Helpful ReviewsLaughing Skull Loungepacfollyrated

Attending their Wednesday night open mic night almost didn't happen for us since parking in the area is a bit cumbersome to find and our cards wouldn't work at the lot across the street but we thankfully finally found a metered street parking spot. You have to go through The Vortex restaurant to get into the comedy club through the same door used to access their shared restrooms in the back left of the restaurant. If you're a student be sure to ask for the student discount since you can get in for $5 instead of $10 and I wouldn't order tickets online since there is a $3 per ticket service fee for the convenience of securing your seat online.Although all the chairs at the front of the intimate red-hued venue were taken when we arrived there is overflow bench seating at the back that is pretty comfortable and still gives you a good view of the stage. The quick but sizable open mic acts were divided into two sets although there was no intermission between the two and the first set was definitely stronger than the last one. There was a really good selection of several comedians here, some skilled, some brand new, and most were pretty funny although all of them were at least somewhat entertaining. Overall I cannot think of very many better ways to entertain yourself for this price during a night out for a unique and largely comedic experience.

Clubs have changed since I was 21 ,but hey I've changed since I was 21. It's nice to be able to go out and not only enjoy the music ,but enjoy the people too. That's what you'll get when you come to Ellery's and the only thing you have to worry about is having a good time. This club is for a more mature crowd or for those old souls at heart. The owners Mr. Ellery and his son Shayne make you feel like more than a customer ,but like family. The bartenders take the time to get to know your name and greet you when you come inside. They have great drink specials throughout the night and the food is amazing. Make sure you try the catfish nuggets and the wings. They offer live music on Wednesday, stepping on Thursdays and nothing ,but fun on Friday and Saturday. This just could be your new hangout spot.

Keep in mind there is a $5 cover to go to the top! I went to Skylounge with some friends on a Friday night. There was a lot of space at this bar so it wasnt a shoulder to shoulder kind of place which is always nice! There is also both indoor and outdoor seating here. We ordered whiskey sours and I believe they cost $9 each! It was fairly strong but enjoyable nonetheless! in my opinion, this isnt a bar I would go to frequently and the view is only average; however, if I had people coming in town to visit or explore the city, I would definitely consider bringing them here!

Not sure what I can say that will enhance the legendary status of this place. It's where my husband and I first connected. We walked here from our rental houses in Candler Park while in grad school in the mid 90s. Look for the mermaid statue that he donated to EAYC when his Emory crew moved out. We have experienced so many awesome memories here - from Halloween parties to impromptu appearances by the Seed and Feed Marching Abominables. We love the two seat-er in the window.

Sky lounge is a rooftop bar at the Glenn hotel in downtown Atlanta. The view is absolutely amazing! It is probably the best view of the city. You can see all of downtown and midtown, Piedmont park, the Ferris wheel, the CNN center, and the new Georgia dome being built. The drinks are good and the price is what you expect for such an awesome view. It is $5 to go up to the rooftop unless you're a guest at the hotel. They have live bands on the weekend as well.

They even serve hookah's during the weekends...I don't usually smoke but was tempted to try it. It was actually very smooth. Had a sweet flavor to it....I was impressed with the overall service and ambiance.

Best place on Euclid to grab a beer! The staff is top notch, the atmosphere is perfect Little 5. They open the front window is great weather....and FYI...Christmas time is full of sing-a-longs!!

I am glad that I have found out about this place. There are other dance clubs around but I heard and I have experienced that this place is one of the best, this place is the bomb.

Best spot on the south side for the 30 and over crowd. .. Its just so small, the dance floor is like standing in a packed elevator. But I always have a good time .

Great live music venue, with an eclectic crowd. Live band karoake is a must do -- highly entertaining. The people watching itself is worth the price of admission.

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Club Evolution in Atlanta, Georgia with Reviews - YP.com

America has lost one of the worlds most valuable commodities.

The following is from our June 19 Trumpet Brief e-mail. These daily e-mails contain personal messages from the Trumpet staff. Click here to join the nearly 20,000 members of our mailing list, so you dont miss another message!

What is one of the hardest things to win back once it is lost? It takes only moments to lose, but you can spend a lifetime trying to regain itand not succeed.

Trust.

America is suffering a trust crisis.

Do you trust those around you? Do you trust the government, the police? Do you trust the financial system? How about scientists, religious authorities, academia?

If you are like most Americans, the answer is noor at least not nearly as much as you used to.

And that is disturbing because trust is what makes the world go round. It is one of the most important factors that historically differentiated Western society from the developing world.

For the past 17 years, Richard Edelman has surveyed people around the world to gauge trust in various institutions. As 2017 begins, his marketing and public relations firm is warning that trust is in crisis in many countries.

You see it across all the four institutions, especial drops in media and government, in ngos and businesses teetering on the edge, he says. Today, were talking about a trust crisis that is causing a systemic meltdown. Only 15 percent of our respondents actually said they trust the system (emphasis added throughout).

Whether it is big media, government, science, the medical industry, religion, academia, industry, the economy, people are rapidly losing trust.

Consider the United States presidency.

What does it mean for the nation when somewhere around half the people in the nation do not trust what comes out of the presidents mouth? When half the nation believes he lies continually, hates women, is colluding with the Russians to subvert democracy? When they believe he is a racist who wants to ban all Muslims from coming to America, and that he is using his office to greedily enrich himself?

What are the effects on the public of being repeatedly told that society is inherently racist, that all white people are racist even if only unconsciously so, that it is in Americas dna, that the police are racist because black people are arrested at higher rates than white people? What is the effect of being told the justice system is racist because African-Americans and Mexicans make up a disproportionately high proportion of the inmate population, that teachers are racist because children of certain minorities get suspended at higher rates than white children and Asians, that America is not the land of opportunity but of suppression and oppressionas Americas last president hallmarked his administration?

A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article from the Guardian titled Why We Cant Trust Academic Journals to Tell the Scientific Truth. It was highlighting a disturbing trend that has some scientists in dithers: lack of trust in scientific findings. Seventy-two percent of scientists know of others who have fabricated results to prove their thesis. Fifteen percent know of scientists who have made up whole data sets. Fifty percent of life-science research cannot be replicated. Fifty-one percent of economics papers cant be replicated. As other journalists have highlighted, up to 40 percent of medical studies published in gold standard peer review journals cannot be replicated. Do cell phones cause cancer? Yes. Then no. Does eating eggs for breakfast increase your risk of heart attack? Or decrease it? Does drinking milk make people obese? Or do certain fats actually help you lose weight? Do women find men with symmetrical features to be better lovers? Do women really think they smell better?

The findings of these studies resonate with the gut feeling of many in contemporary academiathat a lot of published research findings may be false, wrote the Guardian. Just like any other information source, academic journals may contain fake news.

Not even science can be trusted?

Every year, Oxford Dictionaries selects a word or expression that epitomizes the social discourse of the year. 2016s choice?

Post-truth. It means: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Thats rather fittingrather disturbing and rather alarming.

We increasingly live in a post-truth world. And the ramifications are only beginning. According to Richard Edelman: lack of belief in the system + economic and societal fears + loss of trust in institutions = populism.

Hes wrong. It doesnt just result in populism. It leads to tyranny and anarchy.

When populism runs rampant, history shows that tyranny is not far behind. Dictatorial leaders follow. And when the system eventually breaksbecause people fail to solve the cause of problems (think Communist Russia and Boris Yeltsin)then anarchy results.

And a whole new system is needed.

This is exactly what America needs. A new system. One that brings happiness, prosperity, justice.

There are solutions to this worlds problems. But people need to be willing to listen and actually do the things God says lead to happiness and peace.

So there are some dark days coming, but God also says that beyond the darkness is fantastic light.

And that is a truth you can trust in.

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Poll: Most American Adults Believe in Human Evolution - theTrumpet.com

Brush your fossils twice a day. Do it for yourself and for future researchers and museum visitors. Because if any part of you is going to get unearthed millions of years from now, it'll probably be a tooth. Teeth are stronger than bones, and they are much more likely to survive the ages, writes University of Arkansas paleoanthropologist Peter S. Ungar in his book Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet and Human Origins. Not to be confused with Felix Unger, who once invested in a dental adhesive based on the substance barnacles produce to stick to ships. (Watch The Odd Couple, season 4, episode 13: A Barnacle Adventure. Spoiler alert: the glue fails when the patient's mouth gets dry.)

In fossil bones, most of the material that existed while the animal was alive gets slowly replaced over time by minerals. The resulting buried treasure is really a natural cast of the bone with properties more like rock than like what's inside The Rock (aka Dwayne Johnson). Teeth start out most of the way there. Teeth are essentially ready-made fossils, Ungar writes. The enamel that coats ours, for example, is 97% mineral. Such prefossilization means there are often hundreds if not thousands of teeth for every skeleton or complete skull we find.... Fortunately for paleontologists, they are also excellent tools for understanding life in the past.

Teeth tell such tales because their shapes and the usage patterns etched on them offer up heaping helpings of information about what animals ate and how they lived. If we can reconstruct diet from teeth, for example, Ungar writes, we can use them as a bridge to the worlds of our ancestors. Likewise, your teeth could one day serve as a bridge. Unless, of course, you have a bridge.

While reading Ungar, I could not help but think about Don McLeroy, a man who vexed scientists and educators for the first decade of this century in his roles as a member and then chair of the Texas State Board of Education. McLeroy fought against the inclusion of evolution in curricula. He believed that the earth is only a few thousands of years old. He was quoted as saying, Evolution is hooey. And that somebody's got to stand up to experts. All those views would be irritating if McLeroy's day job had been as a plumber or an architect or an insurance agent. But what made McLeroy particularly maddening was that he worked on a daily basis with the most abundantly clear evidence of evolution that can be found in the fossil record: he is a dentist.

While you're chewing on that irony, consider that for hundreds of millions of years some animals have avoided the teeth of predators by getting down and dirty. Imagine yourself the size of a shrew and living in environments where dinosaurs are everywhere, writes Emory University paleontologist Anthony J. Martin in his book The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World beneath Our Feet. Yes, that's a mouthful.

Some want to eat you, while others will carelessly step on you and carry your squashed remains like chewing gum on their feet for days, Martin continues. Oh, you say you live in deep burrows where no dinosaurs can find you or compress you into two dimensions? Yes, that will do nicely.... Congratulations, shrew-sized mammal: You win the survival sweepstakes, and one tiny branch of your descendants eventually gets to a point where it can discuss how you outlived the dinosaurs. Plus, when the asteroid bit into a big chunk of what's now the Yucatn Peninsula 66 million years ago, stuff that lived undergroundand far awayclearly had a significant survival advantage.

In fact, Martin argues that the evolutionary paths taken by most modern animals, whether these are crocodilians, turtles, birds, lungfish, amphibians, earthworms, insects, crustaceans, or mammals, are connected to their burrowing ancestors. That passage can be found deep in the book under the subhead Living on Burrowed Time. Holy moly.

I dug both books. Sink your teeth into them.

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Two New Books Look at Evolution via Teeth and Tunnels - Scientific American

The newfound fossils shed light on the early evolution of one of the planets most mysterious amphibians. Caecilians are one of the most mysterious amphibians on earth. This group of limbless, serpentine carnivores can range in size from 6 inches to 5 feet and primarily live underground in wet, tropical areas across Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Although there are currently about 200 known species of caecilians, little is known about their early evolution.

Caecilians, turtles and some fish are the only major vertebrate groups that paleontologists still have questions about, explained Jason Pardo, a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. Caecilians are hard to find in the fossil record because most are so small, added Adam Huttenlocker, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Anatomical Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Bryan Small, a research associate at Texas Tech University, discovered two caecilian fossils from the late Mesozoic Era in the 1990s in Eagle County, Colorado, but these fossils had reduced limbs and resembled the caecilians of today, leaving questions about the amphibians early evolution unanswered.

However, Small, Pardo, and Huttenlocker recently discovered two new caecilian fossils from the Triassic Period in central Colorado. Named Chinlestegophis jenkinsi, the new fossils act as a sort of missing link, connecting caecilians to stereospondyls, the most diverse amphibian group during the Triassic Period over 200 million years ago.

The skulls of the new fossils were slightly under 1 inch long, implying that C. jenkinsi were about the size of a small salamander, according to Huttenlocker. Chinlestegophis jenkinsi still preserves a lot of the primitive morphology that is shared with other Triassic amphibians, namely their four legs," he added. The ancient amphibian probably ate insects and possessed tiny but functional eyes, differentiating it from modern caecilians, as many modern species either do not have eyes or hide their eyes under moist skin.

Our textbook-changing discovery will require paleontologists to re-evaluate the timing of the origin of modern amphibian groups and how they evolved, Huttenlocker noted. Prior to the discovery of the fossils, stereospondyls were believed to be unrelated to any creatures living today. However, these newfound fossils suggest that the amphibians of today evolved from a common ancestor about 315 million years ago.

Pardo argued that the discovery of the fossils could be beneficial to humans. Its possible that the things that frog and salamander tissue can do when it comes to scarless healing are also present in human DNA but may be turned off, he explained. Because humans are also vertebrates, we enhance our understanding of our own evolutionary history and genetic heritage when we gain understanding of the amphibian lineage.

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Newly discovered fossils fill gaps in amphibian evolution - Treehugger

Ten years ago, the big question before the 2007 NBA draft was which of two players the Portland Trail Blazers would select with the top overall pick. One option was Greg Oden, the 7-footer out of Ohio State who was a traditional center playing near the basket. The other was Kevin Durant, a spindly, less-classifiable big man out of Texas.

It is easy to knock the Blazers for what happened. They drafted Oden, whom injuries limited to 105 games in the NBA. Meanwhile, Durant, who went No. 2, has become one of the best scorers in basketball history, and last week he was named the most valuable player in the NBA Finals as Golden State defeated Cleveland in five games.

But the most resonant lesson from that draft a decade ago is that were it held today, Portland would not need the benefit of hindsight to know to pick Durant over Oden. In fact, in todays NBA, Oden, who at the time defined his game as big-man hook shot, might not even be one of the top picks at all.

An Oden, people would look at him and want to go big, but hows he going to defend the pick-and-roll? Billy King, formerly the Brooklyn Nets general manager, said in an interview. Those guys arent involved in the game as much.

Understanding the evolution in the style of NBA basketball since the 2007 draft helps explain how Thursdays draft is likely to unfold.

The increased reliance on the 3-point shot; the constant presence of the pick-and-roll, which can be easier defended with nimble big men who can defensively switch onto traditional ball-handlers; the increased use of spacing, which requires big men who can credibly draw their defender away from the basket on offense, all mean that some of the best contemporary big men are mold breakers.

They are players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, the 22-year-old, 6-11 All-Star from Greece who has been versatile enough to play point guard for the Milwaukee Bucks, or gentle giants like the Utah Jazzs Rudy Gobert, a Frenchman who led the NBA in blocks per game while ably switching onto smaller opponents.

Youve had a bunch of very athletic guys coming in from overseas Giannis, Rudy Gobert, said player agent Marc Fleisher, and youre finding American players who are more skilled now, even though theyre big and lanky.

So among likely lottery draft picks, it seems as if for every traditional center who is focused on protecting the rim and scoring down low, there are two Swiss-Army-knife-style big men who are as comfortable shooting 18-foot jumpers as 5-foot bunnies.

So when the draft gets underway Thursday night, expect the top-drafted big man not to be Texas bruising center, Jarrett Allen, but Arizonas 7-foot forward Lauri Markkanen, who made nearly two 3-pointers per game for the Wildcats, or Florida States Jonathan Isaac, a Durant-like athlete.

And describing Edrice Adebayo, whose nickname is Bam, the Kentucky freshman whose draft stock fell because of a subpar season with the Wildcats, ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, in a conference call, outlined the very model of a modern NBA big man: Youre looking at 6-10, strong, athletic, runs the floor, can guard pick-and-roll, can ball screen and run to the rim and catch lobs, and hes young.

Fraschilla added, Adebayo comes to mind as maybe someone that slipped in the so-called mock drafts that might be a good, really good, value.

Fleisher, copping to personal bias, had another candidate for such a player, and for the same reasons. Not to plug my own guy, he said in an interview, but thats one of the reasons Jonah Bolden is so interesting to teams. Hes 6-10, 7-4 wingspan, and can play small forward, power forward or center.

Thats the prototypical player teams are looking for now, Fleischer added. (Bolden, for those not in the know, is from Australia, played a year at UCLA and then moved to Serbia to play professionally.)

And then there are the elite point guards, with as many as five likely to be selected with the top 10 picks Thursday: Markelle Fultz (Washington), Lonzo Ball (UCLA), DeAaron Fox (Kentucky), Dennis Smith (North Carolina State) and Frank Ntilikina (France). All were just freshmen (or the equivalent, in the case of the 18-year-old Ntilikina). And all can score as well as do the more traditional point-guard work of facilitating the offense.

What this mother lode of ball-handling talent reveals along with a simple abundance of skill that happens to exist in this draft class is the increased premium on that position.

Theres no question having a really good point guard is pivotal in todays game, whereas the center position has probably been a little devalued lately, Fleisher said.

Indeed, the ever-idiosyncratic San Antonio Spurs might be the only team to make this seasons conference semifinals without an in-his-prime point guard, such as the Washington Wizards John Wall or the Boston Celtics Isaiah Thomas.

If you look at the teams winning now, King said, look at the East, with Kyrie Irving and Isaiah Thomas and John Wall. If youre going to have a good team, you have to have a setup point guard or a scoring point guard.

The fact that the Celtics possess a star point guard in Thomas, as well as the No. 1 pick (because of a fateful, four-year-old trade with the Nets) has created its own drama. The consensus best player in the draft is Fultz. So the word, first reported by Yahoos Adrian Wojnarowski, is that the Celtics will avoid that redundancy by trading their pick to the Philadelphia 76ers (who will select Fultz) and with the third overall selection they will receive in return pick one of the two traditional wing players bound to go early in the first round Josh Jackson (Kansas) or Jayson Tatum (Duke), and probably Jackson plug him in immediately and try to get past the Cleveland Cavaliers in next seasons playoffs, which they failed to do this season.

Ball, too, is the subject of much speculation, some of it manufactured by his P.T. Barnum-esque father, LaVar, who has made clear he considers the hometown Los Angeles Lakers, selecting second, to have the only glass slipper that will fit his sons otherwise ZO2-covered foot.

Still, recent chatter has the Lakers perhaps selecting Fox over Ball, and that is assuming Fultz does not drop to them.

Such details sound trivial, but they are not. The precise order of those high draft picks matters a great deal, as does good judgment. Consider what happened in 2009. That draft class was similarly stocked at point guard, with as many as five (depending on how you define them) taken with the first 10 picks that June.

The Minnesota Timberwolves used the fifth and sixth picks to select two point guards Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn. Since that draft, the Timberwolves have never made the playoffs. With the seventh pick, the Warriors selected what ostensibly should have been the fourth-best point guard, Stephen Curry. They have had considerably superior results.

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The evolution of the NBA Draft - MyAJC

As bees' social behavior evolved, their complex chemical communication systems evolved in concert, according to a study published June 20 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An international team of researchers, including those from Princeton University, reported that a certain species of bees, called halictid bees, have more sensorial machinery compared with related solitary species. The difference is measured by the density of tiny, hollow sensory hairs called sensilla on their antennae.

Because social living requires the coordination of complex social behaviors, social insects invest more in these sensory systems used to communicate information about resources, mates and sources of danger to their colonies and, therefore, are integral to survival than their solitary counterparts, according to Sarah Kocher, an associate research scholar at theLewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the paper's corresponding author.

Kocher and her colleagues imaged the antennae of adult females from 36 species that Kocher netted in the wild, mostly in France, or secured from specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Using a scanning electron microscope at Princeton, they obtained information about the antennae's surface topography and composition and observed convergent changes in both sensilla structures and the chemical signals of the groups as sociality was gained and lost.

Sarah Kocher, an associate research scholar at theLewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the paper's corresponding author,and her colleagues imaged the antennae of adult females from 36 species using a scanning electron microscope. They obtained information about the antennae's surface topography and composition and observed convergent changes in both sensilla structures and the chemical signals of the groups as sociality was gained and lost.

Photo courtesy of Bernadette Wittwer, University of Melbourne

Kocher and her colleagues chose to examine halictid bees because they exhibit remarkable diversity in social behavior, from eusocial to solitary. Eusocial refers to an organizational structure in which individual insects in a colony forgo their reproductive capacity and perform a specific task, such as caring for young or gathering food, as seen in many ant, wasp and honeybee species. Also, within this family of insects, social behavior has evolved independently several times, and there are numerous examples of reversion, or a reappearance of an earlier physical characteristic, and replicated losses of sociality. These repeated gains and losses make the species one of the most behaviorally diverse social insects on the planet, and good candidates for studying sociality, according to Kocher. "What we have is a system with tremendous comparative power," she said.

Relatively little is known about the evolutionary transition between solitary and social living, according to Kocher. But in this paper, "[The researchers] provide an elegant solution to this problem," said Tom Wenseleers, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Leuven in Belgium who is familiar with the research but had no role in it. "By studying a group of primitively eusocial insects that evolved sociality more recently and on several occasions reverted back to a solitary lifestyle, [they] succeed in making an accurate comparison of the investment in chemosensory systems made by social and derived, closely related, nonsocial species."

In the paper, the researchers also noted that ancestrally solitary halictid bees those bees that had never evolved social behaviors had sensilla densities similar to eusocial species, while secondarily solitary halictid bees those bees that evolved from social to solitary and back exhibited decreases in sensilla density. Kocher was surprised by these patterns, but concluded that "sensilla density may be an important precursor to the evolution of social behavior."

"This study demonstrates that changes in social structure are reflected in changes to the sensory systems of insects," she said. "[It] not only illustrates the evolutionary shift from reproducing as an individual to having to coordinate reproduction as a group, but also how this behavioral change can create an evolutionary feedback loop in which traits are selected in order to increase sociality in subsequent generations."

Other authors on the paper, "Solitary bees reduce investment in communication compared with their social relatives" published June 20 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were Bernadette Wittwer and Mark Elgar of School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne; Abraham Hefetz and Tovit Simon of the Department of Zoology, George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel-Aviv University; and Li Murphy and Naomi Pierce of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

The research was supported in part by the Holsworth Research Wildlife Endowment, the National Science Foundation (IOS-1257543), the Norman and Rose Lederer Chair of Biology at Tel-Aviv-University and Princeton University.

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Bee antennae offer links between the evolution of social behavior and communication - Princeton University

A pair of studies suggests the evolutionary roots of humanlike cooperation can be seen in chimpanzees, albeit in rudimentary forms.

curioustiger/iStockphoto

By Michael PriceJun. 19, 2017 , 3:00 PM

Whether its giving to charity or helping a stranger with directions, we often assist others even when theres no benefit to us or our family members. Signs of such true altruism have been spotted in some animals, but have been difficult to pin down in our closest evolutionary relatives. Now, in a pair of studies, researchers show that chimpanzees will give up a treat in order to help out an unrelated chimp, and that chimps in the wild go out on risky patrols in order to protect even nonkin at home. The work may give clues to how such cooperationthe foundation of human civilizationevolved in humans.

Both studies provide powerful evidence for forms of cooperation in our closest relatives that have been difficult to demonstrate in other animals besides humans, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved with the research.

In the first study, psychologists Martin Schmelz and Sebastian Grneisen at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, trained six chimps at the Leipzig Zoo to play a sharing game. Each chimp was paired with a partner who was given a choice of four ropes to pull, each with a different outcome: give just herself a banana pellet; give just the subject a pellet; give both of them pellets; or forgo her turn and let her partner make the decision instead.

Unbeknownst to these partner chimpanzees, the chimp that always started the gamea female named Taiwas trained to always choose the last option, giving up her turn. From the partners point of view, this was a risky choice, Grneisen says, as Tai risked losing out entirely on the banana pellets. Over dozens of trials, after Tai gave up her turn, the six partners pulled the rope that rewarded both themselves and Tai with a treat 75% of the time, indicating they valued her risking her own treats to help them.

But the researchers also wanted to see whether the subjects were willing to give up some of their own reward to repay Tai for her perceived kindness. That kind of reciprocity is often claimed to be a landmark of human cooperation, and we wanted to see how far we could push it with the chimps, Grneisen says.

The team repeated the experiment, except this time when Tai passed the turn to the subjects, the subjects had the option of either giving themselves four banana pellets and Tai none, or giving both themselves and Tai only three banana pellets. The subjects chose the sacrifice option 44% of the time, compared with 17% of the time when the experimenters, not Tai, made the initial decision. This suggests that the chimps frequently felt compelled to reward Tai for her perceived unselfishness, even at their own expense, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

We were very surprised to get that finding, Grneisen says. This psychological dimension to chimps decision-making, taking into account how much a partner risked to help them, is novel.

The second study, also published today in PNAS, looked at what motivates male chimps to risk life and limb on patrol missions. Male chimps in the wild often team up and silently stalk the groups boundaries single-file, sniffing for intruders. These can be costly excursions: About a third of the time, they meet chimps from a rival group, and occasionally the encounters turn bloody. So patrolling chimps risk injury or even death.

According to classic behavioral theories, chimps should put themselves in such peril only if they have offspring or close maternal relatives in the group. Yet, after analyzing behavior and relationship data from 3750 male chimps in Ngogo, Uganda, collected over the past 20 years, researchers learned that although that was true for most chimps, more than a quarter of the patrollers had no close relations in the group. Whats more, males who didnt join these all-male patrols didnt appear to face any repercussions, says the studys lead author, anthropologist Kevin Langergraber from Arizona State University in Tempe. So, it was a bit surprising that so many chimps risked it.

He and his colleagues suggest that a theory known as group augmentation best explains these findings. This theory posits that by patrolling to protect the groups food supply and expand its territory, the entire group becomes more attractive to females and improves each individual males chances of reproducing.

Anne Pusey, another evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who is unaffiliated with the studies, agrees its a reasonable hypothesis. Protecting and expanding the groups territory, she says, would secure or increase the space and food supply for resident females, as well as future immigrant females, with whom [the males] will eventually mate and have a chance of siring offspring. More and healthier females means each individual male has a greater chance at producing offspring.

Langergraber adds that such behavior might serve as an evolutionary basis for human cooperation within huge, diverse communities. One of the most unusual things about human cooperation is its large scale, he says. Hundreds or thousands of unrelated individuals can work together to build a canal, or send a human to the moon. Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated cooperation later in human evolution.

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True altruism seen in chimpanzees, giving clues to evolution of human cooperation - Science Magazine

Among all mammals studied thus far, the orangutans chromosomes are the most like those of the first placental mammal.

USO/iStockphoto

By Elizabeth PennisiJun. 19, 2017 , 3:00 PM

Humans have 46 chromosomes. Dogs have 78. And a small South American rodent called the red viscacha has a whopping 104. Geneticists have marveled at the chromosomal diversity among mammals for decades, and now, they may know how it happened. A new digital reconstruction of the chromosomes of the ancestor of all placental mammals reveals that these tightly packed structures of DNA and proteins have become scrambled over timea finding that may help pinpoint possible problem sites in our genomes that underlie cancer and other disease.

The work "helps us to understand how chromosomes have changed over time, which chromosome rearrangements may have led to the formation of new species, and what might be driving chromosomal rearrangements," says Janine Deakin, a geneticist at the University of Canberra who was not involved with the work. "This was a very elegant study."

There are three kinds of mammals: egg-laying monotremes such as the platypus, marsupials like kangaroos and opossums, and the majorityplacental, or eutherian, mammalsincluding humans and about 4400 other mammal species. The earliest members of this larger group were mouse-sized, lived in trees, and ate insects about 105 million years ago. To figure out how chromosomes of placental mammals have changed over time, researchers need to know what those early eutherians started with. And that required putting some complicated puzzle pieces back together.

To do that, Harris Lewin, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Davis, and colleagues compared 19 genomes of various mammals at different spots in the eutherian family tree, including several primates. But genomes usually dont reveal how an animals DNA is distributed into chromosomesthey just give you the DNA sequence.

So team member Jaebum Kim, now at Konkuk University in Seoul, and colleagues wrote a sophisticated computer program that was able to reconstruct the original eutherian chromosomes based on what parts of the chromosomes are together today in those 19 species. The researchers came up with 21 pairs of ancestral eutherian chromosomes, they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A few of those chromosomes have stayed intactwith their genes in the same orderover the past 105 million years, at least in orangutans and humans. "I find the stability of some of the ancestral chromosomes remarkable," Deakin says.

But many have broken apart, swapping places between and within chromosomes, Kim, Lewin, and their colleagues found. These exchanges "are the footprints of changing the order of the packaging of 22,000 vertebrate genes," says Stephen O'Brien, a geneticist at SaintPetersburg State University in Russia who was not involved with the work.

All told, the scientists found 162 break pointsplaces where a chromosome broke open so the DNA between those points could move around. They found that this chromosome scrambling varied over time and from mammal group to mammal group. "The big surprise is how the chromosomes evolved differently in different lineages, Lewin says. "It's one of the most splendid examples of stepwise changes that led to the evolution of new species, he says.

This new study shows that as mammals evolved early on, the rate at which chromosomes broke apart was stable, and relatively low, with eight per 10 million years. But 65 million years ago,the rate jumped, averaging 20 per 10 million years in primates other than the orangutan. So the orangutan chromosome setup looks the most like the ancient ancestor revealed by Kims team, with eight ancient chromosomes intact. Humans have five such chromosomes and mice have just one.

The researchers also showed that ancestral chromosome 20 is completely conserved in primates, but very much changed in goats and cows because of rearrangements within chromosomes. Rat chromosomes, too, are very different than the early eutherians, but for a different reason: Their chromosomes swapped pieces between chromosomes rather than within a given chromosome.

Lewin thinks sections of repetitive basesthe letters that make up DNAtend to make chromosomes susceptible to scrambling. Goats and cows, as well as rodents, had many so-called retrotransposonsrogue invading DNAand many rearrangements, whereas primates have far fewer of both.

In some ways, the implications of the many chromosomal changes suggested by the new analysis is obviousjust look how different an ant-eater is from a whale.But in other ways, researchers have much to learn about exactly how chromosomal changes influence the course of evolution. The changes were clearly advantageous and perpetuated through time in different mammalian groups, Lewin says.

Though O'Brien says he's impressed with this study's detail,he's holding out for more comprehensive comparisons, wherein the genomes of many more than 19 species are matched up. "That is what is really required to get a full history of our chromosomes, he says. Until that scale is achieved, we will still be poking around in the dark matter of evolutionary processes."

That work is coming, says Lewin, as a project at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is sequencing 150 more mammals. And with those genomes, as well as the genomes of marsupials and monotremes, he and his collaborators plan to tackle the ancestral genome of the first mammal next, which lived about 185 million years ago. "I'm looking forward to seeing this analysis expanded to include a detailed look at all mammals, Deakin says.

Meanwhile, these break points may help guide researchers trying to understand disease. "There are a score of medical syndromes involving chromosome rearrangements," says OBrien, and there may be others not yet discovered.

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Digital reconstruction of ancient chromosomes reveals surprises about mammalian evolution - Science Magazine

Pokmon Gos biggest update ever will begin to roll out to players across starting today. Nearly a year after the iOS and Android game launched, Pokmon Gos gyms have been majorly reworked, and a major cooperative multiplayer feature is on the way too.

Polygon got the chance to try Pokmon Gos new gyms during E3 2017, and I came away feeling cautiously optimistic. I wasnt a huge fan of how gyms worked prior to the update; they suffered from top-tier players camping out at them forever and lacked the competitive incentives of the traditional games gyms. These are among the things Pokmon Gos gym update is meant to correct.

Gyms will now have way more to offer players who may not like fighting in them. Every gym is getting a photo disc to spin, just like PokStops, so players can collect items from them. Whats most interesting is a new mechanic that gives pacifist players a reason to visit gyms. Every Pokmon thats housed at a gym now up to six instead of the original three has something called a motivation factor, which is represented by a heart that fills up or depletes over time. To keep a Pokmon at a friendly gym happy and strong, players can feed them berries. Anyone can do this, as long as theyre on the right team so even if you dont like fighting, you still have a reason to visit a gym.

One of the main issues with Pokmon Gos gyms initially was that battles would become increasingly difficult as players climbed the ladder. This became repetitive, as members of Niantic described to us during our demo; it also meant that lower-leveled trainers stood little chance of making it to the top. The revamped gyms have players take on Pokmon based on the order in which they were placed at the gym. The goal there is to make it possible for anyone to finish an entire gym.

Fighting at a gym can still feel like a bland or solitary affair, all these new additions aside. Its still just tapping the screen repeatedly, swiping left and right to dodge attacks, fighting with a mechanic that doesnt work as well as the turn-based battles of traditional Pokmon games. Niantic hasnt really done anything to change up the fiddly nature of fighting in Pokmon Go, but another big content update addresses the asynchronous single-player nature of it.

Dataminers found hints that raids were coming to Pokmon Go earlier this year, and I got to try out how this new mode works in the actual game. Its the first truly cooperative system Pokmon Go has: A countdown timer randomly appears above gyms, and when it goes off, a giant, very strong Pokmon will appear. Approaching it will commence a Raid Battle, which supports more than a dozen players at once, all of whom work together to take that Pokmon down. Everyone is given a ticket to participate in one of these a day, while premium passes let players play more than one Raid daily.

The Raid Battle system even has public and private lobbies, so friends who have happened upon a Raid Battle together can work side-by-side, no random trainers allowed. After defeating the Pokmon still with the usual screen-tapping players have the chance to actually capture it, adding a high-leveled monster to their team. (Theyll also get a bunch of items, including some mysterious new TM items that Niantic declined to tell us anything about.)

Theres no getting around the fact that battles in Pokmon Go just arent as fun as they could be, because of how reductive that core mechanic is. But playing a Raid Battle alongside a few other journalists and my Pokmon Go-obsessed editor-in-chief did feel closer to what I wanted this game to be back when it was in beta. Defeating the same Pokmon at the same time, seeing other team members Pokmon on-screen while doing so, is an exciting bonding experience. Its a group achievement unlike anything else in Pokmon Go.

Every player also gets something to be personally proud of: Winning against a Raid Boss nets you a badge and the chance to catch that Pokmon you just defeated. I managed to capture that super-strong Machamp we took down after the battle ended, while Chris Grant just couldnt get it to stay in the special Premier Ball. (Sorry, bud.)

It will be interesting to see just how much Raids and the wide-ranging gym updates shake up the game. Will it bring more people back into the fold, especially now that the weathers picked up? Pokmon Go isnt hurting for daily users it recently crossed the 750 million mark but for lapsed trainers, the ability to actually play alongside people and approach those intimidating gyms could be a reason to return.

It also helps that Niantic is also working with Ingress players to finally add more portals into that game, which translate as PokStop locations in Pokmon Go. Those in more isolated areas can hope to actually find more places to go and Pokmon to catch in the coming months.

Were eager to see how this latest evolution of Pokmon Go plays out. Keep checking your phone to see if the gym update is live in your area; maybe well see you in a Raid sometime soon.

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Pokmon Go's huge multiplayer update is the game's next evolution - Polygon

(TNS) Views about evolution are changing, but a new Gallup poll shows that Americans havent given up a belief in divine intervention in science.

The belief in young-Earth creationism that God created mankind in its present form within the past 10,000 years has declined to a new low since Gallup began asking people in 1982 about the origin of humanity.

At the same time, most Americans believe God had some role in humanitys development, whether creation looked like the biblical book of Genesis or evolution over millions of years.

Some see the poll results as positive. Others see them as a sign that religion has been stripped from the classroom, including in a place like Kansas, where supporters and skeptics of evolution have clashed for years.

The poll

The Gallup poll, released in May, reported that 38 percent of Americans believe in young-Earth creationist human origins, down from a high of 47 percent in 1999 and 1993.

People who answered the question by saying that man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but with God guiding the process, also were at 38 percent.

Only 19 percent answered that man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life without involvement from God, equal to the response in 2014.

This was the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1982 that belief in Gods creation of man in his current form has not been the most common response. This year it tied with the belief that God guided the process of evolution.

The reason why

Its not easy to teach an evolution course at a Christian school, said Alan Maccarone, professor of biology at Friends University. For him, the results of the poll are a reason to be excited.

Raised Catholic, Maccarone considers himself an evolutionary biologist and said he sees no conflict between his faith and evolution.

Often, he deals with students rejecting or showing antipathy toward evolution, he said.

People dont really understand what evolution is, Maccarone said. They just know they dont like it.

Perhaps education is making the change, Maccarone said. Another reason could be the amount of public information available in television series, movies, the media and more.

Maybe people are just reading more and seeing more and coming to accept to a greater extent the idea that evolution is a valid concept, Maccarone said.

Robert Lattimer also pointed to education as a reason for people becoming more comfortable with evolution, something his organization has fought.

Lattimer is president of Citizens for Objective Public Education, a group that filed a legal complaint in 2013 about Kansas science standards, saying they use incremental, progressive, comprehensive and deceptive methods to establish a non-theistic religious worldview that is materialistic/atheistic and that promotes the core tenets of Religious (Secular) Humanism.

Eventually, the Tenth Circuit Court determined that parents and students were not personally injured by adoption of the standards. The U.S. Supreme Court denied reviewing the petition on Nov. 14.

Public school science standards in recent years have emphasized unguided evolution, so probably more students are learning about it, Lattimer wrote in an e-mail. At the same time, the schools have been downplaying theistic beliefs resulting in a loss in religious faith in the younger generation.

Evolution in Kansas

Citizens for Objective Public Educations 2013 complaint hasnt been the only challenge to evolutionary teachings in Kansas.

A 2013 article by the Associated Press reported that Kansas has had six different sets of science standards in the past 15 years, as conservative Republicans skeptical of evolution gained and lost board majorities.

In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove references to evolution and the age of the Earth from science standards, a decision that was overturned in 2001.

In 2005, the board approved standards critical of evolution guidelines that were repealed two years later.

In 2013, Kansas adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, which teach evolution, the subject of the lawsuit.

Changing views

As vice president of the Discovery Institute, John West thinks the poll is a positive development.

The Discovery Institute advocates for intelligent design, the belief that life was designed and created by an intelligent entity. In 2005, the Seattle-based group played a critical role in the Kansas evolution hearings.

Intelligent design is a belief not necessarily encompassed by the Gallup poll, and West points out that his own beliefs wouldnt fit into any of the three categories in the poll. Although he believes the universe is billions of years old, he is more skeptical of whether humans evolved.

Yet West notes that the last time the poll was taken in 2014, the people who chose an answer that involved God came to a total of 73 percent. Today, the number is 76 percent.

What didnt change ... is the percentage of people believing that human beings developed without any guidance is stuck at 19 percent, said West, previously an associate professor of political science at Seattle Pacific University. I think that probably the primary thing it says is how high a bar or what a tough challenge it is for people trying to argue that a non-intelligent process can produce us.

Many religions and denominations view their beliefs as compatible with evolution, including Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism, the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Other groups such as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Southern Baptist Convention have rejected the theory of evolution in favor of the literal Genesis account of creation or intelligent design.

When he taught, Harry Gregory, who serves on the board of Kansas Citizens for Science, tried to stay away from arguments about whether a deity was involved in evolution. Gregory describes himself as nontheistic but spent about 10 years teaching biology and environmental science including evolution at Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School.

Kansas Citizens for Science was founded in 1999, largely in reaction to the states anti-evolution science standards. Gregory testified several times as a teacher.

Since in the last 20 years since this issue became public, more biology teachers are teaching about evolution in the classroom, Gregory said. Prior to that and even still a little bit today, biology teachers generally stayed away from evolution because they didnt want to create controversy.

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Creationist views declining, but many think God had hand in evolution - The Garden City Telegram

American Palaeontologist Stephen Gould.

Wally McNamee/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

In 1972 the eminent palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould and his colleague Niles Eldredge proposed an idea about the way evolution worked and, in so doing, sparked a fight of almighty proportions.

New modelling revealed by Michael Landis and Joshua Schraiber of Temple University in Pennsylvania, US, however, adds considerable extra weight to their case.

Gould and Eldredge sought to explain so-called gaps in the palaeontological record missing fossils assumed to represent transitional phases between ancient species and the modern ones into which they evolved by suggesting they were an illusion.

Evolution, they proposed, wasnt a gradual process, marked by the slow accumulation of new characteristics. Rather, they said, the history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only rarely by rapid and episodic events of speciation.

Two important principles underpinned their explanation, which they dubbed the theory of punctuated equilibria.

The first was that once a species evolved, it tended to stay pretty much the same from thereon in until extinction ended its run. The second was that when part of a species became isolated from the rest and thus fell under new selection pressure, if it was going to evolve into something new it would do so very quickly (at least, on a geological scale).

If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, the pair wrote, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera.

The theory was roundly attacked by some other prominent voices in the field. In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins said punctuated equilibrium was an idea that "does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity".

Philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwins Dangerous Idea, also slammed Gould who responded by calling him Dawkins lapdog. Dennett shot back that in doing so Gould was turn[ing] up the volume of his vituperation.

Gould died in 2004, Dennett is now 75, and the debate is still a long way from settled.

However, Landis and Schraiber, publishing on the preprint site bioRxiv, push the argument back in favour of speciation as a comparatively rapid, rather than gradual, process.

The title of their paper serves also as its bold conclusion: Punctuated evolution shaped modern vertebrate diversity.

The pair constructed a mathematical model based on random probability distribution and fed in datasets derived from the morphological characteristics of about 50 clades (genetically-related groups of animals) covering mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians.

The results fitted best within a framework of punctuated development, with long periods of stasis averaging around 10 million years between jump processes of pulsed evolution lasting as little as 100 generations.

All of the data used concerned modern species. Landis and Schraiber suggest that future work integrating their work with the paleontological evolutionary research kick-started by Gould and Eldredge will throw up more detailed evidence about how rapid spurts of evolution and speciation are related.

The reactions of professors Dawkins and Dennett remain unknown, but might be memorable.

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New model backs controversial idea of how evolution works - Cosmos

We have proven time and again in our Wednesday night apologetics class that the Theory of Evolution is an illogical lie. Yet, the vast majority of the world still believes that every living thing in existence is the result of time and chance. Why would intelligent and logical beings choose to believe something as ridiculous as evolution, over the more logical and factual creationism? There are several reasons this might be the case.

First, for the past 50 years, evolution has been the only thing taught in schools. It is not taught as an unproven theory, but as scientific fact. As a result, many do not question the validity of the Evolutionary Theory and just assume that it is factual.

Second, it has been portrayed in popular culture and the media that the most intelligent people believe in evolution. Those who do not believe in evolution are labeled as stupid or ignorant. Men are prideful. We want people to think we are well educated and smart. So people claim to believe in evolution, not based on facts and evidence, but because it will make them appear to be in the same league as those who are educated and intelligent.

Third, it is claimed that the vast majority of scientists believe in evolution. Popular scientists like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson have broken into the mainstream and spew their evolutionary beliefs, claiming that all true scientists believe in evolution, making it seem that all experts believe in this theory as fact, and those with little to no scientific knowledge follow their words. Just because someone is loudest, doesnt make them right. Even if the majority of scientists believe in the theory of evolution, that doesnt make evolution any less of the lie that it is. You are a free-thinking human being, not a sheep following the masses. As Guy N. Woods correctly stated: It is dangerous to follow the multitude because the majority is almost always on the wrong side in this world.

Fourth, there are many who accept evolution because they have rejected God. They dont want there to be a God, so they accept an illogical theory over the logical and factual truth. No one believes in evolution because of the evidence. Why? Because there is virtually no evidence to back the theory up! Even those who believe in evolution must admit this. For example, Professor D.M.S. Watson, who held the position of the Chair of Evolution at the University of London for more than 20 years, stated that evolution itself is accepted by zoologists, not because it has been observed to occur or can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is incredible. This statement and many like it make it clear that many people believe in evolution simply because they already made up their mind that there isnt a God, no matter what the evidence says.

Consider the evidence. Creationism has evidence while evolution is void of any. Creationism is logical while evolution is improbable. Dont be a sheep. Dont follow the masses as they lead you down the path of destruction. Look at the proof, follow where it leads, and come to your own conclusion. When one does that, the only conclusion that exists is the fact that God is, and He created the heavens and the earth and everything in them.

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Four Reasons Why people believe in Evolution - Pike County News Watchman

New York Times

The Evolution of the NBA Draft New York Times Greg Oden, after being selected No. 1 over all by the Portland Trail Blazers during the 2007 N.B.A. draft. Injuries limited him to just 105 games. Credit Jason DeCrow/Associated Press. Ten years ago, the big question before the 2007 N.B.A. draft was ... and more »

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The Evolution of the NBA Draft - New York Times

Jerry Holt jgholt@startribune.com A 2003 research project concluded that for every $1 the state invests in the life of a child, it gets back $8 in value. Within months of that reports release, Minnesota Business for Early Learning was founded as a resource to fight for the cause. It was backed by leading businesses and various chambers of commerce.

It was in the early 2000s that the Minnesota business community began getting serious about a most unlikely education cause.

Businesses and their various foundations and employee giving programs had long sponsored college scholarships for those most in need. In the mid-1980s, the business community began a serious effort at reforming the K-12 system under the leadership of 3M CEO Lewis Lehr and his colleagues at the Minnesota Business Partnership.

Forming an unusual alliance with DFL Gov. Rudy Perpich, such reform ideas as postsecondary enrollment options for high school students (earning college credits along the way), open enrollment, student/parent choice of schools and careful measurement of student performance were the result of several years of significant policy advocacy.

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The evolution of Minnesota businesses' agenda for effective early learning - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Sarkeesian and Feminist Frequency's Managing Editor Carolyn Petit have been compiling data on the gender of protagonists in video games announced at E3 since 2015, which plenty of people in the industry dubbed the "year of the woman." Sarkeesian and Petit weren't convinced, so they decided to dive into the actual numbers and break down the number of games announced at E3 that actually starred female characters.

"There was this sense in the air of, things are changing and there are more games starring women announced, etcetera, etcetera," Sarkeesian said. "But we were like, OK, but we might be getting ahead of ourselves. So we just started counting. And we came up with numbers and we decided to track them over the years, which would create a really interesting data set moving forward in terms of judging how the industry presents itself and how it's changing over time."

As it turned out, at E3 2015, just 9 percent of new games starred women, while 32 percent had men in the leading role. In 2016, the gap grew -- only 3 percent of newly revealed games featured female protagonists, while 41 percent starred men. This escalation made Sarkeesian and Petit nervous about the figures this year, but things are actually closer to 2015 -- the so-called "year of the woman" -- than 2016.

"The important thing, I think, is that we don't rest on our laurels," Petit said. "We don't say, 'Oh, hey, equality achieved!' or whatever when, actually, the reality is that there's still a lot of work to be done. These trends are encouraging and great, but they're not, hopefully, the end of anything."

Follow all the latest news from E3 2017 here!

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The evolution of women in video games continues at E3 2017 - Engadget

"Nobody likes you when you're 23," sang Mark Hoppus in the chorus to pop-punk band Blink-182's 1999 hit What's My Age Again.

I beg to differ.

I'd like to think that when I was 23, a long time ago, I had an active social life.

While studying for my exams as a young English literature undergraduate, my classmates and I were camped out at the McDonald's at Parkway Centre in Marine Parade for days on end, trying to make sense of Roland Barthes and Gayatri Spivak.

Saturday afternoons were spent with one of my closest friends from junior college, searching through the racks at music stores Gramophone and HMV, now both long gone. I remember trying to figure out whether it was worth plunking down the cash for the uncensored version of an Outkast album when I already had the censored one.

Saturday nights, on the other hand, were spent with my secondary school friends at the Dawood coffee shop at the junction of Frankel Avenue and Changi Road. We would talk, eat prata and drink endless cups of teh halia until the wee hours of the morning. That coffee shop closed years ago.

Looking back, I realise for the most part, those weren't exactly the most constructive uses of time.

However, they were invaluable in terms of creating memories and bonds with my friends and peers, and I look back on my early 20s fondly.

But becoming a working adult rapidly depleted me of leisure time, and that was compounded by my becoming a husband and father.

Regular deadlines make it difficult to decide at the last minute to catch that indie movie at a film festival, and paediatrician appointments stand in between you and impromptu Starbucks meet-ups.

I've struggled with the popular wisdom that one really needs to hold on to only a small circle of close friends. After all, I'm friends with different people based on different interests and the stage at which they came into my life, and those don't necessarily intersect.

The hours of conversation, shared experiences and time spent together that it takes to really build a friendship have dried up.

I've struggled with the popular wisdom that one really needs to hold on to only a small circle of close friends. After all, I'm friends with different people based on different interests and the stage at which they came into my life, and those don't necessarily intersect.

The people I attend religious classes at the mosque with aren't necessarily the ones I'll have debates with on the merits of 90s gangsta rap (although sometimes they are).

But after several years of raging against the inevitable consequences of "adulting" - as the kids call it now - I've come to accept that my social circles will never be what they were in the salad days of my youth.

And, in a lot of ways, I'm glad.

"Sometimes, we just outgrow the role that we play," raps Minnesota hip-hop artist Brother Ali in his song Walking Away. Ali was talking about his divorce, but I feel that it applies to friendships as well. I've come to accept two things: However close, not all friendships last forever, and just because you're connected on social media doesn't mean that you're necessarily friends. Facebook and Instagram have a way of keeping relationships alive way beyond their expiry dates.

Mostly though, I've come to realise the importance of having friends at work.

Numerous studies have shown how friendships at work improve productivity and increase employee engagement. I can personally attest to that.

I'm very thankful to have had friends who helped me through some pretty tough times at jobs I've held in the past, without whom going to work might have been a much more excruciating endeavour.

And I'm also grateful to be surrounded by people I consider my friends and peers now, who've helped me adjust to the hectic life of journalism.

I suppose it's not so much that friendships disappear, as it is that they change and evolve, just as we as people evolve and grow.

To expect my life to stay in stasis in 23 forever would not only be unrealistic, it would also be stifling.

Continued here:

The evolution of friendships - The Straits Times

Scientists from several U.S. and Chinese universities say new findings about microbes and their interaction with other species show that Darwin's theory of evolution needs an update.

Their contention is based on discoveries that all plants and animals, including humans, evolved in interaction with a huge number of microscopic species bacteria, viruses and fungi not only in harmful but also in beneficial ways.

In a paper published by the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, scientists from the University of Colorado, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and several other universities say Darwin's tree of life fails to recognize that many forms of life are linked physically and evolved together in so-called symbiomes.

The authors propose creating a working group that would use advanced computational methods to create a multidimensional evolutionary tree describing our complex interaction with microbes.

For centuries, mythologies around the world used the so-called tree of life as a metaphor for diversity stemming from a single source.

In 1859, Charles Darwin used the same concept to explain his theory of evolution, depicting it as a two-dimensional tree with individual species evolving independently of other branches.

Scientists say an updated view on symbiomes could have a profound effect not only on biology but also on many areas of science, including technology and even on society.

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Theory of Evolution Needs Update, Scientists Say - Voice of America

Konami is in a really, really weird place these days. Especially in the western world, their two main franchises arePro Evolution Soccer andMetal Gear.And with Hideo Kojima no longer at Konami, the state ofMetal Gear is entirely up for grabs. So,Pro Evolution Soccerand scattered mobile titles it is. ButPESdoesnt do well in North America. Not with EAsFIFA and a lack of proper soccer culture.

But still, there was always a sense thatPro Evolution Soccer was just going to continue to be what it was until the franchise literally curled up and died, or continued on in perpetuity. However, withPro Evolution Soccer 2018, Konami has made some odd decisions. The first had to do with that whole Diego Maradona lawsuit. Sure, it ended in a settlement out of court in which Maradona appears as a Legacy character inPESgames with all proceeds going to charity, but. Thats one hell of a way to get a talent you are already repping to press as one of your major players.

Then they announcedUsain Bolt as one of their pre-order bonus players. The track star as a soccer player. Definitely an odd move. When explaining the decision at thePES2018 media presentation at E3, the company representatives described the move as something new they were doing withPES2018 as a surprise factor. It turns out Bolt wanted to rep the game as he reportedly wants to transition to a soccer career after exhausting his track career. Konami also hopes that the partnership will open their game up to new audiences who otherwise wouldnt playPES.

Both of those licensing deals are pretty damn odd, but Konami isnt the company it was a few years ago, especially when it comes to the international market. Of course theyd be making some strange moves to try and find footing.

But it seems like, amidst all the strange PR moves, theyve also learned something. For the first time in 8 years,Pro Evolution Soccer is getting an online beta. Because the games online modes are not up to standard, and Western gamers love their online play. Even more interestlingly, that beta (being run July 20-23rd on PS4 and Xbox One) will specifically test the new 3v3 co-op quick match. Why its a 3-on-3 match is beyond me, but it marks the first timePESis getting a co-op mode.

Then, rather than try and market their game to the dust-dry North American market, theyre focusing their campaign with a World Tour in Europe and Latin America this summer. You know, places that get really, really into the World Cup.

But where all that learning falls apart is the game itself.PES2018 will support Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4, and PC. Yes, last gen console support in 2017. And while Konami is pushing the Super 7 areas of focus forPES2018, none of them hold water. Sure, the game looks pretty solid when you sit down and play it, because youre viewing the character models from a very decent distance. But the up-close shots in the press briefing and in the slow-mo recap videos show it all. While Konami may be trying to update the visuals, get better motion capturing, and add facial animations,PES2018 when viewed at close range makesMass Effect: Andromeda look like a hyper-realistic painting.

And sure, the updates to player AI and their ability to control the ball has increased, as have the set pieces like specific penalty kicks and free kicks, the game build at E3 was unstable. And for a game launching this fall, thats not a good sign. Sure,PES has always played better thanFIFA. But this late in the game, even increased licenses and celebrity ambassadors cant helpPES beatFIFA. And I think we all need to stop thinking there will be a year PES beats FIFA.

(Last Updated June 16, 2017 8:08 am )

Stranger Things Action Figures Are On Their Way From Funko

Browsing Bandai Namcos Ace Combat 7 & Dragon Ball FighterZ At E3

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Konami's Increasingly Odd Decisions About Pro Evolution Soccer - Bleeding Cool News

June 15, 2017 As bees' social behavior evolved, their complex chemical communication systems evolved in concert. An international team of researchers, including those from Princeton University, reported that a certain species of bees, called halictid bees, have more sensorial machinery compared with related solitary species. The difference is measured by the density of tiny, hollow sensory hairs called sensilla on their antennae. Credit: Sam Droege, U.S. Geological Survey

As bees' social behavior evolved, their complex chemical communication systems evolved in concert, according to a study published online by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An international team of researchers, including those from Princeton University, reported that a certain species of bees, called halictid bees, have more sensorial machinery compared with related solitary species. The difference is measured by the density of tiny, hollow sensory hairs called sensilla on their antennae.

Because social living requires the coordination of complex social behaviors, social insects invest more in these sensory systemsused to communicate information about resources, mates and sources of danger to their colonies and, therefore, are integral to survivalthan their solitary counterparts, according to Sarah Kocher, an associate research scholar at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the paper's corresponding author.

Kocher and her colleagues imaged the antennae of adult females from 36 species that Kocher netted in the wild, mostly in France, or secured from specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Using a scanning electron microscope at Princeton, they obtained information about the antennae's surface topography and composition and observed convergent changes in both sensilla structures and the chemical signals of the groups as sociality was gained and lost.

Kocher and her colleagues chose to examine halictid bees because they exhibit remarkable diversity in social behavior, from eusocial to solitary. Eusocial refers to an organizational structure in which individual insects in a colony forgo their reproductive capacity and perform a specific task, such as caring for young or gathering food, as seen in many ant, wasp and honeybee species. Also, within this family of insects, social behavior has evolved independently several times, and there are numerous examples of reversion, or a reappearance of an earlier physical characteristic, and replicated losses of sociality. These repeated gains and losses make the species one of the most behaviorally diverse social insects on the planet, and good candidates for studying sociality, according to Kocher. "What we have is a system with tremendous comparative power," she said.

Relatively little is known about the evolutionary transition between solitary and social living, according to Kocher. But in this paper, "[The researchers] provide an elegant solution to this problem," said Tom Wenseleers, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Leuven in Belgium who is familiar with the research but had no role in it. "By studying a group of primitively eusocial insects that evolved sociality more recently and on several occasions reverted back to a solitary lifestyle, [they] succeed in making an accurate comparison of the investment in chemosensory systems made by social and derived, closely related, nonsocial species."

In the paper, the researchers also noted that ancestrally solitary halictid beesthose bees that had never evolved social behaviorshad sensilla densities similar to eusocial species, while secondarily solitary halictid beesthose bees that evolved from social to solitary and backexhibited decreases in sensilla density. Kocher was surprised by these patterns, but concluded that "sensilla density may be an important precursor to the evolution of social behavior."

"This study demonstrates that changes in social structure are reflected in changes to the sensory systems of insects," she said. "[It] not only illustrates the evolutionary shift from reproducing as an individual to having to coordinate reproduction as a group, but also how this behavioral change can create an evolutionary feedback loop in which traits are selected in order to increase sociality in subsequent generations."

Explore further: The high cost of communication among social bees

More information: Bernadette Wittwer et al, Solitary bees reduce investment in communication compared with their social relatives, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620780114

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Bee antennae offer links between the evolution of social behavior ... - Phys.Org

Remember the movie Quest For Fire?

It's an iconic Hollywood moment: Ancient humans discover how to make fire. It happens pretty quickly, and there's a chase scene starring a saber-toothed tiger to heighten the suspense.

Off the big screen, though, evolutionary changes, including cognitive-behavioral changes that would underpin our species' control of fire, often happen in fits and starts over lengthy periods.

In papers just published in a supplement to the journal Current Anthropology devoted to human evolution and fire, we see just how lengthy that process may have been.

In his contribution, "Identifying and describing pattern and process in the evolution of hominin use of fire," Dennis Sandgathe of Simon Fraser University notes that it's quite challenging to distinguish between the archaeological signature of fire use by our early ancestors and that of naturally-occurring fires:

"The probability seems vanishingly small that the location of any open-air Early Stone Age-Lower Paleolithic site would not have natural fires pass over it at least once (and probably many times) in the period of time since its deposition. If the site is not too deeply buried, artifacts and bones can be altered by the heat of a passing natural fire, and charcoal and ash from natural fires can be introduced into the site sequence."

In other words, what looks like evidence for human use of fire may actual be evidence of a natural process.

Sandgathe continues:

"Even in cases where it seems very clear that the fires were the result of hominin behavior, there still remains the possibility that they acquired the fire from natural sources and did not create it themselves. This possibility seems to be consistently overlooked, underappreciated, or simply dismissed out of hand."

While acknowledging the possibility that the site of Gesher Benot Ya'akov in Israel indicates the first repeated fire use by our ancestors at around 800,000 years ago, Sandgathe concludes that "the earliest unquestionable examples" of continuous, long-term fire use come later, between 350,000 and 200,000 at the cave sites of Hayonim, Qesem, and Tabun, also in Israel. There, hearths and burned lithics occur in such abundance as to reasonably preclude other explanations. Sandgathe notes, however, that "continuous" doesn't necessarily mean "habitual," that is, "there may still be decades, centuries, or in some cases even millennia between fire-use events."

We can, Sandgathe says, take the date of 400,000 years ago as a kind of milestone in our ancestors' use of fire. But even then, fire use wasn't anything like a key behavioral adaptation for a long while, as he explained to me via email:

"The current evidence does suggest that, while there may have been rare, isolated fire-use events prior to 400,000 years ago, no hominins were regularly using fire prior to this and, in fact, it seems pretty clear from my (and colleague's) research that at least some Neanderthal populations in Europe were not regularly using fire as recently as 50,000 years ago and perhaps even later...[Fire use] continued to be intermittent, opportunistic, involve the exploitation of natural fire sources, and was not an integral part of any hominin adaptations until sometime after 50,000 years ago."

A non-human primate model may help us understand the evolution of fire behavior, too. Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University and Nicole Herzog of the University of Utah in their paper Savanna Chimpanzees at Fongoli, Senegal, Navigate a Fire Landscape explain why Fongoli is an unusual site for wild chimpanzees: There, in a savanna-woodland setting with environmental pressures quite similar to those our early ancestors may have faced, chimpanzees encounter wildfires quite regularly, some extensive in size. This situation sets the Fongoli chimpanzees apart from all other habituated chimpanzees who live in forested environments where fire is rare.

The Fongoli fires are mostly anthropogenic, set by people in order to clear land for cultivation or to make hunting, or even just walking through the grassland, easier. But those fires impact the chimpanzees' daily lives, too.

The data collection that Pruetz and Herzog carried out shows, first, that the Fongoli chimpanzees spent more time foraging and traveling in burned areas compared to unburned areas. That's smart thinking on the apes' part, because it's an efficient use of their energy. Second, the primatologists conclude that the apes "can accurately predict the leading edges of fire and assess other aspects of fire behavior" such that they seem to be quite unconcerned with smoldering fires or even early flaming fires, but avoid more serious fires.

Pruetz, via Messenger app, described for me a memorable experience she had a few years ago at Fongoli that highlights chimpanzees' fire knowledge:

"I almost violated my own rule of 'follow the chimps' when we're in close proximity to a wildfire. The three adult males I was following first skirted the fire but then watched it for some minutes and went down into the ravine it was moving through. I thought we'd all be burned up and almost turned around but found that they'd crossed a spot in the ravine where there was still some green vegetation at the bottom, and the fire died out there and moved around while we quickly crossed. Note to self: Don't doubt the chimps!"

Writing in Current Anthropology, Pruetz and Herzog conclude that the chimpanzees "appear strategically to use burned landscapes and exhibit cognitive abilities necessary for interacting with wildfires, which tentatively provides support for the early fire-use theory."

Here we have a key insight about our own past: In the periods before the confirmed, repeated fire use that Sandgathe pinpoints, our ancestors may very well have understood fire and incorporated the effects of fire into their normal routines in intelligent ways. The process of fire manufacture and control would then have evolved quite gradually.

Sandgathe himself concludes something that aligns beautifully with the primatologists' perspective. He writes in Current Anthropology:

"In some regions (and time periods) high frequencies of natural fires may have provided some hominin groups with constant, reliable access to fire, limiting any pressure to develop fire-maintenance techniques or fire-manufacture technologies."

Not as sexy, perhaps, as Quest For Fire but good solid science.

As the headline to a recent post of mine here suggests, new evidence in human evolution is being announced at a "dizzying" rate. Just last week the news broke that, based on fossil finds from Morocco, our species Homo sapiens may be over 100,000 years older than we thought.

Often though, the slow-and-steady, behind-the-headlines work such as that discussed in the Current Anthropology issue on fire is where advances in paleoanthropology come.

Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara's new book is Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape

Read more from the original source:

What Are Our Best Clues To The Evolution Of Fire-Making? - NPR