Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains

Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you’re trying to boost your species’ brainpower. That’s because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“If you eat only raw food, there are not enough hours in the day to get enough calories to build such a large brain,” says Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil who is co-author of the report. “We can afford more neurons, thanks to cooking.”

Humans have more brain neurons than any other primate — about 86 billion, on average, compared with about 33 billion neurons in gorillas and 28 billion in chimpanzees. While these extra neurons endow us with many benefits, they come at a price — our brains consume 20 percent of our body’s energy when resting, compared with 9 percent in other primates. So a long-standing riddle has been where did our ancestors get that extra energy to expand their minds as they evolved from animals with brains and bodies the size of chimpanzees?

One answer came in the late 1990s when Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham proposed that the brain began to expand rapidly 1.6 million to 1.8 million years ago in our ancestor, Homo erectus, because this early human learned how to roast meat and tuberous root vegetables over a fire. Cooking, Wrangham argued, effectively predigested the food, making it easier and more efficient for our guts to absorb calories more rapidly. Since then, he and his colleagues have shown in lab studies of rodents and pythons that these animals grow up bigger and faster when they eat cooked meat instead of raw meat — and that it takes less energy to digest cooked meat than raw meat.

In a new test of this cooking hypothesis, Herculano-Houzel and her graduate student, Karina Fonseca-Azevedo, now a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Translational Neuroscience in São Paulo, Brazil, decided to see if a diet of raw food inherently put limits on how large a primate’s brain or body could grow. First, they counted the number of neurons in the brains of 13 species of primates (and more than 30 species of mammals). The researchers found two things: one, that brain size is directly linked to the number of neurons in a brain; and two, that that the number of neurons is directly correlated to the amount of energy (or calories) needed to feed a brain.

After adjusting for body mass, they calculated how many hours per day it would take for various primates to eat enough calories of raw food to fuel their brains. They found that it would take 8.8 hours for gorillas; 7.8 hours for orangutans; 7.3 hours for chimps; and 9.3 hours for our species, H. sapiens.

These numbers show that there is an upper limit on how much energy primates can get from an unprocessed raw diet, Herculano-Houzel says. An ape’s diet in the wild differs from a modern “raw food diet,” in which humans get sufficient calories from processing raw food in blenders and adding protein and other nutrients. In the wild, other apes can’t evolve bigger brains unless they reduce their body sizes because they can’t get past the limit of how many calories they can consume in 7 hours to 8 hours of feeding per day. But humans, she says, got around that limit by cooking. “The reason we have more neurons than any other animal alive is that cooking allowed this qualitative change — this step increase in brain size,” she says. “By cooking, we managed to circumvent the limitation of how much we can eat in a day.”

This study shows “that an ape could not achieve a brain as big as in recent humans while maintaining a typical ape diet,” Wrangham says.

Paleoanthropologist Robert Martin of The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, agrees that the new paper does “provide the first evidence that metabolic limitations” from a raw food diet impose a limit on how big a primate’s brain — or body — can grow. “This could account for small brain sizes of great apes despite their large body sizes.” But “the jury is still out” on whether cooking was responsible for the first dramatic burst of brain growth in our lineage, in H. erectus, Martin says, or whether our ancestors began cooking over a fire later, when the brain went through a second major growth spurt about 600,000 years ago. Hearths show up in the archaeological record 800,000 years ago and the regular use of fire for cooking doesn’t become widespread until more recently.

Read more at Wired Science

Oldest Writing Nearly Deciphered

The world's oldest undeciphered writing system is close to being cracked thanks to a new technology and online crowdsourcing, Oxford University researchers have announced.

Called proto-Elamite, the writing has its roots in what is now Iran and dates from 3,200 to 3,000 B.C. So far, the 5,000-year-old writing has defied any effort to decode its symbols impressed on clay tablets.

Now a high-tech imaging device developed at the Universities of Oxford and Southampton in England might provide the necessary insight to crack the code once and for all.

Comprising a dome with 76 lights and a camera positioned at the top of the dome, the Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is able to capture extremely high quality images of ancient documents.

As the object is placed in the center of the dome, 76 photos are taken each with one of the 76 lights individually lit.

The 76 images are then joined in post-processing so that researcher can move the light across the surface of the digital image and use the difference between light and shadow to highlight never before seen details.

"The quality of the images captured is incredible. I have spent the last ten years trying to decipher the proto-Elamite writing system and, with this new technology, I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," Jacob Dahl, from Oxford University’s Oriental Studies Faculty, said.

Dahl noted that overlooking differences barely visible to the naked eye may have prevented scholars from deciphering the writing.

"Consider for example not being able to distinguish the letter i from the letter t," he said.

The images are now been made available online for free public access on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative website.

As high definition images of the clay tablets are shared with scholars around the world, it is hoped that the enigmatic right to left writing will be finally deciphered.

Indeed, a few features of the writing system are already known: the scribes had loaned or possibly shared some signs from or with the Mesopotamians, such as the numerical signs and their systems and symbols for objects like sheep, goats, cereals.

In the past 10 years, Dahl himself has deciphered 1,200 separate signs, but he admits this is almost nothing compared to the complexity of the system.

About 80-90 percent of the signs are maddening puzzle and even basic words as "cow" or "cattle" remain undeciphered.

"Looking at contemporary and later writing systems, we would expect to see proto-Elamite use only symbols to represent things, but we think they also used a syllabary -- for example 'cat' would not be represented by a symbol depicting the animal, but by symbols for the otherwise unrelated words 'ca' and 'at,'" Dahl said.

According to the researcher, half of the signs used in this way seem to have been completely invented for the sounds they represent.

Read more at Discovery News

Bigfoot Vandalizes a Winnebago

A Pennsylvania man who accused Bigfoot of vandalizing his 1973 Winnebago earlier this month is just one of a long history of people who have blamed the hairy humanoid for attacking personal property and dwellings.

John Reed, a Bigfoot enthusiast, claims that during a camping trip he and his girlfriend saw a tall, dark, hairy figure walk past their camper window at night. According to one news story, Reed said the Bigfoot "threw rocks at his mobile home's outside light to escape discovery."

This explanation doesn't make sense; if the Bigfoot didn't want to be noticed, it presumably wouldn't have walked right past the Winnebago's window with two people inside, nor thrown rocks at the camper. The creature could simply have avoided the campsite, or kept walking into the darkness if it did not want to be detected, instead of standing and throwing rocks at an exterior light.

Perhaps the strangest part of the story is that Reed, who founded a Bigfoot hunting group and claims to have seen it twice before, did not photograph the creature.

Reed is not alone

As odd as this story seems, Reed is not the first to claim to find traces and evidence of what they assume must have been a Bigfoot, though not clearly seeing or photographing it at the time. The logic goes like this: I don't know what else it might have been, so it must have been Bigfoot.

It is well known that wild animals attack vehicles such as car and RVs — especially if they can smell food inside. And many animals, including bears and raccoons, can be very clever and persistent in trying to get into vehicles and other containers. Trashcans in national parks have specially designed latching mechanisms to thwart feral intruders.

There have been other cases where unknown creatures attack vehicles, though those attacks have typically occurred at night and/or while the occupants were away. Strangely, Bigfoot are never credibly accused of attacking people; just about every other animal in the world has been known to attack humans at some point, including cats, dogs, deer, moose, bear, boar, elk, cougar, birds, fish, and so on. Not so for Bigfoot — a fact that raises suspicion among many skeptics.

Bigfoot have been claimed to vandalize not only dwellings but also trees. In October 2011, Bigfoot researcher and biologist John Bindernagel visited western Siberia to examine evidence of the Yeti (the Russian version of Bigfoot). He claimed to have found evidence that the creature broke trees and branches. "Twisted trees like this have also been observed in North America and they could fit with the theory that Bigfoot makes nests," Bindernagelsaid in an interview with the British tabloid "The Sun."

In another mysterious incident that some attribute to Bigfoot or another unknown creature, in 2008 a South Carolina couple claimed that something vandalized their vehicle, leaving mysterious bite marks and ripping out part of the fender on their 2002 Dodge Grand Caravan.

Famous 1924 Bigfoot Attack

The most famous case of a Bigfoot attack allegedly occurred at a place called Ape Canyon, near Mount St. Helens, Washington. In 1924, a group of five miners working at the site were besieged by a group of "ape men." One of the miners, a man named Fred Beck, claimed that they sighted a group of Bigfoot high above them on the edge of the canyon. The miners then spent a terrified night holed up in their cabin, during which the Bigfoot bombarded the cabin with rocks, and, they claimed, even tried to break the door in. The miners couldn't get a good look at the Bigfoot—partly because it was dark and partly because they could only see outside through small cracks in the door and walls.

The incident was cited for years in Bigfoot lore as a classic Bigfoot attack, and the details were exaggerated with each retelling. For example a few dozen fist-size rocks that rained down on the roof and walls became "giant boulders" in some versions of the story. Later research found that the famous Ape Canyon Bigfoot attack was not a hoax — but nor was it real: it was instead a combination of a prank and misperceptions.


Read more at Discovery News

Galaxy's Giant Black Hole Jet a Cosmic Afterburner

A humongous jet of material ejected from the center of a distant galaxy looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, and scientists say it may have formed in a similar way.

Except, in this case a supermassive black hole is subbing in for the jet engine.

The extragalactic jet is a stream of material extending more than 2 million light-years, making it larger than our entire Milky Way galaxy. The jet, known as PKS 0637-752, was recently captured in a new image by the Australia Telescope Compact Array in New South Wales, Australia.

Jets like this are common throughout the universe, and are thought to be formed when large amounts of matter fall into the giant black holes occupying the centers of many galaxies. Material in such jets races outward at nearly the speed of light, and they are some of the largest objects in the universe.

"Massive jets like this one have been studied for decades, since the beginning of radio astronomy, but we still don't understand exactly how they are produced or what they're made of," study leader Leith Godfrey, of the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia, said in a statement.

The new jet photo reveals regularly spaced bright spots similar to the brighter diamond-shaped areas seen in jet engine afterburners.

"One intriguing possibility is that the pattern we see in this cosmic jet is produced in the same way as the pattern in the exhaust from fighter jet engines," Godfrey said.

"If the brighter patches are caused by the same process in astronomical jets as they are in earthly jet engines, then the distance between them can give us important information about the power of the jet and the density of the surrounding space," he added.

The researchers hope the new findings could help them better understand the nature of black hole jets and the ways they affect their host galaxies.

Read more at Discovery News

Fuller Picture of Human Expansion from Africa

A new, comprehensive review of humans' anthropological and genetic records gives the most up-to-date story of the "Out of Africa" expansion that occurred about 45,000 to 60,000 years ago.

This expansion, detailed by three Stanford geneticists, had a dramatic effect on human genetic diversity, which persists in present-day populations. As a small group of modern humans migrated out of Africa into Eurasia and the Americas, their genetic diversity was substantially reduced.

In studying these migrations, genomic projects haven't fully taken into account the rich archaeological and anthropological data available, and vice versa. This review integrates both sides of the story and provides a foundation that could lead to better understanding of ancient humans and, possibly, genomic and medical advances.

"People are doing amazing genome sequencing, but they don't always understand human demographic history" that can help inform an investigation, said review co-author Brenna Henn, a postdoctoral fellow in genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine who has a PhD in anthropology from Stanford. "We wanted to write this as a primer on pre-human history for people who are not anthropologists."

This model of the Out of Africa expansion provides the framework for testing other anthropological and genetic models, Henn said, and will allow researchers to constrain various parameters on computer simulations, which will ultimately improve their accuracy.

"The basic notion is that all of these disciplines have to be considered simultaneously when thinking about movements of ancient populations," said Marcus Feldman, a professor of biology at Stanford andthe senior author of the paper. "What we're proposing is a story that has potential to explain any of the fossil record that subsequently becomes available, and to be able to tell what was the size of the population in that place at that time."

The anthropological information can inform geneticists when they investigate certain genetic changes that emerge over time. For example, geneticists have found that genes for lactose intolerance and gluten sensitivity began to emerge in populations expanding into Europe around 10,000 years ago.

The anthropological record helps explain this: It was around this time that humans embraced agriculture, including milk and wheat production. The populations that prospered -- and thus those who survived to pass on these mutations -- were those who embraced these unnatural food sources. This, said Feldman, is an example of how human movements drove a new form of natural selection.

Populations that expand from a small founding group can also exhibit reduced genetic diversity -- known as a "bottleneck" -- a classic example being the Ashkenazi Jewish population, which has a fairly large number of genetic diseases that can be attributed to its small number of founders. When this small group moved from the Rhineland to Eastern Europe, reproduction occurred mainly within the group, eventually leading to situations in which mothers and fathers were related. This meant that offspring often received the same deleterious gene from each parent and, as this process continued, ultimately resulted in a population in which certain diseases and cancers are more prevalent.

Read more at Science Daily

A Whale With a Distinctly Human-Like Voice

For the first time, researchers have been able to show by acoustic analysis that whales -- or at least one very special white whale -- can imitate the voices of humans. That's a surprise, because whales typically produce sounds in a manner that is wholly different from humans, say researchers who report their findings in the October 23 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

"Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds," said Sam Ridgway of the National Marine Mammal Foundation. "Such obvious effort suggests motivation for contact."

It all started in 1984 when Ridgway and others began to notice some unusual sounds in the vicinity of the whale and dolphin enclosure. As they describe it, it sounded as though two people were conversing in the distance, just out of range of their understanding.

Those unusually familiar sounds were traced back to one white whale in particular only some time later when a diver surfaced from the whale enclosure to ask his colleagues an odd question: "Who told me to get out?"

They deduced that those utterances came from a most surprising source: a white whale by the name of NOC. That whale had lived among dolphins and other white whales and had often been in the presence of humans.

In fact, there had been other anecdotal reports of whales sounding like humans before, but in this case Ridgway's team wanted to capture some real evidence. They recorded the whale's sounds to reveal a rhythm similar to human speech and fundamental frequencies several octaves lower than typical whale sounds, much closer to that of the human voice.

"Whale voice prints were similar to human voice and unlike the whale's usual sounds," Ridgway said. "The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

That's all the more remarkable because whales make sounds via their nasal tract, not in the larynx as humans do. To make those human-like sounds, NOC had to vary the pressure in his nasal tract while making other muscular adjustments and inflating the vestibular sac in his blowhole, the researchers found. In other words, it wasn't easy.

Read more at Science Daily

Two Months Until the Mayan Doomsday Nonevent

For some reason, people really want to remind the world that today (Oct. 21) marks two months before the biggest nonevent in recent history. Even more perplexing is the fact that others seem to really want the world to end in 61 days time.

If the doomsayers are to be believed, on Dec. 21, 2012, the Universe will unleash a maelstrom of inexplicable fiery carnage on our planet. At best, we'll undergo some kind of rapid planetary change; at worst, a weird cosmic alignment will cause the sun to turn the planet, and all of civilization with it, into toast.

Why do these strange individuals want us to believe in this nonsense? Some have a book to sell, while others have a horribly-edited YouTube video they want to share. Others are just plain odd. But regardless of the intent, the result is confusion and fear. Sadly, it is often people who would have otherwise gotten on with their lives peacefully who have swallowed the doomsday nonsense and become needlessly worried about the end of the world.

The current 2012 doomsday nonsense focuses on an ancient civilization that somehow had the divine ability to predict the future. I am, of course, referring to the Mayans, who had a wonderfully complex culture throughout Central America that peaked between A.d. 250-900. They had a calendar, you may have heard about it, called the "Long Count." Apart from being an ingenious means of recording dates, it has another, rather odd attribute -- it "runs out" this year.

But like any calendar, many Mayan scholars agree that the Mayan civilization, if it existed today, would have probably begun a new calendar cycle. Unfortunately we're not going to find out as the Mayans, as a civilization, disappeared centuries ago. Archaeologists have even found evidence deep in the Guatemalan rainforest that the ancient Mayans mentioned dates after Dec. 21, 2012, in texts. Although there are a handful of mentions of the calendar end date, there's no reference to the end of the world. If you ask me, that's a pretty rubbish "prophesy."

But wait! There are still Mayan descendents who live in Central America. Are they currently digging bunkers and stocking up on canned "Apocalypse-ready" baked beans? Um, no. Why's that then?

The Mayans never predicted doomsday! The end of a calendar cycle doesn't mean it's doomsday. The calendar wasn't a magic calendar, it was just a way to document time, remember future dates and record past events. That's what calendars do. Lacking a culture to renew the Long Count, it looks like the final cycle -- the 13th bak'tun -- will come to an end... and that's about it.

All the hype surrounding marauding celestial bodies (Planet X, Nibiru, errant asteroids and comets), weird cosmic occurrences (killer solar flares and galactic alignments) and crazy Earth-shattering events (polar/geomagnetic shift), is just that, hype. They're about as real as the tooth fairy.

The Mayans, on the other hand, are real and their descendents are planning on having a big party on Dec. 21. It is a reason for celebration, a time to remember the last cycle of a wonderful calendar system that represents the last breath of an ancient civilization.

There are many mysteries in this universe and many unexplained phenomena, but don't let that fact cloud your judgement when it comes to Dec. 21; science really does have this covered.

There are no cataclysmic events predicted to happen. There are no coverups. I am not covering up the coverups of some large government coverup. No, NASA isn't hiding anything. No doubt that Dec. 21 will have its fair share of turmoil, but there's no more turmoil predicted to happen on that date than on Dec. 22. Or tomorrow, or next week, or a week next Thursday. The Mayans were advanced for their time and had wonderful astronomy skills, but they did not foretell doom and gloom hundreds of years into the future.

Read more at Discovery News

Biblical Trees Survive After 900 Years

Olive trees in the Jerusalem garden where Jesus Christ prayed before he was crucified have "miraculously" lived through the past nine centuries bacteria-free, according to a molecular research presented last week at the Vatican Radio in Rome.

Carried by a team of researchers from Italy's National Research Council (CNR) and various Italian universities, the three-year study investigated eight gnarled olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the holiest sites of Christendom.

The research found that three of the eight healthy trees (the only ones on which it was technically possible to carry out the dating) come from the middle of the 12th century, although the roots underground are certainly much older.

"These olives are among the oldest broad-leaved trees in the world. Plants of greater age are not reported in the scientific literature," lead researcher Antonio Cimato of the CNR's Tree and Timber Institute in Florence, said.

Carbon dating showed that the trees come from the years 1092, 1166 and 1198, a period when the Crusaders, engaged in the reconstruction of the great churches of the Holy Land, re-built the Basilica of Gethsemane in Jerusalem.

According to the researchers, it is likely that during the construction of the church, the olive garden was rearranged and renovated.

Indeed, olive trees can grow back after being cut down or even burnt.

DNA analysis of the eight trees revealed they were all related to a single, older tree.

"All eight trees have similar genetic profiles, meaning they are olive 'twins,' all children of a single specimen," Cimato said.

According to the researcher, this means the olives were not spontaneous trees, but were deliberately planted.

Why did the Crusaders choose one single tree, among the thousands growing in Jerusalem? Were they trying to preserve a specific, meaningful lineage? Are the olives linked to the very trees under which, according to the gospel of Luke, Jesus sweat drops of blood as he prayed?

Read more at Discovery News

'Gospel of Jesus' Wife' Faces Authenticity Tests

The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus, which may or may not be a forgery, seems to be in limbo, as the Harvard Theological Review has pulled the scientific article describing the discovery from their January 2013 issue.

This withdrawal, however, doesn't mean the journal will never publish the scientific paper by Harvard historian Karen King on the supposed lost Gospel. "Harvard Theological Review is planning to publish Professor King's paper after testing is concluded so that the results may be incorporated," Kit Dodgson, director of communications at Harvard Divinity School, wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Even so, the announcement has garnered both anger and elation.

Hershel Shanks of the Biblical Archaeology Society writes that the withdrawal of the paper is "shameful." (Shanks is founder and editor of the society's Biblical Archaeology Review.)

Meanwhile, another scholar applauds the Harvard Theological Review for making King's study available online, if not yet published in their journal.

"My personal opinion is that Karen King and Harvard Theological Review have significantly improved the traditional peer review process by utilizing the Internet," Oxford University graduate Andrew Bernhard told LiveScience. "In fact, this could potentially be a watershed moment in the history of scholarship where the academic process becomes more open and transparent."

The business-card-size papyrus at the center of the controversy, described as "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife," by King on Sept. 18, was supposedly from the fourth century and written in Coptic, the language of a group of early Christians in Egypt.

King and her collaborators believed the scrap, the first ancient evidence of Jesus speaking of a wife, was authentic. Two Coptic scholars — AnneMarie Luijendijk of Princeton University and Roger Bagnall of New York University — considered the text authentic and dating back to the fourth century, according to the Biblical Archaeology Society's Shanks. Bagnall declined to comment about the postponement of the journal article, until more information was available.

Even so, in weeks following the announcement, skeptical scholars voiced their concerns the papyrus was a fake.

For instance, Bernhard, author of the book "Other Early Christian Gospels" (T & T Clark, 2006), pointed out an eerie resemblance to another online translation of a Gospel. Bernhard, in a paper published online, found similarities such as grammatical errors and line breaks that have been found only in the online translation of the Gospel of Thomas.

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife, Bernhard found, seems to be the work of an amateur who pieced together individual words and phrases from Michael Grondin's "Interlinear Coptic-English Translation of the Gospel of Thomas."

To get to the bottom of the papyrus's authenticity, several analyses will be conducted.

"The owner of the papyrus fragment has been making arrangements for the next round of analysis of the fragment, including testing by independent laboratories with the resources and the specific expertise necessary to produce and interpret reliable results," Dodgson wrote. "This next phase is likely to take several weeks, if not months."

While Shanks says he has no issue with such scientific debate, including questions surrounding the papyrus (such as its date, authenticity and relationship with other texts), he does object to the journal's withdrawal of the paper.

"When a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, backed up by two experts from Princeton and NYU who declare the text to be authentic, presents the case—and tentatively at that—that should be enough for HTR to publish King's article, not to cowardly suspend its decision to publish. Instead, HTR has cringed because there will now be a dispute as to authenticity," Shanks writes on the society's Bible History Daily website.

Read more at Discovery News

Fish Break Law of Physics, Become Invisible

Silver-colored fish, such as herrings, sardines and sprat, are breaking a basic law of physics, according to a new study published in Nature Photonics. The ability allows the fish to become invisible to predators.

The physics law has to do with how light reflects.

As researchers Tom Jordan and Julian Partridge from Bristol University explain, reflective surfaces polarize light, a phenomenon that fishermen or photographers overcome by using polarizing sunglasses or polarizing filters to cut our reflective glare.

Jordan and Partridge, however, found that silvery fish have overcome this basic law of reflection.

The fish's skin contains multilayer arrangements of reflective guanine crystals. (Here's a factoid: guanine is also one of the key components of guano, aka bird and fish poop. The terms originate from an ancient word for dung, "wanu.") It was previously thought that fish skin would fully polarize light when reflected. As the light becomes polarized, there should then be a drop in reflectivity.

But that's not what always happens, as it turns out.

The researchers found that the skin of sardines and herring contain not one but two types of guanine crystal. Each has different optical properties. By mixing these two types, the fish's skin doesn't polarize the reflected light and maintains its high reflectivity.

The result is an optical illusion that can make the fish at times seem invisible to other marine dwellers.

"We believe these species of fish have evolved this particular multilayer structure to help conceal them from predators, such as dolphin and tuna," Roberts was quoted as saying in a press release. "These fish have found a way to maximize their reflectivity over all angles they are viewed from. This helps the fish best match the light environment of the open ocean, making them less likely to be seen."

In future, fish skin might inspire inventors to create better optical devices.

Read more at Discovery News