Australopithecus sediba, a short, gangly hominid that lived in South Africa 2 million years ago, had a diet unlike virtually all other known human ancestors - trees and bushes.

A new study indicates that A. sediba ate harder foods than other early hominids like  Paranthropus boisei, dubbed "Nutcracker Man" because of its massive jaws and teeth, which  focused more on grasses and sedges.

I am endlessly amazed by observing, time and again, that even experienced colleagues fall in the simplest statistical traps. Mind you, I do not claim to be any better - sorry, let me rephrase: to have been any better in the early days of my career as an experimentalist. But then, I started to appreciate that to really understand physics results I needed to at least get familiar with a small set of notions in basic Statistics.

Astronomers have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping was observed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years and the giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the monster cluster's powerful gravity, the effect called gravitational lensing.

The puzzle is, the arc shouldn't exist.

While the world actually grows enough food to feed all its inhabitants, it isn't equally distributed. Nearly 500 million people in the developing world remain undernourished and, if projections hold true, that number could to 20% within a decade due to the impacts of climate change on global food production, according to a detailed analysis by The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn&Child Health (PMNCH), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN), 1,000 Days, World Vision International and partners.

Is the world ready for a robot DJ?

Sometimes you have to be bold.  People laughed at Microsoft when they introduced Microsoft Bob too; people didn't know they needed a graphical image of their office showing a fax machine to send a fax - until it was available.  

Janssen-Cilag International NV (Janssen) announced today that the Committee for Medical Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has granted a positive opinion recommending approval of subcutaneous (under the skin) administration of VELCADE(R) (bortezomib). VELCADE(R) is indicated for the treatment of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer. Subcutaneous bortezomib has fewer side effects and offers greater convenience for patients, with similar efficacy compared to intravenous bortezomib. VELCADE(R) plays a central role in effectively managing multiple myeloma across different patient types and lines of therapy.[1,2] 

A small-scale study found diets that reduce the surge in blood sugar after a meal - low-glycemic index or very-low carbohydrate - are better than a low-fat diet for those trying to achieve lasting weight loss. The study also found that the low-glycemic index diet had similar metabolic benefits to the very low-carb diet without negative effects of stress and inflammation as seen by participants consuming the very low-carb diet.

A new toilet system can turn human waste into electricity and fertilizers and even reduce the amount of water needed for flushing by up to 90 percent

The inventors in Singapore call it the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet and it has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes. Using vacuum suction technology, like you find in airplane lavatories, flushing liquids requires only 0.2 liters of water while flushing solids require just one liter. The existing conventional commonly used in Singapore need 4 to 6 liters of water per flush so a single public toilet, that may be flushed 100 times a day, could save about 160,000 liters of water in a year – enough to fill a small pool.

While browsing facebook, I ran across a friend's posting of a link to a diagnostic test for autism and Asperger's that I hadn't run across before,The Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale-Revised (RAADS-R). According to the abstract,

Even though arsenic is toxic for many organs in the human body, it is used in therapeutic medicine and the treatment of some forms of cancer, and is an active component of drugs against parasitic diseases.