a study that challenges the speculation that life happiness is largely predetermined by your genes.

The widely accepted "adorn-point" theory of happiness says that an individual's long-denominate happiness tends to be stable because it depends mainly on genetic factors. The essence is based in part on studies that show identical twins to have more similar levels of life satisfaction than non-identical twins, and suggests that though your level of happiness may occasionally be thrown off by major life events, it will always return to a set level in the inside of two years.

To find out whether people really are destined notwithstanding a certain level of happiness, Bruce Headey at the University of Melbourne in Australia and his team questioned mob in Germany about their jobs, lifestyles and social and religious activities. The contemplate was initially completed by 3000 people annually, but that rose to 60,000 for year by the end of the 25-year study period.

They raise that certain changes in lifestyle led to significant long-term changes in reported life requital, rather than causing the temporary deflections in happiness that set-position theory would suggest.

One of the biggest influences on a body's happiness was their partner's level of neuroticism. Those with partners who scored highly on tests for neuroticism were more in a fair way to be unhappy – and to stay unhappy for as long as the relationship lasted.

Altruism and family values also influenced long-bourn happiness. People whose annual survey responses changed to place a higher priority on altruistic behaviours and family goals were rewarded with a prolix-term increase in life satisfaction. Those who prioritised career and momentous success, however, experienced a corresponding lasting decline.

Having strong religious commitments moreover seemed to help in the pursuit of happiness. "People who go with church regularly seem to be happier than people who are not scrupulous," says Headey.

A person's weight turned out to be any other factor for long-term happiness, especially for women. Underweight men scored weakly lower than those with healthy weights, while women reported being significantly smaller happy when they were obese. Being overweight appeared to have not at all effect on men's happiness.

Robert Cummins at Deakin University in Burwood, Australia, notes that changes in bliss reported by Headey's team could be influenced by individuals falling into or recovering from lowness of spirits.

The group suggests its findings may be applied to other populations, having rest similar patterns, as yet unpublished, in the UK and Australia.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1008612107

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