The Story of Us: White skin is not about making vitamin D. It's about preventing dehydration.

Credit: © cristovao31 / Fotolia

The Elias lab has shown that pigmented skin provides a better skin barrier,

which was critically important for protection against dehydration.

You're writing a story about the migration of ancient humans into Europe.  As always, you need crisis as a way of furthering the story.  Here's one, minor though it may seem:  On the trip, members of your band with dark skin are much more likely to die of dehydration than members with a lighter skin tone.

Really?  Sure.  Read the following which debunks the Vitamin D theory of why people with lighter colored skin survived as they followed the glaciers north after the last Ice Age. 

The popular idea that Northern Europeans developed light skin to absorb more UV light so they could make more vitamin D – vital for healthy bones and immune function – is questioned by UC San Francisco researchers in a new study published online in the journal Evolutionary Biology.
 

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Ramping up the skin’s capacity to capture UV light to make vitamin D is indeed important, according to a team led by Peter Elias, MD, a UCSF professor of dermatology. However, Elias and colleagues concluded in their study that changes in the skin’s function as a barrier to the elements made a greater contribution than alterations in skin pigment in the ability of Northern Europeans to make vitamin D.

Elias’ team concluded that genetic mutations compromising the skin’s ability to serve as a barrier allowed fair-skinned Northern Europeans to populate latitudes where too little ultraviolet B (UVB) light for vitamin D production penetrates the atmosphere.

Among scientists studying human evolution, it has been almost universally assumed that the need to make more vitamin D at Northern latitudes drove genetic mutations that reduce production of the pigment melanin, the main determinant of skin tone, according to Elias.

“At the higher latitudes of Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Baltic States, as well as Northern Germany and France, very little UVB light reaches the Earth, and it’s the key wavelength required by the skin for vitamin D generation,” Elias said.

Skin color has nothing to do with production of Vitamin D
“While is seems logical that the loss of the pigment melanin would serve as a compensatory mechanism, allowing for more irradiation of the skin surface and therefore more vitamin D production, this hypothesis is flawed for many reasons,” he continued. “For example, recent studies show that dark-skinned humans make vitamin D after sun exposure as efficiently as lightly-pigmented humans, and osteoporosis – which can be a sign of vitamin D deficiency – is less common, rather than more common, in darkly-pigmented humans.”

"Dark-skinned humans make vitamin D after sun

exposure as efficiently as lightly-pigmented humans."

Furthermore, evidence for a south to north gradient in the prevalence of melanin mutations is weaker than for this alternative explanation explored by Elias and colleagues.

Skin as a barrier to water loss
In earlier research, Elias began studying the role of skin as a barrier to water loss. He recently has focused on a specific skin-barrier protein called filaggrin, which is broken down into a molecule called urocanic acid – the most potent absorber of UVB light in the skin, according to Elias. “It’s certainly more important than melanin in lightly-pigmented skin,” he said.

In their new study, the researchers identified a strikingly higher prevalence of inborn mutations in the filaggrin gene among Northern European populations. Up to 10 percent of normal individuals carried mutations in the filaggrin gene in these northern nations, in contrast to much lower mutation rates in southern European, Asian and African populations.

Moreover, higher filaggrin mutation rates, which result in a loss of urocanic acid, correlated with higher vitamin D levels in the blood. Latitude-dependent variations in melanin genes are not similarly associated with vitamin D levels, according to Elias. This evidence suggests that changes in the skin barrier played a role in Northern European’s evolutionary adaptation to Northern latitudes, the study concluded.

Yet, there was an evolutionary tradeoff for these barrier-weakening filaggrin mutations, Elias said. Mutation bearers have a tendency for very dry skin, and are vulnerable to atopic dermatitis, asthma and food allergies. But these diseases have appeared only recently, and did not become a problem until humans began to live in densely populated urban environments, Elias said.

The Elias lab has shown that pigmented skin provides a better skin barrier, which he says was critically important for protection against dehydration and infections among ancestral humans living in sub-Saharan Africa. But the need for pigment to provide this extra protection waned as modern human populations migrated northward over the past 60,000 years or so, Elias said, while the need to absorb UVB light became greater, particularly for those humans who migrated to the far North behind retreating glaciers less than 10,000 years ago.

The data from the new study do not explain why Northern Europeans lost melanin. If the need to make more vitamin D did not drive pigment loss, what did? Elias speculates that, “Once human populations migrated northward, away from the tropical onslaught of UVB, pigment was gradually lost in service of metabolic conservation. The body will not waste precious energy and proteins to make proteins that it no longer needs.”

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Story Source:  The above story is based on materials provided by University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), written by Jeffrey Norris.  1.Jacob P. Thyssen, Daniel D. Bikle, Peter M. Elias. Evidence That Loss-of-Function Filaggrin Gene Mutations Evolved in Northern Europeans to Favor Intracutaneous Vitamin D3 Production. Evolutionary Biology, 2014

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: Science confirms ~ some people enjoy suffering

www.empower2themax.com.au

Here's a story ready for the writing.

Okay, yes, it's been done, but if you're looking for something meaty to sink your creative teeth into, think about this.  How do people who dislike themselves react when you try to cheer them up?  When you put a positive spin on their lives?  They ignore you, right?

This study suggests that you may want to rethink cheering up your friends who have low self-esteem because, they don't want to hear it.  It's not that they're happy the way they feel about themselves.  It's that they only hear things that confirm their opinion of themselves.

People with low self-esteem have overly negative views of themselves, and often interpret critical feedback, romantic rejections, or unsuccessful job applications as evidence of their general unworthiness. On top of this, researchers at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University found that this person likely doesn't want you to try to boost their spirits.  They're happy, so to speak, mucking about in their emotional pity-pot.

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"People with low self-esteem want their loved ones to see them as they see themselves. As such, they are often resistant to their friends' reminders of how positively they see them and reject what we call positive reframing-expressions of optimism and encouragement for bettering their situation," said Professor Denise Marigold, from Renison University College at Waterloo, and lead author of the study.

These individuals usually prefer negative validation, which conveys that the feelings, actions or responses of the recipient are normal, reasonable, and appropriate to the situation. So a friend could express understanding about the predicament or for the difficulty of a situation, and suggest that expressing negative emotions is appropriate and understandable.

The researchers found no evidence that positive reframing helps participants with low self-esteem. And in fact, the people providing support to friends with low self-esteem often feel worse about themselves when you attempt to cheer them up. Oy.  What to do?

Some study participants indicated that supporting friends with low self-esteem could be frustrating and tiring. The researchers found that when these support providers used positive reframing instead of negative validation in these situations, they often believed the interaction went poorly, perhaps because the friends with low self-esteem were not receptive and the efforts didn't work.

"If your attempt to point out the silver lining is met with a sullen reminder of the prevailing dark cloud, you might do best to just acknowledge the dark cloud and sympathize," said Professor Marigold.

Ah, ha! So, acknowledge the "dark cloud" and "sympathize", then clam up.  In other words, don't encourage, don't point out the positive, don't put a good spin on things.  Agree with them, sympathize, let them sink in their own swamp, and let them work it out for themselves.

In fiction and film, doesn't the reader or viewer want the protagonist, in this case the person with the I'm-not-worth-a-shit attitude, to figure it out for themselves?  Don't we all enjoy a story where the main character grows and changes - through their own efforts?  It seems that what works in fiction is what works in real life.  People don't change until they are good and ready.  Right?

There's the plot, fellow writers.  What do you think you can do with it?

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Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Waterloo. Denise C. Marigold, Justin V. Cavallo, John G. Holmes, Joanne V. Wood. You can’t always give what you want: The challenge of providing social support to low self-esteem individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014

Scientists predict Higgs boson probably should have caused our universe to collapse? But it didn't. Why?

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One possible signature of a Higgs boson from a simulated collision 

between two protons. It decays 

 almost 

immediately 

into two 

jets 

of hadrons and two. . . are you following this? I'm not.

I think we all know that we're living in an age of amazing scientific research and discovery.  It's a given that most of the scientists who ever lived in the 6.5 million year history of the human animal are alive and working today.

It's safe to say that we're in the beginning of a remarkable scientific golden age.  At the beginning?  Yep.  Which means that there is far more that we don't know than we do.  And you're safe in assuming we don't know much given that we live on a hinky-dinky little planet way out in the boondocks of space, far, far away from the galactic center.

Science is a process that accretes knowledge much as a pearl accretes around a grain of sand in an oyster.  You start with a question.  You seek an answer to that question.  You find an answer to that question.  

And the answer poses ten or twenty or a hundred new questions.

Take the Higgs boson, a particle that existed very briefly immediately after the Big Bang.  The theory was that this particle is what gives all other particles mass.  Don't ask me how, I've read and reread the reports, and it sounds a bit like voodoo.  But, this is how cosmologists and physicists and mathematicians had it worked out.  

So the quest was to prove the theory by finding a Higgs boson.  How do you find something incredibly small that only existed very briefly at the beginning of time?  Obviously, to some at least, you create a machine that recreates the conditions that existed at the beginning of time.  The CERN particle collider in Switzerland, a huge, expensive set of magnets and computers that accelerates particles to damn near the speed of light then sets them up for head on collisions.  How cool is that?  Makes crashing toy cars together seem like child's play.  Which it is.

The CERN Large Hadron Collider is built.  (Hadron?  Beats me, maybe a reader know what it is. I haven't a clue.)

Anyway, the experiment is on.  Only, some theorists say, "Wait.  If you succeed in creating a real Higgs boson, it could create a black hole which could end the planet."

More theoretical work, mostly in the language of math, and it was determined that the probability of this happening was acceptably low. (To whom is this risk acceptable is the question.  They never asked me.  Did they ask you?) So they run the experiments, scientists and observers giggling like school boys as they slam elementary particles together resulting in spectacular collisions (except for one neurotic guy in the back who was waiting for it all to come crashing down into a black hole.  Luckily, he was wrong.)

And then, in July 2012, they find the particle in question, THE Higgs boson.  Of course, they don't know this for the months it took to analyze the data, but eventually, someone stood up and said, "Eureka.  We found it.  Probably."  

Probably?  Yes, because the best we can say about any subatomic particle is probably. Particle physics is all about the odds of something being somewhere sometime probably spinning this way or that but probably not.  And the probability that we found the Higgs boson is such that we can conclude that we found it.  

Probably.

Where is this leading?  To one of the questions that arose from the analysis of the results of all those collisions.

According to Robert Hogan, a PhD student at King's College London, we shouldn't be here.  The universe as we know it shouldn't exist.  It should have collapsed back into itself right after the Big Bang as a Great Big Thud.

While some might argue that our universe, or at least the Earth, is a Great Big Thud, obviously we are here and able to ask the question many cosmologists are asking today, "WTF?"

Here's the story from the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth as it's being presented today, 24 June 2014:

British cosmologists are puzzled: they predict that the Universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This startling conclusion is the result of combining the latest observations of the sky with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson.

After the Universe began in the Big Bang, it is thought to have gone through a short period of rapid expansion known as 'cosmic inflation'. Although the details of this process are not yet fully understood, cosmologists have been able to make predictions of how this would affect the Universe we see today.

In March 2014, researchers claimed to have detected one of these predicted effects. If true, their results are a major advance in our understanding of cosmology and a confirmation of the inflation theory, but they have proven controversial and are not yet fully accepted by cosmologists.

In the new research, scientists investigated what the observations mean for the stability of the Universe. To do this, they combined the results with recent advances in particle physics. The detection of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider was announced in July 2012; since then, much has been learnt about its properties.

Measurements of the Higgs boson have allowed particle physicists to show that our universe sits in a valley of the 'Higgs field', which describes the way that other particles have mass. However, there is a different valley which is much deeper, but our universe is preventing from falling into it by a large energy barrier.

The problem is that the results predict that the universe would have received large 'kicks' during the cosmic inflation phase, pushing it into the other valley of the Higgs field within a fraction of a second. If that had happened, the universe would have quickly collapsed in a Big Crunch.

"This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory because if this had happened we wouldn't be around to discuss it" said Robert Hogan, a PhD student at King's College London, who led the study.

Perhaps the results contain an error. If not, there must be some other -- as yet unknown -- process which prevented the universe from collapsing.

"If is shown to be correct, it tells us that there has to be interesting new particle physics beyond the standard model" Hogan said.

And the process goes on.  

*  *  *  *  *

Story Source: Materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). "Should the Higgs boson have caused our universe to collapse? Findings puzzle cosmologists." ScienceDaily.

Impress your friends: Be an Instant Soccer Expert!

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  Clint Dempsey scored Team USA's first goal during the
FIFA World Cup 2014 Group G preliminary match against Ghana.

Well, maybe not an expert, but by reading these five short stories you will be much better prepared to hold your own in our quaternary obsession with Futbol!   GOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLL!


FIFA World cup qualification: is it a fair game?
FIFA has 208 member football associations from around the world all clamoring to qualify for each World Cup tournament and reap the massive $8 million appearance fee as well as further windfalls and lucrative merchandising revenues. With fierce competition for qualification, is FIFA allocating the 32 places fairly or are processes biased by finances and politics? New research, published in the journal Soccer & Society, suggests that a more transparent allocation processes is urgently required. Without this, experts at Canada's Sprott School of Business argue, FIFA will be open to the accusation it is more concerned with financial gain from the World Cup than showcasing the very best football.

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In their new article, "Unfair play in World Cup qualification? An analysis of the 1998-2010 FIFA World Cup performances and the bias in the allocation of tournament berths," Christian Stone and Michel Rod studied the match results for 1st round tournament matches 1998-2010 to assess the adequacy of the qualification process. This demonstrated that the current system of qualification is not based on ensuring the qualification of the best 32 teams in the world, nor does it fairly allocate qualification spots on the number of teams per federation or any other metric. Such findings suggest things could be done differently and identify the need for a more dynamic system with fewer fixed spots and more opportunity for inter-confederation play, giving those at the top of their game the opportunity to shine and for a truer representation of the best during the World Cup.

The World Cup generates 90% of FIFA revenues. Stone and Rod believe that this economic success should be used by FIFA, in the cause of corporate social responsibility, to expand participation. Without that, the question is asked "has world football become the means to an end in terms of money as the ultimate objective?"

• Story Source: Materials provided by Taylor & Francis. Christian Stone, Michel Rod. Unfair play in World Cup qualification? An analysis of the 1998–2010 FIFA World Cup performances and the bias in the allocation of tournament berths. Soccer & Society, 2014

New ball to showcase talent in World Cup
Physics experts believe the new soccer ball created for the 2014 FIFA World Cup is a “keepers’ ball”. The new ball, called Brazuca, should be much more predictable than the 2010 World Cup ball, Jabulani, which was less-than-affectionately labelled a 'beach ball' because of its sometimes erratic flight path.

"The Brazuca has very deep grooves -- it's much rougher than Jabulani -- and this creates a different pattern of air flow around the ball," says Professor Derek Leinweber, Professor of Physics in the University's School of Chemistry and Physics. He has previously written about and lectured on the aerodynamics of cricket balls, golf balls and earlier World Cup soccer balls.

"The Jabulani was much smoother than the Brazuca with smaller grooves and ridges across its surface," says Professor Leinweber. "That meant the ball had to be moving much faster before the airflow around the ball changed from smooth to turbulent. As this shift to turbulent airflow occurred at high speeds, the ball could make some pretty erratic movements on the way to the net.

"In contrast the Brazuca, with its deeper grooves, hits that turbulent air flow at a lower speed with the result that the ball is much more predictable. In many ways, it's a return to the aerodynamics of the old 32-panel ball."

Mr Kiratidis says he believes players taking hard and fast shots in this World Cup won't find the Brazuca as easy to bend into the net as they did with the Jabulani.

• Story Source: Materials provided by University of Adelaide. "New ball to showcase talent in World Cup." ScienceDaily. 

How does a soccer ball swerve? 
It happens every four years: The World Cup begins and some of the world's most skilled players carefully line up free kicks, take aim -- and shoot way over the goal.

The players are all trying to bend the ball into a top corner of the goal, often over a wall of defensive players and away from the reach of a lunging goalkeeper. Yet when such shots go awry in the World Cup, a blame game usually sets in. Players, fans, and pundits all suggest that the new official tournament ball, introduced every four years, is the cause.

Many of the people saying that may be seeking excuses. And yet scholars do think that subtle variations among soccer balls affect how they fly. Specifically, researchers increasingly believe that one variable really does differentiate soccer balls: their surfaces. It is harder to control a smoother ball, such as the much-discussed "Jabulani" used at the 2010 World Cup. The new ball used at this year's tournament in Brazil, the "Brazuca," has seams that are over 50 percent longer, one factor that makes the ball less smooth and apparently more predictable in flight.

"The details of the flow of air around the ball are complicated, and in particular they depend on how rough the ball is," says John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and the author of a recently published article about the aerodynamics of soccer balls. "If the ball is perfectly smooth, it bends the wrong way."

By the "wrong way," Bush means that two otherwise similar balls struck precisely the same way, by the same player, can actually curve in opposite directions, depending on the surface of those balls. Sound surprising?

How a ball curves:  The Magnus Effect
It may, because the question of how a spinning ball curves in flight would seem to have a textbook answer: the Magnus Effect. This phenomenon was first described by Isaac Newton, who noticed that in tennis, topspin causes a ball to dip, while backspin flattens out its trajectory. A curveball in baseball is another example from sports: A pitcher throws the ball with especially tight topspin, or sidespin rotation, and the ball curves in the direction of the spin.

In soccer, the same thing usually occurs with free kicks, corner kicks, crosses from the wings, and other kinds of passes or shots: The player kicking the ball applies spin during contact, creating rotation that makes the ball curve. For a right-footed player, the "natural" technique is to brush toward the outside of the ball, creating a shot or pass with a right-to-left hook; a left-footed player's "natural" shot will curl left-to-right.

So far, so intuitive: Soccer fans can probably conjure the image of stars like Lionel Messi, Andrea Pirlo, or Marta, a superstar of women's soccer, doing this. But this kind of shot -- the Brazilians call it the "chute de curva" -- depends on a ball with some surface roughness. Without that, this classic piece of the soccer player's arsenal goes away, as Bush points out in his article, "The Aerodynamics of the Beautiful Game," from the volume "Sports Physics," published by Les Editions de L'Ecole Polytechnique in France.

"The fact is that the Magnus Effect can change sign," Bush says. "People don't generally appreciate that fact." Given an absolutely smooth ball, the direction of the curve may reverse: The same kicking motion will not produce a shot or pass curving in a right-to-left direction, but in a left-to-right direction.

Why is this? Bush says it is due to the way the surface of the ball creates motion at the "boundary layer" between the spinning ball and the air. The rougher the ball, the easier it is to create the textbook version of the Magnus Effect, with a "positive" sign: The ball curves in the expected direction.

"The boundary layer can be laminar, which is smoothly flowing, or turbulent, in which case you have eddies," Bush says. "The boundary layer is changing from laminar to turbulent at different spots according to how quickly the ball is spinning. Where that transition arises is influenced by the surface roughness, the stitching of the ball. If you change the patterning of the panels, the transition points move, and the pressure distribution changes." The Magnus Effect can then have a "negative" sign.

From Brazil: The "dove without wings"
If the reversing of the Magnus Effect has largely eluded detection, of course, that is because soccer balls are not absolutely smooth -- but they have been moving in that direction over the decades. While other sports, such as baseball and cricket, have strict rules about the stitching on the ball, soccer does not, and advances in technology have largely given balls sleeker, smoother designs -- until the introduction of the Brazuca, at least.

There is actually a bit more to the story, however, since sometimes players will strike balls so as to give them very little spin -- the equivalent of a knuckleball in baseball. In this case, the ball flutters unpredictably from side to side. Brazilians have a name for this: the "pombo sem asa," or "dove without wings."

In this case, Bush says, "The peculiar motion of a fluttering free kick arises because the points of boundary-layer transition are different on opposite sides of the ball." Because the ball has no initial spin, the motion of the surrounding air has more of an effect on the ball's flight: "A ball that's knuckling … is moving in response to the pressure distribution, which is constantly changing." Indeed, a free kick Pirlo took in Italy's match against England on Saturday, which fooled the goalkeeper but hit the crossbar, demonstrated this kind of action.

Bush's own interest in the subject arises from being a lifelong soccer player and fan -- the kind who, sitting in his office, will summon up clips of the best free-kick takers he's seen. These include Juninho Pernambucano, a Brazilian midfielder who played at the 2006 World Cup, and Sinisa Mihajlovic, a Serbian defender of the 1990s.

And Bush happily plays a clip of Brazilian fullback Roberto Carlos' famous free kick from a 1997 match against France, where the player used the outside of his left foot -- but deployed the "positive" Magnus Effect -- to score on an outrageously bending free kick.

"That was by far the best free kick ever taken," Bush says. Putting on his professor's hat for a moment, he adds: "I think it's important to encourage people to try to understand everything. Even in the most commonplace things, there is subtle and interesting physics."

YouTube Video:  Bending it like Beckham

• Story Source:  Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, original article was written by Peter Dizikes. J.W.M. Bush. The Aerodynamics of the beautiful game. Sports Physics, 2013

Soccer-related facial fractures examined
Fractures of the nose and other facial bones are a relatively common and potentially serious injury in soccer players, reports a Brazilian study. Through their analysis, researchers report that he nose and upper jaw (maxilla) accounted for 35 percent of fractures and the cheekbone (zygomatic bone) for another 35 percent. Most of the remaining fractures were of the lower jaw (mandible) and eye socket (orbit). Eighty-seven percent of the injuries were caused by collision with another player; the rest occurred when the player was struck by the ball.

• Story Source: Materials provided by Wolters Kluwer Health: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins. Dov C. Goldenberg, Gal M. Dini, Max D. Pereira, Augusto Gurgel, Endrigo O. Bastos, Purushottam Nagarkar, Rolf Gemperli, Lydia M. Ferreira. Soccer-related Facial Trauma. Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, 2014

Why reaching the top in soccer is all in the mind, not the feet
The mental edge that drives Premier League soccer players to succeed from a young age, including dealing with criticism, confronting challenges after repeated failures, and not being intimidated by others, has been outlined by researchers. "The report found that mentally tough players demonstrated a commitment to learning, had a strong level of trust with their coach, were more compliant with instructions and were always seeking ways to improve," researchers say.

• Story Source: Materials provided by University of Lincoln. Clive Cook, Lee Crust, Martin Littlewood, Mark Nesti, Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson. ‘What it takes’: perceptions of mental toughness and its development in an English Premier League Soccer Academy. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2014

The Story of Us: Did Neandertal evolve all at once? Or slowly over time?

Credit: Image © Javier Trueba / Madrid Scientific Films

Skull 17 from the Sima de los Huesos site in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain.

Trying to keep up with the latest research in the middle of the Scientific Revolution is a task beyond my capabilities, though it is fun trying.
Take, for instance, one of our predecessor species, Neandertal.  Type the name into a science search site, and over a dozen breakthrough studies were published just over the last several years.  These studies deal with the ancient but help explain how we got be the thinking animal we are.

One question of debate in some circles is: do species evolve all at once?  Or slowly over time?

For a writer, all at once is a bonanza of potential conflict and crises.  Slowly over time, less so, but still rife with those with a new feature such as a dominant brow ridge being ostracized - a theme in Jean Aul's delightful series, Earth's Children.

Here is a story of a study that compares and contrasts skulls with a mix of Neandertal and more primitive traits that help illuminate human evolution.


Researchers studying a collection of skulls in a Spanish cave identified both Neandertal-derived features and features associated with more primitive humans in these bones. This "mosaic pattern" supports a theory of Neandertal evolution that suggests Neandertals developed their defining features separately, and at different times -- not all at once. Having this new data from the Sima de los Huesos site, as the Spanish cave is called, has allowed scientists to better understand hominin evolution during the Middle Pleistocene, a period in which the path of hominin evolution has been controversial.

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Period of maximum glaciation during the Pleistocene.
Note that southern Europe is clear of ice. 

The Pleistocene Epoch is typically defined as the time period that began about 1.8 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago. The most recent Ice Age occurred then, as glaciers covered huge parts of the planet Earth.

There have been at least five documented major ice ages during the 4.6 billion years since the Earth was formed — and most likely many more before humans came on the scene about 2.3 million years ago.

The Pleistocene Epoch is the first in which Homo sapiens evolved, and by the end of the epoch humans could be found in nearly every part of the planet.

Source: livescience.com

*  *  *  *  *

"The Middle Pleistocene was a long period of about half a million years during which hominin evolution didn't proceed through a slow process of change with just one kind of hominin quietly evolving towards the classic Neandertal," said lead author Juan-Luis Arsuaga, Professor of Paleontology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

"With the skulls we found," co-author Ignacio Martínez, Professor of Paleontology at the University of Alcalá, added, "it was possible to characterize the cranial morphology of a human population of the European Middle Pleistocene for the first time."

About 400 to 500 thousand years ago, in the heart of the Pleistocene, archaic humans split off from other groups of that period living in Africa and East Asia, ultimately settling in Eurasia, where they evolved characteristics that would come to define the Neandertal lineage. Several hundred thousand years after that, modern humans -- who had evolved in Africa -- settled in Eurasia, too. They interbred with Neandertals, but even then showed signs of reproductive incompatibility. Because of this, modern humans eventually replaced Neandertals.

The degree of divergence between Neandertals and modern humans over such a short period of time has surprised scientists. Why did Neandertals differentiate so quickly from other early hominins? What pattern of changes did Neandertals undergo?

To answer these questions, scientists have needed an accurate picture of European populations around 400,000 years ago, the early stages of the Neandertal lineage. This has been challenging, however, because the European fossil record -- an important tool for answering these questions -- is isolated and dispersed, consisting of remains from disparate timelines. Samples at the Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain, however, are different.

"What makes the Sima de los Huesos site unique," Arsuaga said, "is the extraordinary and unprecedented accumulation of hominin fossils there; nothing quite so big has ever been discovered for any extinct hominin species -- including Neanderthals."

"This site has been excavated continuously since 1984," Martínez added. "After thirty years, we have recovered nearly 7,000 human fossils corresponding to all skeletal regions of at least 28 individuals. This extraordinary collection includes 17 fragmentary skulls, many of which are very complete."

The 17 skulls belong to a single population of a fossil hominin species. Some of have been studied before, but seven are presented anew here, and six are more complete than ever before. With these intact samples at their fingertips, the researchers made progress characterizing defining features.
Their work has helped address hypotheses about Neandertal evolution, specifically the accretion model hypothesis, which suggests that Neandertals evolved their defining features at different times, not in a single linear sweep.

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"For decades the nature of the evolutionary process that gave rise to Neanderthals has been discussed," explained Martínez. "An important question in these debates was whether the 'neandertalization process' involved all regions of the skull from the beginning, or if, on the contrary, there were various stages in this process that affected different parts of the skull at different times."

The researchers' skull samples showed Neandertal features present in the face and teeth, but not elsewhere; the nearby braincase, for example, still showed features associated with more primitive hominins.

"We think based on the morphology that the Sima people were part of the Neanderthal clade," Arsuaga said, "although not necessarily direct ancestors to the classic Neanderthals." They were part of an early European lineage that includes Neanderthals, but is more primitive than the later Pleistocene variety.

Critically, many of the Neandertal-derived features the researchers observed were related to mastication, or chewing. "It seems these modifications had to do with an intensive use of the frontal teeth," Arsuaga said. "The incisors show a great wear as if they had been used as a 'third hand," typical of Neanderthals."

The work of Arsuaga et al. suggests that facial modification was the first step in Neandertal evolution. This mosaic pattern fits the prediction of the accretion model.

"One thing that surprised me about the skulls we analyzed," Arsuaga said, "is how similar the different individuals were. The other fossils of the same geological period are different and don´t fit in the Sima pattern. This means that there was a lot of diversity among different populations in the Middle Pleistocene."

Indeed, other European Middle Pleistocene Homo sapiens do not exhibit the suite of Neandertal-derived features seen in this fossil group. Thus, more than one evolutionary lineage appears to have coexisted during the European Middle Pleistocene, with that represented by the Sima sample being closer to the Neandertals.

Arsuaga and his team were delighted to work on this effort. "Finding a single tooth is a great success in any other site of comparable age, so imagine what it is like to painstakingly reconstruct 17 skulls," he said. "It's like finding a treasure."

So 17 skulls at one site, skulls with a variety of features, but showing a tendency to use the teeth as "a third hand."  What was going on there - socially and culturally?  Were food sources changing?  Was competition from other hominid groups increasing?  Well, speculate away as speculation is the mother of interesting fiction.

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Story Source:  Materials provided by American Association for the Advancement of Science. J. L. Arsuaga, I. Martínez, L. J. Arnold, A. Aranburu, A. Gracia-Téllez, W. D. Sharp, R. M. Quam, C. Falguères, A. Pantoja-Pérez, J. Bischoff, E. Poza-Rey, J. M. Parés, J. M. Carretero, M. Demuro, C. Lorenzo, N. Sala, M. Martinón-Torres, N. García, A. Alcázar de Velasco, G. Cuenca-Bescós, A. Gómez-Olivencia, D. Moreno, A. Pablos, C.-C. Shen, L. Rodríguez, A. I. Ortega, R. García, A. Bonmatí, J. M. Bermúdez de Castro, and E. Carbonell. Neandertal roots: Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos. Science, 2014

The next generation of Invisibility Cloaks: "You can't touch this."

canadianawareness.org

A prototype invisibility cloak for use by soldiers in combat.  Someday.

Frodo's ring and Harry Potter's cloak gave them invisibility, actually an old fantasy realized by science over the past few years. Today, objects really can be hidden from light, heat or sound. However, hiding of an object from being touched still remained to be accomplished. 

Now scientists from the Karlsruhe (Germany) Institute of Technology (KIT) have succeeded in creating a method that "hides" an object from a person's sense of touch, sort of making the pea under the mattress not noticeable to the princess.

The "touch" invisibility" device developed by KIT prevents  a person's sense of touch responding to the object.  Here's an explanation from the press release of how the KIT technology works:

The invisibility cloak is based on a so-called metamaterial that consists of a polymer. Its major properties are determined by the special structure. "We build the structure around the object to be hidden. In this structure, strength depends on the location in a defined way," explains Tiemo Bückmann, KIT, the first author of the article. "The precision of the components combined with the size of the complete arrangement was one of the big obstacles to the development of the mechanical invisibility cloak." The metamaterial is a crystalline material structured with sub-micrometer accuracy. It consists of needle-shaped cones, whose tips meet. The size of the contact points is calculated precisely to reach the mechanical properties desired. In this way, a structure results, through which a finger or a measurement instrument cannot feel its way.

In the invisibility cloak produced, a hard cylinder is inserted into the bottom layer. Any objects to be hidden can be put into its cavity. If a light foam or many layers of cotton would be placed above the hard cylinder, the cylinder would be more difficult to touch, but could still be felt as a form. The metamaterial structure directs the forces of the touching finger such that the cylinder is hidden completely. "It is like in Hans-Christian Andersen's fairy tale about the princess and the pea. The princess feels the pea in spite of the mattresses. When using our new material, however, one mattress would be sufficient for the princess to sleep well," Bückmann explains.

Implementation of such a mechanical invisibility cloak is rather complex. After the definition of the desired mechanical properties, the physical basic equations are inverted mathematically in order to draw conclusions with respect to the structure of the metamaterial. Using this method, materials not encountered in nature can be planned. Examples are solids which are stiff to pressure, but soft to shear. For manufacture from the polymer, the direct laser writing method of the KIT spinoff Nanoscribe is applied. It reaches the required precision over the complete sample length of several millimeters.

The mechanical invisibility cloak represents pure physical fundamental research, but might open up the door to interesting applications in a few years from now, as it allows for producing materials with freely selectable mechanical properties. Examples are very thin, light, and still comfortable camping mattresses or carpets hiding cables and pipelines below.

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How you or any writer uses this technology in combination with other invisibility techniques is up to your imagination.  I do seem to remember a scene in Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin in which a woman is submerged in a sensory deprivation tank resulting in her complete mental collapse.  With these type of devices would it be possible to do much the same without the expense of a special tank?  Simply disoriented a character in your story by suppressing their five (or six) senses?

This would be an interesting thought experiment indeed.

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Story Source: Materials provided by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. T. Bückmann, M. Thiel, M. Kadic, R. Schittny, M. Wegener. An elasto-mechanical unfeelability cloak made of pentamode metamaterials. Nature Communications, 2014

What Bronze Age Brits used for jewelry

A Stone Age burial dating from 5000-7000 BC shows
the skeletons of two women who were buried wearing
necklaces made of numerous shells.

A new study by scientists at the University of York has shed new light on the use of mollusk shells as personal adornments by Bronze Age people.

The research team used amino acid racemisation analysis (a technique used previously mainly for dating artifacts), light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, to identify the raw materials used to make beads in a complex necklace discovered at an Early Bronze Age burial site at Great Cornard in Suffolk, UK.

They discovered that Bronze Age craftspeople used species like dog whelk and tusk shells, both of which were likely to have been sourced and worked locally, to fashion tiny disc-shaped beads in the necklace.

About Tusk Shells
Tusk shells (left) or Scaphopoda, meaning literally "boat-footed" are a class of shelled marine mollusks. Shells range from about 0.5 to 15 cm in length. These mollusks live on soft substrates offshore (usually not intertidally). Because of this subtidal habitat and the small size of most species, many beachcombers are unfamiliar with them; their shells are usually not nearly as common or as easily visible in the beach drift as the shells of sea snails and clams.

The shells of scaphopods are conical and curved and they are usually whitish in color. Because of these characteristics, the shell somewhat resembles a miniature elephant's tusk, hence the common name tusk shell. However, unlike an elephant's tusk, the shells of these molluscs are hollow and open at both ends.

About the Dog Whelk

The dog whelk, dogwhelk, or Atlantic dogwinkle, scientific name Nucella lapillus, is a species of predatory sea snail, a carnivorous marine gastropod mollusc in the family Muricidae, the rock snails.

This species is found around the coasts of Europe and in the northern west Atlantic coast of North America. It is also can be found in estuarine waters along the Atlantic coasts. This species prefers rocky shores, where it eats mussels and acorn barnacles

The researchers included archaeologists, mathematicians, chemists and physicists, the latter from the BioArCh and York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis (YCCSA) and the Departments of Archaeology, Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics at the University of York. Dr Sonia O'Connor, of the University of Bradford's Department of Archaeological Sciences, carried out the light and electron microscopy, and prehistoric jewellery specialist Dr Alison Sheridan, of National Museums Scotland, facilitated access to the Great Cornard necklace, which had been excavated by Suffolk Archaeology.

When it was first established that the tiny white beads had been made from shell, the question arose as to its source. Had the shell been obtained locally or did it originate from a species from further afield, perhaps even the Mediterranean thorny oyster (Spondylus)? The Mediterranean thorny oyster is a shell of long-standing symbolic and cultural significance which is known to have been used on the Continent around the time when the Great Cornard necklace was made.

But this collaborative research, led by Dr Beatrice Demarchi, of York's Department of Archaeology and BioArCh, and Dr Julie Wilson, of the Departments of Chemistry and Mathematics and YCCSA, has shown this not to be the case, and has suggested an alternative possibility.

Dr Demarchi said: "Dog whelks and tusk shells were likely to be available locally so these people did not have to travel far to get hold of the raw materials for their beads.

"There is evidence, from elsewhere in Britain and further afield, for the use of tusk shells at various times in the past. This may well be because they are relatively easy to work and their hollow shape is very distinctive."

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Story Source:  Materials provided by University of York. Beatrice Demarchi, Sonia O'Connor, Andre de Lima Ponzoni, Raquel de Almeida Rocha Ponzoni, Alison Sheridan, Kirsty Penkman, Y. Hancock, Julie Wilson. An Integrated Approach to the Taxonomic Identification of Prehistoric Shell Ornaments. PLoS ONE, 2014.

Where's Indiana Jones when we need him? Ancient coins looted from archaeological sites

Credit: Nathan Elkins photo

Ancient Constantinian coins.

There is a story here, or at least part of a story, considering that the market in coins and other stolen artifacts is in the billions of dollars annually.  I can picture our hero, Iowa Schwartz, combating an international cartel of dealers in stolen artifacts.  That's been done?  Not the way you would write it.

Here's the article:

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Millions of ancient looted coins from archaeological excavations enter the black market yearly, and a Baylor University researcher who has seen plundered sites likens the thefts to stealing "smoking guns" from crime scenes. But those who collect and study coins have been far too reluctant to condemn the unregulated trade, he says.

"Archaeologists are detectives. When something has been taken away from a historical site, the object is divorced from its relationship with other objects, and its utility for the writing of history -- much like solving a criminal case -- is diminished," said Nathan Elkins, Ph.D., assistant art professor in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.

Elkins is the staff numismatist at the excavations of an ancient synagogue from the Roman/Byzantine period in Huqoq, Israel. He has written an article, "Investigating the Crime Scene: Looting and Ancient Coins," that appears in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

Numismatists -- those who study or collect such currency as coins, tokens, paper money and even such trade objects as shells or lambskins -- must not condone or, worse, encourage that destructive behavior, Elkins said.

Coins are among objects stolen and sold through the multi-billion-dollar black market in antiquities. The New York Times recently reported looting in Spain and also in Egypt, where looters have taken advantage of political upheaval to steal thousands of objects from unprotected sites and even a national museum. The U.S. market alone imports "hundreds of thousands of earth-encrusted coins annually that are smuggled from Balkan nations such as Bulgaria," Elkins says.

He saw up close and personal the results of thefts at a site he previously worked -- a Roman Empire-era fort in Israel.

"One season we arrived and found one area that had been looted by someone with a metal director. Pits were dug into the floors and walls, and the soil dug out was greenish, indicating they had removed copper coins and perhaps other metal objects," he said. "It caused a lot of damage to the site and destroyed information."

Coins taken in such illegal and secretive excavations and touted with fake histories are easy to find in auction catalogs and online storefronts -- and inexpensive to boot, he said. "'Common' coins such as these may sell for the price of a fast-food lunch, but they're invaluable sources to archaeologists and historians," he said. When discovered beneath floors, foundations or wells, they provide information about how people lived and behaved in the past and can date occupation levels and monuments.

Elkins noted that there is "a widespread demand for biblical coins on account of their associations with Judaism, Christianity and the Bible, which of course exacerbates the looting problem. And the intellectual and material consequences of looting biblical coins are equally severe as that of Roman imperial coins and Greek coins."

Among such biblical coins are those used to pay temple taxes, tribute coins to Romans rulers and the "widow's mite," a small coin of little value mentioned in the Gospel of Mark.

For some coin collectors, obtaining coins of questionable origin is a matter of short-sightedness, he said. The origin and history of a coin may be irrelevant to them if their interest is merely in its image, rarity and method of production.

Some scholars and collectors may be hesitant to question a coin's background for fear of alienating dealers or other collectors, Elkins said. And, to be fair, some coins are in public or private collections with no recorded history rather than having been illegally obtained and passed off with a fake history, he said.

Elkins said that most collectors have "a genuine passion" for ancient history, but they must be more assertive and conscientious in reporting suspected illegal activity, insisting on the provenance of coins and avoiding giving money to those who buy from looters and smugglers.

Elkins became fascinated with ancient coins as a teen who was interested in Roman history. "Those (coin) images tended to be politicized, commemorating an imperial virtue or referring to a recent military victory, for example," he said. "As much of the ancient population was illiterate, and the majority of people lived outside of Rome, coins were a primary vehicle for the communication of political ideology in the Roman Empire.

"The study of coins lies at the intersection of multiple fields, including archeology, art history, Classics, ancient history and economics," Elkins said. "Coins are the 'smoking guns,' the definitive evidence -- and it's important to preserve as much evidence as possible."

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Story Source: Materials provided by Baylor University. Nathan T. Elkins. Investigating the Crime Scene: Looting and Ancient Coins. Biblical Archaeology Review, 2014

The demise of English pubs. What will detectives do?

Source:  The LA Times

The man who ran this neighborhood pub, the Wyndham
Arms in Kentisbeare, decided to call it quits. Hit by hard
times, he locked up one evening and never came back,
closing the village's "local" after more than 200 years.

From the days of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter and Miss Marple, the stereotypical English public house or pub has been at the core of any fictional detective's work.  And now, sad to say, the English pub is disappearing.

Take a walk through a typical town center or village in England and the chances are you will stumble across a King's Head, Rose & Crown or a Red Lion for a pint of ale or a bite to eat. Pubs are among the most common and well-loved buildings in the country, but have recently been identified as 'a severely threatened building type' by English Heritage.

Academics from the University of Leicester are now looking into pubs in Leeds as part of a research project funded by English Heritage.

Having been the hub of the social life of many communities for centuries, the pub has played a key role in shaping English national identity. However, pubs have been closing in large numbers each week over recent years and are disappearing from our city centers and their outlying areas, often being demolished or converted into housing, shops or restaurants.

A team from the University of Leicester will focus on 19th and 20th century pubs in Leeds with an aim to identify and highlight significant and threatened buildings and increase understanding and appreciation of urban and suburban pubs.

The in-depth area study will involve assessing the buildings themselves and also talking to pub users, owners and local residents about the buildings and their histories.

Emma Dwyer, Business Development Executive for Heritage at the University of Leicester, said: "This is a great opportunity to combine expertise from our School of Archaeology and Ancient History and our Department of History of Art & Film in a project that will have an impact on public understanding of how the pubs of Leeds have developed, and the risks they face from conversion and redevelopment."

Emily Cole from the assessment team at English Heritage said: "Across the country, the number of pubs has been falling steadily for over a century and those dating from 1918-85 are, in particular, increasingly threatened with closure or demolition. They are therefore a high priority for English Heritage.  This project in Leeds is one of a number we are carrying out to increase our knowledge of the architectural style and development of these pubs and their historical and social significance, and to gauge the level of protection that already exists or that it is felt that they deserve."

The results of the project will be presented at a public workshop in Leeds in autumn 2014 and the findings will be written up as a report, forming part of English Heritage's work on historic towns and suburbs for the National Heritage Protection Plan.

It is hoped that this will also prove of use and interest to local authorities, community organisations and other local groups in understanding and protecting these culturally important buildings.

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Story Source:  Materials provided by University of Leicester. "New project to investigate vanishing pubs in England." ScienceDaily.

TECHNOLOGY: Eliminating credit card fraud with palm readers

Credit: Image courtesy of Lund University

Paying for a coffee or lunch by simply scanning your 

palm still sounds like science fiction to most of us.

This post applies to a wide range of genres from SciFi to crime to Romance as well as to our daily lives.  If you've ever had your debit or credit card info stolen and used to run up bills, you know the frustration of getting those charges off your account.  Here's a new application of old technology that may make our accounts more secure.

Paying for a coffee or lunch by simply scanning your palm still sounds like science fiction to most of us. However, an engineering student at Lund University in Sweden has made it happen -- making his the first known company in the world to install the vein scanning technique in stores and coffee shops.

Fredrik Leifland got the idea for his start-up two years ago when he was standing in line at the supermarket. Growing impatient, he knew there had to be an easier and quicker way than using credit cards, and together with a group of classmates at Lund University he soon discovered biometric solutions. While vein scanning technology already existed, there was no system for actually using it as a form of payment.

"We had to connect all the players ourselves, which was quite complex: the vein scanning terminals, the banks, the stores and the customers. The next step was finding ways of packaging it into a solution that was user friendly," says Fredrik.

Their solution worked. There are currently 15 stores and restaurants mainly around the Lund University campus that use the terminals, with 1,600 active users.
Security is a major advantage of the technique, according to Fredrik.

"Every individual's vein pattern is completely unique, so there really is no way of committing fraud with this system. You always need your hand scanned for a payment to go through," he clarifies.

With ongoing plans to expand the business further, and other companies around the world implementing the technology, the payment method seems to be here to stay -- and if Fredrik gets his way -- we'll all spend less time waiting in line at the supermarket in the future.

To see a demonstration, click here:

Qwixter palm scanner in action

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Story Source: Materials provided by Lund University. "Buy lunch, pay with your hand: Vein scanning technique." ScienceDaily.

CRIME: Is letting felons cop pleas to lesser charges working? Research says no.

Photo:  www.ibm.com

Letting a person charged with a felony is a staple of crime fiction as well as in court is a fact of life in the American legal system.  Is it a strategy that saves taxpayers money while lowering crime rates?  Or is it merely an expedient money saver that leads to more violent crime later?

A UC Davis study comparing violent misdemeanor convictions with their original criminal charges has found that subsequent violent crimes could be prevented if criminal charges were reduced less often during plea bargaining.

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The small, preliminary study, posted online June 9 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, re-analyzed data on 787 individuals under age 35 who had violent misdemeanor convictions and purchased handguns in California in 1989 or 1990. The goal was to assess the impact of reduced criminal charges on gun purchases and subsequent crime.

"Federal law prohibits felons from legally purchasing firearms, but individuals with violent misdemeanor convictions face no such restrictions in most of the country," said Garen Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine and director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program. "Our study found that people with convictions for violent misdemeanor crimes who subsequently purchased handguns have very high rates of arrest for firearm-related or violent crimes later on. We need to consider the merits of prohibiting people convicted of violent misdemeanors from purchasing handguns and consider whether felony charges should be reduced less often."

For the study, Wintemute and colleague Mona Wright reviewed criminal records, linking violent misdemeanor convictions with their original criminal charges. Nearly 40 percent of the 787 individuals in the study had misdemeanor convictions resulting from felony charges. The overwhelming majority of records were for men (96.2 percent), with most (47.8 percent) having only one prior conviction of any type. Twenty-five percent had two prior convictions and 27 percent had three or more.

Within this group, Wintemute then identified those who purchased handguns and had California arrests within three years of the handgun purchase. Of the 699 records available for follow up, 34.5 percent of individuals were arrested -- 23.8 percent for violent or firearm-related crimes, such as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, among others. Age, number of prior convictions and time since the most recent conviction were associated with risk of subsequent arrest. Risk for those originally charged with felonies was similar to that for those originally charged with misdemeanors.

"Nearly 25 percent of subjects who had purchased a handgun were charged with a new firearm-related or violent crime within three years of purchasing a handgun," said Wintemute. In urban counties, the majority (95 percent) of convictions for crimes charged as violent felonies are arrived at through plea bargaining, which commonly involves a reduction from felony to misdemeanor charges. We may be missing an opportunity to prevent those most at risk for committing violent crimes from legally purchasing firearms."

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Story Source: Materials provided by University of California - Davis Health System. Mona A. Wright, Garen J. Wintemute. Firearm Prohibition for Persons Convicted of Violent Crimes. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2014

CRIME: Detecting drug abuse through sewage.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

This is an interesting concept, tracking the outflows of a community's sewer system to detect illegal substances at the treatment plant.  Once this is installed, the next step would be to install detectors at the intersections of main sewer lines then smaller connectors until detectors are installed in each neighborhood.

From a civil liberties viewpoint, this should be about as welcome as drone aircraft circling overhead.  From a crime detection standpoint, it could quickly spot a meth cooking operation or other activity.  For the author of crime fiction, it's one more twist to add to a plot.

Here's the story:

The war on drugs could get a boost with a new method that analyzes sewage to track levels of illicit drug use in local communities in real time. The new study, a first-of-its-kind in the U.S., was published in the ACS ournal Environmental Science & Technology and could help law enforcement identify new drug hot spots and monitor whether anti-drug measures are working.

Kurunthachalam Kannan and Bikram Subedi note that to date, most methods to estimate drug use in the U.S. are based on surveys, crime statistics and drug seizures by law enforcement. But much illegal drug use happens off the radar. To better approximate usage, scientists have been turning to wastewater. Like a lot of other compounds from pharmaceuticals and personal care products to pesticides, illegal drugs and their metabolic byproducts also persist in sewage.

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In Europe, a number of studies have been done to see how well wastewater treatment plants are removing illicit drugs from sludge before treated water is released into the environment. But until now, no study in the U.S. had looked at this, likely leading to underestimates of abuse. Kannan and Subedi wanted to form a more complete picture of drug use, so they studied levels of illicit drugs at two wastewater treatment plants in Albany, New York.

Surprisingly, the scientists found cocaine in 93 percent of all untreated samples. Levels of byproducts from opioids and hallucinogenic drugs were also detected. They found that the wastewater treatment plants didn't remove all illicit drugs before releasing water back into the environment -- and eventually into drinking water. But, the researchers suggest, tracking drugs in wastewater could help policymakers and law enforcement understand patterns of abuse and better fight it.

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Story Source: Materials provided by American Chemical Society. Bikram Subedi, Kurunthachalam Kannan. Mass Loading and Removal of Select Illicit Drugs in Two Wastewater Treatment Plants in New York State and Estimation of Illicit Drug Usage in Communities through Wastewater Analysis. Environmental Science & Technology, 2014