Food prices in the U.S. fell for 19 straight months through July, the longest streak of price declines since the 1950s. Prices for staples like beef and eggs have fallen dramatically over the past year and a half, thanks in part to cheaper fuel costs and China buying less food from the U.S.
It did not take long before African rulers began to protest. The King of Kongo made a series of appeals to the King of Portugal decrying the impact of slaving. He protested about young men and women - including those from noble families - being kidnapped in broad daylight to be sold to European traders who then branded them with hot irons. He should stop complaining, the Portuguese sovereign replied. Kongo was a huge land that could afford to have some of its inhabitants shipped away; in any event, he went on, the Kingdom of Kongo benefited handsomely from the trade, including that of slaves.
A set of human-like footprints dating to 5.7 million years ago, discovered on the Greek island of Crete, challenge existing theories of how and when our species evolved. Prior to this discovery, the oldest confirmed hominin footprints were found in Tanzania and dated at a maximum of 3.65 million years. Anthropologists believed these ancient human relatives were isolated in Africa for several million years before spreading out to Europe and Asia. A new analysis of the prints found in Crete could complicate this evolutionary tale. “What makes this controversial is the age and location of the prints,” researcher Per Ahlberg tells ScienceDaily.com. At the time the prints were made, nearly 6 million years ago, Crete was still part of the Greek mainland and early human ancestors were theoretically still living in Africa and had ape-like feet. The fossils in Crete, however, have distinctly hominin-like features, including a predominant “big toe.” The animal didn’t have claws and walked upright on the soles of its feet—not its toes. “This discovery challenges the established narrative of early human evolution head-on and is likely to generate a lot of debate,” Ahlberg says.
Human evolution is often thought of as a process that ended millennia ago, when our ape-like ancestors morphed into Homo sapiens. But a new study has found that the process of natural selection continues, gradually weeding out life-shortening traits in modern humans, including genes that predispose people to heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and heavy smoking. Geneticists examined the genomes of 210,000 people of European descent in search of mutations associated with greater or lesser longevity. Natural selection—a basic mechanism of Darwin’s theory of evolution—is based on the principle that organisms best suited to their environments tend to survive longer, making it more likely that they’ll pass their genes on to future generations. The researchers found that the ApoE4 gene linked to Alzheimer’s is becoming less common, particularly among women. A gene mutation associated with a strong addiction to cigarette smoking in men is also on the decline, ScienceDaily.com reports. “It may be that men who don’t carry these harmful mutations can have more children, or that men and women who live longer can help with their grandchildren, improving their chance of survival,” says the study’s co-author, Molly Przeworski. The analysis also reveals that genetic variants linked to heart disease, asthma, obesity, and high cholesterol all appear less frequently in people who live longer—an indication that humans may continue to adapt to a constantly changing environment.
Philip Osborn never knew he had a sister until he moved in next door to her. After living in Florida for years, Osborn recently moved back to a Michigan retirement home to be closer to his family. His new neighbor, Marilyn Meyers, adopted at birth, had spent the past few decades searching for her biological family — so when she heard that someone with the last name Osborn had just moved in, she started investigating. After confirming small bits of family history, they were shocked to discover they were siblings. "I've always wanted to be an older brother," Osborn told Fox17. "It's divine intervention."
Yoga and meditation are becoming increasingly mainstream activities in the U.S., and new research helps explain why. Daily sessions of either practice can have dramatic effects on brain function. Scientists asked 31 healthy people to engage in 25 minutes of hatha yoga, mindfulness meditation, and quiet reading in random order. Mental tasks completed before and after each session found that yoga and meditation led to greater improvements in the participants’ energy level, mood, executive function, and ability to control thoughts and emotions. “Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation both focus the brain’s conscious processing power on a limited number of targets, like breathing and posing, and also reduce processing of nonessential information,” the study’s co-author, Peter Hall, tells ScienceDaily.com. That mental training, he said, apparently enables people “to focus more easily on what they choose to attend to in everyday life.”
