From The Scotsman:
New research shows people can follow trails across countryside like dogs, using the sense of smell alone. The study, published in Nature magazine, suggests humans are just out of practice at smelling, after people who repeatedly tracked smells across fields became faster and more accurate.
(With one story I got to use a great headline and link to The Scotsman. It pretty much made my morning.)
Dear readers,
Once again I totally forgot about comments waiting for moderation. There were a dozen or more waiting in the queue when I finally got to it just now. If your comment was one of those, I apologize.
Sincerely,
Captain Oblivious
A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals
No, seriously. That’s the headline. I’m not making it up. It’s an article on soy from WorldNetDaily. Just had to share.
I don’t usually go on about my work, but the company was recently featured on San Diego’s local 10News. The piece is actually pretty representative, covering both the upcoming-events side of things as well as the demand side of it. There’s a YouTube video of the segment at the official blog.
In case you wondered where I’ve been hiding (including on my birthday), we’re just finishing up an awesome weekend visiting Deb and Kerrigan in Petaluma. It’s the Land of Things Ben Likes, including sheep, tractors, a big biodiesel truck, a little hybrid-electric car, and playgrounds up the wazoo. He even got to ride Deb’s horse Chance, as did K and I. Fun all around! Thanks, D and K!
From the New York Times:
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.
The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome. It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.