Take a chill pill

A study done by John Hopkins School of Medicine in 2002 showed that men who expressed higher levels of anger when responding to stressors were more than 6 times as likely to suffer a heart attack by 55.

Secret 'Slave' Tunnels Discovered Under Roman Emperor's Villa

archaeologists have uncovered a massive network of tunnels under the Roman Emperor Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, Italy.

The underground passageways likely allowed thousands of slaves and merchants to keep the estate running without creating any distraction at the street level.

Though similar tunnels have been discovered at the complex before, the new discovery is exciting because the passageways were not mentioned in any ancient plans of the grounds, Marina De Franceschini, an archaeologist heading the excavation who works with the University of Trento, wrote in an email.

Underground network

Researchers have long known that a massive underground network of roads lay underneath the ruins of Hadrian's villa in Tivoli, Italy.

The villa was a retreat for the emperor Hadrian, a patron of art and architecture who reigned from A.D. 117 to A.D. 138.

But while Hadrian discussed affairs of state and held grand dinner parties in his opulent house, underneath him, a network of nearly invisible people kept the estate running.

The underground passageways allowed thousands of merchants, slaves and carts laden with goods to enter the villa without causing any hustle and bustle.

"It is a very modern solution, something similar to what you see today in cruise ships where you have luxury quarters for the passengers and a parallel system of corridors for the personnel," De Franceschini said.

Slaves chiseled the passageways out of the soft tufa rock, and the same rock was then was used to construct the villa. But over the centuries, soil had completely filled in the underground tunnels and their full extent was a mystery.

Using ancient architectural plans, researchers had uncovered passageways underneath southwestern part of the ruins, but they suspected there must be more.

New passageway

So a few years ago, Franceschini asked for help excavating the eastern portion from a group called Sotterranei di Roma, or Underground Rome. These speleologists and amateur archaeologists specialize in rappelling into underground tunnels and excavating them, said Inge Weustig, a classicist who works with the group.After carrying countless buckets of dirt from the narrow subterranean passageways — some of which are just a few feet wide — the team uncovered an entirely new passageway, leading from an area of the Villa called the Academy to a 2.5 miles (4 km) underground roadway called the Grande Trapezio.

The specific purpose of the system of passageways remains a mystery, but it lies on the outskirts of Hadrian's Villa, Weustig said.

"It is seen as the more private part of the whole complex," Weustig told LiveScience. "They've interpreted it as a kind of secret or more remote place in the villa where he could just go to be alone, or at least with a few people."

Here Be Dragons- The Evolution of Sea Monsters on Medieval Maps

WASHINGTON — The iconic sea serpents, mermaids and other mythical creatures found on world maps from medieval and Renaissance times splash to life on the pages of a new book.

Chet Van Duzer's "Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps" (British Library, 2013) charts the evolution of the mythical creatures that adorned atlases from the 10th century through the 17th century. Cartographers used the beastly art to illustrate mysterious, unexplored regions of the globe and the possible dangers of seafaring.

Despite their wild appearance, many of these creatures were based on real animals."The creatures look purely fantastic. They all look like they were just made up," Van Duzer, a map historian at the Library of Congress, said here Thursday (Sept. 5) in a talk about his book. "But, in fact, a lot of them come from what were considered, at the time, scientific sources."

 Bizarre beasts

Sea monsters on maps run the gamut from menacing sea serpents to improbable lion-fish hybrids. Many cartographers simply copied these sea monsters from illustrated encyclopedias, Van Duzer told LiveScience. At other times, particularly a period in the 16th century, mapmakers took some poetic license with the animals (like terrestrial-aquatic hybrid animals).

But depictions of these creatures have been studied very little, Van Duzer said. Though people in modern times typically think of monsters as mythical beasts, whales and walruses were considered monsters in medieval and Renaissance times.

In his book, Van Duzer, who was a 2012 Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress and has since joined its staff, charts the origin of sea monsters from "mappa mundi," medieval European aps of the world; nautical maps; and Ptolemy's Geography, a treatise by the Greco-Roman mathematician and scientist Claudius Ptolemy, which contained an atlas of the known world during the second century.

Mappa mundi aren't the most geographically accurate maps, but they contain a treasure trove of bizarre animals. One illustration depicts a man in the belly of a monster, most likely a reference to the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Another shows a creature with the head of a chicken and the body of a fish. "Every land creature had an equivalent in the sea," Van Duzer said.

A Latin version of Ptolemy's Geography known as the Madrid manuscript is the only version that contains sea monsters. Close inspection of the map reveals the sea monsters were drawn by an expert — likely an add-on to increase the map's sale value, Van Duzer said.

Dangers of the deep

These monstrous creatures suggest a world full of dangers lurking in distant oceans. Gigantic octopuses drag ships and sailors into the sea, and seductive sirens flaunt their beauty.

Whales feature prominently in medieval and Renaissance maps. Many sketches allude to an ancient story about sailors mistaking a whale for an island. In the story, sailors anchor their ship to the whale's back and light a fire to cook food. When the whale feels the fire's heat, it plunges into the deep, carrying the ship and sailors along with it.

Portrayals of whales and other map creatures became more realistic during the early 17th century. Maps from this era show ships exerting dominion over the beasts of the ocean. Eventually, the beasts disappeared from maps altogether.

Modern maps, which lack these fantastic beasts, have absolutely lost something, Van Duzer said.

New Clues To King Solomon's Mines Found

New evidence that links the vast copper mines in southern tip of Israel to the reign of King Solomon has been discovered, archaeologists report.

During the Iron Age, humans took advantage of the copper deposits lurking in Israel's Timna Valley, as evidenced by the thousands of ancient mines and dozens of smelting sites in the district. But archaeologists have debated who controlled the mines, and when.

After American archaeologist Nelson Glueck explored the region in the 1930s, he announced he had found the real-life "King Solomon's Mines" in the biblical kingdom of Edom. ("King Solomon's Mines" was a popular Victorian adventure novel, published by the English author H. Rider Haggard.)ater research — and the 1969 discovery of an Egyptian temple in the center of the valley — cast doubt on Glueck's claims. Some archaeologists have since favored an interpretation suggesting the ancient Egyptians first built the mines in the 13th century B.C.But recent excavations at Timna Valley turned up artifacts that have been radiocarbon dated to the 10th century B.C., when the Bible says King Solomon ruled.

The mines, however, were likely operated by the Edomites, a semi-nomadic tribe that battled constantly with Israel, the researchers say.

"The mines are definitely from the period ofKing Solomon," archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University, said in a statement this week. "They may help us understand the local society, which would have been invisible to us otherwise."

This past winter, Ben-Yosef and a team of researchers investigated an area known as Slaves' Hill, a previously untouched smelting camp that holds traces of hundreds of furnaces and layers of copper slag, the grit that's left over after the metal is extracted from its ore.

The site lacks significant architectural ruins, but the researchers found more ephemeral traces of ancient life: bits of clothing, woven ropes, dates, grapes, pistachios and ceramics.

Eleven samples of material from Slaves' Hill were submitted for testing at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford in England. The results showed that the ancient items dated toSolomon's reign, the researchers said.

"In Timna Valley, we unearthed a society with undoubtedly significant development, organization, and power," Ben-Yosef said in a statement. "And yet because the people were living in tents, they would have been transparent to us as archaeologists if they had been engaged in an industry other than mining and smelting, which is very visible archaeologically."

Despite debate about how much archaeologists can trust the Bible as a historical source, Ben-Yosef added that it's very possible David and Solomon existed and at times, may have even exerted some control over the Timna Valley mines.

Ben-Yosef told LiveScience in an email that the team plans to submit their findings to a peer-reviewed academic journal. The new radiocarbon dates are in line with the chronology Ben-Yosef and other researchers put forth last year in the journal American Schools of Oriental Research. That 2012 study was based on findings from a nearby mining site.

Biblical-Era Town Discovered Along Sea of Galilee

A town dating back more than 2,000 years has been discovered on the northwest coast of the Sea of Galilee, in Israel's Ginosar valley.

The ancient town may be Dalmanutha (also spelled Dalmanoutha), described in the Gospel of Mark as the place Jesus sailed to after miraculously feeding 4,000 people by multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, said Ken Dark, of the University of Reading in the U.K., whose team discovered the town during a field survey.

The archaeologists also determined that a famous boat, dating to around 2,000 years ago, and uncovered in 1986, was found on the shoreline of the newly discovered town. The boat was reported on two decades ago but the discovery of the town provides new information on what lay close to it.The evidence the team found suggests the town was prosperous in ancient times. "Vessel glass and amphora hint at wealth," Dark wrote in an article published in the most recent edition of the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly, while "weights and stone anchors, along with the access to beaches suitable for landing boats — and, of course, the first-century boat … all imply an involvement with fishing." 

The architectural remains and pottery suggest that Jews and those following a polytheistic religion lived side by side in the community. In addition, the researchers found that the southern side of the newly discovered town lies only about 500 feet (150 meters) away from another ancient town known as Magdala.

Architecture and pottery

Fields between the modern-day town of Migdal and the sea coast contained hundreds of pottery pieces dating from as early as the second or first century B.C. to up to some point after the fifth century A.D., the time of the Byzantine Empire, the archaeologists found. The artifacts suggest the town survived for many centuries. 

Also among their finds were cubes known as tesserae and limestone vessel fragments, which were "associated with Jewish purity practices in the early Roman period," indicating the presence of a Jewish community in the town, Dark told LiveScience in an email.

Some of the most impressive finds, however, were not made in the fields but rather in modern-day Migdal itself. The archaeologists found dozens of examples of ancient architectural remains, some of which the modern-day townspeople had turned into seats or garden ornaments, or simply left lying on the ground. In one instance, the researchers found more than 40 basalt ashlar blocks in a single garden.

After talking to the local people, and trying to identify the source and date of the findings, the researchers determined that many of the architectural remains came from the local area and likely were part of this newly discovered town.These remains included a number of ancient column fragments, including examples of capitals (the top of columns) carved in a Corinthian style. "This settlement may have contained masonry buildings, some with mosaic floors and architectural stonework," Dark wrote in his paper.

The finds also included a pagan altar, made of light-gray limestone and used in religious rituals by those of a polytheistic faith, Dark said.

Is it Dalmanutha?

In the New Testament, Dalmanutha is mentioned only briefly in the Gospel of Mark.

The gospel says that after feeding 4,000 people by miraculously multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread, Jesus "got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha. The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, 'Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.'Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side." (Mark 8:10-13, New International Version)

Dark isn't certain the newly discovered town is Dalmanutha, but there is evidence to support the idea. From the remains found, researchers can tell the newly discovered town would have been a sizable, thriving location in the first century A.D., and the name Dalmanutha has not been firmly linked to a known archaeological site.

It's likely that the newly found town's name is among the few place-names already identified by other researchers relating to the Ginosar valley shore, and one of those places is Dalmanutha, Dark said.

Running the A/C? New Building Codes Could Slash Energy Costs (Op-Ed)

Suppose you're in the market for a new home. There's brand new construction in a neighborhood you like — but there's also an older home that looks like a good buy. Of course, many factors enter into your decision, but if you're a smart buyer, you'll consider not only the purchase price but the cost of maintaining the home, including utility bills.

The problem is, unless you start ripping out the walls and examining the insulation, you have no way of knowing how energy-efficient a house is. You might be cranking up the heat all winter and sweltering in the summer with the air conditioning on full blast — and paying higher energy bills every month.A revised building-energy code, proposed by NRDC, the Institute for Market Transformation, and the Britt/Makela Group — with unprecedented support from 20 of the biggest homebuilders in the country — would significantly improve the energy efficiency of new homes, and make it easier for consumers to factor energy efficiency into a home-buying decision.

The code, if adopted, would make newly built homes 20-percent more energy efficient by 2015 — saving each household anywhere from $300 to $850 each year in utility costs — and give homes a numerical score on an energy-efficiency index.

A new building code that trims home energy waste is an obvious plus for consumers. Energy-efficient homes are more comfortable and save homeowners money on energy bills. (Energy efficient homes are even, according to new research, 30 percent less likely to go into default.) But what's remarkable here is that much of the building industry is throwing its weight behind efficiency improvements, too.Leading Builders of America, an organization representing homebuilders responsible for 40 percent of the new, single-family-home market, and about 90 small builders and other industry groups, are fully behind the proposed code upgrade. Not just because it's nice to be eco-sensitive, but because it's good for business.

According to my colleague David Goldstein, a MacArthur Fellowship winner and one of the masterminds — along with another esteemed colleague, Meg Waltner — behind the new code, this is the first time in nearly 40 years that efficiency advocates and the building industry have jointly supported a major upgrade in energy-efficiency requirements. For builders, the code proposal makes sense for the bottom line, because it gives them flexibility in how they meet the standards, and allows them to find more cost-effective ways to do so.

In the past, a builder had to check off a list of specific requirements in order to meet the code — a certain amount of insulation in specific areas, a maximum solar heat transmission through windows, a maximum duct leakage, and so on. For a home that is long and skinny, for example, it might be more difficult for a builder to meet the duct leakage requirements at a reasonable cost.

The new code would allow a builder to install triple-pane windows or a more efficient water heater instead. Or a builder could use a lot of insulation he picked up inexpensively at a distress sale, and forego a more costly efficiency measure somewhere else in the building, as long as the home's overall efficiency requirement was met.

Under the existing code requirements, even if the builder checked off all the right boxes, a home buyer would still have no clue as to how efficient their new home might be. Did it come in well above code? Did it barely make the grade? Or was it rubber-stamped without actually meeting code in the first place?

The revised code, if adopted, would give homes a numerical rating on an efficiency index — like a miles-per-gallon rating on a car — making it easy for a home buyer to comparison shop, and also to figure out, later on, if their home is performing as promised.

Many homebuilders are already voluntarily using an energy index, called the Home Energy Rating System (HERS), to rate their homes, because it's a useful selling point. A new home that saves hundreds of dollars a year in energy costs has a distinct edge over an older home — or even an almost-new foreclosure — that is less efficient. And if builders are already getting a HERS rating, using it to meet building codes reduces their costs of doing business.

On a large scale, this market shift toward more energy-efficient homes will save consumers more than $100 billion by 2030. It will also take a big chunk out of U.S. carbon emissions. Homes are responsible for 18 percent of U.S. global-warming emissions, and over the long term, as more housing stock meets new energy codes, that could be cut in half. The new code would reduce carbon emissions by a total of 560 million metric tons by 2030 — the equivalent of the carbon pollution produced by 158 coal-fired power plants in a year.

The International Code Council, a nonprofit organization that develops model building codes for state and local building authorities, will consider the revised energy code when it meets in Atlantic City in October. If it passes the council, the new energy-saving code will become the new model on which many cities, counties and states base their building codes. Once it's adopted by local and state authorities, the new building energy code will save money for homebuyers and homebuilders, reduce waste, and cut carbon pollution. If that's not enough reason to get excited by a building code, I don't know what is.

Lehner's most recent Op-Ed was Building a Drought-Proof Farm. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Rare 6-Million Year Old Skull of Juvenile Ape Discovered

An extremely rare juvenile skull of an extinct ape has now been revealed from China, findings that suggest a very diverse group of apes once lived in Southeast Asia, researchers say.

Apes, which include gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans, are the closest living relatives of humanity. They once inhabited most of the Old World, including large portions of Europe and Asia, and a much larger swath of Africa than they do at present.

A critical time in the evolution of humans and their ape relatives was the late Miocene Epoch about 5 million to 11 million years ago. Near the end of the Miocene, apes had become extinct in most of Eurasia.Climate and environments were changing rapidly throughout the world at the end of the Miocene, and these changes are reflected in the changing faunas, particularly in the Old World, where animals adapted to living in more equable forest habitats gave way in most places to those capable of living in more open habitats and drier, more seasonal conditions," said researcher Jay Kelley, a paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Cool cranium discovery

To explore ape evolution during the late Miocene, scientists investigated a site in the Yunnan province in southern China called Shuitangba, which is a mine for lignite, a form of low-grade coal. Southern China was less affected by the deteriorating climate during the late Miocene that drove extinct many ape species throughout the rest of Eurasia.Miners have recovered fossils at Shuitangba since at least the 1950s. The investigators began excavating at the site in 2007. "The workers keep a lignite fire going all the time to roast potatoes, which is smoky and smells awful, and your hair and clothes become permeated with the lignite smell," Kelley said.

The researchers now reveal the 6-million-year-old cranium of the extinct ape Lufengpithecus, a skull about 3 inches (8 centimeters) wide. 

"It's from a young juvenile — it would have been perhaps about 5 years old if its growth was like that of chimpanzees," Kelley told LiveScience. "I suspect adults of this species would have been in the body size range of large chimpanzees, the larger males perhaps somewhat larger. We know from the developing canine teeth that our juvenile was a male."

Back when these apes were alive, the area was fairly swampy — "warm or hot and wet for much of the year, even if there was some seasonality," Kelley said. "We have also found a diverse array of birds associated with wetter environments, and mammals associated with wet environments such as beavers and otters. We have also uncovered the trunks of very large trees, so it was heavily forested."

Learning about ape evolution

Skulls of fossil apes and other close relatives of humanity are extremely rare, especially those of infants and young juveniles. This find is only the second relatively complete cranium of a young juvenile from the Old World during the entire Miocene, an epoch stretching from 5 million to 23 million years ago.

"The preservation of the new cranium is excellent," Kelley said in a statement. "This is important because all previously discovered adult crania of the species to which it is assigned, Lufengpithecus lufengensis, were badly crushed and distorted during the fossilization process."

In living species of apes, skulls at the same stage of development as the new fossil already closely resemble those of adults. "Therefore, the new cranium, despite being from a juvenile, gives researchers the best look at the cranial anatomy of Lufengpithecus lufengensis," Kelley said.

Due to where and when Lufengpithecus lived, scientists had thought it was related to the modern orangutan, which is now limited to Southeast Asia, but once also dwelled in southern China. However, the new skull bears little resemblance to living orangutans.

"More similarity to orangutans would have been expected," Kelley said.

As such, the researchers now suggest Lufengpithecus represents a late-surviving lineage of Eurasian apes without clear links to living groups of apes.

"It increasingly appears that there was a very diverse radiation of apes surviving in southeastern Asia long after apes had become extinct in most of the rest of Eurasia," Kelley said.

The researchers hope further excavations will unearth remains of adult specimens to better uncover the relationships between this lineage and other fossil and living apes.

"There is a natural tendency among paleoanthropologists to want one's discovery to be relevant to human evolution, but I don't think that's the case here," Kelley said. "The evolution of apes is equally fascinating and to that our new cranium can make a valuable contribution."

The scientists will detail their findings in print in November in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.

Humans Landed on 'Treasure Island' Earlier Than Thought

Ancient trash heaps in Bolivia used for millennia now suggest humans explored the western Amazon as early as 10,000 years ago, researchers say.

This discovery adds to the evidence that people made it deep into the Americas much earlier than previously thought, scientists added.

Scientists concentrated on a tropical savannah region in the Bolivian Amazon that past researchers thought was too harsh of an environment for ancient peoples to inhabit. Hundreds of small, forested mounts of earth known as "forest islands" dot these lowlands, which are seasonally flooded by water. These forest islands were typically thought of as natural in origin — for instance, as landforms cut away by shifting rivers, or long-term termite mounds or bird rookeries.Now, investigators have found that three of these forested islands areshell middens — piles of freshwater snail shells left by human settlers more than 10,000 years ago, according to carbon dating. The newfound site "is the oldest archaeological site in southern and western Amazonia," said researcher Umberto Lombardo, a geographer at the University of Bern in Switzerland. "This discovery alters the map of early human occupations in South America." 

Evidence of human settlement

What first surprised Lombardo about the forest islands he and his colleagues investigated was that "under the surface, there seemed to be rocklike material," he said. (The area has a dearth of rocks.)On a closer examination, we saw that this hard material was some sort of shell deposit," Lombardo said. He then began to suspect it was artificial, because he could not think of any natural process that could have created such a deposit.

The first site the researchers investigated was named Isla del Tesoro, which is Spanish for "Treasure Island." There is a general belief in that area, known as the Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia "that if a foreigner is interested in excavating a site, then it must contain buried gold," Lombardo said. "Of course, there is no gold, but it is very important to work on your public relations with the local population before you start digging," he said. "If you don't explain very clearly what you are up to, they will think you are there to steal their gold."

Samples of soil collected from the three mounds revealed they were made of a dense collection of shells, bones and charcoal. They apparently formed in two phases — an older layer made up primarily of the shells of freshwater apple snails as well as the bones of deer, fish, reptiles and birds, and an overlying layer composed of organic refuse containing pottery, bone tools and human bones. 

The overlying layer, which possesses human bones and artifacts, clearly resulted from human settlement. Whereas the underlying layer of shells might not obviously result from human activity, molecules detected in the underlying layer are linked to human feces.

Separating the two layers is a thin layer rich in pieces of burnt clay and earth. "My first impression is that it could be made of fragments of hearths, like ovens," Lombardo said. "Indigenous people in the region still cook in such ovens made of clay."

The Clovis culture

Radiocarbon dating of two of the middens reveals an ancient human presence during the early Holocene period approximately 10,400 years ago. The researchers suggest hunting and gathering forays brought prey there for preparation, cooking and eating; shells and other artifacts built up into mounds over approximately 6,000 years of human use. The hunter-gatherers may have eventually abandoned these sites as the climate shifted toward wetter conditions later.The scientists discovered these shell middens in Llanos de Moxos, which holds a dramatic number of ancient earthworks. The hundreds of large earthen mounds, and thousands of miles of raised fields and sophisticated drainage works in the area, suggest it was able to support relatively large populations in the past, and the researchers propose the predecessors of these "Earthmovers" may have created the newfound middens.

These findings might add to hotly debated theories that humans came to the Americas much earlier than previously thought. For most of the past 50 years, archaeologists thought the first Americans, dubbed the Clovis culture after sites found near Clovis, N.M., arrived about 13,000 years ago. However, scientists have recently uncovered evidence that humans were in the New World more than 14,000 years ago.

"Our discovery shows that people occupied the Llanos de Moxos in the Bolivian Amazon at least 10,500 years ago," Lombardo said. "To reach this location, people had to travel 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) if they came from the Atlantic coast, or they had to cross the Andes if they came from the Pacific Coast. This suggests that either they moved and adapted to new environments extremely fast or they started their journey quite a long time ago."

Lombardo and his colleagues now would like to investigate why people abandoned these forest mounds after 6,000 years of use. "The data we have indicates that about 4,200 years ago, an important environmental change took place," he said. "What caused this environmental change?"

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 28 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Did Neanderthals Teach Modern Humans How to Make Tools?

Neanderthals apparently created the oldest known examples of a kind of bone tool used in Europe, thus raising the possibility that modern humans may have learned how to make these tools from Neanderthals, researchers say.

Neanderthals were once the closest living relatives of modern humans, dwelling across a vast area ranging from Europe to the Middle East to western Asia. This ancient lineage of humans went extinct about 40,000 years ago, about the same time modern humans expanded across the world.

Neanderthals created artifacts similar to ones made at about the same time by modern humans arriving in Europe, such as body ornaments and small blades. Scientists hotly debated whether such behavior developed before or after contact with modern humans."There is a huge debate about how different Neanderthals were from modern humans," said Shannon McPherron, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Now, McPherron and his colleagues have discovered that Neanderthals created a specialized kind of bone tool previously only seen in modern humans. These tools are about 51,000 years old, making them the oldest known examples of such tools in Europe and predating the known arrival of modern humans.

New Neanderthal behavior

The bone tools in question are known as lissoirs ("polishing stones"), which are used to smooth out hides to make them tougher, impermeable and lustrous. Scientists unearthed fragments of four examples of such tools at two Neanderthal sites in southwestern France. The uniform smoothness and rounded edges of the lissoir tips probably resulted from scraping, thus hinting that they were, indeed, used against soft materials such as hides."We have found an entirely new aspect of Neanderthal behavior," McPherron said.

Until now, all known Neanderthal bone tools researchers found "have looked just like their stone tools," McPherron said. "In other words, Neanderthals looked at bone as just another raw material to flake into stone tool types like scrapers, notches and hand axes."

"Modern humans, on the other hand, made lots of different kinds of bone tools that took advantage of the properties of bone, to be ground into specific shapes like points, awls and smoothers," McPherron added. "Here, for the first time, we have evidence of Neanderthals doing exactly the same thing. They were taking ribs and shaping them into a tool that looks identical to the modern human tools found 40,000 years ago and to tools still in use today for preparing hides."

"What this means is that Neanderthals did, in fact, recognize that bone could be worked in special ways to create new kinds of tools, and in this way, Neanderthals are not different from later modern humans," McPherron added. "For many researchers, specialized bone tools were thought to be one of the technologies that separate the two groups of humans. This is no longer the case." 

McPherron cautioned that the researchers are not suggesting that Neanderthals were the first to make bone tools.

"There are sophisticated bone tools that are even older in Africa, for instance," McPherron said. "Neanderthals were, however, the first in Europe to make specialized bone tools."

And these aren't the first Neanderthal bone tools, but instead the first Neanderthal bone tools that weren't just replicas of their stone tools.

Neanderthal invention?

It remains unclear whether Neanderthals learned how to make lissoirsfrom modern humans or invented them entirely on their own, or even whether modern humans learned how to make this particular kind of bone tool from Neanderthals.

"The date we have of approximately 51,000 years old is earlier than the best evidence we have of modern humans in Europe, but it is still close enough that we have to mention the possibility," McPherron said. "What we need to do now is look in even older sites for these same tools, to see if Neanderthals had been making these tools for much longer."

"I think that as others look for this bone-tool type amongst their small bones, we will find many more," McPherron added. "I suspect that this new aspect of Neanderthal behavior was actually rather widespread."

For now, these findings "are the best evidence we have that Neanderthals were capable of inventing on their own one aspect of what has been called modern human culture," McPherron said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

2013 in Running for Latest First Atlantic Hurricane on Record

The 2013 season has a chance at producing no hurricanes through the middle of September, which would rival two records. However, there are some players on the field that could defend those records.

While the 2013 season thus far has delivered six tropical storms, it has not delivered any hurricanes as of Sept. 3.During the satellite era, the latest first hurricane to form on record was Gustav in 2002. Gustav reached hurricane status on Sept. 11 and went on to become a Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds of 100 mph off the coast of New England and Atlantic Canada, before tracking into Newfoundland. Gustav began as a subtropical system.

This NOAA satellite image shows Gustav brushing the Outer Banks of North Carolina on Sept. 10, 2002.

Prior to satellites, the latest first hurricane on record was during the World War II era. During 1941, the first detected tropical storm formed on Sept. 11. It was not until a second tropical storm strengthened, on Sept. 16, when that season finally had its first hurricane.

Even though that season started so late, there were four hurricanes, including three major hurricanes (sustained winds of 111 mph or greater) with one Category 4 storm with peak sustained winds of 130 mph. Dozens of people were lost at sea during that Caribbean hurricane, which slammed into Central America.According to Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski, "Even though dry air has backed off a little in recent days, strong westerly winds aloft continue to interrupt tropical development for almost every budding system."

The atmosphere over the tropics thus far has behaved more like an El Nino pattern, where abnormally warm Pacific Ocean waters create westerly winds aloft over the tropical Atlantic. The current sea surface pattern over the tropical Pacific is considered to be neutral.

"Hurricane formation in the Atlantic is overdue and is soon is likely to shift in favor of multiple tropical systems," according to Kottlowski.

On the tropical weather maps, there are three areas of disturbed weather that could become organized tropical systems now through early next week, but it appears the best chance of a hurricane would not come until the middle of the month.The current weather pattern would prevent a tropical system in the Atlantic from making landfall along the East Coast of the U.S. during the first part of September and would continue to deter rapid strengthening to a hurricane in general during the same period.

According to Expert Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson, "While there is a window for a Gulf of Mexico system to impact the United States and eastern Mexico, there is currently a buffering zone protecting much of the Atlantic Coast of North America.""This zone of strong westerly winds is likely to stay in place into at least the first part of next week," Anderson added.

A system drifting toward the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, near the Yucatan Peninsula as of Sept. 3, is in the most favorable area for quick development.

"The system near the Yucatan Peninsula may not have enough time to develop into a hurricane, before being swept ashore," Kottlowski said.

For those that follow computer models, for the first time this season multiple models are showing significant development of a hurricane over the Atlantic, but not until around Sept. 10 or later.

While such a system could foil the latest first hurricane on record in the Atlantic, steering winds in this part of the basin around the middle of the month would take such a system northward, well away from land over the central part of the basin.

Early Human Ancestors Transformed Diet Around Lucy's Time

Early human ancestors made a drastic shift in their diet, from eating exclusively fruits and leaves to including grasses and succulents about 3.5 million years ago, new research suggests.

The new results, published in several studies today (June 3) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), were found by analyzing the fraction of different carbon isotopes, or atoms of the same chemical with different molecular weights, in tooth enamel from more than 100 fossilized teeth of several species of early human ancestors.

"Until about 4 million years ago our early hominin ancestors had diets that were, isotopically at least, very similar to chimpanzees'," said Matt Sponheimer, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "They started eating new things, using the landscape in new ways around 3.5 million years ago. It's very possible that it was one of the important steps in the diversification of our lineage."

Diet insight

Because plants using different methods of photosynthesis to grow absorb different amounts of carbon isotopes, the ratio of those isotopes in dental enamel can reveal insights into the feeding habits of early human ancestors.

For instance, so called C3 plants absorb more of the heavy isotope carbon-13 into tissue than do C4 or CAM plants.

To analyze what the ancient human ancestors were eating, the team analyzed the fraction of different carbon isotopes in teeth from every early human fossil that could be sampled: 175 individuals from 11 different species dating between 4 million and 1.3 million years old. The fossils included the species Australopithecus afarensis, the species that includes the 3.2-million-year-old "Lucy," as well as early Homo species.

Prior to about 3.5 million years ago, human ancestors ate exclusively C3 plants. But after that, despite living in a very similar environment, their diet underwent a radical transformation to include C4 and CAM plants.

That signified a change from eating exclusively leaves and fruits to foods derived from grasses and succulents. That could include grass seeds and underground roots, and even termites or small, scavenged animals, although the exact composition of the diet still remains a mystery. 

The findings suggest that beginning around the time of Lucy, human ancestors seem to have transitioned from a fairly restricted diet to one with more variety, and that may have led to their diversification, Sponheimer said.

"Lucy and her like, they seem to be willing to eat just about anything," Sponheimer told LiveScience.

By contrast, some species such as Paranthropus bosei, or "Nutcracker Man" were becoming more specialized, narrowing their diets and focusing on C4 foods. Though its large jaws were originally thought to be used for cracking nuts, in fact, now researchers believe they used their jaws to grind grasses and seeds.

The findings largely confirm what scientists suspected, Richard Klein, a biologist at Stanford University, wrote in an accompanying commentary article published in PNAS.

"Twenty years ago, we might have guessed, based mainly on the savanna settings in which early hominins evolved, that they depended increasingly on grassy foods or on creatures that ate grasses. The craniodental morphology of P. boisei might also have led to us to speculate that it relied on grassy foods to a particularly great extent," Klein wrote. "Now, thanks to stable-isotope analyses, we no longer have to guess, and the broad pattern of early hominin dietary evolution is established."

Early Humans Lived in China 1.7 Million Years Ago

An extinct species of tool-making humans apparently occupied a vast area in China as early as 1.7 million years ago, researchers say.

The human lineage evolved in Africa, with now-extinct species of humans dispersing away from their origin continent more than a million years before modern humans did. Scientists would like to learn more about when and where humans went to better understand what drove human evolution.

Researchers investigated the Nihewan Basin, which lies in a mountainous region about 90 miles (150 kilometers) west of Beijing. It holds more than 60 sites from the Stone Age, with thousands of stone tools found there since 1972 — relatively simple types, such as stone flakes altogether known as the Oldowan. Researchers suspect these artifacts belonged to Homo erectus, "thought to be ancestral to Homo sapiens," Hong Ao, a paleomagnetist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi'an, told LiveScience. The exact age of these sites was long uncertain. To find out, Ao and his colleagues analyzed the earth above, below and in which stone tools at the Shangshazui site in the Nihewan Basin were found. The tools in question were stone blades potentially used for cutting or scraping.

The scientists analyzed the way in which the samples of earth were magnetized — since the Earth's magnetic field has regularly flippednumerous times over millions of years, looking at the manner in which the magnetic fields of minerals are oriented can shed light on how old they are. The researchers discovered this site in northern China might be about 1.6 million to 1.7 million years old, making it 600,000 or 700,000 years older than previously thought.

Horse, elephant and other fossils suggest the area back when the stone tools were made was mainly grassland interspersed with patches of woodland. A lake between the mountains there was probably a major attraction for hominid explorers, providing water and a range of other food sources, while the mountains could have represented an important material source for making stone tools. The researchers suggest hominid migrations to East Asia during the early Stone Age were a consequence of increasing cooling and aridity in Africa and Eurasia.

Given that slightly older artifacts and bones belonging to Homo erectuswere previously discovered in southern China more than 1,500 miles (2,500 km) away, these new findings suggest early and now-extinct human species may potentially have occupied a huge territory in China.

"Homo erectus occupied a vast area in China by 1.7 million to 1.6 million years ago," Ao said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 15 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Ancient Road Leading to Stonehenge Found

Scientists have uncovered a portion of an ancient path that may have led to Stonehenge.

While dismantling a modern road that runs near Stonehenge, the archaeologists uncovered two ditches found to be remnants of an ancient pathway called the avenue. Archaeologists have known of the avenue and suspected it led directly to the monument, but the modern road had cut the delicate pathway in two, obscuring its purpose. The new discovery confirms the avenue's role as an ancient pathway to the site."We found the bottoms, the truncated ditches, that belong to the feature known as the avenue, which is the processional leading up to Stonehenge," said archaeologist Heather Sebire, a property curator for English Heritage, which manages Stonehenge.

An exceptionally dry season also revealed the imprints where three stones used to lie in the main stone circle, suggesting the massive stone monument was once a complete circle.

Removing a road

The purpose of Stonehenge is an enduring mystery. Some have argued it was a massive sound illusion, a symbol of unity or a monument built on a sacred hunting ground.

For years, English Heritage had planned to remove the A344 road that snaked through the area and cut quite close to Stonehenge. Though archaeologists suspected the A344 had cut the avenue almost perpendicularly, they weren't optimistic they would find any traces of the earthwork, because the road is now recessed into the ground below the grass level.

But after workers pulled up the tarmac of the road, archaeologists noticed two parallel ditches that were almost perpendicular to the road. The ditches connected the truncated parts of the avenue. Though the banks of the pathway have long since disappeared, the ditches remained.

The discovery confirms that the avenue, which is about 98 feet (30 meters) wide, extended 0.3 miles (0.5 kilometers) straight to the stone monument before snaking onward for about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to the Avon River in the nearby village of Amesbury.

No one knows exactly what the avenue was used for, but archaeologists have some ideas.

"We think it was a processional way; it was where people processed up into Stonehenge," Sebire told LiveScience.

Dry summer

An unusually dry summer also has revealed the presence of three dry patch marks within the stone circle where massive boulders may have once stood. Dry weather can often reveal archaeological features that have been obscured for centuries.

But those traces can be fleeting, Sebire said.

"They're quite ephemeral. It rained a few weeks ago, and it disappeared," Sebire said.

Archaeologists have yet to conduct thorough excavations but have surveyed and photographed the imprints.

The discovery bolsters the notion that Stonehenge was once a full circle; some archaeologists believe that Stonehenge was never completed.

Time is Key to Putting a Price on Climate Risk (Op-Ed)

Time compression is a simple concept fundamental to risk management. It refers to the fact that we can solve almost any problem given enough time — the problem only becomes troublesome when events unfold too quickly, leaving insufficient time to react and manage the consequences.

I first heard the term when my friend and former colleague, Jacob Rosengarten, spoke at a recent conference for hedge-fund investors, describing what went wrong during the financial crisis.The concept can be applied broadly — in national security, for example, the concept applies to a country that must defend against an enemy missile launch or a cyberattack in minutes or seconds. Risk-management responses must come in a timely and accurate manner, for in such situations, there are rarely second chances.

History contains a number of risk-management lessons in which outcomes have gone awry due to the unanticipated emergence of time compression. Returning to the financial-meltdown example, it cascaded into market after market like falling dominoes, resulting in severe selling pressures, market losses, unexpected defaults and government bailouts of key companies. Things happened so rapidly that it was hard to keep score, all at great cost to society.

The consequences of time compression also describe the risk-management challenges created by climate change. Is it possible to avoid a global catastrophe caused by climate change coupled with time compression?

The answer almost certainly is yes. With foresight and planning, the planet can avoid the consequences of catastrophic time compression. It is important, however, that society not become overconfident about predicting or understanding all the implications of climate change.

Containing the unexpected risks associated with time compression requires immediate and urgent defensive action: It is time to price carbon-dioxide emissions.

This is an action that governments around the world can take simply by changing a few lines in the tax code, making industries that emit large quantities of carbon dioxide pay a price for doing so. The only interesting question that remains is how much to charge relative to a risk that is still unknown.

Let's examine the risk. Much like the financial crisis, we might expect a slow-moving increase in global temperatures resulting from climate change, as well as its related impacts, such as sea-level rise and ocean acidification. Yet the sheer complexity of the physical systems at work could lull the world into underestimating the risk, and increasing the chances of calamitous global damage.

Climate change, when tied to time compression, makes corrective actions more costly and less certain of efficacy. An invisible change in the tax system would create appropriate incentives for every economic agent in the world to change their behaviors. It would prompt businesses to develop alternative technologies that are safer for the environment, encourage consumers to make the right energy choices and coax investors to build capital stock suitable for the future.

Today, unfortunately, those invisible tax codes instead create incentives to increase carbon emissions.

Economists expect the emissions price required to successfully avoid catastrophic impacts from time compression to be relatively low if society were to act now. But there are two potential problems with such an expectation: First, it could be wrong, and second, until society prices carbon emissions fittingly, the risk itself is growing exponentially — as it has during the past half century.

Society must arrive at the correct response in the context of risk management.

The only effective brake on additional catastrophic risk is to price future uncertainties created by carbon emissions. The expected damages wrought by climate change are enough to justify pricing emissions today, but the latent risk produced by time compression andunexpected catastrophe requires an additional risk premium.

In economic terms, this means any carbon emissions pricing must take into account both the expected loss and the wide confidence interval (indicating the need to continue collecting data), as well as the cost to the planet of underestimating either. In reality, the appropriate price of carbon emissions will probably never be known. Like all pricing, it will adjust and fluctuate with changing circumstances and as more data become available.

Some may argue that it is premature to adopt such a risk-averse posture on carbon-emissions pricing. After all, if we don't know how climate change will unfold, is the cost of this conservatism really worth it in terms of what we will forgo today?

In fact, conservatism in pricing climate change is good public policy. The cost of being wrong — that is, not being conservative enough — potentially is unaffordable, not just for the plant and animal species that live on the planet, but also for humans. What if conflicts erupt as a result of changes prompted by climate change, such as access to freshwater?

People buy insurance on their homes, even though they can't predict when a natural disaster will strike — or if one will occur at all. But we all agree that the cost of such a disaster is unacceptably high should it happen. So we protect ourselves.

If people do this for their homes, why not do it for future generations and the planet ?

This is not the time to slowly ease onto the brake over multiple decades, as many policymakers have suggested. This is the time to brake hard. Such action, hopefully, over time, will prompt the price of carbon emissions to drop, along with the risk.

Society should not regard the act of filling the Earth's atmosphere with greenhouse gases lightly. Just as in the financial crisis, when the meltdown in value of the huge investments in risky mortgages unpredictably rippled into other markets, this global chemistry experiment also may spill over intouncontrollable environmental disasters, all compounded by time compression.Whether the price of emissions today should be low or high compared with future prices depends on whether society considers the risk of potential, and as yet unknown, environmental disasters. If society does not consider that risk, then the price should be lower today. This approach assumes that future generations will be just fine, and that they will spend whatever it takes to offset the consequences of climate change.

Be forewarned, however: Starting with a low price does not take into account the possibility that today's actions will lead to unexpected impacts, which create time compression and additional consequences impossible to reverse.

Make no mistake — this already is happening. Arctic ice is slowly disappearing. What we don't know, however, is the long-term consequences of this. Will such changes lead to a world less hospitable to human life, and if so, how bad will it be? No one really knows.

The danger of time compression caused by climate change is real — thus, society must immediately price the risk.

World governments must address these risks urgently. They must work in a concerted manner — consistent with their responsibilities to protect their populations and futures — to price carbon emissions sufficient for creating a meaningful margin of safety. Pricing should be high enough for society to feel confident enough that it can control the risk and develop viable alternative technologies.

Hopefully, there is plenty of capacity for the atmosphere to safely absorb the emissions that will come over the next several decades while cheaper alternative energy sources take over. Of course, there are no guarantees, just as with homeowners insurance. The question is, how much risk is society willing to assume on behalf of future generations?

Yes, there are serious challenges to implementing a carbon-pricing policy. It must be fair to developing nations, and take into account that some countries, hoping for a free ride, will not want to participate. This will require true statesmanship by world leaders to resolve. But complexity should not be an excuse for inaction.

After all, we may have less time than we think.

3D Printed Medical Devices Spark FDA Evaluation

When Kaiba Gionfriddo was just a few months old, a 3D-printed device saved his life.

Kaiba was born with a rare condition called tracheobronchomalacia, which meant his windpipe was weak, and would collapse and prevent air from flowing to his lungs. Researchers at the University of Michigan sought approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a 3D-printed tracheal splint, which they implanted around the baby's airway to help him breathe.

Thanks to 3D printing, a technology that produces objects of any shape, including medical devices highly customized for patients, from a computer model, these kinds of stories are becoming increasingly common. In order to keep up, the FDA is now looking at how it might evaluate medical devices made using 3D printers.Another patient had 75 percent of his skull replaced with a 3D-printed implant that was customized to fit his head. The FDA has also 3D-printed devices such as spinal fusion devices and hip cups, the part of a hip impant that fits into the hip socket.The FDA currently treats 3D-printed devices the same way it treats conventionally made medical devices, an FDA spokeswoman said.

"We evaluate all devices, including any that utilize 3D printing technology, for safety and effectiveness, and appropriate benefit and risk determination, regardless of the manufacturing technologies used," spokeswoman Susan Laine told LiveScience in an email. She added, "In some cases, we may require manufacturers to provide us with additional data, based on the complexity of the device."

In order for a new device to receive FDA approval, its creators must either prove the device is equivalent to one already marketed for the same use, or the device must undergo the process of attaining premarket approval. Anyone, not just medical device companies, can submit a device for approval.

But because 3D-printed products are made using a different manufacturing method than traditional medical devices use, they could require additional or different forms of testing. Two FDA laboratories are looking into ways 3D printing could affect the way medical devices are manufactured in the future.

The FDA's Functional Performance and Device Use Laboratory uses computer-modeling methods to determine how tweaks to a medical product's design could affect its safety and performance in various patient populations. Understanding the effect of these tweaks helps the FDA evaluate devices that are customized to an individual patient or group.

The FDA's Laboratory for Solid Mechanics focuses on how different printing methods affect the strength and durability of the materials used to make the devices. The lab's findings "will help us to develop standards and set parameters for scale, materials, and other critical aspects that contribute to product safety and innovation," FDA scientists wrote in a recent blog post.

3D printing makes it easier to customize devices to a patient's particular anatomy. For example, medical imaging can be used to create custom dental devices, hearing aid earplugs and surgical instruments. The FDA reviews each device as a separate submission, butmanufacturers don't have to obtain approval for each patient for whom the device has been adjusted, Laine said.

President Barack Obama launched a national effort In August 2012 among companies, universities and nonprofit organizations to support new "additive manufacturing" (3D printing) technologies, known as the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII).

NASA Funds 12 Far-Out Space Tech Ideas

NASA has granted funding to a dozen imaginative tech concepts, in the hopes that one or more of them will lead to big breakthroughs in space science and exploration.

The 12 ideas, which were selected under Phase 1 of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, are ambitious and varied. One aims to build biomaterials such as human tissue with a 3D pinter, for example, while another proposes to induce deep-sleep torpor states in astronauts making the long journey to Mars.

"These new Phase 1 selections include potential breakthroughs for Earth and space science, diverse operations and the potential for new paths that expand human civilization and commerce into space," NIAC program executive Jay Falker said in a statement.Phase 1 awards are worth about $100,000. The selected mission teams will use the money to conduct nine-month initial analysis studies, after which they can apply for Phase 2 funding of approximately $500,000 for two more years of concept development.

The 12 selected concepts, along with their principal investigators, are:

— Pulsed Fission-Fusion (PuFF) Propulsion System (Rob Adams, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center)

— Torpor-Inducing Transfer Habitat For Human Stasis To mars (John Bradford, Spaceworks Engineering, Inc.)

— Two-Dimensional Planetary Surface Landers (Hamid Hemmati, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

— Dual-mode Propulsion System Enabling CubeSat Exploration of the Solar System (Nathan Jerred, Universities Space Research Association)

— Growth Adapted Tensegrity Structures: A New Calculus for the Space Economy (Anthony Longman)

— Eternal Flight as the Solution for 'X' (Mark Moore, NASA Langley Research Center)

— Deep Mapping of Small Solar System Bodies with Galactic Cosmic Ray Secondary Particle Showers (Thomas Prettyman, Planetary Science Institute)

— Biomaterials Out of Thin Air: In Situ, On-Demand Printing of Advanced Biocomposites (Lynn Rothschild, NASA Ames Research Center)

— Plasmonic Force Propulsion Revolutionizes Nano/PicoSatellite Capability (Joshua Rovey, University of Missouri, Rolla)

— Transformers For Extreme Environments (Adrian Stoica, Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

— 10-Meter Sub-Orbital Large Balloon Reflector (Christopher Walker, University of Arizona)

— Low-Mass Planar Photonic Imaging Sensor (Ben Yoo, University of California, Davis)

The NIAC program has been operating in its present form since 2011. The original NIAC, called the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, ran from 1998 through 2007. (In 2008, Congress ordered the U.S. National Research Council to investigate NIAC's effectiveness and importance. The reviews were favorable, leading to the program's resurrection several years later.)