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Study researcher Christopher Miller sampling sediments containing the ancient mattresses. CREDIT: Credit: Prof. Lyn Wadley via LiveScience.com
The oldest known bedding — sleeping mats made of mosquito-repellant evergreens that are about 77,000 years old — has been discovered in a South African cave.
This use of medicinal plants, along with other artifacts at the cave, helps reveal how creative these early peoples were, researchers said.
An international team of archaeologists discovered the stack of ancient beds at Sibudu, a cave in a sandstone cliff in South Africa. They consist of compacted stems and leaves of sedges, rushes and grasses stacked in at least 15 layers within a chunk of sediment 10 feet (3 meters) thick.
"The inhabitants would have collected the sedges and rushes from along the uThongathi River, located directly below the site, and laid the plants on the floor of the shelter," said researcher Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Modern sedges growing on the uThongathi River near Sibudu excavation site.
CREDIT: Prof. Christopher Miller via LiveScience.com
The oldest mats the scientists discovered are approximately 50,000 years older than other known examples of plant bedding. All told, these layers reveal mat-making over a period of about 40,000 years.
"The preservation of material at Sibudu is really exceptional," said researcher Christopher Miller, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. [See Photos of the Ancient Beds]
Photo courtesy: Yahoo!News
Fishermen in Nova Scotia are reporting unusually high numbers of soft lobsters, which means a poorer quality of catch and less money for them.
Ashton Spinney says fishermen like him are landing more lobster this year, but the shells are not as hard.
"It's just something we've never seen before," Spinney, chairman of the LFA 34 management board, told CBC News.
Soft lobsters don't command top price. They are fragile and die quickly, and can't be exported to the lucrative European market.
"It's a concern because it makes it difficult to ship them and you have to take more precautions to keep them alive," Spinney said.
Spinney and others in the industry blame the water temperature. Where Spinney fishes, the water is 8 C, which is "unusually warm" for the season.
Warm water stresses the crustaceans, forcing them to grow quickly and moult more than normal.
The lobster science centre at the Atlantic Veterinary College warned that lobster caught in the area could be of lower quality this year.
The centre has been testing lobsters for shell hardness and other factors since 2004. It found seven of 10 sites had lower numbers of hard-shell lobsters than last year.
"As advised in the past, extra caution should be taken when deciding what product can be stored for later sale," the centre said in a report.
The fall lobster season has been open for a week. Already, Spinney said, the talk at the docks is how to keep thousands of kilograms of lobster alive long enough to get them to processing plants.
A colony of honeybees. Photograph: Haraz Ghanbari/AP via guardian.co.uk
The 27th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster in India that killed 20,000 people will be commemorated by World No Pesticides Use Day. This year, it is also the start of a three-day public trial of pesticide companies by the Permanent People's Tribunal (PPT), an international opinion tribunal that has raised awareness of cases from Eritrea to Guatemala.
It will convene in Bangalore, India, to hear cases brought against the big six pesticide companies; Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont, which control 74% of the global pesticide market. The PTT will invite the companies to defend an allegation of violating human rights. The World Bank estimates that more than 350,000 people each year die of unintentional pesticide poisoning - close to 1,000 people a day. Pesticide Action Network (PAN) International, which is spearheading the PPT, says that up to 41 million people suffer from adverse effects of pesticide exposure.
But it's not just people that have been killed and maimed by these toxic chemicals. Since a new class of systemic pesticide, called neonicotinoids - which move through the plant to the the flowers, attacking insects' nervous system on contact - appeared on the market two decades ago they have been linked to the worrying worldwide deaths of honeybees.
In Germany, Italy, France, and Slovenia, a Bayer-manufactured neonicotinoid, imidacloprid has been suspended as a seed dressing for corn following research showing it contaminated the pollen the bees collect and feed to their young and could, in laboratory conditions, impair honeybees' communication, memory and learning abilities. Beekeepers in Italy and France also blame another neonicotinoid, thiamethoxam, produced by Syngenta, for killing their bees and studies have shown how bees' flight could be adversely affected by the absorption of very low doses.
In the US, where a third of honeybees were wiped out in 2008, scientists have found imidacloprid at higher levels than had ever been reported before in the field. Although the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, is likely caused buy a combination of factors, even the head of the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory believes that exposure to pesticides is a critical factor, along with parasites and poor nutrition.
"We call them the three Ps. If we have all three of them present in bees then they will be in poor health, but even having two of them could be problematic," said Jeff Pettis last year. Also last year a leaked memo from the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed that another Bayer pesticide, highly toxic to bees, had only received conditional registration and the company was instructed to conduct further field studies to assess clothianidin's threat to bee colonies. Seven years later it was still waiting.
In 2008, two-thirds of honeybee colonies along the Rhine, in Germany, died from the dust from a clothianidin seed treatment on corn that had drifted onto neighbouring field. Bayer and Syngenta continue to deny evidence of any link between these toxic products and the collapse of bee colonies.
PAN UK is inviting witnesses to give evidence at the PPT, but until the hearing begins PAN says it can't give out the their names. The defendants will be summoned to offer responses. Whether they turn up is unknown. You can watch the hearings live here.
The PPT, which cannot impose legal penalties, was set up in 1979 to raise awareness of human rights violations because there is no international forum empowered to hear and make judgment on cases of human rights violations brought against global corporations. In 1996, after the session of PPT on industrial hazards and human rights in Bhopal, the Charter on Industrial Hazards and Human Rights was adopted.
My opinion, and that of others, is that there is an overwhelming body of evidence pointing the finger at the sub-lethal impact of pesticides on bees, isn't it time that their creators were held to account?
After all, what is good for the environment is good for us. Without bees and other winged pollinators we face a very bleak future in regard to food security worldwide.
Water on the floor inside Fukushima after a leak in an image released by Tepco. Water has been used to cool reactors at the plant. Photograph: Tepco/AFP/Getty Images via guardian.co.uk
The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has said it is considering dumping water treated for radiation contamination into the ocean as early as March, prompting protests from fishing groups.
Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the utility operating the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which was hit by a powerful tsunami in March that caused the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years, said it was running out of space to store some of the water it had treated at the plant because of an inflow of groundwater.
"We would like to increase the number of tanks to accommodate the water but it will be difficult to do so indefinitely," a Tepco spokesman, Junichi Matsumoto, told reporters.
He said the plant was likely to reach its storage capacity of about 155,000 tonnes in or around March 2012.
Tepco plans to come up with possible ways to handle radioactive waste and present its proposals to the government's nuclear regulatory body for approval.
"The government should not, and must not, approve a plan allowing Tepco to dispose of treated water in the ocean," said Kenji Sumita, an emeritus professor at Osaka University who specialises in nuclear engineering.
"The reality is that semipermanent storage is the only solution available under current technological constraints. Tepco may have to find the storage space and look for a technological breakthrough in the coming years that allows it to condense and greatly reduce the volume of tainted water."
The admission is a setback for the utility, which appeared to be making progress in its clean-up after building a cooling system that no longer required pumping in vast amounts of water. It also built a system, drawing on French, US and Japanese technology, that decontaminates the vast pool of tainted runoff to supply the cooling system with water.
The company said representatives of a nationwide federation of fishing co-operatives had visited its Tokyo headquarters to protest on Thursday.
Tepco said it was still assessing the potential environmental impact of releasing the accumulating water, but that if forced to do so, it would discharge water expected to have the least effect on the environment.
Tens of thousands of tonnes of water contaminated with radiation have accumulated at the plant, 150 miles (240km) north-east of Tokyo, after Tepco, early in the crisis, tried to cool reactors that suffered nuclear fuel meltdowns by pouring in water, much of it from the sea.
"Our priority is also to look for ways to limit the inflow of groundwater into the buildings at the plant," Matsumoto said.
The operator estimates that due to the inflow the amount of water requiring storage is increasing by 200 to 500 tonnes every day.
The utility released more than 10,000 tonnes of water tainted with low levels of radiation in April to free up space for water with much higher levels of radioactivity, drawing criticism from neighbours such as South Korea and China.
Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
Working security at a preserve for big cats might seem like a pretty cushy job, considering how well-equipped the animals are in defending themselves against anyone or anything that may wish to harm them. But the danger to these endangered Bengal tigers was to come from within.
According to officials, a 48-year-old guard charged with protecting a group of endangered Bengal tigers poisoned an adult female to death before removing several of her body parts, including the whiskers which he somehow believed would enhance his sexual prowess.
The disturbing news surfaced in Chhattisgarh, central India, at a time when local authorities are diligently protecting big cats from extinction, mainly due to poachers.
The Malaysian Sun Daily reports that the security guard admitted to authorities that he killed the six-year-old tigress, whose body was found mutilated last week at a sanctuary in Chhattisgarh, central India. After being arrested, the guard told authorities that he removed the cat's claws, teeth, and whiskers, because he believes them to have magical medicinal properties.
The article went to say that a forest officer stated the guard believed the whiskers of the big cat species have medicinal value to enhance male sexual power; and, certain body parts of the feline help their possessor gain mystical powers.
Unfortunately, the guard's cruelty and misguidedness couldn't have come at a worse time for Bengal tigers. The big cats, native to India, are one of the most rapidly declining species on the planet; wildlife experts say there are only around 1,700 of the tigers left in existence -- and the future doesn't look promising. Threats from human activities, such as encroaching development in tiger habitats and poaching, continue to push tigers to the brink of extinction.
And evidently, not even the guards hired to protect them can be trusted.
Photo courtesy: Heather Cowper/CC BY 2.0
The French Alps were once the destination of the rich and famous; the beautiful people; and, those wishing to be seen. That may soon change. Climate change seems to be wreaking havoc with their once glorious glacial scenery.
Himalayan glaciers often get most of the media attention, in regards to the rate at which they are melting as our climate changes, but new research presented to the American Geophysical Union focuses instead on the French Alps.
According to this research, presented by BBC News, over the past 40 years French glaciers have lost 25% of their area. On Mont Blanc for example, in the early 70s glacier covered 375 sq. km. (145 sq.mi.), but today only covers 275 sq. km. (106 sq. mi.).
That rate of decline is an average however, the research shows. In the southern part of the French Alps glacier loss has been nearly complete, and in the Ecrins Massif the rate of retreat has been three times as great as in the Mont Blanc region.
As for the differences in retreat, obvious differences in altitude of the mountains, as well as differences in weather conditions and precipitation between region.
Despite (largely manufactured) controversy about how quickly glaciers are retreating around the world's mountain regions at large, due to less-that-ideal sourcing in the last IPCC report, the US Geological Survey has concluded that the world's glaciers are in retreat and climate change is to blame.
Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first U.S. president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second? William Jefferson Clinton. Some things speak for themselves, don't they?
The first product with a bar code was scanned on June 6, 1974 was a 10-pack of Wrigley's gum. That pack of gum is displayed in the Smithsonian Museum. I guess greatness comes in all shapes, sizes and flavours.
The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma. Now, this could save lives without the fear of contracting any diseases.
Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes. Who would have thought?
CONTACT LENSES: A young woman wears cat's eye contact lens. The American Academy of Ophthalmology recently warned that decorative lenses could damage eyes. Photo courtesy: theepochtimes.com
Contact lenses that are decorative and over-the-counter, such as glow-in-the-dark or striped lenses, could be damaging to the eyes, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Wearing the lenses could lead to infections, inflammation, vision loss, and general pain, the AAO added.
Many of the decorative lenses are advertised as being fashion accessories, toys, or cosmetics, but researchers say all contact lenses need to be fitted by an eye doctor. During Halloween, many young people purchase odd-colored lenses to go with their costume.
"Many people believe that decorative lenses don't require the same," said Thomas Steinemann, MD, professor of ophthalmology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a researcher with the AAO, in a statement.
“In fact, permanent eye damage can occur from using over-the-counter lenses,” Dr. Steinemann added. “Any type of contact lens is a medical device that requires a prescription and proper fitting by an eye care professional.”
Often times, they are advertised as “one size fits all,” or they say there’s “no need to see a specialist," which the AAO says is false advertising. level of care or consideration because they can be purchased over-the-counter or on the Internet.
"Consumers need to know that permanent eye damage can occur from using over-the-counter lenses," Dr. Steinemann said. "Personally, I have seen far too many serious cases in both children and adults from using decorative lenses. My most recent case was a patient who was only 12 years old."
If lenses are not properly fitted, they could scratch the eye, or if they are not cleaned, they could cause infection, and can lead to the swelling of blood vessels in the cornea. The AAO recommends having an eye specialist measure each eye before getting lenses.
Via theepochtimes.com
FOREST: Time spent walking through the woods and forest glades has positive effects on health. Photo courtesy: theepochtimes.com
I could spend all day sitting on the bridge breathing the air, feeling the sun warm my skin, listening to the water; and, luxuriating in the fresh, clean healthy surroundings.
Research in Japan has demonstrated that being in green spaces improves a person’s immune system. In Japan, when possible, people leave the city for a day in the woods for “forest bathing,” “shinrinyoku” in Japanese.
In two studies — one included 260 healthy people and another 12 people — it was deduced that forest bathing, which is walking through woods and forest glades, lowers the pulse and blood pressure. The effects lasted a month. Tests of the subjects’ saliva showed decreased levels of cortisol, meaning they were less stressed.
The test subjects were divided into two groups: those who stayed in an urban environment and those sent to a forested area. Both groups engaged in the same activities and ate the same diet. It is thought that the chemical phytoncides, an oil that defends trees from insects and decomposition, somehow affect the chemicals in the human brain.
In other studies, it was demonstrated that there was an increase in natural killer cells that fight cancer, an increase in white blood cells, and a reduction of glucose levels in diabetics.
Professor Qing Li, president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine said forest bathing “can have preventative effect on cancer generation and development.”
An article in The Epoch Times (Sept. 24, 2010) mentions that research has shown that tranquil scenes calm the brain by changing its blood flow. There are also more connections being made among different parts of the brain.
Japanese scientists have also concluded that the feel of the sun, the scent of trees, and the sound of water can have a calming effect.
Getting in touch with nature is being used as therapy and education elsewhere. Eeva Karjalainen of the Finnish Forest Research Institute, which deals with socially sustainable forest management, supports the findings and says that forest visits promote physical and mental health by reducing stress.
In the U.K. and in Europe, depression is being treated with farm work and gardening. Whether it is tending plants or animals, the act of caring for something alive in the fresh air has had a positive effect on patients with clinical depression.
The U.K. has 42 care farms, Norway has 400, and the Netherlands 600. The U.K. farms are part of a wider school of thought in ecotherapy: Even walking can be a useful therapy. U.K. studies have shown that 71 percent of people who take a “green walk” feel less depressed.
A school in the south of England has its young students spend a portion of their day in the greenery. It has been observed that the children will seek out their own small spaces in addition to experiencing and learning about nature.
In the United States, there have been studies about the positive effects of green spaces on hyperactivity and ADHD. Maybe we all need a little patch of green to call our own.
The research may have been funded by those with a vested interest, but perhaps we really should stop and smell the roses. And the fir trees!
Via theepochtimes.com
Stonehenge, the ancient megalithic monument in the south of England built around 5,000 years ago. (Carl Court/Getty Images). Photo courtesy: theepochtimes.com
Two huge pits discovered near Stonehenge might have been part of a route that people used in sun rituals at the summer solstice before the monument was built.
Measuring 5 m (16.4 ft.) across and at least 1 m (3.3 ft.) deep, the pits are positioned within the Neolithic Cursus pathway, an enigmatic linear enclosure 100 meters wide and 2.5 kilometers long, north of Stonehenge. One pit sits at the eastern end and the other at the western end of the Cursus.
The international archaeological survey team also found a gap in the northern side of the Cursus that may have been the entrance and exit to the ceremony procession following the sun’s path.
“The perimeter of the Cursus may well have defined a route guiding ceremonial processions which took place on the longest day of the year,” says project leader Vince Gaffney at the University of Birmingham in a press release.
Gaffney says that observers of the ceremony may have stood at the Heel Stone located at Stonehenge’s entrance, where the pits would have aligned with the sun as it rose over the eastern pit and set over the western pit.
Tall stones, wooden posts, or fires may have been placed in the pits to mark the sun’s path.
“These exciting finds indicate that even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important, ritual focus and the area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date,” Gaffney says.
Archaeologists have long established that Stonehenge can mark astronomical events, and was linked to the passage of the seasons and in particular the sun.
“If you measure the walking distance between the two pits, the procession would reach exactly half-way at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge,” says Henry Chapman at the University of Birmingham in the release.
“This is more than just a coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance.”
The survey was led by the University of Birmingham’s IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre (VISTA), with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna (LBI ArchPro).
Study researcher Christopher Miller sampling sediments containing the ancient mattresses. CREDIT: Credit: Prof. Lyn Wadley via LiveScience.com
Modern sedges growing on the uThongathi River near Sibudu excavation site.
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