It was always believed that the earliest of the human genus, Homo habilis (Handy Man) were the first toolmakers. That was until recently when a team of international researchers discovered two ribs of a large hoofed animal that roamed modern Ethiopia nearly 3.5 million years ago.

The evidence came to life when the ribs were studied, revealing slices in the bone, suggesting the use of tools 800,000 years beyond what was previously believed. From the ancestor known as Australeopithecus aferensis, the genus from which the famous “Lucy” came, the bones are believed to have been cut with tools the primates used in skinning the meat. “In this part of the world, at this time period, the only [hominid] species found to this point has been afarensis,” Shannon McPherron said. McPherron, an archaeologist from The Max Plancke Institute, is the co-author of the study that was published yesterday in Nature magazine.

Though it stands as reasonable to believe that tool-use was much older than previously thought simply by the sophistication of what we’ve discovered and marked as being the “oldest tools”. It’s easy to understand tools as originating from rocks being used in their natural state. A rock with a naturally sharp edge would’ve been used to cut, while those with more of a blunt edge would’ve been used to crush objects like bone to get inside to the marrow. As with anything, tools went through stages of evolution, as their function was passed down through generations over millions of years. “We’ll have to find more than these two bones, but if we fill in the record and we find more evidence of this, then we might be looking at a kind of learned behavior that was then shared and passed along in and amongst these groups,” McPherron said.

Though Lucy and her peers might not have been manufacturing tools, it appears they were using them almost a million years before we ever knew.

Atop the oil slicked surface of the Gulf waters, hired shrimp boats drag fireproof boom. Running parallel to one another, they “sweep” the surface of its oil, seaweed, and any other marine life which might get corralled before setting it all on fire. They’re called “Burn Boxes”, and from them the black plumes rising to the clouds can be seen from many miles away.

 Amidst the confusion of cleanup and rescue teams currently operating in the Gulf of Mexico, one such group has been shoved out of the way by BP, and now must sit idly by and watch helplessly as their dependents burn alive. 

Captain Mike Ellis, a charter boat operator in the Gulf, was hired to help rescue sea turtles. That includes the Kemps Ridley turtles, which because of their status as “critically endangered” are currently protected behind a law wielding criminal charges and a $50,000 price tag on anyone capturing or killing one.

Hired for a three week stint Ellis had to prematurely shut down his operations as BP stopped giving him access to search through the mucky contents of the burn boxes before setting them aflame. “Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Ellis said.

Blair Witherington, a research scientist from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who is also a part of the sea turtle rescue effort told reporters, “It reflects the conventional wisdom of oil spills: If they just keep the oil out at sea, the harm will be minimal. And I disagree with that completely.”

Clinging to one of their main food sources – strips of Sargassum seaweed that in many instances stretch for miles, in which normally hide a variety of crustaceans, worms, and small fish – the turtles are only finding the sea-plants saturated in oil. “Most of the Gulf of Mexico is a desert. Nothing out there to live on. It’s all concentrated in these oases,” Witherington said. “…It’s the base of the food chain. And these areas we’re seeing here by comparison are quite dead.” He later added, “As far as I can tell, that whole fauna is just completely wiped out.”

It can hardly be expected for the heads of BP to care about anything other than the business they’ve built primarily on the theft of Iran’s natural resources in the early 1900’s – the theft which has brought upon so much anti-western sentiment that runs rampant throughout most of the middle-east even today. And how justifiable is slowing the cleanup process further for sea turtles when entire eco-systems are still endangered; still watching over the slicks ominously creeping straight toward them? To us who care about empowering the powerless it is very justifiable, as it’s only another instance of the same carelessness that brought this mess upon us in the first place.

Photo courtesy of AP

When asked about volume with regards to anything the non-statistician/“normal Joe” usually answers, “Tons!” when it’s a large amount or, “Not much,” when it is indeed not much. I would think that most people who are seriously concerned over the situation right now in the Gulf of Mexico would answer, “Tons!” because a precise figure is needed only by those who have either given up hope, and so now think it would be interesting to find out exactly how much of BP’s crude continues to flow into the waters of the Western Hemisphere, or by those who have forgotten how to think about the “here and now”.

On Sunday, 54 days into what is amounting to a global disaster, engineers from British Petroleum deployed deepsea sensors so they could produce a more accurate number of how much oil continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Initially BP officials measured the daily flow-rate between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels (42,000 and 210,000 US gallons respectively). It wasn’t long before “outside experts” got involved for that number to be pushed aside, however, and the tally has continued to grow ever since. For a long time it was nothing more than a guessing game, factored largely by the video captured of the endless spew from the broken pipe one mile beneath the water’s surface.

At the start of last week BP had pinpointed a number as the collection cap was securing the oil at a rate of 630,000 gallons a day. A sense of relief rippled, even through the relentless statisticians. But the measure was short-lived, however, as an unknown amount was still seen leaking from around the capture point of the broken pipe. From this point new estimates of the “new” amount being leaked came in, registering at approximately “hundreds of thousands” of gallons per day. Of course, the vague figure still left the curious-minded without that precise figure.

The most recent estimate reported between 760,000 gallons to 1.8 million gallons continues to pump from the broken pipe each day. Though with the assistance of these deepsea sensors – that seemingly have been left to sit in storage up to this point, perhaps along side of some contraption also idly awaiting to be put to use, called a Miracle Plug – we’re finally going to have an accurate number of gallons, or barrels still leaking from the floor of the Gulf. As if it really matters.

In 1992, the city of Chicago experienced a flood in which 250 million gallons of water leaked into a tunnel that was once used in the early 1920’s for the transportation of coal. It happened when construction workers were driving new pilings into the Chicago River. The hammering caused a weakening of the tunnel walls which cracked under the pressure, and resulted in the flooding of the intricate network of tunnels, passageways, and basements throughout Chicago’s downtown “Loop”.

In both cases, the errors were the fault of humans wholly ignorant to what effect their operations were having on the surrounding workspace. The difference in reaction was drastic, however, in the sense that the officials in Chicago knew they needed to focus on nothing but plugging the hole. They called in truckloads of cement, rocks, and dirt in their hasty attempts at stopping the leak. At one point they even tried closing off the hole with truckloads of mattresses. Yes, it sounds silly, almost comical that people would take the tampon method of plugging the leak, and figure that a mass amount of mattresses might do the trick, but we have to give them the utmost credit, simply because they spared nothing in their attempts to plug the hole. The point is, nobody sat around trying to figure out the flow-rate of the water as it passed through the city’s underground, only how to stop the flow completely.

To this point we’ve watched high definition video of the flow coming from the floor of the Gulf, and now we know we can do a fairly decent job of surgically manipulating the area as we witnessed a submersible clip the pipe with a fixed set of shears. We’ve watched BP set “hats” and “caps” on top of the pipe, and all the while oil flows steadily toward the shores of the United States and beyond, yet they still can’t seem to find the urgency in which to drop in everything that isn’t buoyant to try plugging the leak.

There’s a point when we should be able to discount the priorities of someone who seemingly lacks the urgency necessary to quell a situation, and simply shove them out of the way. These people who need an exact figure to measure whether or not we need to take immediate action in any potential dire situation, should be forced to remain sidelined until the situation has been remedied. It seems too often they need to be reminded of the situation at hand, and what is most important. Sure, we can keep them at the sidelines where they could be used to simply answer questions such as, “Have we tried stuffing it full of mattresses?” In the meantime, take a backseat while we panic our way to dumping everything including the kitchen sink to dam the flow from the hole BP punched into the earth, where really no human should be allowed to play.

photo courtesy of NASA

NASA scientist William Boynton announced the find after the Phoenix Mars Lander “touched and tasted” Martian water on Wednesday. With a robotic arm the lander was able to dig a soil sample and place it in a heating mechanism which captured the water vapors. With this they were able to claim they have definitive proof that water exists on the Red Planet, and have extended Phoenix’s mission by five weeks to try to find if it was ever capable of harboring life. “Cupboard” and “Neverland” will be the upcoming dig sites where the scientists hope to find evidence of microbial life, and with their discovery of water and ice now behind them, the possibility has climbed sharply.

Maybe it isn’t all that strange that NASA named the craft, that’s responsible for finding water where it was never believed to have existed, Phoenix.

With a heap of issues to talk about, the G8 leaders are proving their annual summit is a waste of jet fuel and travel expenses. In what could be an annual meeting through video-conferencing, the leaders would rather spend their people’s money to gather for 3 days to bicker and cut business deals.

President Bush, a lone trooper on the issue of war, played out his usual childishness when he told the world that he will not help cut back on global pollution unless China and India agree to do the same. And as the job market in the U.S. continues to shrink he reiterated his belief that the only way to help the impoverished in the world is through free trade agreements.

Though he was able to boost the value of a buck by speaking highly of the world’s need of a strong dollar, the boost was less than one-hundredth of a cent against the Euro. And though he spoke out against the situation in Zimbabwe, calling Robert Mugabe’s election a “sham,” he is pushing for India to accelerate their nuclear development program, without signing anti-proliferation agreements, to where it can be in full swing before Bush leaves office.

With more issues yet to talk about, like the inflated cost of food and oil and the loss of wildlife and the environment, it appears that the G8 leaders are taking care of business the hard way. When they could be at home prioritizing their seemingly screwed up policies and taking action, they instead waste more time and money with words. Of course, that is assuming that government leaders can do more than setup walls of red tape and botch the processes in addressing global concerns.

Click here to read how mixed up the gene pool could be in the evolution toward a One World Government.

Yesterday at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, researchers reported some staggering numbers – the ratio of bacteria in our bodies to our human cells is 10 to 1. One scientist was able to estimate approximately 500 different species of bacteria living on our skin alone. This has led other researchers to tackle individual body parts to study possible correlations with their ailments. One is studying the bacteria in the human digestive tract to see if there may be a relationship to Crohn’s disease, while another is studying the bacteria residing in the digestive tract to see if there’s a correlation to obesity.

Click here to read about those we unknowingly play host to, and their ecosystem within us.

image courtesy of Nicolle Rager-Fuller/National Science Foundation

It isn’t so surprising that life is constantly being formed in our oceans. Considered the “Garden of Eden” to Evolutionists, it is where the chemistry of life forms single-celled organisms which then split. Eventually we have all of the living creatures we have today. Though even Evolutionists are wrong once in awhile; not by their belief that life came from the primordial muck of the oceans, but by how much proof they have that life is still being formed in those very oceans.

Click here to read more about those at the top of our family tree.

It is known that oil extracted from algae can be used for fuel. Currently, there are algae farms in various parts of the United States that are testing how viable an alternative this fuel source could be. Scientists have come to the conclusion that if one-tenth of the state of New Mexico was sectioned off and built up with algae farms it would produce enough fuel to cover our transportation issues.

After testing various fuel sources they have come to conclusion that Ethanol is perhaps the worst alternative, since the ratio of yield to the power consumed in its manufacturing pales in comparison to other sources. Not to mention that the higher the demand for corn becomes, the less other vegetables will be grown, thus the higher prices we’ll have to pay at the grocery.

Click here to read why soon we may be herding fun-guys. Wait, what?

photo courtesy of Rockefeller University

What looks to be an image of outer space is actually an image taken from the first viewing of a virus being born. It just so happens to be of the HIV virus which has taken over 25 million lives in the past 25 years. Using a technique called Total Internal Reflection Microscopy, a virologist and a biophysicist were able to watch as hundreds of thousands of HIV molecules gathered to form a single particle in a living cell.

Historically, the problem seemed to be that scientists could never view the surface of a cell.

Click here to read why penetration seemed to be what was screwing everything up.

Because of the slowness in their sexual maturation sharks and rays have a tendency to be overfished. Now, because the human palate finds the meat and fins particularly savory, over half of the various species of oceanic sharks are threatened with extinction.

Click here to read why Hooper, Brody, and Quint need to stay out of the water.