If you talk to the global warming crowd, carbon dioxide -- CO2 -- is the enemy of mankind. Any and all creation of CO2 is bad for the planet, we're told, and its production must be strictly limited in order to save the world. But what if that wasn't true? What if CO2 were actually a planet-saving nutrient that could multiply food production rates and feed the world more nutritious, healthy plants? As it turns out, CO2 is desperately needed by food crops, and right now there is a severe shortage of CO2 on the planet compared to what would be optimum for plants. Greenhouse operators are actually buying carbon dioxide and injecting it into their greenhouses in order to maximize plant growth. The science on this is irrefutable. As just one example, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food says:

CO2 increases productivity through improved plant growth and vigour. Some ways in which productivity is increased by CO2 include earlier flowering, higher fruit yields, reduced bud abortion in roses, improved stem strength and flower size. Growers should regard CO2 as a nutrient.

Bob Carter, Willie Soon & William Briggs: Changing sun, changing climate

A pre-Viking woolen tunic found beside a thawing glacier in south Norway shows how global warming is proving something of a boon for archaeology, scientists said on Thursday. - The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing — suitable for a person up to about 5 feet, 9 inches tall (176 centimeters) — was found 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway. Carbon dating showed it was made around the year 300. A Viking mitten dating from the year 800 and an ornate walking stick, a Bronze Age leather shoe, ancient bows, and arrowheads used to hunt reindeer are also among 1,600 artifacts found in Norway's southern mountains since thawing accelerated in 2006. The archaeologists said the tunic showed that Norway's Lendbreen glacier, where it was found, had not been so small since 300. When exposed to air, untreated ancient fabrics can disintegrate in weeks because of insect and bacteria attacks. "The tunic was well-used — it was repaired several times," said Marianne Vedeler, a conservation expert at Norway's Museum of Cultural History. The tunic is made of lamb's wool with a diamond pattern that had darkened with time. Only a handful of similar tunics have survived so long in Europe. The experts in Oslo said one puzzle was why anyone would take off a warm tunic by a glacier. One possibility was that the owner was suffering from cold in a snowstorm and grew confused with hypothermia, which sometimes makes suffers take off clothing because they wrongly feel hot.

With the release of the password to unlock the full 220,000 email treasure trove, the Climategate saga has entered a new phase. Joining us to discuss this latest development is Dr. Tim Ball of drtimball.com.

Climategate: Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails
It’s Time For The Person Who Leaked the CRU Emails To Step Forward
Climategate 3.0
Climategate 3.0 has occurred – the password has been released
Climategate: FOIA – The Man Who Saved The World

Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge. Philip Zimbardo was the leader of the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment -- and an expert witness at Abu Ghraib. His book The Lucifer Effect explores the nature of evil; now, in his new work, he studies the nature of heroism.

Wall Street Journal: CIA Ramps Up "Role" in Iraq...
John Glaser: CIA Boosts Support for Iraqi Militias
Chris Floyd: A Low, Dishonest Decade: New Details for the Iraq War Crime Mosaic
Naomi Spencer: Guardian/BBC report lays out US policy of torture, murder in Iraq

Global warming activists and media outlets are hyping a new study published in Science that claims the Earth is experiencing unprecedented temperatures. See: New York Times: Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years & Associated Press: HEAT SPIKE UNLIKE ANYTHING IN 11,000 YEARS. But the new media touted study is "based on 'reconstructed data' from 73 data sites, pretended to cover space-time of 196 million sq. mi. and 11,300 years". Another way to view the same claims are as follows: Earth Cooler Today Than 28% of the Past 11,300 Years: 'This is a paper that was bound to cause lurid headlines along lines that Earth is warming faster than at any time during past 11,000 years'. The new study is also counter to a preponderance of existing peer-reviewed studies showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warming were both as warm or warmer than today without benefit of modern emissions or SUVs.

Tests of water samples from Antarctica's Lake Vostok have yielded a completely new class of bacteria, a Russian scientist has told reporters. - The frozen samples were brought up from under the Antarctic ice in May 2012. Sergei Bulat of St. Petersburg’s Nuclear Physics Institute said they collected a core sample of water frozen into the borehole. He said the probe contained bacteria that didn’t belong to any known phyla, which is the next ranking above a class in size. In May, the samples will be brought to the lab by the Akademik Feodorov icebreaker to confirm the discovery.

Iceland Spar - thought to be the material used
in Viking sunstones

A crystal found in a shipwreck could be similar to a sunstone - a mythical navigational aid said to have been used by Viking mariners, scientists believe. - The team from France say the transparent crystal may have been used to locate the Sun even on cloudy days. This could help to explain how the Vikings were able to navigate across large tracts of the sea - well before the invention of the magnetic compass. However, a number of academics treat the sunstone theory with scepticism. The team from the University of Rennes in France say they found the crystal while examining the wreck of a British ship sunk off the island of Alderney - in the English Channel - in 1592. An oblong crystal the size of a cigarette packet was next to a pair of dividers - suggesting it was part of the navigational equipment. It has now been shown that it is of Iceland spar - a form of calcite known for its property of diffracting light into two separate rays. Testing a similar crystal, the scientists proved that by rotation it was possible to find the point where the two beams converge - indicating the direction of the Sun. They say it works on cloudy days, and when the Sun has set.

KpopStarz: Legendary Viking Sunstone Found – What's Next, Atlantis?
Yahoo: Mythical Viking sunstone may have existed after all

Dr. Elhaik’s research shows that the dominant element in the genetic makeup of European Jews is Khazar. For Central European Jews it is 38%, while for East Europeans it is 30%.

On December 14, 2012, Dr. Eran Elhaik turned almost two generations of Jewish genome research upside down. But he went even further. The young Israeli-American geneticist has charged former researchers with academic fraud, and he has the research to back it up. How could those those eminent Jewish scientist before him have been so wrong? Easy says Dr. Elhaik, “First these researchers decided what conclusions they wanted to find, and then they set off to find evidence to support it.” I was not bashing Jewish scientists. What Elhaik has described is a slam dunk fraud. But why? Why would Jews who take such pride in the academic achievement risk exposing themselves to a group deception which was bound to be discovered later? Dr. Elhaik does not delve into the quicksand of the politics, but I will gladly do so. They perpetrated the fraud solely to support the bogus biblical claim to Palestine which was anchored in their being a separate people. This distinguished them from all others because they claimed a land title in their blood. They bet the farm on this DNA proof of purchase, a God given bar coded passport to the Palestine. Dr. Ehaik just erased the bar code. It was just stamped on anyway, because it was never in the blood. Dr. Elhaik’s research shows that the dominant element in the genetic makeup of European Jews is Khazar. For Central European Jews it is 38%, while for East Europeans it is 30%. To that you can add his findings that in both groups their genome is mostly Western European. Surprise, surprise. The Roman empire is the dominant lineage there, those that settled on the frontier, like retired soldiers, and the locals with whom they produced families. There were some Jewish merchants there as Elhaik did find some Middle Eastern roots which he suspects are Mesopotamian and a bit of biblical Israel. But here comes the slam dunk…the Israel connection is such a tiny part of their overall genome that it cancels out their DNA title claim to the Land. The good doctor would not wander into this swamp but I will, by calling a spade a spade. [H/T: xymphora: A short history of Polish colonialsim]

Eran Elhaik: The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses. (Eran Elhaik, Ph.D.) - Abstract: The question of Jewish ancestry has been the subject of controversy for over two centuries and has yet to be resolved. The “Rhineland hypothesis” depicts Eastern European Jews as a “population isolate” that emerged from a small group of German Jews who migrated eastward and expanded rapidly. Alternatively, the “Khazarian hypothesis” suggests that Eastern European Jews descended from the Khazars, anamalgam of Turkic clans that settled the Caucasus in the early centuries CE and converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Mesopotamian and Greco–Roman Jews continuously reinforced the Judaized empire until the 13th century. Following the collapse of their empire, the Judeo–Khazars fled to Eastern Europe. The rise of European Jewry is therefore explained by the contribution of the Judeo–Khazars. Thus far, however, the Khazars’ contribution has been estimated only empirically, as the absence of genome-wide data from Caucasus populations precluded testing the Khazarian hypothesis. Recent sequencing of modern Caucasus populations prompted us to revisit the Khazarian hypothesis and compare it with the Rhineland hypothesis. We applied a wide range of population genetic analyses to compare these two hypotheses. Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis and portray the European Jewish genome as a mosaic of Near Eastern-Caucasus, European, and Semitic ancestries, thereby consolidating previous contradictory reports of Jewish ancestry. We further describe a major difference among Caucasus populations explained by the early presence of Judeans in the Southern and Central Caucasus. Our results have important implications for the demographic forces that shaped the genetic diversity in the Caucasus and for medical studies.

Eran Elhaik: The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses. (Eran Elhaik, Ph.D.) - Discussion: (Pages 71-72) A major difficulty with the Rhineland hypothesis, in addition to the lack of historical and anthropological evidence to the multimigration waves from Palestine to Europe (Straten 2003; Sand 2009), is to explain the vast population expansion of Eastern European Jews from fifty thousand (15th century) to eight million (20th century). The annual growth rate that accounts for this population expansion was estimated at 1.7-2%, one order of magnitude larger than that of Eastern European non-Jews in the 15th-17th centuries, prior to the industrial revolution (Straten 2007). This growth could not possibly be the product of natural population expansion, particularly one subjected to severe economic restrictions, slavery, assimilation, the Black Death and other plagues, forced and voluntary conversions, persecutions, kidnappings, rapes, exiles, wars, massacres, and pogroms (Koestler 1976; Straten 2003; Sand 2009). Because such an unnatural growth rate, over half a millennium and affecting only Jews residing in Eastern Europe, is implausible - it is explained by a miracle (Atzmon et al. 2010; Ostrer 2012). Unfortunately, this divine intervention explanation poses a new kind of problem - it is not science. The question of how the Rhineland hypothesis, so deeply rooted in supernatural reasoning, became the dominant scientific narrative is debated among scholars (Sand 2009).

Scribd: Johns Hopkins Genome Study of Jewish Origins (The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses.) - Conclusions: We compared two genetic models for European Jewish ancestry depicting a mixed Khazarian-European-Middle Eastern and sole Middle Eastern origins. Contemporary populations were used as surrogate to the ancient Khazars and Judeans, and their relatedness to European Jews was compared over a comprehensive set of genetic analyses. Our findings support the Khazarian Hypothesis depicting a large Caucasus ancestry along with Southern European, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European ancestries, in agreement with recent studies and oral and written traditions. We conclude that the genome of European Jews is a tapestry of ancient populations including Judaized Khazars, Greco-Romans Jews, Mesopotamian Jews, and Judeans and that their population structure was formed in the Caucasus and the banks of the Volga with roots stretching to Canaan and the banks of the Jordan.

The results of a new study indicate that suicide rates among veterans in the United States are increasing. - An estimated 22 military veterans take their lives every day in America, according to the study helmed by Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist and researcher who works with the Department of Veterans Affairs. “While the percentage of all suicides reported as Veterans has decreased, the number of suicides has increased,” the conclusion of the study stated. Specific trends were observed during the course of the study regarding the age and gender of veterans who most frequently committed suicide. [...] The study was conducted over the course of two years, and is, according to Bossarte, indicative mainly of veteran suicides playing a part in what is a national problem.

Skeleton found beneath Leicester car park confirmed as that of Richard III, as work begins on new tomb near excavation site

Not just the identity of the man in the car park with the twisted spine, but the appalling last moments and humiliating treatment of the naked body of Richard III in the hours after his death have been revealed at an extraordinary press conference at Leicester University. There were cheers when Richard Buckley, lead archaeologist on the hunt for the king's body, finally announced that the university team was convinced "beyond reasonable doubt" that it had found the last Plantagenet king, bent by scoliosis of the spine, and twisted further to fit into a hastily dug hole in Grey Friars church, which was slightly too small to hold his body. But by then it was clear the evidence was overwhelming, as the scientists who carried out the DNA tests, those who created the computer-imaging technology to peer on to and into the bones in raking detail, the genealogists who found a distant descendant with matching DNA, and the academics who scoured contemporary texts for accounts of the king's death and burial, outlined their findings. Work has started on designing a new tomb in the cathedral, only 100 yards from the excavation site, and Canon David Monteith said a solemn multifaith ceremony would be held to lay him into his new grave there, probably next year. Leicester's museums service is working on plans for a new visitor centre in an old school building overlooking the site.

Wikipedia: Richard III of England
The Search for King Richard III - The Genealogy - Video
University of Leicester: The search for Richard III - completed

A scientist has said it would be possible to clone a Neanderthal baby from ancient DNA if he could find a woman willing to act as a surrogate. - The process would not be legal in many countries and would involve using DNA extracted from fossils. George Church, a genetics professor of Harvard School of Medicine, said that the process was possible and that far from being brutal and primitive, Neanderthals were intelligent beings. They are believed to be one of the ancestors of modern man and became extinct 33,000 years ago. He added that altering the human genome could also provide the answers to curing diseases such as cancer and HIV, and hold the key to living to 120.

Self-control, not self-esteem, leads to academic success, researchers have concluded. Indeed, teaching self-esteem actually reduces student achievement and undermines the work ethic of some students. “In one study, university students who’d earned C, D and F grades ‘received encouragement aimed at boosting their self-worth.’ They did worse than students with similar grades whose self-esteem had been left alone. ‘An intervention that encourages [students] to feel good about themselves, regardless of work, may remove the reason to work hard,’” notes “Roy Baumeister, a Florida State professor who’s studied the topic for years. ‘Self-control is much more powerful and well-supported as a cause of personal success,’ he says.”

The two black holes are not supermassive black holes like the one at the centre of our galaxy, but they are still ten times more luminous than the normal stellar-mass black holes that pepper the space between the stars. - NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), has captured an image of two black holes in the spiral galaxy IC342 (also known as Caldwell 5). “These new images showcase why NuSTAR is giving us an unprecedented look at the cosmos,” said Lou Kaluzienski, NuSTAR program scientist in a release. “With NuSTAR’s greater sensitivity and imaging capability, we’re getting a wealth of new information on a wide array of cosmic phenomena in the high-energy X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.” The NuSTAR is the first telescope in orbit that can focus on high-energy X-Ray emissions, which allows it to get a much clearer picture of distant stellar phenomena. Galaxy IC342 is 7 million light-years away from Earth. “High-energy X-rays hold a key to unlocking the mystery surrounding these objects,” Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena said in a statement. “Whether they are massive black holes, or there is new physics in how they feed, the answer is going to be fascinating.” In the NuSTAR image (above), the two points of purple indicate the presence of black holes. The purple indicates X-rays while the rest of the image is represents visible light. “Before NuSTAR, high-energy X-ray pictures of this galaxy and the two black holes would be so fuzzy that everything would appear as one pixel,” said Harrison.

The country that oversaw the launch of the world's first artificial satellite hopes to regain some of its former glory with a big boost in space spending announced by Russia on Thursday after a series of failures. - Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($68.71 billion) on developing Russia's space industry from 2013 to 2020, state-run RIA news agency reported. "The programme will enable our country to effectively participate in forward-looking projects, such as the International Space Station (ISS), the study of the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies in the solar system," Medvedev was quoted as saying. Despite the launch by the former Soviet Union of Sputnik 1 in 1957, triggering the Cold War space race, Russia's space programme has suffered a series of humiliating setbacks in the past year.

The Canadian government has reportedly ordered the scientific journals of the country not to publish articles authored by Iranian researchers and scientists. - Iranian academics, who had primarily received an acceptance from the journals, have received new messages that notified them of the journals' decision not to publish their work due to recent policies adopted by the Canadian government. In a recent move, the Canadian Journal of Psychiatric Nursing Research refused to publish an article by an Iranian assistant professor despite the earlier acceptance of the article. The journal argued that it "will not be permitted to publish" the article as previously stated, citing the political and non-academic reasons. It said that Ottawa had closed down its mission in Tehran for what it called the “civil rights abuse of the citizens of Iran” and “the threat to the security of Canadian personnel and Israel.”

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found seven galaxies that formed relatively shortly after the universe’s birth some 13.7 billion years ago, scientists said on Wednesday, describing them “as baby pictures of the universe.”

One of the objects may be the oldest galaxy yet found, dating back to a time when the universe was just 380 million years old, a fraction of its current age. “These early galaxies represent the building blocks of present-day galaxies,” John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told reporters in a conference call. The discovery of galaxies dating back to the universe’s early years should help scientists figure out what happened after the “dark ages,” a period of time about 200 million years after the [supposed] Big Bang explosion when cooling clouds of hydrogen, clumped together by gravity, began to ignite, [allegedly] triggering the first generation of stars. “It was a very important moment in cosmic history,” said astronomer Richard Ellis, with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Scientists do not know exactly when this “cosmic dawn“ occurred and whether it was a single, dramatic event that caused all the galaxies to form their first stars, or whether it happened more gradually over millions of years. The discovery of seven galaxies spanning a period between 350 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang supports theories that the cosmic dawn was a drawn-out affair, with galaxies slowly building up their stars and chemical elements over time, said Brant Robertson of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Astronomers plan follow-up studies after Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, launches in 2018. The research appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Meet Robocod, the latest weapon in Homeland Security's increasingly high-tech underwater arsenal, a robotic fish designed to safeguard the coastline of America and bring justice to the deep. Well almost.

The new robot, named BioSwimmer, is actually based not on a cod but a tuna which is said to have the ideal natural shape for an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). Its ultra-flexible body coupled with mechanical fins and tail allow it to dart around the water just like a real fish even in the harshest of environments. And while it does have a number of security applications, this high maneuverability makes it perfectly suited for accessing hard-to-reach places such as flooded areas of ships, sea chests and parts of oil tankers. Other potential missions include inspecting and protecting harbors and piers, performing area searches and military applications. BioSwimmer uses the latest battery technology for long-duration operation and boasts an array of navigation, sensor processing, and communications equipment designed for constricted spaces. It is being developed by Boston Engineering Corporation's Advanced Systems Group (ASG) basesd in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Argentine experts have discovered the fossils of a two-metre-tall penguin that lived in Antarctica 34 million years ago. - Paleontologists with the Natural Sciences Museum of La Plata pro vince, where the capital Buenos Aires is located, said the remains were found on the icy southern continent. “This is the largest penguin known to date in terms of height and body mass,” said researcher Carolina Acosta, who noted that the record had been held by emperor penguins, which reach heights of 1.2 metres tall.

Many of the body’s processes follow a natural daily rhythm or so-called circadian clock. There are certain times of the day when a person is most alert, when blood pressure is highest, and when the heart is most efficient. Several rare gene mutations have been found that can adjust this clock in humans, responsible for entire families in which people wake up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. and cannot stay up much after 8 at night. Now new research has, for the first time, identified a common gene variant that affects virtually the entire population, and which is responsible for up to an hour a day of your tendency to be an early riser or night owl. Furthermore, this new discovery not only demonstrates this common polymorphism influences the rhythms of people’s day-to-day lives -- it also finds this genetic variant helps determine the time of day a person is most likely to die. The surprising findings, which appear in the November 2012 issue of the Annals of Neurology, could help with scheduling shift work and planning medical treatments, as well as in monitoring the conditions of vulnerable patients.

If you’ve been following the sci-tech section of any major news site over the past few years, chances are you have seen more than a few stories discussing the possibility of extending the highly problematic act of genetic modifications onto the human race. A step that has been foretold by science fiction novels and simultaneously discounted as conspiracy for years. According to one leading synthetic biologist with a passion for eugenics (meaning ‘selective breeding’) and cloning technology, it may be just around the corner. Scientist George Church envisions a world where traits are pre-determined by parents for their offspring — children created via cloning technology to create ‘better’ humans. He also claims to be creating Neanderthal cells within his laboratory, holding an inventory of Neanderthal ‘parts’ across the lab space. In the near future, he even plans to ‘create’ a Neanderthal baby within his lab.

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech.

While dolphins have been taught to mimic the pattern and durations of sounds in human speech, no animal has spontaneously tried such mimicry. But researchers heard a nine-year-old whale named NOC make sounds octaves below normal, in clipped bursts. The researchers outline in Current Biology just how NOC did it. But the first mystery was figuring out where the sound was coming from. The whales are known as "canaries of the sea" for their high-pitched chirps, and while a number of anecdotal reports of whales making human-like speech, none had ever been recorded. When a diver at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in California surfaced saying, "Who told me to get out?" the researchers there knew they had another example on their hands. Once they identified NOC as the culprit, they made the first-ever recordings of the behaviour.

They found that vocal bursts averaged about three per second, with pauses reminiscent of human speech. Analysis of the recordings showed that the frequencies within them were spread out into "harmonics" in a way very unlike whales' normal vocalisations and more like those of humans. They then rewarded NOC for the speech-like sounds to teach him to make them on command and fitted him with a pressure transducer within his nasal cavity, where sounds are produced, to monitor just what was going on. They found that he was able to rapidly change the pressure within his nasal cavity to produce the sounds. To amplify the comparatively low-frequency parts of the vocalisations, he over-inflated what is known at the vestibular sac in his blowhole - which normally acts to stop water entering the lungs. In short, the mimicry was no easy task for NOC.

Geo-engineering is touted as a last-ditch effort to save people and the planet from global warming. But the truth is that geo-engineering can alter rain cycles leading to droughts and famine that could result in billions of deaths! Therefore, Bill Gates appears to be using his concern over global warming to cloak his real intent of controlling weather and/or depopulation. [...] Geo-engineering can actually cause global warming when tampering with clouds in the upper atmosphere/stratosphere. The Gates-funded scientist lobbyists propose spraying sulfur dioxide 30 miles above Earth and the New Mexico experiment proposes spraying 15 miles above surface- both of these fall within the parameters of the upper atmosphere/stratosphere.

The United States Military conducted top secret experiments on the citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, for years, exposing them to radioactive compounds, a researcher has claimed. While it was known that the government sprayed 'harmless' zinc cadmium silfide particles over the general population in St Louis, Professor Lisa Martino-Taylor, a sociologist at St. Louis Community College, claims that a radioactive additive was also mixed with the compound. She has accrued detailed descriptions as well as photographs of the spraying which exposed the unwitting public, predominantly in low-income and minority communities, to radioactive particles. 'The study was secretive for reason. They didn't have volunteers stepping up and saying yeah, I'll breathe zinc cadmium sulfide with radioactive particles,' said Professor Martino-Taylor to KSDK. Through her research, she found photographs of how the particles were distributed from 1953-1954 and 1963-1965.

Photo: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Researchers have sequenced the genome of an archaic Siberian girl 31 times over, using a new method that amplifies single strands of DNA. As the team reports online in Science this week, more than 99% of the nucleotides are sequenced at least 10 times, so researchers have as sharp a picture of this ancient genome as of a living person's. That precision allows the team to compare the nuclear genome of this girl, who lived in Siberia's Denisova Cave more than 50,000 years ago, directly to the genomes of living people, producing a "near-complete" catalog of the small number of genetic changes that make us different from the Denisovans, who were close relatives of Neandertals.

Wikipedia: Altai Mountains

Thomas H. Douglass: The Denisova discovery - An international team of scientists made headlines at the end of last year when they used genetic evidence to show that an ancient people, once living in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, were distant cousins of the Neanderthals and contributed to the modern human genome before their extinction. The discovery is a triumph of modern genomics and decades of publicly funded science research in the United States and elsewhere, which has led to the sequencing of the human genome and promises to revolutionize our understanding of evolution, disease, and global genetic diversity.

The Mars rover Curiosity is indulging in a flurry of multimedia activity ahead of its science mission proper. It sent the first image from its 100mm telephoto lens, already spotting an intriguing geological "unconformity". Nasa also released a colour panorama of Mount Sharp, the rover's ultimate goal. On Monday, the rover relayed "the first voice recording to be sent from another planet", and on Tuesday it will broadcast a song from artist will.i.am as part of an educational event.

But alongside these show pieces, Curiosity - also known as the Mars Science Laboratory - is already warming up its instruments for a science mission of unprecedented scope on the Red Planet. Nasa said that the rover was already is returning more data from Mars than all of the agency's earlier rovers combined. It will eventually trundle to the base of Mount Sharp, the 5km-high peak at the centre of Gale Crater, in which the rover touched down just over three weeks ago. For now it is examining the "scour marks" left by the rocket-powered crane that lowered the rover onto the planet's surface, giving some insight into what lies just below it.

The rover will now employ its Dan instrument, which fires the subatomic particles neutrons at the surface to examine levels of hydrogen- and hydroxyl-containing minerals that could hint at Mars' prior water-rich history. Another tool in its arsenal, the ChemCam, which uses a laser to vapourise rock and then chemically examine the vapour, will also have a look at the scour marks. And the Sample Analysis at Mars or Sam instrument, itself a package of three analysis tools, has now been switched on and is being run through its paces ahead of "sniffing" the Martian atmosphere; the tests include analysing a sample of Earth air that was left in it at launch.