Evidence continues to mount that Homo floresiensis, the controversial hominids better known as hobbits, were a distinct member of our ancestral family, rather than pathologically shrunken misfits.

According to analyses published Wednesday in Nature, the big toes of H. floresiensis are disproportionately longer than those of either modern humans, formally known as Homo sapiens, or Homo erectus, the original out-of-Africa hominid.

The exceptionally tiny brain of H. floresiensis, which some researchers thought could not be explained by natural evolutionary pressures, also fits with brain development seen in ancient species of hippos who evolved in island isolation, just like the hobbit.

The papers are the latest salvos in a battle that’s raged since 2003, when anthropologists found one semi-complete skeleton and fragments of six others in an Indonesian island cave. The skeletons appeared to come from hominids who stood just three feet tall and were anatomically distinct from H. sapiens.

Anthropologists who believed the fossils represented a new species named it after its home island of Flores, where local folk tales described a race of diminutive jungle dwellers. They hypothesized a direct-line descent from H. erectus, the last common ancestor of all human species, who left Africa 2.5 million years ago.

But other researchers were unconvinced. They said the hobbits’ brains were too small to have made the sophisticated stone tools found with their skeletons. The skeletons probably belonged to pathologically stunted locals who’d been ritually buried by their fully H. sapiens tribe, said the skeptics.

Since 2003, researchers on both sides of the divide have produced interpretations supporting their arguments. But as described in a recent New York Times article, “The research community is definitely trending towards the hobbits.” Richard Leakey, a preeminent anthropologist who originally refused to take sides in the debate, told the Times that recent research “greatly strengthened the possibility” that H. Floresiensis was real.

The latest studies strengthen the possibility even more. In the first, State University of New York at Stony Brook biomechanicist William Jungers reports that H. floresiensis could move its big toes from side-to-side, just like modern humans, but the toes are so disproportionately long that they resemble the toes of apes rather than our own.

This suggests that H. floresiensis may belong to an as-yet-unknown branch of the human family tree, possibly even an evolutionary brother of Homo erectus. “These new findings raise the possiblity that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented,” wrote Jungers’ team.

In the second paper, Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister of London’s Natural History Museum looked at fossil skulls from several species of long-extinct hippos that evolved into dwarfish form on the island of Madagascar. The brains of the hippos were unexpectedly small, even given the diminution of their bodies.

“Our findings … suggest that the process of dwarfism could in principle explain small brain size, a factor relevant to the interpretation of the small-brained hominin found on the island of Flores,” they wrote.

The papers raise interesting possibilities for the hobbit, writes Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman in an accompanying commentary. Perhaps it comes from a pre-H. erectus species, such as Homo habilis. Or maybe H. erectus was “more diverse and anatomically primitive than we thought.”

Lieberman suspects the latter, he wrote, “But the only way to test these and other hypotheses is to find more fossils, especially in Asia. Get out your shovels!”

Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.

Using simulations, a team of German and Russian physicists have pioneered a new technique for particle acceleration, called proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA). The technique may one day allow machines a fraction of the size of today's accelerators to create the highest-energy particles ever.

"This could be a major step forward," says Allen Caldwell of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, coauthor of the study, which appeared in Nature Physics Sunday. "The dream is that it will lead to much more compact — and therefore much cheaper — electron accelerators."

Progress in particle physics is contingent on the power of particle accelerators, and as particle colliders grow, the price tag and bureaucratic hurdles grow with them. Government pocketbooks are becoming increasingly tight — in December both the U.S. and the U.K. pulled out of the proposed $7 billion International Linear Collider, which may never actually be built. So to continue searching for answers to physics' greatest questions — dark matter, extra dimensions, supersymmetry — physicists may have to find a fundamentally new way to accelerate particles. Caldwell and his colleagues hope proton-driven PWFA will pave the way.

Giant particle accelerators work by smashing subatomic particles such as electrons or protons together at high energies. This transforms the particles into energy, which then converts back into matter, potentially revealing new particles and advancing understanding of old ones. Over the past half century, particle accelerators have thoroughly probed the lower energy levels. The next frontier is the land of the teraelectronvolt (TeV, or a million million electronvolts).

There are only two ways for accelerators to increase the power: create a stronger electric field, or increase the distance over which particles are accelerated. We've already pretty much maxed out the strength of electric fields that can be contained without ripping electrons off the walls and essentially melting the inside of the accelerator. The other option is to create ever larger accelerators.

Building bigger proton accelerators, such as Fermilab's Tevatron in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, is still possible because protons can be accelerated to very high energies in a circle. But the highest-energy electrons need linear tracks such as that of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory or the proposed International Linear Collider.

While proton accelerators are more powerful because of the continuous circular acceleration, electron accelerators are important because they are more precise. This is where plasma-wakefield acceleration may be able to help.

This radically new kind of acceleration skirts the electric field issue by using plasma — gas in which electrons have been ripped from their nuclei. This soup of ionized gas can handle electric fields about a thousand times stronger than can conventional accelerators, meaning the accelerators can potentially be a thousand times shorter.

In PWFA, tightly-packed bunches of electrons are fired into the plasma like bullets from a machine gun, blowing the plasma's electrons away in all directions leaving the heavier plasma nuclei behind. These positively charged nuclei form a bubble of electron-free plasma behind the particle bullet. The negatively charged expelled electrons are drawn back toward the positively charged bubble.

But as the electrons snap back toward the bubble, they overshoot their original positions. So the particle bullet leaves behind a wake of mispositioned electrons, creating an intense electric field. By riding in this wake, the electrons can reach very high energies in a very short distance.

In 2007, a collaboration between SLAC, UCLA, and USC demonstrated PWFA's potential: In a single meter, they were able to boost electrons zooming down SLAC's linear track to twice what they can achieve over the entire two-mile-long accelerator.

But this strategy also has its limits. The maximum energy of the accelerated electrons depends on the energy of the particle bunches. SLAC currently produces the highest-energy electrons of any accelerator, at 50 gigaelectronvolts (GeV, or a thousand million electronvolts).

So Caldwell and his colleagues decided to give plasma-wakefield acceleration a new twist by blasting the plasma with protons instead of electrons. Today's accelerators can bring protons to much higher energies than they can electrons. Protons at the Tevatron can hit 1 TeV (hence the name), and those at the LHC will be seven times as energetic.

"This would be a tool to transfer that energy from the protons to the electrons, via the plasma, in a single stage," says Caldwell.

In a numerical simulation, the team used proton-driven PWFA to accelerate electron bunches to 500 GeV in 300 meters of plasma. Compare that to the proposed $7 billion International Linear Collider (ILC), which will need at least nine miles to hit the same target, and SLAC's linear accelerator, which needed 10 times the distance to reach a tenth of the energy. Combining the new proton-driven PWFA with the LHC's powerful proton beam, Caldwell says it might be possible to accelerate electrons to several TeV, so that physicists can have their power, and their precision too.

"I look forward to watching these ideas continue to develop," says Mark Hogan, a member of the electron-driven PWFA team at SLAC. "There is still a lot of research and development needed to nurture these ideas. But in the not too distant future, we may find that ideas such as this have transformed the field of particle accelerators to make future machines that are both smaller and more affordable to society."

Electron acceleration by proton-driven PWFA is in its earliest theoretical stages — this study is the first to describe the concept — and is far from experimental verification. Perhaps the biggest issue is the proton bunch length, which must be very small to allow the electrons to overshoot and create the wakefield.

"It's easy to do for electron bunches," says co-author Frank Simon of the Max Planck Institute. "But hadron colliders have bunches that are centimeters in length. We need bunches that are a hundred micrometers in length. We're still looking at how to test the idea with present technology."

As governments put a stranglehold on spending, advancements in PWFA may be the best hope for refining the discoveries expected to be made at the LHC.

1850: Edward Bellamy is born. He's the American socialist and visionary author best known for penning the forward-looking utopian novel, Looking Backward.

Bellamy grew up in western Massachusetts, a desultory law student who knew he wanted to be a writer. He soon ditched law for journalism and worked for a couple of newspapers — the Springfield Union and New York Post — before turning to fiction.

He wrote short stories and several popular Victorian novels — The Duke of Stockbridge (1879), Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880) and Miss Ludington's Sister (1884) — but attained fame with the publication in 1888 of Looking Backward, the story of a young man who falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887, only to wake up in 2000 when the world has evolved into a great socialist paradise.

Bellamy embraced a central pillar of socialism, that cooperation among humans is healthier than cutthroat competition. This conviction formed the basis of Looking Backward and emerged as its central theme. Boston in the year 2000, Bellamy's setting for the novel, is indeed a world where socialism has emerged triumphant and the world is harmonious because of it.

Bellamy predicted a revolution in retail, with something like today's warehouse clubs and big-box stores. Transactions would be handled by a card system much like a modern debit card. People could use enhanced telephone lines to listen to sermons and classical music.

The book was a hit, selling over a million copies and ranking behind only Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ as the top best-seller of the era.

Bellamy's success led to a slew of other utopian-themed novels, although none reached Looking Backward's level of popularity. The book also spawned experiments in communal living and fed the Nationalist movement, which urged the nationalization of all industry and the elimination of class distinctions.

Socialism, of course, had different connotations in the 19th century when it rose, principally as a backlash to the brutalities of industrialization and the exploitation of the workers by the ruling class. (Were he alive today, Bellamy might note, with interest, that while the worst excesses of the industrial age are gone, the exploitation continues.)

Had Bellamy lived to the ripe old age of 150, he no doubt would have been disappointed to find capitalism running amok, and his fellow man no less greedy and self-serving than in his own time.

But he didn't live to be 150. In fact, Bellamy was still a relatively young man when he died of tuberculosis in 1898.

Source: Wikipedia, Bowling Green University

If you're one of those weird and sometimes gloomy people (like me) who get the urge to close the curtains on even the nicest of days, a new solar development will give us a new excuse to do it: It might help the environment and save us a few bucks.

Sheila Kennedy, a faculty member of MIT's School of Design, has developed new solar textiles and used them to create the first sustainable, energy yielding curtains. The curtains were developed for a green-living exhibit at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and the coolest thing about them is that they can produce up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity (or about half of what's needed to power up a house every day.)

Just like regular solar cell panels, the curtains absorb sunlight in the daytime and hold it in as needed. As currently designed, the 'soft panel' curtains can cover walls or roofs, but they might be applicable in other forms. For example, the museum exhibit integrated the 'soft panels' into the design of the skylight, and is also used as a wall separator.

Think about other environmental and creatively satirical ways in which you could use these solar rugs. For example, you could take out your old couch, cover it in 'solar wear,' and put it on the roof. Is that a terribly kitschy decoration for a tired Santa, or an innovative earth-saving gadget? You be the judge.

According to the developers, this textile OPV (organic photovoltaic) system is still not as competent as the best flat, solar panel technologies out there, but will be improved in the next few years.

The researchers used an fMRI machine to measure hippocampal blood flow in four subjects who navigated a room in virtual reality. They focused on groups of neurons identified by Maguire in an earlier study of London taxi drivers, whose hippocampi were hyperdeveloped by years of mental navigation through the city's mazelike streets.

After analyzing activation patterns and correlating them with a record of test subjects' movements, Maguire's team found that patterns could actually be used to predict location.

The results "are an intriguing first step toward using fMRI to read out information about visuo-spatial scenes," said Arne Ekstrom, a University of California at Los Angeles cognitive neuroscientist who was not involved in the study.

Ekstrom cautioned that the findings, relying on a bird's-eye fMRI view of just one part of the hippocampus, don't explain what's happening in individual neurons or across the entire structure.

Further studies will incorporate more test subjects than the four men included in this study, and involve other types of memory than spatial.

Though the findings fit with earlier demonstrations of visual memory's reconstruction from visual cortex activation patterns, study co-author Demis Hassabis, a London-based artificial intelligence researcher, cautioned that full-blown mind reading is still decades away.

More relevant, said Hassabis and Maguire, are potential insights into how memory deteriorates.

"We're learning more and more about how memory is laid down," said Maguire. "We can begin to understand how pathological processes erode memories, and think about how we might help patients in a rehabilitation context, to make the most of what memories they have left."

Meet Eclyse – an animal that looks like it was assembled in one of those dodgy garages where they weld halves of two stolen cars together.

But Eclyse isn't the result of some crazed Doctor Dolittle with a god complex. It's a zorse – a zebra/horse hybrid, born on a ranch in Germany. And she's the product of a holiday romance.

While most zorses have stripes across their whole body, Eclyse only has two blocks of stripes – on her face and her rear.

The pure white areas she gets from her mother, a horse called Eclipse. Eclipse's owners sent her to a ranch in Italy for a while – where she met a rugged, handsome zebra called Ulysses.

One thing led to another – and when she got back home to Germany, Eclipse surprised her keepers by producing a little half-horse, half-zebra with highly unusual markings.

Ranch spokesman Udo Richter commented: 'You can tell she is a mix just by looking at her. But in temperament she can also exhibit characteristics from each parent.

'She is usually relatively tame like a horse but occasionally shows the fiery temperament of a zebra, leaping around like one.'

From Wikipedia: “A phobia is an irrational, persistent fear of certain situations, objects, activities, or persons. The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive, unreasonable desire to avoid the feared subject. When the fear is beyond one’s control, or if the fear is interfering with daily life, then a diagnosis under one of the anxiety disorders can be made.” Here are the top 10 Bizarre phobias!

1. Ithyphallophobia - Fear of Erections

Defined as “a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of an erect penis”, each year this surprisingly common phobia causes countless people needless distress. To add insult to an already distressing condition, most fear of erection therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient to be exposed repeatedly to their fear. Known by a number of names - Medorthophobia, Phallophobia, Ithyphallophobia, and Fear of an Erect Penis being the most common - the problem often significantly impacts the quality of life. It can cause panic attacks and keep people apart from loved ones and business associates.

2. Ephebophobia - Fear of Youths

The psychological and social fear of youth. The effects of ephebiphobia appear to cause damage throughout society. At least one major economist has proposed that the fear of youth can have grave effects on the economic health of nations. Coinage is attributed to a 1994 article by Kirk Astroth published in Phi Delta Kappan. Today, common usage occurs internationally by sociologists, government agencies, and youth advocacy organizations that define ephebiphobia as an abnormal or irrational and persistent fear and/or loathing of teenagers or adolescence.

3. Coulrophobia - Fear of Clowns

Coulrophobia is an abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns. It is not uncommon among children, but is also sometimes found in teenagers and adults as well. Sufferers sometimes acquire a fear of clowns after having a bad experience with one personally, or seeing a sinister portrayal of one in the media. The weird appearance of the clowns, swollen red noses and unnatural hair colors makes these persons look so mysterious and treacherous. Adults who are victims of coulrophobia know what they fear is completely irrational and illogical, but they can’t escape the circumstance.

4. Ergasiophobia - Fear of Work

Ergasiophobia can be a persistent and debilitating disorder in some people, causing significant psychological disability and dysfunction. These individuals may actually be suffering from an underlying mental health problem such as depression or Attention Deficit Disorder.

5. Gymnophobia - Fear of Nudity

Gymnophobia is a fear or anxiety about being seen naked, and/or about seeing others naked, even in situations where it is socially acceptable. Gymnophobes may experience their fear of nudity before all people, or only certain people, and may regard their fear as irrational. This phobia often arises from a feeling of inadequacy that their bodies are physically inferior, particularly due to comparison with idealized images portrayed in the media. The fear may also stem from anxiety about sexuality in general, or from a persistent feeling of vulnerability associated with the thought that those who have seen the gymnophobe naked will continue to imagine the gymnophobe nude.

6. Neophobia - Fear of Newness

Neophobia is the fear of new things or experiences. It is also called cainotophobia. In psychology, neophobia is defined as the persistent and abnormal fear of anything new. In its milder form, it can manifest as the unwillingness to try new things or break from routine. The term is also used to describe anger, frustration or trepidation toward new things and toward change in general. Some conservative and reactionary groups are often described as neophobic, in their attempts to preserve traditions or revert society to a perceived past form. Technophobia can be seen as a specialized form of neophobia, by fearing new technology.

7. Paraskavedekatriaphobia - Fear of Friday the 13th

A Friday occurring on the 13th day of any month is considered to be a day of bad luck in English, German, Polish, Bulgarian and Portuguese-speaking cultures around the globe. The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia, a word that is derived from the concatenation of the Greek words Παρασκευή, δεκατρείς, and φοβία, meaning Friday, thirteen, and phobia respectively; alternative spellings include paskevodekatriaphobia or paraskevidekatriaphobia, and is a specialized form of triskaidekaphobia, a phobia (fear) of the number thirteen.

8. Panphobia - Fear of Everything

Panphobia, also called omniphobia, Pantophobia or Panophobia, is a medical condition known as a “non-specific fear”; the sufferer finds themselves in a state of fear but with no known target, and therefore no easy remedy. It has been described as “a vague and persistent dread of some unknown evil”. This fear is often seen as a secondary condition to schizophrenia.

9. Taphophobia - Fear of being Buried Alive

Fear of being buried alive is the fear of being placed in a grave while still alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. The abnormal, psychopathological version of this fear is referred to as taphophobia. Before the advent of modern medicine the fear was not entirely irrational. Throughout history there have been numerous cases of people being accidentally buried alive.

10. Pteronophobia - Fear of being Tickled by Feathers

Pteronophobia is the irrational fear of being tickled by feathers. Certain childhood events, such as tickling a baby, can lead to this fear as the child may feel trapped. It is related to the fear of tickling.

Bonus: Luposlipaphobia

The fear of being pursued by timber wolves around a kitchen table while wearing socks on a newly-waxed floor. This is actually a fictional phobia which was created by Gary Larson - author of the Far Side comics.