The remains of newborn twin girls have been found in the archaeological site of Sant Miquel d'Olèrdola in Catalonia and it is expected that they belong to two girls between 38 and 40 weeks of gestation, who were buried at the same time in the same grave with their legs entwined.
The remains date between the middle of the 4th century B.C. to the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. and are the first bone remains of twins to be recorded in the Iberian peninsula.
If you think about it rationally, sex may be fun but it's too much work and, from a reproduction standpoint, the payoff is uncertain. Scientists have speculated for a long time on why all living things don't simply make like amoebas and split.
Scientists believe that sexual reproduction offers two big advantages: It can sweep bad mutations out of the gene pool more quickly. Also, by shuffling parents' genetic material each generation, it increases the likelihood that new genetic combinations will arise that help organisms adapt to their environment.
I have set out to write about "Naturality" for this column three times since the beginning of 2012 and each time I have abandoned the article. It's a complex topic that easily gets away from me. I have been measuring Naturality in search engine results for several years now. Some years ago I devised a simple formula to help me explain Naturality to people:
1 = Ny + Ty + Oy
The fair trade movement is in its seventh decade but has an internal problem. Fair trade, as a concept, sought originally to make sure small people got a fair deal - a Mennonite visiting Puerto Rico saw the poverty levels of people there and decided to help them make more money, rather than advocating to give them government handouts (I know, I know, zany religious types).
Conservatives give more money to charity,
studies show. This makes some sense; liberals believe in sharing wealth already and advocate policies reflecting that while conservatives advocate smaller government and greater individual initiative.
But why do people in those political groups give to one cause over another? According to a new analysis in the
International Journal of Research in Marketing: Special Issue on Consumer Identities, the values of their political affiliation are more important than the charity itself.
The word 'lunacy' is derived from the longheld belief that people act a little crazier during a full moon. We know the moon - Luna - effects us, its gravitational pull creates ocean tides and many ancient cultures thought it could also affect our health or state of mind.
While there is no link between the moon and human lunacy, spacecraft and computer simulations reveal that the moon does indeed have the cosmic kind; a far-reaching, invisible influence on the solar wind.
When I was small, the word “desert” conjured images of towering Saharan dunes: windswept sand punctuated by rare oases, the only sign of life an occasional animal track quickly buried by the next sandstorm. Then, when I was 13, my parents took me to the Southwest. We visited Saguaro, Joshua Tree, and other parts of the Mojave Desert, chased tarantulas, and watched cactus wrens build nests.
Oppressed people under attack in the War Against Smokers may have a new defender - science.
A specific antioxidant supplement containing N-Acetylcysteine, or NAC may be an effective therapy for some features of autism, according to a pilot trial from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital that involved 31 children with the disorder.
You've read a lot about
'invisibility' over the last few years. Mathematicians and scientists have been working on various devices that enable invisibility cloaks which shield small objects from detection by microwaves or sound waves.
