The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Population geneticist Montgomery Slatkin, graduate student Fernando Racimo and post-doctoral student Flora Jay were part of an international team of anthropologists and geneticists who generated a high-quality sequence of the Neanderthal genome and compared it with the genomes of modern humans and a recently recognized group of early humans called Denisovans.

Arc discharges are common in welding and lightning storms but what about about in altered gravity conditions?

How often does that really come up? Not often, unless we ever send manned missions into space again, and it may be relevant in the design of ion thrusters used for spacecraft propulsion so let's do some science.

Social authoritarian cultures like San Francisco want to ban things and limit choice but when it comes to healthier kids, it doesn't require creating higher prices, more taxes or political fundamentalism regarding Happy Meals, it can just mean a few less french fries. That saves McDonald's a little money and kids won't notice the difference.

Cornell marketing professor Dr. Brian Wansink and Dr. Andrew Hanks, also of Cornell, analyzed transaction data from 30 representative McDonald's restaurants and found that calories are unimportant to kids when eating. They're obviously important when it comes to obesity so the solution seems obvious.

As we age, our brains undergo a major reorganization, a 'pruning' which streamlines the connections in the brain - except the long-distance ones that are crucial for integrating information. 

Studying people up to the age of 40, authors of a paper
in Cerebral Cortex suspect this newly-discovered selective process might explain why brain function does not deteriorate – and indeed improves –during this pruning of the network. Interestingly, they also found that these changes occurred earlier in females than in males. 

A paper in the journal Child Development says that children as young as 3 understand multi-digit numbers more than previously believed and may even be ready for direct math instruction when they enter school.

This will have implications for the debate over education policy, where the chronic lament is that children are not being taught to the test enough and therefore only score in the middle on international standardized tests.

"Contrary to the view that young children do not understand place value and multi-digit numbers, we found that they actually know quite a lot about it," said co-author Kelly Mix, 
Michigan State University psychologist. "They are more ready than we think when they enter kindergarten."

Vodka can make people do strange things - especially if they also have a phone. But it can also do cool things, like demonstrating how to message people using chemical signals when conventional wireless would fail.

Researchers in the UK have successfully text messaged 'O Canada' using evaporated vodka. 

The chemical signal, using the alcohol found in vodka in this case, was sent four metres across the lab with the aid of a tabletop fan. It was then demodulated by a receiver which measured the rate of change in concentration of the alcohol molecules, picking up whether the concentration was increasing or decreasing.