A cave in South Africa contains a bed made of bundles of sedge and wild quince leaves. It was found by archaeologist Lyn Wadley of Wits University while excavating a site at Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal province. Wadley found the bed, about the size of a modern twin bed, buried over nine feet deep in sediments inside a rock shelter on a cliff face on the banks of the Thongathi river, 20 north of Durban. Wadley has been working there since 1998. The bed was covered with a layer of aromatic leaves from a plant called the river wild quince. No other tree leaves were found on the bedding, so the leaves were not there as a result of random leaf fall, the report said.

At various times in Earth history, single-celled organisms threw their lot in with each other to become larger and multicellular, resulting, for instance, in the riotous diversity of animals. However, fossil evidence of these major evolutionary transitions is extremely rare.

At Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, Ken Regan tackles what the statistical nuance of 'evidence' means in the latest Higgs disclosure, delving into statistics and social convention in a hard science (actually, he puts "hard science" in quotes, though I am not sure why - perhaps he thinks 'hard' is the colloquial version, like 'difficult' so he doesn't want to annoy social fields) such as particle physics and whether the assumptions behind the confidence intervals can be violated on both sides: by humans owing to unexpected selection bias, and by Nature possibly acting like a cheating prover in an interactive protocol. 

America is the only civilized country that allows late-term abortion on demand yet America is regarded as more hung up on abortion than European countries.  What gives?  Outside the recurring re-election campaigns of people like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, who insist if they do not get 80% of the votes in Democrat bastion San Francisco women will be 'having abortions in back alleys', abortion is not really an issue.

At some point we need to either ban cigarettes or call off the fundamentalist ranting about smokers.  Yes, smoking is bad for you, everyone knows that by now, but having the state of California increase taxes on cigarette smokers - making the state government even more reliant on them - while they use some of that money for anti-smoking campaigns, which means the government now wants to kill the revenue source it is making itself more reliant on, is the kind of thing only...well... progressive government would do.

Eye evolution is always interesting stuff, as I last discussed regarding Dr. Ivan Schwab's "Evolution's Witness".  

A new finding suggests that the compound eyes evolved right at the origin of this branch of the evolutionary tree, long before the sorts of hard exoskeletons we now consider typical of arthropods.

When rational people give up, all that is left are zealots - that means the conduct of some nations at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) could be a sign reasonable discussion of controlling emissions are out the window.

It has been hoped for years that a meaningful successor to the Kyoto agreement could be in reach soon but it's a little silly to have the world's top CO2 emitter exempt from CO2 emissions cutbacks - not to mention India, Brazil and Mexico, who are also exempt and don't want that to change, since they are much poorer than China and China remains exempt.

Let's hope bizarre stories regarding Sweden's nationalized health care system are the exception - worried Americans have enough on their minds without wondering if a government life/death panel will suddenly decide not having legs is not good enough reason to have a wheelchair.

A man from Nyköping in eastern Sweden has been denied a power wheelchair despite having had both of his legs amputated after a long struggle with diabetes. The health authority remained "uncertain if the impairment was permanent".

Modern humans first arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa but some new research suggests humankind left Africa traveling through the Arabian Peninsula instead of hugging its coasts, as long thought.

Over 100 newly discovered sites in the Sultanate of Oman might confirm that modern humans left Africa through Arabia long before genetic evidence suggests - the sites are located far inland. in the Dhofar Mountains of southern Oman, away from the coasts.