CALI, Colombia, February 23 /PRNewswire/ --

The commercials featuring the Geico caveman made it seem as if a Neandertal (also neanderthal) could readily interact within a Homo sapiens society.... we may soon find out if that is true.

Recently, scientists at the Max Plank Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany announced that they had completed the sequencing of the Neandertal genome.

People differ from one another in millions of ways. For starters, there is eye color, hair color, body build, and tendencies toward certain diseases and conditions. We know that genes determine these differences. Now, we also are learning that genes affect how our bodies respond to disease. Through the study of genetic links between patients and chronic diseases, Geisinger Health System researchers are hoping to gain a better understanding of how to prevent, diagnose and treat these diseases. 

People voluntarily pick what information they store in short-term memory. Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers can see just what information people are holding in memory based only on patterns of activity in the brain.

Psychologists from the University of Oregon and the University of California, San Diego, reported their findings in the February issue of Psychological Science. By analyzing blood-flow activity, they were able to identify the specific color or orientation of an object that was intentionally stored by the observer.

Scientists are harnessing the cosmos as a scientific “instrument” in their quest to determine the makeup of the universe.   Evalyn Gates calls from the University of Chicago calls it “Einstein’s telescope” but she actually means the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which acts as a sort of natural telescope.

In general relativity, mass can warp space and create gravitational fields that bend light - confirmed in  by Arthur Eddington during a solar eclipse, when he saw that the light from stars that passed close to the sun was slightly bent, making them appear out of position.

During the next decade, some cosmologists say a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal evidence for the cosmic inflation hypothesis, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago - it also predicts the existence of an infinite number of universes.   The hypothesis was first proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979 but cosmologists currently have no way of testing this prediction.

Paleontologists can still hear the echo of the death knell that drove the dinosaurs and many other organisms to extinction following an asteroid collision at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago.

"The evolutionary legacy of the end-Cretaceous extinction is very much with us. In fact, it can be seen in virtually every marine community, every lagoon, every continental shelf in the world," said University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski. It is, he said, "sort of an echo of the big bang for evolutionary biology."

We hear a lot about 'going green' these days and it seems even the Universe can't endure one more moment of Al Gore putting his hands together, as if in prayer, and guilting us into investing in carbon trading companies, one of which he happens to own stock in.

As a peace offering, the cosmos is offering comet Lulin, which is making an appearance in the nighttime sky this month - and it's green.  Literally. Don Yeomans of JPL, manager for NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, answers a few questions about this odd comet.

Sky chart showing comet Lulin on Feb. 24, 2009. Image credit: NASA/JPL

A new study says that kids who are allowed to watch R-rated movies are much more likely to believe it's easy to get a cigarette than those who aren't allowed to watch such films. 

The researchers found that parental permission to watch R-rated movies was one of the strongest predictors of the perception that cigarettes are available, about as strong as having friends that smoked. If allowed to watch R-rated films, nonsmokers were almost twice as likely, and smokers were almost three times as likely to say it would be easy for them to get cigarettes. 

Scientists have identified a small family of lab-made proteins that neutralize a broad range of influenza A viruses, including the H5N1 avian virus, the 1918 pandemic influenza virus and seasonal H1N1 flu viruses.

These human monoclonal antibodies, identical infection-fighting proteins derived from the same cell lineage, also were found to protect mice from illness caused by H5N1 and other influenza A viruses. Because large quantities of monoclonal antibodies can be made relatively quickly, after more testing, these influenza-specific monoclonal antibodies potentially could be used in combination with antiviral drugs to prevent or treat the flu during an influenza outbreak or pandemic.