Browsing, as I do from time to time, recent German news in thelocal.de, I came across
AUCKLAND, NZ – Twelve hours after liftoff from San Francisco airport, fifteen hours after my roommate dropped me off at the international terminal, I was hauling my luggage toward my connecting gate when the strap of my laptop bag abruptly tore off. Fortunately, somewhere in the back of my sleepy brain, I remembered that I’d packed a backup for the cheaply made bag, which hadn’t looked quite up to the task I’d asked of it. I re-packed books and electronics in a canvas tote, and ditched the ruined mess of plasticy fabric at the next trashcan.
Miss Wombles,
1. Person first language. Learn about it. This is the first clue that indicates to me that you are not equipped to have this type of discussion. --part of a new comment on a two-year-old post
The post, in itself, and the remainder of the person's comment aren't what's important here. Plenty of folks have tackled this issue of person-first language. Lydia of Autistic Hoya has done so several times. Stuart Duncan has covered it. I'm pretty sure there are few long-term bloggers in autism-land who haven't handled this issue.
I started a new job this spring. After a long search in a tough market, I landed my dream job as a senior professor and administrator at a top research university – a university that did
not retain a headhunter for its search.
Talks at other schools had progressed to first or second interviews before fizzling, and they fizzled due to the ineptitude of the universities’ search firms. The headhunters deserve a whipping, and this column administers ten lashes.
Parents of children with neurological conditions and disorders and mental health issues are often faced with the frightening and difficult decision of whether to medicate for specific issues and behaviors. Parents are already stressed, worried, and expecting the worst when they walk into a psychiatrist's office, and it doesn't help when they've already been through the gamut of pediatricians, psychologists and other health professionals who have an opinion on the diagnosis of mental health issues in children and the role medication should play in the treatment.
Around 100,000 years ago, human evolution was in a rut, modern human ancestors consisted of 5-10,000 individuals living in Africa.
Yet modern humans somehow emerged from this population bottleneck, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, like Neanderthals. What caused this bottleneck in the first place? Answers range from gene mutations to cultural developments like language to climate-altering events, like a massive volcanic eruption.
Maybe there is another possible factor: infectious disease.
The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That's already about 80% of the total bounty of 2011!
This is not a story of Lost Tribes, but of lost history--the discovery of "Jewish genes" in Hispano Christian populations of the American Southwest. Jon Entine, author of Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chose People, reports.
“Let us remember all of our Jewish brothers and sisters, who through their faithfulness to One God, inspired all Christians.”
Researchers announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new early anthropoid fossil.
The 37-million-year-old Afrasia djijidae resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age in the Sahara Desert of Libya. That close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius indicates that early anthropoids colonized Africa only shortly before the time when these animals lived. The colonization of Africa by early anthropoids was a pivotal step in primate and human evolution, because it set the stage for the later evolution of more advanced apes and humans there.
There was a time when giant insects ruled the skies and it corresponded to high oxygen levels.
After the evolution of birds, about 150 million years ago, insects got smaller - despite rising oxygen levels. What gives?
Insects reached their biggest sizes about 300 million years ago during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods. This was the reign of the predatory griffinflies, giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches - creepy. The leading theory attributed their large size to high oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere (over 30 percent, compared to 21 percent today), which allowed giant insects to get enough oxygen through the tiny breathing tubes that insects use instead of lungs.
