Science News for Writers

Credit: Alan McElligott.   Dr Alan McElligott with a goat.  The goat likes him.  Dr McElligott is happy. I love science.  You never know what type of earthshaking factoid may rear its weird head on any given day.  Like two days ago. When it was announced that goats like happy people. And since goats don't appear to be following me around, I must not be happy. Go figure. I thought I was. Here's the report.  It explains why goats may or may not be following you around. *  *  *  *  * Goats prefer happy people Goats can differentiate between human facial expressions and prefer to interact with happy people, according to a new study led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London.  The study, which provides the first evidence of how goats read human emotional expressions, implies that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited to those with a long history of domestication ...

Credit: Busby et al./Current Biology 2015 Gene flow within West Eurasia is shown by lines linking the best-matching  donor group to the sources of admixture with recipient clusters (arrowhead).  Line colors represent the regional identity of the donor group, and line thick- ness represents the proportion of DNA coming from the donor group. Ranges of the dates (point estimates) for events involving sources most similar to  selected donor groups are shown. It's often said that the history we know was written by the winners with the losers lost to history and memory. Until the age of DNA analysis, that is. DNA retains a record of historic events, and the collective DNA of a population can be used to trace historic movements of entire populations or invasions by outside groups. Using DNA allows us to trace historic movements of peoples in pre-history, such as recent research that shows that an unknown somewhat mysterious population invented agricultu...

Credit: L. Tan This is an inscription from 1891 found in Dayu Cave. It reads: On May 24th, 17th year of the Emperor Guangxu period (June 30th, 1891 CE), Qing Dynasty,  the local mayor, Huaizong Zhu led more than 200 people into the cave to get water. A fortuneteller named Zhenrong Ran prayed for rain during a ceremony. What is the effect of climate change of the short-term?  As this story points out, social instability, attacks on government, starvation, even cannibalism. What could be the effect of long-term climate change?  We appear to be in the early stages of change and conflict.  It's real on all continents as people are starting to leave areas of the greatest effect - drought, heat waves and so on - and moving toward the Poles.  Follow international news, and you'll find stories almost daily of people crossing to Europe from Africa, fleeing not just political repression but the lack of food.  I leave the details to the writer'...

Credit: © Comugnero Silvana / Fotolia  Wild barley . One of the most popular posts on SNfW is entitled, " DNA Research Shows a Mystery Population Invented Agriculture " reporting on research led by Marta Mirazón Lahr of Cambridge University.  This research simply states, as the title says, an unknown population of stone age humans developed agriculture, supplanting the hunter gatherer cultures that came before.  Sections of the report say ~ "Scientists have developed evidence that supports the idea that our ancestors separated into at least three populations earlier than 36,000 years ago: Western Eurasians, East Asians and a mystery third lineage. "This mystery population may have remained small for a very long time, surviving as refugees in areas such as the Zagros Mountains of Iran and Iraq, for example," said Mirazón Lahr. "We have no idea at the moment where they were for those first 30,000 years, only that they were in the Middle East b...