If you want to really get back to nature, it still involves meat.  A team of researchers has discovered evidence that human ancestors were using stone tools and consuming the meat and marrow of large mammals 1 million years earlier than previously documented.

While working in the Afar region of Ethiopia, the Dikika Research Project (DRP) found bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use - cut marks made while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow. The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago and provide the first evidence that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools and consumed meat. 

One solution to the heart risk caused by obesity, although an obtuse one, is to add things to the junk food industry instead of taking away some junk food.

Researchers at Imperial College London writing in the American Journal of Cardiology suggest fast food vendors provide statin drugs free of charge.  Statins reduce the amount of unhealthy LDL cholesterol in the blood, and trial data has shown them to be highly effective at lowering a person's heart attack risk.

In the study, Dr. Darrel Francis and colleagues calculate that the reduction in cardiovascular risk offered by a statin is enough to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

The odd shape of NGC 4696, the largest galaxy in the Centaurus Cluster (galaxy cluster Abell 3526), leads to fundamental science questions.  First, why is it such a strange shape? And what are the odd, capillary-like filaments that stretch out of it? What is the role of a large black hole in explaining its odd appearance?

RESTON, Virginia, August 11, 2010 -- comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a report on Twitter.com growth worldwide. The study found that in June, nearly 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com, an increase of 109 percent from the previous year, as the social networking site achieved strong gains across all global regions. Indonesia reported the highest penetration, with 20.8 percent of Internet users in the country visiting Twitter.com that month, followed by Brazil and Venezuela, with Venezuela's growth fueled in large part by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's decision to join Twitter in late April. 

Some people can sleep through a Who concert while others wake up if a mouse in the yard moves.   A new report in Current Biology says the difference is that sound sleepers show a distinct pattern of spontaneous brain rhythms.

During sleep, brain waves become slow and organized and the thalamus, a way station for all types of sensory information except smell, spontaneously engages with the cortex. This interaction can produce transient fluctuations of the brain's electric field visible on the EEG as rhythmic spindles - brief bursts of faster-frequency waves. 

Fotopedia Heritage, in cooperation with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, has brought together 20,000 photos, illustrating all World Heritage Sites and 3,000 points of interests in a free application for the iPhone and iPad. 

 Fotopedia Heritage is part of Fotopedia, the first collaborative photo encyclopedia. A team led by Jean-Marie Hullot built the application while the Fotopedia community added and curated the photos thus ensuring high relevance and quality.