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'Great Dying' linked to dent Down Under *
Millions of years before the dinosaurs vanished, an even bigger mass extinction wiped out more than 90 per cent of the species on Earth. Now scientists think they may have evidence of an impact crater that contributed to the “Great Dying.”
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'Museum without walls' displays Egypt's glories *
Experiencing the glories of Egypt, both ancient and modern, will become a lot easier starting today thanks to a groundbreaking joint effort of the Egyptian government and a Toronto-based team of Web designers.
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A primate primer: Boys will be boys, as girls ape mom *
Chimps shed light on roots of sex-based learning differences in human youngsters.
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Ancient arm bone shows fish used limbs *
American scientists have unearthed the world's oldest arm bone, a 365-million-year-old fossil that provides key evidence that fish used limbs in water well before animals used them to climb up on land.
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Antarctic the ‘lost world' of dinosaurs *
A “lost world” of early dinosaurs roamed the Antarctic long after they were supplanted in the rest of the world, the recent discovery of fossilized bones suggests.
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Artworks 30,000 years old *
Some of the oldest undisputed artworks ever found — figurines carved from mammoth ivory around 30,000 years ago — have been discovered in a cave in Germany, shedding light on early humans' religious beliefs and confirming they were surprisingly skilled artists.
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Beads may be jewel for anthropology *
They are more like the jewellery you would see at a craft fair than in the famous window at Tiffany's. But researchers say perforated shells found buried in a cave in South Africa have the distinction of being the oldest personal ornaments ever discovered.
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Cats may have been pets 9,500 years ago *
Kitten found in Neolithic grave on Cyprus appears to have been buried with a human.
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Did Neanderthals and humans mix? *
One of the abiding questions in human evolution is the intimacy of the relationship between early people and their clear, near relations, the Neanderthals.
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Dinosaur footprints in Gobi solve mysteries *
Since 1948, the barren Nemegt area of Mongolia's Gobi Desert has been a fossil hunter's nirvana. Bones from thousands of dinosaurs and other creatures that roamed the shores of an ancient river 83 million to 65 million years ago have been dug up.
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Dwarf mouse dies at 41/2 -- 136 in human years *
Yoda, a genetically modified dwarf mouse that lived to be the oldest of his kind, died yesterday in his cage at the University of Michigan.
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Early mammal did put bite on dinosaurs *
Hey, Dino! Guess who's coming to dinner?
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Experts 'do a number' on U of T's Lost Tomb of Jesus statistician *
Prof. Andrey Feuerverger's one-in-600 calculation is based on many assumptions about the prevalence of the names and their biblical significance.
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Find puts humans in Arctic 30,000 years ago *
An extraordinary archeological find in Siberia shows that early modern humans lived in the High Arctic in the thick of the most recent Ice Age, not after it had begun to retreat as had previously been thought.
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First Discovery of a Dinosaur Bed in British Columbia *
The first discovery of a dinosaur bone bed in British Columbia has been confirmed -- near the town of Tumbler Ridge.
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Fossil find fills gap in human evolution *
We were never Neanderthals...
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Fossils show animals took land bridge from Asia *
Ancestors to modern North American black bears, wolverines and other animals walked here across a land bridge from Asia, an important new fossil find in the Canadian Arctic shows.
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Gene Therapy . . . the Natural Way *
Is it the end of the nature-nurture debate? As ANNE McILROY reports, new research implies that the quality of parental care can alter children's genetic makeup.
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Genes decide the shape you're in *
According to a study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of identical twins, the reason why some people can eat all the chocolate and chips they want and not increase their cholesterol levels, is all down to their genes.
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Genome decoding completed *
An international consortium of scientists announced Monday that it has completed the map of the human genetic code to an accuracy of 99.99 per cent and said the accomplishment opens a new era for biology and medicine.
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Hidden secrets on the nature and timing of genome evolution in mammals revealed *
Breakages in chromosomes in mammalian evolution have occurred at preferred rather than random sites as long thought, and many of the sites are involved in human cancers, an international team of 25 scientists has discovered.
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Lord, He's hot *
Talk about resurrecting your career. Name the arts genre and Jesus was there in 2003, MICHAEL POSNER writes.
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Maybe we are rare *
It used to be that we thought we knew what a solar system was. It featured a star with small, rocky planets circling near it and big, gaseous planets orbiting farther away. The nearest planets were the hottest and the farthest were the coldest, and all the planets came into existence after the dust and gas that surrounded a newborn star glommed together.
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Media not behind 'genohype,' study shows *
The media are often accused of exaggerating the importance of developments in the field of genetic research. Those who level the allegation have even coined a term to describe it — they call it genohype
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Monkey not so extinct *
A species of monkey thought likely to be extinct may still be swinging through the trees in Africa, an Ohio Statue University anthropologist says.
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Mummy tells tale of infection *
Chagas disease, a deadly parasitic blood illness that recently has drawn attention in North America, has infected some South and Central Americans for at least 9,000 years, researchers said Monday.
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Murder solved after two million years *
Researchers in South Africa announced yesterday that they have solved one of the oldest murder cases in the world. The victim was 3˝-year-old Taung child, the first fossil from a human ancestor discovered in Africa.
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Neanderthals' teeth reveal rapid growth to maturity *
When you're living on the edge of a largely ice-covered continent, sleeping in caves, sharing turf with giant cave lions and bears, you had better grow up quickly.
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Oldest-known human ornaments found *
Some 75,000 years ago, in a Stone Age cave overlooking the ocean, someone collected shells and bored holes in them, producing the oldest known evidence that humans had fashioned an ornament.
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On a hunch, archeology student finds ancient smokehouse *
An archeology student's hunch has paid off in the discovery of one of the oldest smokehouses in British Columbia.
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Profs untangle mystery of Frobisher gold scam *
A team of professors from Laval University think they have finally solved some of the mystery surrounding Canada's first great gold scandal.
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Study shows pandemic path a bird flu can take *
Killer of millions in 1918 was able to make human-to-human infection leap.
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Super, but not useful *
One of the odder things about this year's Nobel Prize in physics is that it was given for research in two cold-temperature phenomena that have very different application pathways in the modern world.
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T. rex a typically hungry teen *
Here's a dinosaur finding that parents can appreciate: The teenage Tyrannosaurus rex typically went through an explosive growth spurt, gaining nearly more than 2.25 kilograms a day.
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The buzz about bees *
Genes, genes everywhere, and what's a soul to think? Scientists announced last month that they had sequenced the genes of the first farmed animal. It wasn't the pig, or the cow or the chicken, but the stinging honey bee.
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The poop on ancient man *
Fossilized feces are a veritable trove of human DNA and could answer a host of questions about the hunter-gatherer life thousands of years ago. JACOB BERKOWITZ reports...
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Why identical twins stop being identical *
Because DNA 'epigenetics' has kicked in. PAUL TAYLOR explores a new branch of science.
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Bird flu not being spread by people, WHO says *
Genetic evidence shows bird flu is not being passed from person to person in Vietnam, reassuring news that suggests the outbreaks that have killed 18 people have not become an epidemic, the World Health Organization said yesterday.
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Bones of contention *
For decades the remains of B.C.'s Haida ancestors have been locked away in metal drawers as specimens in museums around the world. Now, the Haida are fighting to bring them home, ALEXANDRA GILL writes
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Earth uses self-cooling mechanism, study finds *
The Earth is apparently geologically programmed not to let the atmosphere get too hot. And if the temperature does spike, global cooling processes can kick in as little as a decade later, new European research says.
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Iraq: Threatened treasures *
The full and tragic story of what may well have been the greatest cultural robbery in modern history will take weeks, if not months, to chronicle.
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Mona Lisa: So that explains the smile *
The most famous painting in history celebrates her 500th birthday this year. Over the centuries, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been denounced as a femme fatale, celebrated as the paragon of womanhood, inspired three suicides, and survived a theft. Yet that serene smile staring at us behind bulletproof glass in Paris's Louvre museum remains mysterious.
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SARS an invader from outer space? *
An international group of scientists has come to believe that the deadly SARS virus is an invader from outer space. Obviously, when the space aliens said "Take me to your leader," everyone naturally thought of Toronto's Discount-retailer-slash-Mayor, Mel Lastman...
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Scientists revise view of 1918 pandemic *
The 1918 flu that killed 20 million people appears to be more birdlike than previously thought, according to findings by U.S. and British researchers that could help explain why it was the deadliest influenza strain ever recorded.
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SOCIAL STUDIES -- Tuesday, August 26, 2003 *
A DAILY MISCELLANY OF INFORMATION BY MICHAEL KESTERTON
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SOCIAL STUDIES -- Wednesday, August 13, 2003 *
A DAILY MISCELLANY OF INFORMATION BY MICHAEL KESTERTON
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