Vesti iz sveta nauke

Truly an incredible achievement considering he owns a commercial space launch agency. ITIF frankly need their heads examined.

A 15-year-old just discovered a lost Maya city in the Mexican jungle

William Gadoury, a 15-year-old school student from Quebec, Canada, has found something that’s been hidden from archaeologists for centuries - a lost city of the Maya civilisation, buried deep in the Yucatan jungle of southeastern Mexico.

He didn’t do it by hiring a bunch of expensive equipment, hopping on a plane, and slaving away on an excavation site - he discovered the incredible ruins from the comfort of his own home, by figuring out that the ancient cities were built in alignment with the stars above.

"I did not understand why the Maya built their cities away from rivers, on marginal lands and in the mountains," Gadoury told French-Canadian magazine, Journal de Montréal. "They had to have another reason, and as they worshiped the stars, the idea came to me to verify my hypothesis. I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities."

Gadoury had been studying 22 Maya constellations for years before releasing that he could line up the positions of 117 Maya cities on the ground with maps of stars and constellations above -  something that no one had pieced together before.

With this in mind, he located a 23rd constellation, which included just three stars. According to his sky map, he could only link up two cities with the three stars, so suspected that a third city remained undetected in that spot.  

Unfortunately, the location on the ground that matched up with the third star wasn’t exactly somewhere that Gadoury could just go visit - it’s right in the heart of the jungle, in the inaccessible and remote region of Mexico’s southern Yucatán Peninsula.

Not that that stopped Gadoury - he knew that a fire had stripped much of the forest in the area back in 2005, which meant that from above, you might have an easier time spotting ancient ruins than if the canopy had been thriving for the past couple of thousand years.

All he needed to do was access satellite imagery of the area from the Canadian Space Agency, which he mapped onto Google Earth images to see if there were any signs of his lost city.

Further analyses from satellites belonging to NASA and the Japanese Space Agency revealed what looks like a pyramid and 30 buildings at the location mapped by the star, Yucatan Expat Life reports. "Not only has he discovered a new Maya city, but it is one of the five largest on record."

As Daniel De Lisle from the Canadian Space Agency told Samuel Osborne at The Independent, the satellite images revealed certain linear features on the forest floor that looked anything but natural. "There are enough items to suggest it could be a man-made structure," he said.  

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-15-year-old-just-discovered-a-lost-maya-city-in-central-america

In a searing investigation into the once lauded biotech start-up Theranos, Nick Bilton discovers that its precocious founder defied medical experts—even her own chief scientist—about the veracity of its now discredited blood-testing technology. She built a corporation based on secrecy in the hope that she could still pull it off. Then, it all fell apart.

As Holmes started to assemble her board of directors, she chose a dozen older white men, almost none of whom had a background in anything related to health care. This included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state George Shultz, former Georgia senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, and William J. Perry, the former defense secretary. (Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader, and former cardiovascular doctor, was an exception.) “This was a board that was better suited to decide if America should invade Iraq than vet a blood-testing company,” one person said to me.

The regular use of Caesarean sections is having an impact on human evolution, say scientists.
More mothers now need surgery to deliver a baby due to their narrow pelvis size, according to a study.
Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today.
Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour.
Researchers in Austria say the trend is likely to continue, but not to the extent that non-surgical births will become obsolete.
Dr Philipp Mitteroecker, of the department of theoretical biology at the University of Vienna, said there was a long standing question in the understanding of human evolution.
"Why is the rate of birth problems, in particular what we call fetopelvic disproportion - basically that the baby doesn't fit through the maternal birth canal - why is this rate so high?" he said.
"Without modern medical intervention such problems often were lethal and this is, from an evolutionary perspective, selection.
"Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters."

Opposing forces

It has been a long standing evolutionary question why the human pelvis has not grown wider over the years.
The head of a human baby is large compared with other primates, meaning animals such as chimps can give birth relatively easily.
The researchers devised a mathematical model using data from the World Health Organization and other large birth studies.
They found opposing evolutionary forces in their theoretical study.
One is a trend towards larger newborns, which are more healthy.
However, if they grow too large, they get stuck during labour, which historically would have proved disastrous for mother and baby, and their genes would not be passed on.
"One side of this selective force - namely the trend towards smaller babies - has vanished due to Caesarean sections," said Dr Mitteroecker.
"Our intent is not to criticise medical intervention," he said. "But it's had an evolutionary effect. "

Future trends

The researchers estimated that the global rate of cases where the baby could not fit through the maternal birth canal was 3%, or 30 in 1,000 births.
Over the past 50 or 60 years, this rate has increased to about 3.3-3.6%, so up to 36 in 1,000 births.
That is about a 10-20% increase of the original rate, due to the evolutionary effect.
"The pressing question is what's going to happen in the future?" Dr Mitteroecker said.
"I expect that this evolutionary trend will continue but perhaps only slightly and slowly.
"There are limits to that. So I don't expect that one day the majority of children will have to be born by [Caesarean] sections."
The research is published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Commenting on the study, Smithsonian paleoanthropologist Dr Briana Pobiner said there are "probably many other biological and cultural issues that factor into the Caesarean sections rate, which varies widely across the developed and developing world".
And Daghni Rajasingam, a consultant obstetrician and a spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians, said factors such as diabetes and obesity, are having an impact on the number of Caesarean sections.
"I think what is important to take into the [question of] evolution is that things like diabetes are much more common at a younger age so we see many more women of reproductive age who have diabetes," she said.
"That has consequences as to whether or not they may need a caesarean section.
"In addition, the rates of obesity are increasing so more and more women of reproductive age have a higher body mass index and this again has an impact on caesarean section rates."