Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Skull in Underwater Cave May Be Earliest Trace of First Americans

After trekking through the jungle, carrying multiple scuba cylinders, and traveling thousands of feet inside the Aktun-Hu cave system, PET/GUE Member Alex Alvarez discovered a human skull. Photo by Daniel Riordan-Araujo
Explorers have discovered what might be the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas.

Alex Alvarez, Franco Attolini, and Alberto (Beto) Nava are members of PET (Projecto Espeleológico de Tulum), an organization that specializes in the exploration and survey of underwater caves on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

Alex, Franco and Beto have surveyed tens of thousands of feet of mazelike cave passages in the state of Quintana Roo. The team's relatively recent explorations of a large pit named Hoyo Negro (Black Hole, in Spanish), deep within a flooded cave, resulted in their breathtaking and once-in-a-lifetime discovery of the remains of an Ice Age mastodon and a human skull at the very bottom of the black abyss.

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Via: National Geographic

Friday, February 18, 2011

9 Ways to Hack your Brain to Think Faster

Lets face it, the brain is basically a biological computer. It needs food, it needs oxygen, it needs exercise. You can take steps to improve the power of your brain, in effect it’s about improving, modifying, hacking the brain. OK, we may not get to the level of Einstein, but no reason why you can’t be getting the best out of what you have got.

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Via Geek With Laptop

British cave yields ice-age skull cups

One of the human skull-cups made by ice age Britons 14,700 years ago unearthed from Gough's Cave. The process required great skill and knowledge of anatomy.
Ice age Britons drank from human skulls and may even have eaten flesh and bone marrow, but they were far from barbarians.

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Via: PhysOrg.com

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Boy Without a Cerebellum Baffles Doctor

Chase was also born prematurely, and he was legally blind. When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum -- the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.

"That's when the doctor called and didn't know what to say to us," Britton said in a telephone interview. "No one had ever seen it before. And then we'd go to the neurologists and they'd say, 'That's impossible.' 'He has the MRI of a vegetable,' one of the doctors said to us."

Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.

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Via: AOL News

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Experts determine age of book 'nobody can read'

The Voynich manuscript's unintelligible writings and strange illustrations have defied every attempt at understanding their meaning.
While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, one of the most mysterious writings ever found – penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands – a research team at the UA solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?

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Via: PhysOrg

Poor diets may lower children's IQ

Nursery child eating lunch. Photograph: Graham Turner
Diets high in fat, sugar and processed foods are lowering children's IQ, a new study suggests. The report says that eating habits among three year olds shapes brain performance as they get older.

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Via: guardian.co.uk