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We routinely identify animals by the feces they leave behind, but now this is being done with prehistoric man. DNA is being recovered from dried human excrement in order to identify where these prehistoric people came from. The dried excrement in Oregon’s Paisley Caves is the oldest found yet in the New World?dating to 14,300 years ago?and provides apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia. The Paisley Caves are located in the Summer Lake basin near Paisley, about 220 miles southeast of Eugene on the eastern side of the Cascade Range. The series of eight caves are westward-facing, wave-cut shelters on the highest shoreline of pluvial Lake Chewaucan, which rose and fell in periods of greater precipitation during the Pleistocene.
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Autism is believed to be a disease that is triggered when genetically susceptible children are exposed to an unknown toxin. This was originally thought to be the mercury in thimerisol vaccine preservatives, but autism rates have continued to rise, even though thimerisol and mercury have been largely phased out as vaccine preservatives. Now evidence has appeared that autism might have a stronger genetic component than previously believed.

This is because the mothers of two children in New York, both of whom have autistic children, turn out to have had the same sperm donor. While sperm banks will not reveal the identity of donors, there is a website called Donor Sibling Registry which can arrange meetings between offspring of the same donors.
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The lives of elephants are still a mystery. Can they even communicate telepathically? Let’s hope we can learn more about them before they become extinct. And not all of them live in the jungle. Some of them even create art!

Some elephants live in the desert of Namibia. In BBC News, Rebecca Morelle quotes researcher Martyn Colbeck as saying, “Elephants normally drink every day, but the desert elephant has adapted to go up to five days without drinking. Just behind the tongue they have this little pouch?[which] allows the elephants to?store several liters of water?” They not only drink this water, they use it to give themselves cooling showers with their trunks.

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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Yes! No! Yes! – Are cell phones dangerous?or not? One expert says they could kill far more people than either asbestos or smoking. There is evidence that using them for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain tumors. This type of cancer takes at least 10 years to develop, which is why the proof has been slow in coming.

In the March 30 edition of the Independent, Geoffrey Lean quotes cancer expert Vini Khurana as saying, “There is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumors.” He believes this will be “definitively proven” in the next decade.

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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