In 2008, a fossil tooth and finger bone were found in a cave in Siberia. After analysis it turned out to belong to a new species of human, now known as the Denisovans. In 2010, a draft of the Neanderthal genome was released, providing indications for potential interbreeding with our ancestors. In the same year, analysis of the Denisovan genome also revealed indications for potential interbreeding.

Now, a new study, published in Science, states that these interbreeding events could have boosted the human immune system.

Harry Lonsdale called me out of the blue last year,saying that he would be passing through Santa Cruz and wanted to discuss an idea he had. Well sure, I said, so we picked a day for him to visit. I had never heard of Harry, but when he showed up, right on time, we immediately hit it off. Harry turned out to be one of those rare people who are full of energy and ideas, generous and willing to share, someone who gets things done. He would have been wonderful in politics, and in fact ran twice as a Democrat for Oregon's senate seat, losing close races to Mark Hatfield. (He wrote a book about his experience: Running: Politics, Power and the Press, available from Amazon.)

Journalism as an occupation with ethical standards was a 20th century invention.  For a brief, shining moment in time, journalists were interested in truth and newspapers flourished.  Truth is subjective, of course, and so are editors who set the tone of newspapers and during the time when the press had power across all society, editors were on the left and the right.   Newspapers reached everyone, multiple times each day.

Today, the 'fourth estate', as Edmund Burke termed it in the 18th century, still has considerable power - it makes presidents and brings down companies - but it is less trusted than it was two generations ago.

Most baseball general managers live in obscurity most of their careers.  Its their first hire, the manager, that usually gets the red hot spotlight, after every win and loss, second-guessed by reporters with recorders and then later by fans.  The GM puts the players on the field and lets the manager and his coaches take it from there. 

If you work in experimental high-energy physics you soon acquire a particular sensitivity to the economical display of relevant information. Producing figures that convey the most meaning with the minimum effort is sort of an art, and it is a necessary consequence that HEP experimentalists -the smart ones- end up converging on the definition of graphs which are better than all others in this respect.

You ever wondered why it is that we share only 50% of our genes with a sibling but 98% with chimpanzees?

Humans are a freak of nature. We are in between a so called ‘tournament species’ and a ‘pair-bonding species’. In other words: naturally very aggressive primates constantly stressed in the pressure grip of macro evolution. These and many other important issues are touched on in Robert Sapolsky's lecture on Behavioral Biology, Biology 150.

In microfluidic devices, small separated droplets flow in a stream of carrier liquid. Occasionally, selected droplets have to be merged to carry out a chemical reaction, which can be greatly facilitated with the use of electric field through a process of electrocoalescence.

Researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences have recently found what governs the process and how to maximize the efficiency of merging.

Why would Mohamed Atta graciously let a car rental agent know the check oil light was on in the car he returned and then help crash a plane full of people and fuel into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, an act of simple religious hatred?

It's a puzzle of psychology.  The ability to deal kindly with people on an individual level and then demonize them when they are in a group has been a longstanding mystery.   Group behavior, being social, obviously had benefits for early man; trying to live without a group was practically a death sentence even when an 'individual' victory in ways large and small was absolutely necessary for survival.  

A fossil discovered in northeast China has pushed back mammal evolution 35 million years and provides new information about the earliest ancestors of most of today's mammal species—the placental mammals. 

A team of scientists led by Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologist Zhe-Xi Luo describes in Nature Juramaia sinensis, a small shrew-like mammal that lived in China 160 million years ago during the Jurassic period. Juramaia is the earliest known fossil of eutherians, the group that evolved to include all placental mammals, which provide nourishment to unborn young via a placenta.

Successful aging and positive quality of life indicators correlate with sexual satisfaction in older women, according to a report in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society which also shows that self-rated 'successful' aging, quality of life and sexual satisfaction appear to be stable even in the face of declines in physical health of women between the ages of 60 and 89.

The study used 1,235 women enrolled at the San Diego site of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, an ongoing program funded by the National Institutes of Health which has addressed causes of death, disability and quality of life in more than 160,000 generally healthy, post-menopausal women since 1993.