Archaeologists from the UK working in the Channel Island of Jersey have found the remains of a 14,000 year old hunter-gatherer settlement offering great views over landscapes now drowned by the English Channel. (more…)
Berkeley Lab researchers help scientists determine the radiation risk of exploring an underwater aircraft carrier.
About 42 miles southwest of San Francisco and 2,600 feet underwater sits the U.S.S. Independence, a bombed-out relic from World War II. The aircraft carrier was a target ship in atomic weapon tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands after the war. Then, in 1951, it was loaded up with 55-gallon drums of low-level radioactive waste and scuttled just south of the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge off the California coast. (more…)
Should climate change trigger the upsurge in heat and rainfall that scientists predict, people may face a threat just as perilous and volatile as extreme weather — each other.
Researchers from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley report in the journal Science that even slight spikes in temperature and precipitation have greatly increased the risk of personal violence and social upheaval throughout human history. Projected onto an Earth that is expected to warm by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, the authors suggest that more human conflict is a likely outcome of climate change. (more…)
*New analytical method approaches the unstudied 99% of the human genome*
WASHINGTON, D.C., – 02 Nov 2011: Evolutionary history shows that human populations likely originated in Africa, and the Genographic Project, the most extensive survey of human population genetic data to date, suggests where they went next. A study by the Project finds that modern humans migrated out of Africa via a southern route through Arabia, rather than a northern route by way of Egypt. These findings will be highlighted today at a conference at the National Geographic Society.
National Geographic and IBM’s Genographic Project scientific consortium have developed a new analytical method that traces the relationship between genetic sequences from patterns of recombination – the process by which molecules of DNA are broken up and recombine to form new pairs. Ninety-nine percent of the human genome goes through this shuffling process as DNA is being transmitted from one generation to the next. These genomic regions have been largely unexplored to understand the history of human migration. (more…)
As the world’s leading authority on beads manufactured from shells by California’s Chumash Indians, UCLA archaeologist Jeanne Arnold was stumped by a series of anomalous artifacts excavated at former settlements on the Channel Islands.
Pierced with more than one hole, often at unconventional angles or too close to the edges, the oddly configured multi-hole beads differ considerably from the smooth, round, precisely drilled beauties that served as currency among the Chumash prior to the arrival of Europeans in Southern California. (more…)
