So nobody thought to apply a bit of WD-40?

The Invisible Hand will swoop right in and take care of that puppy.

For those who need it:

Neanderthals were found in the Middle East. They’ve probably have interbred first with modern humans there, when they came out of Africa.

Declining living standards tend to lead to dissatisfaction among the general population, while wealthy elites compete for prestigious positions.

I believe that “BCE” means “Before Common Era”, i.e. BC.

The IUCN distinguishes between species that still have wild populations and those that only exist in captivity. The latter are known as “extinct in the wild”. It makes a difference in conservation work.

Not the best thing to read when you’re starting your day.

Yes, they’re small percentages, but the article points out that the influx of Anatolian farmers into Europe diluted the Neanderthal heritage carried by the mesolithic populations already there. I was just wondering why the Neanderthal component of their genome was sufficiently small that this would have such an effect.

I’m surprised that nobody looked before this.

Any word on why the Anatolian population had a smaller percentage of Neanderthal DNA?

CT-scanning is a real boon to palaeontology. This isn’t the first fragmentary, distorted specimen to be reconstructed so that it could be better understood.

When you consider how much of the classical world’s writings were lost, anything’s a boon. Even replicates of texts that made it to the present would give us some idea of the fidelity of the copies we were handed down.

I hope that this method will allow the recovery of classical texts that the Church didn’t see fit to preserve, such as most of the classical world’s scientific literature.

Any word on what the pets themselves think of vaccination?

Username checks out.

This is the sort of thing that Bjorn Lomberg was talking about when he told us that a clear-eyed unbiased look at trends in world forest cover indicated that it was increasing and so there was nothing to worry about and we could all go back to being capitalists. Tree plantations count as forest for people like him.

Thanks for the link, it’s really useful. I didn’t realize that we’d still get a significant occlusion up where I live.

When organisms fossilize, they fossilize all the way down to a molecular level.

the Lycorma deliculata