March 3, 2017 | 3:56pm

Ben McAdoo announced three adjustments to his Giants coaching staff on Friday, including the creation of a new position: Pratik Patel has been hired as director of performance nutrition/assistant strength and conditioning coach.

Patel was most recently the sports nutrition coach at Oregon.

Rob Leonard has been promoted to assistant defensive line coach after spending the previous four seasons as a defensive assistant. Leonard replaces Jeff Zgonina, who left to become the 49ers defensive line coach.

Bobby Blick replaces Leonard as the defensive assistant. Blick was the director of player personnel for Armys football team in 2016.

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Giants hire a nutrition coach in latest evolution of staff - New York Post

Off his game ... Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island. Photograph: Warner Bros

Deep in the distant jungle the undergrowth stirs, the lagoons froth, the branches shake and a huge monster rears terrifyingly up on its haunches, blotting out the sun. Run for your lives! Its a 700 ft turkey, making squawking and gobbling noises and preparing to lay a gigantic egg.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jacksons game remake; its something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked with but minus the fun. The film gives away the apes physical appearance far too early, thus blowing the suspense, the narrative focus is all over the place and the talented Tom Hiddleston is frankly off his game. Given no support in terms of script and direction, he looks stiff and unrelaxed and delivers lines with an edge of panic, like Michael Caine in The Swarm.

This is a Kong deprived of his kingship and his mystery, and even the title is a jumble, unsure of whether its the ape thats the star or maybe the island itself, seething with loads of huge animals, scaring the borrower-sized humans who have rashly dared enter this domain. It comes to us from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts known for his comedy before this and screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly and John Gatins. The script here feels like the umpteenth rewrite with almost all the humour and nuance chucked out to make sure it plays in non-English-language territories.

The time is the early 70s, just after the fall of Saigon, perhaps the latest plausible period in which technology would not have instantly alerted humanity to a primate of this size. Brainy scientists Bill Panda (John Goodman) and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) get government funding for a top-secret mission to go to the remote Skull Island somewhere in south east Asia to investigate the rumoured big creature. They ask for military help and get it from bored soldier Lt Col Preston Packard (Samuel L Jackson) and his guys, eager for a redemptive challenge after the fiasco of Vietnam. This is one war were not gonna lose! Packard hollers, but hoists the white flag almost at once in the war against silliness and boredom.

On the civilian front, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) is a tough, sexy photojournalist (a job that exists in the movies, not so much in real life) who senses the story of a lifetime, and Bill has also hired a tracker: former British special forces guy James Conrad (Hiddleston) whose alpha chops are established at the very beginning with a perfunctory fight in a bar. He wins. Kong himself is played in motion capture by that very interesting British actor Toby Kebbell who also plays Prestons trusted subordinate Maj Jack Chapman.

The ape is repeatedly and anti-climactically revealed. Almost at once, our attention is pointlessly split into the gung-ho adventures of the army types (Preston is trying to find his missing buddy) and James, Mason and their party who have become separated from the military and discover the islands startling human secret. They make an upriver journey in an entirely preposterous boat allegedly made from salvaged parts of a crashed plane.

The dramatic presence of Kong himself is muddled. The film tries to make him the islands noble-savage deity, the hairy good guy, as opposed to the huge baddie lizards who are scuttling around the place but are kept in check by the mighty Kong. The script makes a half-hearted joke about not knowing what to call these lizards; I suspect none of the writers could agree. How did we get from the 1933 King Kong to this? A theory of de-evolution is needed.

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Kong: Skull Island review only de-evolution can explain this zestless mashup - The Guardian

BOSTON In humans mysterious journey to become intelligent, socializing creatures like no other in the animal world, one innovation played an essential role: religion.

Thats the theory that a preeminent evolutionary scientist is setting out to prove.

You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness, said Robin Dunbar. Somehow, its clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that were all one family.

Dunbar, an evolutionary psychology professor at Oxford University, gained some measure of fame more than 20 years ago for his research on the size of animals social networks. Each species of primate, he found, can manage to keep up a social bond with a certain number of other members of its own species. That number goes up as primates brain size increases, from monkeys to apes.

Humans, Dunbar found, are capable of maintaining significantly more social ties than the size of our brains alone could explain. He proved that each human is surprisingly consistent in the number of social ties we can maintain: about five with intimate friends, 50 with good friends, 150 with friends and 1,500 with people we could recognize by name. That discovery came to be known as Dunbars number.

And then Dunbar turned to figuring out why Dunbars number is so high. Did humor help us manage it? Exercise? Storytelling? That riddle has been Dunbars quest for years and religion is the latest hypothesis hes testing in his ongoing attempt to find the answer.

Most of these things were looking at, you get in religion in one form or another, he said.

In the case of Dunbar and his colleagues, they already published research demonstrating that two other particularly human behaviors increased peoples capacity for social bonding. In the lab, they showed that first, laughter, and second, singing, left research subjects more capable of forming connections with other people than they were before.

Religion is the remaining key to explaining humans remarkable social networks, Dunbar thinks. These three things are very good at triggering endorphins, making us feel bonded, he said last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting, where he presented his teams research on laughter and singing and introduced the forthcoming research on religion.

Religion includes numerous elements of Dunbars earlier studies on endorphin-producing activities. Lots of singing, to start. Repetitive motion triggers endorphins, he said, noting that traditions from Catholicism to Islam to Buddhism to Hinduism make use of prayer beads.

Plus, researchers have shown that doing these activities in synchronized fashion with other people drastically magnifies the endorphin-producing effect: Picture the coordinated bowing that is central to Muslim, Jewish and Catholic worship.

And Dunbars most recent published research demonstrated the effectiveness of emotional storytelling in bonding groups of strangers who hear the story together again, a fixture of religious worship.

What you get from dance and singing on its own is a sense of belonging. It happens very quickly. What happens, I suspect, is that it can trigger very easily trance states, Dunbar said. He theorizes that these spiritual experiences matter much more than dance and song alone. Once youve triggered that, youre in, I think, a different ballgame. It ramps up massively. Thats whats triggered. Theres something there.

Dunbars team will start research on religion in April, and he expects it will take three years. To begin, he wants to map a sort of evolutionary tree of religion, using statistical modeling to try to show when religious traditions evolved and how they morphed into each other.

Of course, religious people themselves might find Dunbars theory odd most dont think of religion existing to serve an evolutionary purpose, but of their faiths simply being true.

But Smith thinks one can easily have faith in both Gods truth and religions role in human development. From the religious point of view, you can say this ... God created humans as a very particular type of creature, with very particular brains and biology, just so that they would develop into the type of humans who would know God and believe in God, Smith said. Theyre not in conflict at all.

He added: A lot of people assume, falsely, that science and religion are zero-sum games: that if science explains something, then religion must not be true ... If you were God and wanted to set up the world in a certain way, wouldnt you create humans with bigger brains and the ability to imagine?

One more research finding on the place of God in our brains remember Dunbars number, the five intimate friends and 50 good friends and 150 friends each person can hold onto? Dunbar says that if a person feels he or she has a close relationship with a spiritual figure, like God or the Virgin Mary, then that spiritual personage actually fills up one of those numbered spots, just like a human relationship would. One of your closest friends, scientifically speaking, might be God.

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Religion key to humans' social evolution, scientist says - The Durango Herald

Prehistoric creatures dont come any more poignant than mammoths. I trace my own fascination with them back to elementary school where school fieldtrips and visits with my mom took me to a Los Angeles icon, the La Brea Tar Pits, where Columbian mammoth bones stuck in the tar (actually asphalt) were being pulled out, as they still are today.

In the Ice Age, animals famously became trapped in the sticky stuff after mistaking such a pit for a watering hole. Outside the current spiffy Page Museum on the site, motorists along Wilshire Boulevard can still admire the same statuary group I recall from childhood visits, depicting a female mammoth trapped in the tar as an adult male and a younger mammoth, her family, look on helplessly. The idea of these great creatures, so out of place wandering what would one day be the Southern California of my childhood, gave me a melancholy sort of thrill.

Now scientists have upped the poignancy factor with a genetic description of the end of the race for mammoths. Their story played out on remote, frigid Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, where a group of perhaps 300 individuals survived, dwindling to an end as late as 2000 BC. In other words into historic times! They compared the genome of a mammoth from 45,000 years ago when the population was robust across northern Europe and Siberia, to an individual from 4,300 years ago, close to the last of its kind.

The evolution, or devolution, is heartbreaking. The Abstract from the research article in PLOS Genetics describes a population slowly falling victim to inbreeding:

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) populated Siberia, Beringia, and North America during the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA sequencing have allowed for complete genome sequencing for two specimens of woolly mammoths (Palkopoulou et al. 2015). One mammoth specimen is from a mainland population 45,000 years ago when mammoths were plentiful. The second, a 4300 yr old specimen, is derived from an isolated population on Wrangel island where mammoths subsisted with small effective population size more than 43-fold lower than previous populations. These extreme differences in effective population size offer a rare opportunity to test nearly neutral models of genome architecture evolution within a single species. Using these previously published mammoth sequences, we identify deletions, retrogenes, and non-functionalizing point mutations. In the Wrangel island mammoth, we identify a greater number of deletions, a larger proportion of deletions affecting gene sequences, a greater number of candidate retrogenes, and an increased number of premature stop codons. This accumulation of detrimental mutations is consistent with genomic meltdown in response to low effective population sizes in the dwindling mammoth population on Wrangel island. In addition, we observe high rates of loss of olfactory receptors and urinary proteins, either because these loci are non-essential or because they were favored by divergent selective pressures in island environments. Finally, at the locus of FOXQ1 we observe two independent loss-of-function mutations, which would confer a satin coat phenotype in this island woolly mammoth.

The creamy, satiny white coat would have provided less warmth, and so you picture them succumbing, perhaps in some cases, to the elements.

The New York Times observes that the researchers found that many genes had accumulated mutations that would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete, making the proteins useless. They mention evolution only once, quoting Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University, who notes, This is probably the best evidence I can think of for the rapid genomic decay of island populations.

Well, if this genomic decay isnt evolution at work, what is it? When actually observed in the world, as opposed to in the imagination of the Darwinist, this is how evolution tends to be: things falls apart, sometimes with consequences that spell the end of a species, as happened with the mammoths, or occasionally with beneficial results. Or things stay the same, thanks to natural selection weeding out deleterious mutations. Or they vary minimally, or vary a little more dramatically only, in the end, to revert to a mean when given the chance, as Tom Bethell describes in Darwins House of Cards.

What evolution is never seen doing is building complex structures new proteins, for example. That always lies beyond a distant horizon, strictly a matter as Bethell emphasizes of imaginative extrapolation. This theory simply cannot produce the goods it promises, try and try as it might. And that is poignant in its own way, if you think about it.

Image: Woolly mammoth, by Flying Puffin [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Evolution in Action? The End of the Woolly Mammoth - Discovery Institute

Washington DC - infoZine - Rainfall and snowfall patterns are changing with climate variation, which likely plays a key role in shaping natural selection, according to results published today by an international team of researchers.

Twenty scientists from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia contributed to the study. Their results were published in the journal Science.

The team assembled a database of 168 published studies that measured natural selection over certain time periods for plant and animal populations worldwide. The results from the data set the scientists examined showed that between 20 and 40 percent of variation in selection within studies could be attributed to variability in local precipitation.

That's significant, he says, "especially considering the global scale of the study. These results suggest that variation in selection is actually partly predictable based on climate features like precipitation."

Adds Doug Levey, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, "These results show that changes in precipitation can have surprising evolutionary effects on plants and animals worldwide."

In a time of change for rainfall, snowstorms and other forms of precipitation, plants and animals are changing, too, Siepielski said. As an example, Siepielski cited birds that live in the Galpagos Islands, called medium ground finches. The birds' beak sizes and shapes have changed over several generations.

"Differences in precipitation over years have affected the sizes of seeds available for the birds to eat," Siepielski said. "Birds that had bills well-matched to eat particular seed sizes were the ones that tended to survive."

The team found that changes in temperature had much less effect than precipitation. Siepielski called that surprising. "Temperature didn't have much explanatory power," he said. "It might act on a different scale that we couldn't pick up in the data set."

"By showing that selection was influenced by climate variation," the researchers stated in their paper, "our results indicate that climate variability may cause widespread alterations in selection regimes, potentially shifting evolution on a global scale."

Translation: what comes down as rain or snow may radically alter how some species will evolve.

Link:

NSF Study: Precipitation Patterns Influencing Evolution - Kansas City infoZine

March 3, 2017 Associate Professor David Ackerley. Credit: Victoria University

Research led by Associate Professor David Ackerley, director of Victoria's Biotechnology programme, has underpinned the development of a new form of chemotherapy that exclusively targets cancer cells.

A key goal of this chemotherapy is a more targeted treatment method that results in fewer side effects for cancer patients.

To achieve this goal, Associate Professor Ackerley and his team engineered enzymes that can transform a relatively safe and non-toxic compound (a "pro-drug") into a drug that is highly toxic to cancer cells.

The genes encoding these enzymes are delivered to cancer cells using viruses or bacteria that are only able to replicate in tumours.

The pro-drug the team worked with is called PR-104A, and was developed by scientists at the University of Auckland, including Associate Professor Ackerley's collaborators on this study, Associate Professor Adam Patterson and Dr Jeff Smaill.

"The enzyme we started with was moderately active with PR-104A," says Associate Professor Ackerley. "However, this was purely by chancenature has never evolved enzymes to recognise these very artificial types of molecules.

"We reasoned that by mimicking evolution in the laboratoryby introducing random mutations into the gene encoding our target enzyme, then selecting the tiny minority of variants where chance mutations had improved activitywe might eventually achieve a more specialised enzyme that could more effectively activate PR-104A."

Not only is the team's artificially evolved enzyme significantly better at activating PR-104A within living cells, it also addresses another major problemhow to keep track of the microbes in patients to make sure they are only infecting cancerous cells.

"A unique aspect of our work is that our enzymes can also trap radioactive molecules called 'positron emission tomography (PET) probes'," says Associate Professor Ackerley. "We hope that this will allow a clinician to put a patient in a full body PET scanner to safely identify the regions where the microbes are replicating."

The team's research has been published in this month's edition of high-profile research journal Cell Chemical Biology, and has been supported by several New Zealand funding agencies including the Marsden Fund managed by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the New Zealand Cancer Society.

In ongoing work, Dr Smaill and Associate Professor Patterson have been developing more effective pro-drugs to partner with Associate Professor Ackerley's enzymes. The team has been collaborating with groups at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, aiming to progress the therapy into clinical trials in cancer patients.

Explore further: Wave of interest in new cancer therapy

More information: Janine N. Copp et al. Engineering a Multifunctional Nitroreductase for Improved Activation of Prodrugs and PET Probes for Cancer Gene Therapy, Cell Chemical Biology (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.chembiol.2017.02.005

Using viruses and bacteria that normally cause disease to cure disease is an apparent contradiction, but its fundamental to the work being carried out by Dr. David Ackerley.

Colon cancer cells that are pretreated with an ingredient found in cruciferous vegetables are more likely to be killed by a cancer drug that is currently in development, found ETH scientists. This is one of only a few examples ...

To better understand how cancer initiates and spreads, Yale associate professor of pathology Qin Yan turned to the field of epigenetics, which examines changes in the expression of genes and proteins that do not affect the ...

Research at Victoria University of Wellington could lead to a new generation of antibiotics, helping tackle the global issue of 'superbugs' that are resistant to modern medicine.

Unprecedented images of cancer genome-mutating enzymes acting on DNA provide vital clues into how the enzymes work to promote tumor evolution and drive poor disease outcomes. These images, revealed by University of Minnesota ...

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have uncovered a new class of compounds - glyconaphthalimides - that can be used to target cancer cells with greater specificity than current options allow.

A type of functional brain training known as neurofeedback shows promise in reducing symptoms of chemotherapy-induced nerve damage, or neuropathy, in cancer survivors, according to a study by researchers at The University ...

Research led by Associate Professor David Ackerley, director of Victoria's Biotechnology programme, has underpinned the development of a new form of chemotherapy that exclusively targets cancer cells.

Physicians currently have no targeted treatment options available for women diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer known as triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), leaving standard-of-care chemotherapies as a first ...

A new study by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James) has identified a mechanism by which cancer cells ...

It's what's missing in the tumor genome, not what's mutated, that thwarts treatment of metastatic melanoma with immune checkpoint blockade drugs, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in ...

Anyone who uses an employee badge to enter a building may understand how a protein called ENL opens new possibilities for treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a fast-growing cancer of bone marrow and blood cells and the ...

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Mimicking evolution to treat cancer - Medical Xpress

NBCNews.com

The Evolution and Collapse of the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Florida History NBCNews.com The Evolution and Collapse of the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Florida History. Fri, Mar 03. How did Scott Rothstein go from one of the most recognized names in Florida's legal and political circles to the mastermind behind a $1.4 billion Ponzi scheme? and more »

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The Evolution and Collapse of the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Florida History - NBCNews.com

March 2, 2017 (Top) color samples were used in the present study. (Bottom) optimal number of clusters in Japanese color names derived by k-means analysis with Gap statistic. Credit: Ichiro Kuriki

Color plays an important role in conveying visual information. For example, color can help the observer find an object in a cluttered environment. Although the human eye can distinguish millions of colors, human languages have only a few color terms, such as "red," "green," "blue" and "yellow," which speakers can use to communicate about colors in everyday life. These color terms change over time as a language evolves, and the Japanese language is no exception.

This became clear through the work of an international collaboration between researchers at Tohoku University, their colleagues at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Ohio State University.

The researchers investigated the number of color categories (such as aka, midori, ao, ki, etc.) that are commonly used by native Japanese speakers. They asked 52 participants to name 320 color samples of various hues and lightness (plus black, white and several grays) using only single color words without modifiers (no "greenish yellow" or "light purple").

Statistical analysis of the results revealed 19 common Japanese categories. There were the 11 basic color categories common to most modern industrialized cultures (red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, brown, orange, white, gray and black), plus eight additional named color categories. These were: mizu ("water")/light blue, hada ("skin tone")/peach, matcha ("ceremonial green tea")/yellow-green, oudo ("mud")/mustard, enji/maroon, yamabuki ("goldflower")/gold and cream. Of these additional terms, mizu was used by 98% of informants, making it a strong candidate for a 12th Japanese basic color category.

Thirty years ago, a study of Japanese color categories (Uchikawa & Boynton, 1987) did not reveal mizu as a basic color category, because the informants in that earlier study often used mizu ("water") and ao (blue) interchangeably. Conversely, Uchikawa & Boynton found that kusa ("grass") was a very popular term for yellow-green, whereas, in the present study, kusa has been largely replaced with matcha ("ceremonial green tea"). These results illustrate that color terms, like many other aspects of language, change over time.

In contrast to these recent changes, there is one tradition that has not changed over the past millennium: the mixed use of green and blue. Careful study of classic Japanese poems before the 10th century showed that ao ("blue") was used to name both things that were clearly blue and also things that were clearly green; the same was true of midori ("green"). Even today, modern Japanese people refer to the color of the green traffic light, lush green leaves and green vegetables, as ao ("blue"). However, the use of ao and midori are otherwise quite distinct.

The transition from a single category encompassing both blue and green ("grue") to distinct blue and green categories is considered to be a landmark in the typical evolution of color lexicons around the world. For example, the Middle English term "hwen" was used to denote a grue category until 13th century, but modern English, like modern Japanese, has distinct terms for separate blue and green color categories. These investigators showed that, in addition to distinct color terms for blue and green, modern Japanese has recently added a new intermediate color term "mizu" for lighter bluish and greenish samples.

This study showed that although modern Japanese is not a "grue" language - since blue and green are distinct color categories - Japanese people have nonetheless retained traditional expressions from the classic poetic tradition of a thousand years ago.

Explore further: Blue or green? United Kingdom split over color of swatch

More information: Ichiro Kuriki et al, The modern Japanese color lexicon, Journal of Vision (2017). DOI: 10.1167/17.3.1

A survey from a Scottish eye care company could be sparking a color controversy similar to last year's debate over the color of a dress.

How do we remember colors? What makes green... green?

From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the worlds languages.

Would a color by any other name be thought of in the same way, regardless of the language used to describe it?

Though people can distinguish among millions of colors, we have trouble remembering specific shades because our brains tend to store what we've seen as one of just a few basic hues, a Johns Hopkins University-led team discovered.

A joint group of researchers from Chuo University, Japan Women's University and Tohoku University has revealed that infants aged between 5 and 7 months hold the representation of color categories in their brain, even before ...

A core set of genes involved in the responses of honey bees to multiple diseases caused by viruses and parasites has been identified by an international team of researchers. The findings provide a better-defined starting ...

While it was once believed that genes regulated biological functions almost exclusively by being transcribed to coding RNAs that were then translated into proteins, it is now known that the picture is much more complex. In ...

Rest easy, folks. Armies of genetically modified super-species are unlikely to conquer Earth anytime soon.

Why we sleep is one of the enduring unanswered mysteries of modern science. Along with such activities as eating, protecting oneself and reproducing, sleep is one of the major biological imperatives of existence.

The brown anole, a prolific lizard native to Cuba and the Bahamas and now commonly found in many tropical and subtropical regions, is providing new clues to how genetics and hormones work together to shape the development ...

It's a cheering thought for anyone heading towards their golden years. Research from the Babraham Institute has shown that ageing can be beneficial - albeit so far only in yeast.

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The evolution of Japanese color vocabulary over the past 30 years - Phys.Org

NBCSports.com

Panthers GM not a fan of talk of offensive evolution NBCSports.com I know our coaches are bright men and they can evolve, . . . I hate that word, Gettleman said. They can change. Stick a needle in my eye, I'm different than the first time you guys saw me up here. The bottom line is the responsibility of the coaches ... and more »

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Panthers GM not a fan of talk of offensive evolution - NBCSports.com

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The Siberian permafrost has been a massive freezer for everything buried within it for hundreds of thousands of years. But climate change has provoked an alarming defrost of the tundra.

Permafrost is a silent ticking time bomb, explains Robert Spencer, an environmental scientist at Florida State University, because as it thaws, the dirt canrelease bacteria, carbon, methane, viruses, and more.

Huge holes have even begun appearing seemingly out of the blue, and in other places, the tundra is bubbling beneath peoples feet.

Now, new research has revealed that one of the permafrosts biggest craters in the region, which is referred to bythe local Yakutian people as the doorway to the underworld, is growing so quickly that its exposing forests, carcasses, and up to 200,000 years of historical climate records. Its called the Batagaika crater, which is a megaslump or thermokarst.

The largest of its kind, coming in at almost 0.6 miles long and 282 feet deep, it seems the crater is expanding each day. The team even suggests that the side wall of the crater will reach a neighbouring valley in just a few months due to temperatures heating up in the Northern Hemisphere, which couldresult in additional land collapse.

On average over many years, we have seen that theres not so much acceleration or deceleration of these rates, its continuously growing, explainsFrank Gnther from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. And continuous growth means that the crater gets deeper and deeper every year.

The hole will only get deeper and larger, which will bring to the surface carbon stores that have been trapped for thousands of years.

Global estimations of carbon stored in permafrost is [the] same amount as whats in the atmosphere, Gnther said.

At the very least, however, the crater could reveal a slew of important climate data, which, according to lead researcherJulian Murton from the University of Sussex, could help us to understand how the climate of Siberia changed in the past, and how it will shift over the coming years. Such insight mayhelp us to better prepare for when the permafrost melts again, which last occurredaround 10,000 years ago,when theEarth transitionedout of its last Ice Age.

The Batagaika site contains a remarkably thick sequence of permafrost deposits, which include two wood-rich layers interpreted as forest beds that indicate past climates about as warm or warmer than todays climate, Murton explains.

The upper forest bed overlies an old land surface that was eroded, probably when permafrost thawed in a past episode of climate warming.

But theres more research that needs to be done, Murton says,as the exact dates of the sediment that have been exposed in the crater still arent known.

Murton is devising a plan at the moment to drill bore holes in the region in order to examine additional sediment in hopes of getting a better understanding of what happened in the past.

Ultimately, were trying to see if climate change during the last Ice Age [in Siberia] was characterised by a lot of variability: warming and cooling, warming and cooling as occurred in the North Atlantic region, he explains.

Your life path number can tell you A LOT about you.

With the ancient science of Numerology you can find out accurate and revealing information just from your name and birth date.

Get your free numerology reading and learn more about how you can use numerology in your life to find out more about your path and journey. Get Your free reading.

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Siberia's Melting 'Doorway To The Underworld' Is Exposing Ancient Forests - Collective Evolution

Macroevolution and Its Complaints Discovery Institute The term macroevolution has problems. Why? Among other things, because it's a term that means different things to different people. Case in point: an email correspondent points out a random usage on a BioLogos Forum thread, Is evolution continuing?

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Macroevolution and Its Complaints - Discovery Institute

Modesto Bee

Oakdale pastor leads a look at Adam, Eve and evolution co-existing Modesto Bee He's done more reading on it in recent years and seen an emergence of ideas that are more in the center of the spectrum of beliefs. You can embrace evolution and still believe Adam and Eve were real people, Roberts said in a phone interview Wednesday.

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Oakdale pastor leads a look at Adam, Eve and evolution co-existing - Modesto Bee

The Orioles farm system is not very good, just about everyone who isnt paid by the Orioles agrees. This has been the case for a few years now. The team has maintained success every other year at the big league level, so it hasnt mattered yet, but they havent had much success in getting mid-tier prospects to turn into MLB-caliber players.

You can see this clearly in the evolution of the annual Orioles top 10 prospects list over the past several seasons. While the Orioles have had some prospects that everybody really liked, including Manny Machado, Dylan Bundy, and Kevin Gausman, these same players were about all the value that the Orioles have gotten at the MLB level from their top 10 guys.

The folks at MLB Pipeline, who do the top 100 prospects in baseball and the top 10 prospects in each organization for MLB.com, helpfully put each list from 2011 onward in one graphic on Twitter:

The strength of the top names kept the Orioles at least in the middle of the pack for a number of these years. Along with the players the Orioles got when they were still picking in the top 5 every year, Jonathan Schoop has proved to be a success story from the farm. There are some others rounding out these top 10 rankings where about all one can do is give a grim shake of the head.

I mean, really, was Xavier Avery and Joe Mahoney really the best they could do prior to the 2011 season? Nick Delmonico and Jason Esposito before the 2012 season? It remains something of a miracle that the 2012 team won 93 games. Other than Machado, they sure didnt get much help from the farm. Outside of Schoop and Gausman, neither did the 2014 team.

That 2011 ranking is so long ago that it still has Mychal Givens the shortstop, and the fact that he re-emerged as a reliever prior to the 2016 rankings was a poor sign for the system anyway. Givens has had some big league success, but for the most part, if one of your best prospects is already a reliever, thats not a good thing.

To be fair to the Orioles, and to any failed prospect anywhere, its hard to get to MLB and stay there. Most minor leaguers, even some that get themselves proclaimed as top 100 prospects in all of MLB, arent good enough. Of the ones who are good enough, many will get hurt and not be what they were supposed to be.

There are a lot of failures that can be laid at the Orioles feet. They havent developed an outfielder since Nick Markakis. All we need to know about their success in developing starting pitchers is that they thought it was a good idea to give up a first round pick to sign Yovani Gallardo and later trade for Wade Miley last year.

Some of these are self-inflicted wounds. Trading Eduardo Rodriguez cost the Orioles, though they did at least have the value of Andrew Miller down the stretch run and in the playoffs that year. Trading Zach Davies cost them more, because Gerardo Parra was awful. The two have combined to start 75 games over the past two seasons.

Still, a starting rotation consisting of Chris Tillman, Gausman, Bundy, Rodriguez, and Davies probably wouldnt leave you feeling much better than you might about the current rotation. This stuff isnt easy to do, and its harder still now that the team is good and theyre not picking in the top 5-10 spots of every round any more.

The thing is, everyones old top 10 prospect lists look pretty bad. Most people in Birdland, myself included, would probably agree that the Boston farm system is always getting hyped. Here is their top prospect lists over the last decade:

Will Middlebrooks had a good half-season in his rookie year and was terrible afterwards. Brentz is 28 and has 90 MLB plate appearances under his belt.

There are success stories, much like the Orioles had. Xander Bogaerts is good. Jackie Bradley Jr., after an abysmal rookie year, is looking good, much to the chagrin of Os fans. So is Mookie Betts, whose ranking below some of those other guys now looks hilarious.

Others, like Yoan Moncada and Manuel Margot, were used as trade bait to fetch top quality MLB talent: Chris Sale and Craig Kimbrel.

Ryan Lavarnway was going to be the Red Sox catcher of the future. Then it was going to be Blake Swihart. Neither one proved to be that. Henry Owens has spent three years as a top 100 prospect in MLB. He also walked 81 batters in 137.2 innings at Triple-A last year. All the prospect people liked Allen Webster, at least until he came up to the MLB level and was bad, and so on.

Ranking prospects isnt a pointless endeavor. The people with expertise still do better than if a bunch of random schmucks were rating prospects. Its something to talk about. Its not an ironclad prophecy received from a blind hermit living on top of a mountain.

Maybe one lesson with the above is that Red Sox prospects get hyped more than they should. But the bigger lesson is just that its hard to find and develop big league talent, even if you have gobs of money and can afford to fail sometimes. Boston still owes Rusney Castillo another $46 million, for crying out loud.

If the Orioles are lucky, another four or five years down the road, the success rate of their top 10 prospects will be better than their ones from four or five years ago. Theyre really going to need it.

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The evolution of the Orioles top 10 prospects - Camden Chat

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Definition

noun, plural: evolutions

(1) The change in genetic composition of a population over successive generations, which may be caused by natural selection, inbreeding, hybridization, or mutation.

(2) The sequence of events depicting the development of a species or of a group of related organisms; phylogeny.

Supplement

Evolution pertains to the sequence of events depicting the gradual progression of changes in the genetic composition of a biological population over successive generations. Accordingly, all life on earth originates from a common ancestor, which is referred to as the last universal common ancestor, some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

In order for evolution to occur, there must be genetic variation. Genetic variation brings about evolution. Without it there will be no evolution. There are two major mechanisms that drive evolution. First is natural selection. Individuals with advantageous traits are more likely to reproduce successfully, passing these traits to the next generation. This kind of evolution driven by natural selection is called adaptive evolution. Another mechanism involves genetic drift, which produces random changes in the frequency of traits in a population. Evolution that arises from genetic drift is called neutral evolution.

Word origin: Latin evolutio (an unrolling, unfolding), ex- (from, out of) + volere (to roll)

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Evolution - Biology-Online Dictionary

February 28, 2017 Belemnoteuthis antiquus NHM OR25966, a 166 million year old exceptionally preserved extinct squid-relative was found near Bristol (Christian Malford). These ancient cephalopods with their large internal shell were not as fast as their recently evolved relatives, which survived until today's squid and cuttlefish. Credit: Jonathan Jackson and Zo Hughes, NHMUK

Octopus, cuttlefish and squid are well known in the invertebrate world. With their ink-squirting decoy technique, ability to change colour, bizarre body plan and remarkable intelligence they highlight that lacking a back-bone doesn't always mean lacking sophistication.

Examining their deep evolutionary past, researchers have been spoiled by their generous fossil record, as demonstrated by drawer after drawer of ammonites and belemnites in every natural history museum shop. But, the mostly shell-less modern cephalopods have been less easy to understand.

Now a new study, led by researchers from the University of Bristol, has found out how these remarkable creatures evolved by comparing their fossil records with the evolutionary history chronicled in their gene sequences to shed light on their origins.

Published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, it shows that the cephalopods diversified into the familiar modern octopuses, cuttlefish and squid during a time of great change in the marine world, known as the Mesozoic Marine Revolution, 160 to 100 million years in the past.

Lead author, Al Tanner, a PhD student at the University of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences, is a molecular biologist and bioinformatician at the Bristol Palaeobiology Research Groupa world leading evolutionary research group.

He said: "On land this was the time of the dinosaurs, but beneath the seas, ecologies were changing rapidly. Fish, squid and their predators were locked in evolutionary 'arms-races', leading to increasingly speedy and agile predators and prey.

"The cephalopods are now known to have also been caught up in this major transition, evolving to lose the shells of their ancestors and develop as dynamic and uniquely adapted marine animals."

The researchers used a technique called molecular clocks to investigate the timing of when the groups split from each other. Bristol co-author, Professor Davide Pisani, added: "Complex Bayesian models take all sorts of information into account to build a tree of evolutionary time.

"The key element of molecular clocks though is the fact that mutations steadily accumulate in genetic material over time - so by figuring out how many mutations per million years you find, and how it may vary between different groups, we can estimate evolutionary time."

Al Tanner said: "The molecular clock results can be compared to the fossil record. What we see is that while there is some uncertainty in molecular clock estimates, octopuses and squid appear during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution and the two lines of evidence come together to tell the tale of evolution".

Co-author Dr Jakob Vinther said: "By having a reduced internal skeleton compared to their ancient relatives, the modern squids and octopuses could compress their body and more efficiently jet away leaving a baffling cloud of ink with the attacking predator. Before the predator realises what has happened and gains clear view again, the squid is far out of sight."

Al Tanner added: "The research exemplifies why evolutionary biologists are increasingly seeking to understand deep history from the combined study of both living organisms and the geological record. Through this synoptic view, so called molecular palaeontologists are transforming our understanding of how life became so complex and diverse."

Explore further: Despite multicolor camouflage, cuttlefish, squid and octopus are colorblind

More information: Molecular clocks indicate turnover and diversification of modern coleoid cephalopods during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/lookup/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.2818

Researchers at The University of Queensland have established that colourful coastal cephalopods are actually colourblind but can still manage to blend beautifully with their surroundings.

(Phys.org)An international team of researchers has found a trove of marine fossils at a North American site that offers evidence of life bouncing back faster than thought after the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's ...

A study by researchers at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum sheds new light on a previously unclassifiable 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore known as Nectocaris pteryx.

A team of researchers from the University of Bristol studying the 'living fossil' Sphenodon - or tuatara - have identified a new way to measure the evolutionary rate of these enigmatic creatures, giving credence to Darwin's ...

A previously undiscovered species of an extinct primordial giant worm with terrifying snapping jaws has been identified by an international team of scientists.

The researchers from the Bristol Palaeobiology Group, part of the School of Earth Sciences, studied the best way to understand relationships of extinct animals to other extinct species as well as those alive today.

Think of all the things your mom taught yousit up straight, close your mouth when you chew, remember to say please and thank you the list goes on.

Octopus, cuttlefish and squid are well known in the invertebrate world. With their ink-squirting decoy technique, ability to change colour, bizarre body plan and remarkable intelligence they highlight that lacking a back-bone ...

A University of Florida study shows that mollusk fossils provide a reliable measure of human-driven changes in marine ecosystems and shifts in ocean biodiversity across time and space.

Intensive selective breeding over the past 200 years and high extinction rates among feral populations has greatly reduced the genetic diversity present in domestic goat breeds. The effect these pressures have had on Irish ...

Organic additives found in road salt alternativessuch as those used in the commercial products GeoMelt and Magic Saltact as a fertilizer to aquatic ecosystems, promoting the growth of algae and organisms that eat algae, ...

The Zika virus taking hold of the inner organelles of human liver and neural stem cells has been captured via light and electron microscopy. In Cell Reports on February 28, researchers in Germany show how the African and ...

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Yet another evolutionary fairy-tale to explain away the emperor's invisible gown.

It's strange that otherwise highly intelligent people are so blinded by a commitment to naturalism that they cannot or just plainly refuse to see the commonsense that points to the fact that abstract entities like information, signalling and coding cannot arise from purely materialistic processes alone. Those entities require an existing outside intelligent agent to affect the required outcomes. Hence darwinian evolution is a dead-end road. The Creator made life.

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Shedding new light on the evolution of the squid - Phys.org - Phys.Org

A reconstruction of Anchiornus, based on the new data. (Credit: Julius T. Csotonyi)

Firing lasers at fossils continues to be a winning strategy for paleontologists.

The new techniquebrings hidden details in fossils to the forefront, including remnants of soft tissue invisible to the naked eye. And a team of researchers from China is using the laser-assisted images to help piece together the evolutionary process that turned dinosaurs into the birds we know today.

In a paper published Tuesday inNature Communications, the team fixedits lasers onto a small feathered dinosaur calledAnchiornus to better understand its morphology. The technique, called laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF), causes minerals within the bones to light up in different colors, betraying thesoft tissues they once were.

An arm of Anchiornus, imaged with laser-stimulated fluorescence. (Credit: Wang XL, Pittman M et al. 2017)

With the new perspective, the researchers spotted a host of bird-like traits inAnchiornus, revealing that avian characteristics were present in some dinosaurs even 160 million years ago.

They found that the dinosaur had drumstick legs, a thin tail and footpads that closely resemble those of modern chickens. In addition, Anchiornuspossessed a structure called a propatagium, found on the front edge of birds wings, which is crucial for flight. Under a microscope, these soft tissues remain hidden, but with the help of lasers, they stand out in psychedelic colors.

Two images showing the fossil under normal light (top) and LSF (bottom). The inset image shows the chicken-like footpads. (Credit: Wang XL, Pittman M et al. 2017)

Anchiornus dates to the late Jurassic Period, which is whenpaleontologists believe birds were just beginning to appear. Finding bird-like features in this dinosaur allows researchers to better track this transition, in addition to offering hints of how vertebrates first developed the ability to fly.

The propatagia they found in Anchiornus look very similar to those found in modern gliding birds, they say, giving them some clues to its function.It still isnt clear, though, if the feathery dinosaurs were able to get off the ground or if the structures merelyrepresent an intermediate step onthe path to flight.

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Lasers Illuminate the Evolution of Flight - Discover Magazine (blog)

How protein misfolding may kickstart chemical evolution Science Daily Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is well-established -- organisms adapt over time in response to environmental changes. But theories about how life emerges -- the movement through a pre-Darwinian world to the Darwinian threshold ...

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How protein misfolding may kickstart chemical evolution - Science Daily

How would you explain the evolution of a small set of genes that are expressed for but a few brief hours -- when we consist of only 8-16 cells -- in a finely tuned choreography unique to placental mammals?

The answer, of course, is to use teleological language. That is because the evolutionary explanation is so transparently unrealistic. Thus, in a Science Daily article, Oxford University's Ignacio Maeso explains:

It was really shocking to find these genes are only read for a pulse of a few hours in our entire lifetime.

...

They are found on chromosome 19, known to be an unstable part of our genome. Think of it as a bubbling cauldron of DNA, with individual bits of DNA being added and taken away, occasionally forming whole new genes. At the dawn of placental mammals, 70 million years ago, these genes emerged and were grabbed by evolution to perform a new task, acting to control what cells do in the earliest stages of development.

"Grabbed by evolution to perform a new task": As often happens, the combination of passive voice and infinitive form tells the tale.

The teleology is not a mere slip-up. As we have documented many times, it is a common thread running throughout the genre of evolutionary literature. It is needed to make sense of the data, because evolution doesn't.

Not too surprisingly, teleological language appears in the original research journal paper in BMC Biology as well. To wit:

A small number of lineage-specific tandem gene duplications have occurred, and these raise questions concerning how evolutionarily young homeobox genes are recruited to new regulatory roles. For example, divergent tandem duplicates of the Hox3 gene have been recruited for extra-embryonic membrane specification and patterning in dipteran and lepidopteran insects, a large expansion of the Rhox homeobox gene family is deployed in reproductive tissues of mouse, and duplicates of TALE class genes are expressed in early development of molluscs.

Two of the evolutionists' favorite words are "recruited" and "deployed." They sound so active, despite, once more, the passive voice. And note the teleology slipped in, in the form of a prepositional phrase ("for...specification and patterning"), a construction typically used to indicate a subject's purpose or objective.

What better way to obviate the rather awkward problem that, if evolution is true, all biological variation must be random with respect to fitness (a claim that, by the way, has been falsified so many times we stopped counting), and thus without objective or purpose.

Evolutionists nonetheless continue to spread this fake news.

Photo credit: Joseppi -- stock.adobe.com.

Cross-posted at Darwin's God.

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In Evolutionary Literature, Researchers Habitually Slip in Teleological Language - Discovery Institute

Science Daily

Newfound primate teeth take a big bite out of the evolutionary tree of life Science Daily It is a member of the ancient Sivaladapidae primate family, consumed leaves and was about the size of a house cat, said Patel, co-author of the new study in the Journal of Human Evolution. "Among the primates, the most common ones in the Kashmir region ... Fossilised primate jaw discovery sheds new light on human evolutionSiliconrepublic.com Human Evolution: Fossil Hunters Find Primate Jawbone; New Species May Expand Knowledge Of Human Family TreeMedical Daily all 4 news articles »

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Newfound primate teeth take a big bite out of the evolutionary tree of life - Science Daily