Monthly Archives: February 2014

Skeleton from one of the earliest Americans yields its genome

Posted: February 15, 2014 at 11:43 am

The burial mound in Montana where the skeleton was found.

Texas A&M University

The peopling of the Americas via the Bering Sea land bridge is one of the more confusing events in recent history. Some of the earliest signs of human occupancy are actually in Chile. After that, the first distinct toolmaking culture, the Clovis people, appeared in the interior of North America and rapidly swept across the continent. There are also indications that a separate migration occurred down the Pacific Coast, possibly associated with people who had distinctive skeletal features, while the Inuit seem to be relatively recent arrivals.

The sudden appearance of the Clovis toolset has caused some people to suggest that the Clovis were a distinct migration by a passage between ice sheets directly into North America's interior. Others have even suggested that they arrived from Europe, brought by people who crossed the ice through Greenland (an idea that's favored by a certain Bigfoot researcher). Now, researchers have completed the genome of an individual who was buried with Clovis tools in Montana 12,500 years ago. The results suggest that the migration into North America was more unified than some thought.

Although Clovis tools are relatively common at many North American sites, they're generally not associated with skeletal remains. And there have been no distinctive skeletal features that label remains as belonging to a distinctive Clovis ethnic group. All of which makes Montana's Anzick site exceptional: it contains remains that were placed with Clovis tools, unambiguously tagging the skeleton as belonging to this group.

Completing a genome from a bone of this age is no longer big news. The DNA showed the expected signs of age-associated damage, and careful controls needed to be done to show that the contamination with modern DNA is minimal. In this case, the skeleton was male, which means it has a single X chromosome. Therefore, any DNA variation on the X would be a sign of contamination. By this and other measures, 99 percent of the DNA came from the individual in question.

The researchers used the resulting data to reconstruct the mitochondrial genome. And, already, the results brought a bit of clarity to the migrations of our ancestors. Its DNA sequence belongs to a type that now is almost exclusively distributed along the Pacific Coast, a distribution that some have suggested indicates the migration of a distinct group of humans, who arrived separately from those who settled the continents' interiors. The new result shows that the interiors and coasts were settled by the same people.

The Clovis genome also lacks many of the variants that are present in the modern populations, placing it at the base of the tree. The authors conclude that these results should serve as a caution against reading too much into the modern distribution of DNA variants.

The Y chromosome showed a similar story, placing it closer to all existing native populations than any sequences from Eurasia. The main genome is also consistent with the Clovis population being ancestral to most Native American populations.

But the results don't entirely argue for a single migration into North America. That's because the Clovis genome is more closely related to genomes from South America than it is to a few groups in Northern Canada and the Canadian Arcticincluding some groups that speak languages from the main Amerind group. That suggests that there might have been a second distinct migration along the interior of the ice sheets, one that left the northern populations of North America a bit more mixed than those of more southerly locations.

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Posted: at 11:43 am

Veteran actress Cherie Gil

I would like to be able to emanate the human side of Diana Vreeland. We talk about the woman, the human being, thats what I like to capture, the poignancy of that.

Tucked into a dark corner of the bar right across the Peninsula Manilas Salon de Ning, Evangeline Rose De Mesa Eigenmann more popularly known by her on-screen moniker Cherie Gil looked like a beautiful anachronism. With her pulled-back hair, all black outfit, and with the lit cigarette she held in one hand and the flute of wine in the other, she seemed to fit more in the swinging 60s rather than the present day.

A lot of it is due to the veteran actress ability to get underneath the skin of the characters that she portrays. When she sat down with the Students and Campuses staff for this 60 Minutes interview, she had just come from the press conference of her latest passion project: Full Gallop, a one-woman play on the life and times of legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who helmed Vogue from 1962 to 1971.

My Own Mann Productions Full Gallop will open with a gala night premiere on March 14 with regular performances on March 15 and 21 at 8 p.m. and on March 16 and 23 at 4 p.m. at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium of the RCBC Plaza.

I would like to be able to emanate the human side of her with the help of Bart (Guingona, the director). Its actually quite poignant, she says of the play. It all starts with who she is. We talk about the woman, the human being. Thats what Id like to capture, the poignancy of that.

Diana Vreeland is merely the latest in the long list of characters whose foibles, pathos, and poignancy she has captured and performed on screen and on stage in her 37 years in the business. Its easy to remember the various roles she has played on screen, from the lesbian Kano in Lino Brockas Manila By Night, to the spoiled Trining in Peque Gallagas Oro, Plata, Mata, and to her oft-quoted villainess Lavinia Arguelles in Emmanuel Borlazas Bituing Walang Ningning.

Her success and longevity in the business isnt exactly surprising. She does, after all come from a family of thespians from her father and mother Eddie Mesa and Rosemarie Gil to her brothers Mark Gil and Michael de Mesa.

When I started, it wasnt even a planned thing. I just got involved because my dad has a TV show. They would ask me to come and sing a song and I would sing and play, she recalls with a laugh. I just wanted to be on stage. I wanted to be performing, even in school. I was meant to be on stage yata, to be the center of attraction.

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Are robots outsmarting us?

Posted: at 11:43 am

Robots are leading the second machine age, automating not just manual labor but cognitive function. Photo by Flickr user Gregory Lee.

Editors Note: The robots are coming? The robots are coming!

Actually, it turns out theyre finally here: humiliating us at Jeopardy, driving us from the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters, running our lives online as software bots. Famous as a someday threat to factory jobs, robots (from the Czech robota drudgery or serf labor) are about to give almost all of us human workers a run for our money. As a result, we live in the The Second Machine Age, according to authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

As far back as 1893, Ambrose Bierce, not exactly known as a science fiction writer, imagined a mechanical man so frustrated, it beat its inventor to death. And machines replacing humans is a theme weve long explored on Making Sense, as in our 2011 report Man vs. Machine. The fear, of course, is that technological advancement, of the kind weve featured from Singularity University, will at last decisively benefit the highly skilled few at the expense of the workaday rest.

Digital advancements, like iPhones and Twitter, are only creating a handful of well-paying jobs, techno-pessimist Tyler Cowen told us in 2011. His take: an innovation drought is now stymying economic growth. He argued, in a tour of his kitchen and major appliances, that no contemporary invention has significantly changed our lives as much as the refrigerator or gas stove of many decades ago.

But Brynjolfsson and McAfee, director and associate director, respectively, of the MIT Center for Digital Business, know of no drought; instead, they see the increasing automation of cognitive tasks as the second great era of technological change.

In this extended conversation, they explain how this latest industrial revolution, with potentially negative repercussions for the labor market that they fully acknowledge, will have any even bigger effect than the first.

In a second post, Brynjolfsson and McAfee explain what kind of educational and infrastructural investment humans need to make in order to stay a step ahead of robots. Their tour of Bostons robots with Paul Solman aired on the NewsHour Thursday. Watch that segment below.

Simone Pathe, Making Sense Editor

630306298762987Second machine age will require more human creativityRobotic technology is increasingly infiltrating our everyday world, and as robots become more capable of human labor, people will likely have to develop new skills for new jobs. Economics correspondent Paul Solman talks to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee, who argue in their new book, "The Second Machine Age," that we are facing a radical new industrial revolution.2014-02-13 18:00:00disabled2365179167uYo7S-UDpSMtrue

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Are robots outsmarting us?

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Home Remedies For Eczema – Easy and Effective Ways of Treating Your Skin Condition – Video

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