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POPSDo Cleaners Contain Toxins? The 1976 law, according to Earthjustice "requires household and commercial cleaner companies selling their products in New York to file semi-annual reports with the state listing the chemicals contained in their products and describing any company research on these chemicals' health and environmental effects."
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POPSUC Berkeley scientists unveil skeleton that shares chimp, human features More: she is not "the missing link," a transitional creature between today's chimps and humans. This concept has been abandoned: We did not evolve from living champs or apes, but shared a common ancestor. Nor is she this long-sought "last common ancestor." That's because she's too young; chimps and humans are thought to have diverged between 5 million and 10 million years ago. Then we went our separate ways, each taking different evolutionary trajectories. But she's important because she is the closest we have come to this unfound "last common ancestor." She belonged to a new type of early hominid that was neither chimpanzee nor fully human.
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POPSwhy are we the naked ape? did we come from the sea........go to TED talks 2009 to hear a speaker named Morgan speak on the subject of evolution and hairlessness too
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POPSIs the Internet melting our brains? I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony. We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation.
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POPSStephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution" The best part of the article: ""By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA." :)
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POPS7 Places You MOST See in Morocco When visiting, there are seven place you must see in Morocco. Starting with the world famous Casablanca and ending with Marrakech there is a surprising wealth of culture and history to be uncovered in between.
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POPSHow the Irish were viewed in Victorian times
"These ideas were not confined to a lunatic fringe of the scientific community, for although they never won over the mainstream of British scientists they were disseminated broadly and it was even hinted that the Irish might be the elusive missing link! Certainly the "ape-like" Celt became something of an malevolent cliche of Victorian racism. Thus Charles Kingsley could write I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw . . . I don't believe they are our fault. . . . But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much. . . ." (Charles Kingsley in a letter to his wife, quoted in L.P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, p.84). Even seemingly complimentary generalizations about the Irish national character could, in the Victorian context, be damaging to the Celt. Thus, following the work of Ernest Renan's La Poésie des Races Celtiques (1854), it was broadly argued that the Celt was poetic, light-hearted and imaginative, highly emotion
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POPSSwamp Gorillas Perform Hand Clapping Ritual more (at source): "The sound was always two rapidly consecutive beats and the sound does carry within the rainforest, much like a gorilla chest beat," added Kalan, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Oxford Brookes University.
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POPS Orangutan ruse misleads predators more: Co-author Madeleine Hardus, from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, told BBC News: "This study clearly indicates that the abilities of great ape communication have been traditionally undervalued and that there may be traces of language precursors in our closest relatives, the great apes." She added that the findings suggest that primate calling behaviour is not purely based on instinct, but instead is socially learned.
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POPSAnother Great Escape The funniest thing in this video is the people's laughing in the background. They really sound like apes and monkeys don't they?
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POPSAll the Monkeys Ain't in the Zoo Yes, of course I know that a chimp is an ape. I like this big guy.. He's got a lot of spunk. I love how he took away the keeper's gun! I just hope that he isn't punished for this escapade.
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POPSWe are Storytelling Apes: let Faith decline A pithy, powerful critique of Armstrong and the apothatic tradition. Fairly clearly (I think) an equally pithy response could be made centred upon the fact that the criticisms partly support Armstrong's position, and do not contradict it. However, the critique of her overarchingness is totally valid: the examples of Hamas and women are indicative of the near universal tendency of a certain class of writers/thinkers to believe they need to pull a definitive view of everything from their glittering theories. The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, Karen Armstrong, The Bodley Head, 2009
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POPSChimps do get "AIDS," study finds at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. At Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania researchers collected observational data and, from chimps that had died, tissue samples. Feces and urine tests pinpointed which living chimps were SIV positive. SIV is spread via bodily fluids, during sexual contact and probably during birth, Lonsdorf said. The virus may also spread through biting and fight wounds, she added—"which will be the topic of further study over the next several years." At the outset of the study, there was little sense that anything was wrong with the SIV-positive chimps, said Lonsdorf. Then the researchers began noticing the much higher death rate among the SIV-positive chimpanzees. And infected females, it turned out, were much less likely to give birth. When they did, their babies had a very low chance of survival. Hope for Fighting AIDS in Humans? "We can learn a lot about disease mechanisms by studying the same disease in different species''.
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POPSWhy humans are more innovative than apes i clipped this from a very interesting article - describes a number of tests/challenges and compares the ability of chimps and young children to tackle them. the differences are insightful.