Graffiti Personal scrawlings

A test-tube for cultural evolution.

The story of Hezbollah's halal hookups. Foreign Policy.

It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain.

Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving. New Scientist..

Countering a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a new study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

latimes.com.

Scientific American.

The success of the human species is all down to our mastery of fire and cooking, a scientist claims. And hot food not sex was the basis for our relationships. Times Online.

Flash 8.

The New York Times.

A small glimpse into a timeline of epic scale. Presented by the YTMND education council.

Idioms are not only great fun, they also cast fresh light on the less rational workings of the human mind. guardian.co.uk.

Why did animals evolve so late in the day? And why did the ancestors of modern animals apparently evolve in a geological blink of an eye during the early Cambrian between about 542 and 520 million years ago? A series of recent discoveries could help explain these long-standing mysteries. New Scientist.

New Scientist.

Wired Science, Wired.com.

Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters - the United States, China and India - were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered - all of them controversial.

The Timescale of Life

Scientists are decoding the geological secrets of banded iron formations. Science News.

Our large brains may make us cognitively superior to chimps, but, according to a new hypothesis, we could be paying a price for our sizable cerebrum: a higher rate of cancer. LiveScience.