Os cientistas concluíram que a beleza e a atratividade de uma pessoa, avaliada pela simetria de seus traços, são a exigência visual que a biologia utiliza para indicar que homens e mulheres possuem genes de qualidade.

Deste modo, homens e mulheres querem que seus pares sejam bonitos e atraentes, pois, sem saber, seu instinto de conservação da espécie interpreta a beleza como um sinal de qualidade genética que será transferido à geração seguinte.

Para fazer a pesquisa, os especialistas utilizaram fotografias de europeus, de membros de uma das últimas tribos de caçadores, os Hadza da Tanzânia, assim como de macacos, e mediram as faces de todos eles.

Depois, foi pedido a um grupo de voluntários que julgassem a masculinidade dos rostos com traços mais e menos simétricos.

Eles descobriram que os homens com o rosto simétrico eram percebidos como tendo proporções faciais mais masculinas, e o mesmo ocorria no caso das mulheres.

Os pesquisadores concluem que, em geral, todas as culturas tendem a escolher pares com traços simétricos, e isso sugere que esses são indicativos de melhores genes e que o eleito será melhor companheiro.

Answer:  When your gut is hanging off the bench.

Es posible que Homo habilis hubiera desarrollado un lenguaje, aunque seguramente era más simple que el de los humanos modernos. Sin embargo, esto no implica necesariamente que habilis hablara con palabras. Puede que se comunicase con gestos. La teoría de que el lenguaje fue inicialmente gestual, o una mezcla de gestos y palabras, para derivar posteriormente en el lenguaje predominantemente oral que nos caracteriza tiene unos cuantos adeptos. En particular, el lingüista Michael Corballis ha hecho una minuciosa exposición de esta teoría en su libro “From Hand to Mouth”.

Los partidarios del origen ‘gestual’ del lenguaje utilizan varios argumentos para justificar su teoría. En primer lugar, los chimpancés no tienen ‘vocalizaciones referenciales’ como las de los macacos verdes, y en cambio utilizan un amplio repertorio de gestos. Otro argumento se basa en las ‘afasias’ provocadas por lesiones en el área de Broca. Curiosamente, los pacientes sordomudos que sufren lesiones en este punto tienen problemas para ‘hablar’ en lenguaje de gestos, lo que indica que esta área está implicada en el procesamiento del lenguaje, independientemente de que éste se realice mediante gestos o palabras. Estos autores señalan que, aunque minoritarios, existen algunos lenguajes ‘naturales’ basados en gestos, como los que empleaban los nativos de Norteamérica; y que son tan ricos y complejos como los que emplean palabras habladas.

Más aun, la teoría del origen gestual del lenguaje resuelve el llamado ‘problema de referencia’, el cual resulta difícil de explicar si las palabras hubieran sido utilizadas en primer lugar. Este ‘problema’ consiste en que las palabras contienen signos arbitrarios, que no se parecen en nada a los objetos a los que hacen referencia. Con pocas excepciones, resulta imposible encontrar un ‘sonido’ que corresponda con un objeto dado y que tal conexión pueda ser entendida, si no existe un acuerdo ‘previo’ sobre la relación entre ambas cosas. Excepto con las onomatopeyas, resulta casi imposible emitir un sonido que ‘represente’ claramente a un objeto. Si los gestos hubieran sido empleados originalmente como signos, este problema de referencia es menor, debido a dos razones. En primer lugar, podemos aludir a los objetos corrientes mediante el procedimiento de señalarlos. Esto proporciona una forma inmediatamente inteligible de ‘nombrar’ objetos (admitiendo que sólo es utilizable para aquellos que se encuentren a la vista). Por otra parte, los verbos son mucho más fáciles de representar mediante gestos, ya que casi siempre es posible realizar un ‘pantomima’ que represente la acción, de forma que sea entendible sin necesidad de que haya un acuerdo previo sobre el significado. Utilizando la terminología de Pierce, diríamos que los gestos permiten hacer representaciones ‘icónicas’ de muchos verbos. Considerando ambos hechos, parece plausible que el gesto constituyera un medio más adecuado para el lenguaje original. Por otra parte, no hay ninguna razón para excluir la posibilidad de que este lenguaje inicial estuviera formado por una mezcla de gestos y vocalizaciones. En alguna etapa posterior los gestos perderían fuerza en favor de las palabras, aunque en la actualidad el habla normal siga empleando ambas. Podríamos decir, en broma, que el lenguaje tuvo que evolucionar de ‘la mano a la boca’ para que los humanos pudiéramos hablar por el móvil.

]]> http://quizaxehatrack.wordpress.com/?p=17 Wed, 07 May 2008 02:31:52 +0000 quizaxehatrack http://quizaxehatrack.wordpress.com/?p=17 Sections of the law also make it clear that DNA may be used in genetic experiments and tests.

You can read the entire law here.

As I previously wrote when the senate passed a law preventing discrimination on the grounds of your genetic makeup, it was to be assumed that your genetic information would either be public knowledge or government property.

I think we should all look at this with a great deal of scrutiny. Government has a terrible history of keeping our privacy or not using our personal information for political ends.

I am not just referring the dreams of eugenics and master race creating that Hitler thought about. The US government was quick to inter our own citizens in World War II based on their genetic heritage.

That may have been a long time ago. But let us not forget that under the guise of the misnamed ”Patriot act” the government had no problem suspending the right of habeus corpus as well as several other personal rights we previously took for granted. That should serve as a lesson that, with the proper spin, we readily give the government power that our founding fathers would have instantly rejected.

In our current system where officials are regularly elected by purchasing and manipulating popular opinion, what are the safeguards against, someday, a government that decides that we no longer wish to have citizens that carry the diabetes gene, or suffer from ADHD because they create budgetary overruns in our society.

Many Americans have opposed the notion of a national ID card because of the fear of how that could be abused by local officials on grounds of race or creed or nation of origin. If you don’t think the government happily goes after certain faith, you should read about what Senator Grassley is up to.

How much more information about you can they have if they have tagged your DNA?

The Citizens Council on Healthcare has published a very cogent analysis of the privacy concerns that this law brings up.

I am surprised that so few media outlets have not recognized this chilling legislation for what it could be.

"ME DIGA ONDE VIVE QUE TE DIREI QUEM ÉS"

Um terço da expressão genética depende do ambiente em que vivemos

Os estilos de vida e o lugar em que vivemos afetam a expressão de nossos genes, determinando o funciomaneto de nosso organismo. E acontecem num grau que os cientistas não esperavam. Nada menos que 30% dos genes contidos nos glóbulos brancos são afetados pela pressão ambiental. Cientistas estadunidenses (North Carolina State University) chegaram a essa conclusão estudando etnias que vivem em distintos lugares (cidade, campo e montanha) e que tem estruturas genéticas similares. Amplas diferenças em suas expressões genéticas ocorrem em função do lugar que habitam. Essa descoberta implica que há de se levar em conta o meio de vida para compreender as relações entre genes e enfermidades.

Mais informações: Tendências 21 (Espanha)

ROTA IMPOPULAR

CIÊNCIA URBANA

Y un ser humano no es precisamente un banal proyecto. Miles de millones de procesos y sustancias preprogramadas se echan a andar cada vez que una nueva persona quiere ir tomando forma. Es una operacion delicada: requiere de un balance extremo, de dosis controladas y precisas, de cambios y recambios realizados de manera exacta y definida. Basta tan sólo con alguna pequeña perturbación en esa balanza sangrona para que se obtenga como resultado una cita mensual con psicólogos y psiquiatras por el resto de la vida.; sesiones de rehabilitación, dependencia a los psicofármacos, un blog lleno de incoherencias. Todo esto se obtiene.

Semejante atropello a la razón tiene su origen en los silencios del pasado; o más bien, en la falta de silencios: genes callados que de pronto se ponen a hablar; proteínas parlanchinas que sin más comienzan a callar. Estrés, tensiones, preocupaciones, dudas existenciales, dudas amorosas... todo esto influye en la manera en que nuestro código interior se va configurando. Ya sea que hayamos heredado el cielo o el infierno; que tengamos más o menos recursos faciales o verbales con los cuales atrevernos a enfrentar a la terrible carterita que todo lo compra; el hecho es que el ambiente nos modifica, nos cambia. y no sólo a nosotros, sino también de manera imperceptible a nuestra descendencia futura y ultrafutura.

Lo que vivamos hoy se verá reflejado en la vida diaria de nuestros bisnietos, así como los ancestros sin nombre influyen en nuestra naturaleza actual. Estas son las lecciones de la Epigenética: un nuevo enfoque a las teorías del desarrollo evolutivo y la transmisión de la herencia. Lecciones que nos imponen de alguna manera mayor responsabilidad en el cuidado de nuestra salud porque, si estamos dispuestos a autosabotearnos la existencia, ¿estamos dispuestos a hacer lo mismo con la de nuestros queridos y anónimos tataranietos?

I'm not going to comment much on this at all-will just copy and paste the piece as his style of writing is very personable like he's talking to you-like a conversation....also, I'd add more in my other site, At The End Of The Tunnel..

"Five months ago, I wrote a series on race, genes, and intelligence. Everything about it hurt: the research, the writing, the reactions, the regrets. Not a day has gone by that I haven't thought about it. I've been struggling to reconcile two feelings that won't go away: that what I wrote was socially harmful and that I can't honestly renounce the evidence I presented. That evidence, which involved the proposed role of heredity in trait differences by race, is by no means complete or conclusive. But it's not dismissible, either. My colleague Stephen Metcalf summarized the debate better than I did: "It's a conflict between science and science."

When you find yourself in a dilemma this difficult, sometimes the best thing to do is let it sit in your head until you find a way to make sense of it within your value system. I think I'm beginning to find the answer that works for me: I was asking the wrong question.

In last fall's series, I asked myself why I was writing about such an ugly topic. "Because the truth isn't as bad as our ignorant, half-formed fears and suspicions about it," I concluded. "And because you can't solve a problem till you understand it." I wrote my commitment on a piece of paper and leaned it against my computer monitor: The truth doesn't care what you want.

Sometimes, with time and perspective, it's the small, overlooked things that turn out to be big. In retrospect, I was consumed by the wrong word. The flaw in my approach wasn't truth. It was the. Even if hereditary inequality among racial averages is a truth, it's less true, more unjust, and more pernicious than framing the same difference in nonracial terms. "The truth," as I accepted and framed it, was itself half-formed. It was, in that sense, a half-truth. And it flunked the practical test I had assigned it: To the extent that a social problem is genetic, you can't ultimately solve it by understanding it in racial terms.

A study published two weeks ago in Nature Medicine illustrates the point. Gina Kolata of the New York Times explains what happened:

Doctors who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. [Now researchers] have discovered why: these nonresponsive patients have a slightly altered version of a gene that muscles use to control responses to nerve signals. … As many as 40 percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites have the gene variant, the researchers report. The findings, heart failure specialists say, mean that people with the altered gene might be spared taking what may be, for them, a useless therapy.

In other words, racial observation turned out to be a temporary step toward a deeper genetic explanation. Most blacks don't have the altered gene, and some whites do. Given these findings, prescribing or not prescribing beta blockers based on race rather than genes would be malpractice.

In a similar way, policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks.

By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.

The question I set out to explore last fall was how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic differences. That's still an important project. We're going to find many more genetic and trait differences among populations. You can't meaningfully denounce every such finding or theory as racist. Racism has to mean something else. I think it should mean looking and settling for racial analysis when some other combination of categories—economics, culture, genetics—more accurately fits the data. It's easy to group people by race and compare averages. But it's pernicious.

In the age of genetics, egalitarianism doesn't mean you have to deny differences in racial averages. It means you have to beware the injustice this kind of grouping and averaging does to individuals. That warning goes for the left as well as the right. Last week, Rev. Jeremiah Wright told the NAACP that "European and European-American children have a left-brained, cognitive, object-oriented learning style" whereas "African and African-American children … are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style." Before making such generalizations, ask yourself whether you want even four little children to live in a nation where their brains will be judged by the color of their skin.

Drawing a line against racial analysis doesn't solve all the problems I raised about inequality. In fact, it creates new problems. On the right, it leaves the question of whether genetic generalization and determinism are wrong. On the left, it raises the question of whether any policy, including affirmative action, should be based on race. I don't know where those questions will lead. But I'm pretty sure drawing this line is the right first step."

From Slate

No futuro, segundo reportagem atual da Superinteressante, fazer a análise do próprio DNA vai acabar se tornando um procedimento médico tão trivial quanto os atuais exames de sangue.

Fiz minha inscrição gratuita na página 23andMe e daí pude ver os resultados de uma família européia, podendo visitar várias informações gerais sobre doenças hereditárias, como por exemplo a obesidade. Super interessante!

We posted a story on the Signs page that David Kelly was involved with ultra secret work at Israel’s Institute for Biological Research.

A report on November 15, 1998 by the Sunday Times suggests that this Institute "is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews".

Israel planning 'ethnic' bomb as Saddam caves in

The London Times
November 15 1998

ISRAEL is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources. The weapon, targeting victims by ethnic origin, is seen as Israel's response to Iraq's threat of chemical and biological attacks.

A scientist there said the task was hugely complicated because both Arabs and Jews are of Semitic origin. But he added: "They have, however, succeeded in pinpointing a particular characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people."

It is widely accepted that Israel has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the region, and it is assumed that this applies to their stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. A quick search on the web turned up a long list of articles on the subject, including the following:

Report: Secret Israeli chemical tests kill 4, wound 25

Arabic News.Com
August 21 1998

Tests carried out by an Israeli secret laboratory recently killed four persons and other 25 have been reported wounded in Neis Zayouna district near Tel Aviv, an Israeli daily reported.

Israel flatly denied the report. "No person has ever been killed in a work accident at the Biological Institute since its inception 45 years ago," Prime Minister Netanyahu's media advisor stated today.

This just happens to be the Institute cited above. And if these deaths were due to field tests, they wouldn't be "work accidents". But it is evidence that something is going on in Israel that could be related to the development of these types of weapons. There is also this comment from Ariel Sharon, while he was still Foreign Minister. His attitude hasn't changed in the intervening years as his active sabotage of the so-called "Peace Map" shows.

Report: Israel developing biological weapons targeting Arabs

Regional-Israel, Military, 11/16/1998

Last year the Pentagon warned in a secret report against the possibility of developing biological elements through genetic engineering to manufacture new weapons of mass destruction.

Within the same context, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon reiterated that, "Israel reserves its right to repel any possible Iraqi attack."

At the conclusion of his meeting on Sunday with the US secretary of commerce, Sharon added: "Israel can defend itself and knows how to prevent being attacked."

A different type of evidence is found in the following written by the webmaster at www.konformist.com who published a good article on ethnic weapons in 2000 that we will look at later. He is discussing the reader response to the article:

What is interesting is that, though I received quite a few Emails from the Zionist community, none denied the accuracy of the story. Instead, they brashly admitted it was true, then added it was necessary because Israel needed to defend itself from its Arab neighbors. What is most telling is that many letters included references to Arabs that were derogatory and dehumanizing. That such a destructive philosophy is accepted by so many uncritically in Israel explains much of the vicious thuggery performed against the Palestinians over the last four months (not to mention the last 33 years).

These comments are completely in keeping with Sharon's, so we can put a high probability that Israel is developing something along these lines.

The progress on the Human Genome Project now makes it possible to target specific groups of individuals based upon certain genetic signatures. This is the logical next step in the progression of biological weapons. These weapons have been around for thousands of years. The Romans used to dump dead animals into the water supply of their enemies to inflict disease. The American "settlers" used small pox in blankets to target the Native American populations. The American Native population is still subjected to this type of attack:

#16 Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific Bioweapens

In this country, continuing a historic policy toward Native Americans, it has been revealed that the American Indian Health Service (IHS—funded by the Federal Government, who employ the doctors and nurses) coerced Native American men and women into forced sterilizations in the early to mid 1970s. The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated that 3,400 people (mostly women) underwent the treatment, but their study only covered four of twelve IHS regions for four years.

Activists put the estimate much higher, at 60,000 to 70,000. This, coupled with the suspicion raised by the hantavirus outbreak in the Four Corners region of Arizona/New Mexico/Colorado/Utah keeps suspicion and fingers pointed at the federal government and at least some government policies toward the American Indian population. (Hantavirus is one of many "new" diseases that have come under suspicion of having their origins in genetic engineering or biowarfare labs.)

As reported in a 1994 Project Censored update, Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds biowarfare research site was also reopened despite local residents' protests over fears that the facility was originally closed because of safety concerns. Fort Dietrick, the site of the most notorious CIA drug and army biowarfare research in the United States now houses major research facilities of the National Cancer Institute, raising issues of conflict (or collusion) or interest.

But with the development of the chemical industry, bio-warfare took a new turn. Greg Bishop, in the article referred to above, first published at konformist.com, looks at some of the major points:

Ethnic Weapons For Ethnic Cleansing

Greg Bishop
March 2000

[T]his "theoretical possibility" was recognized over 25 years ago, if not before. It was originally brought to the attention of potential customers with the publication of an article in the Military Review of November 1970.

This journal for command-level military personnel was published by the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The feature, entitled "Ethnic Weapons," authored by Carl A. Larson, outlines the history, desirability, and possibilities of engineered biological pathogens which would affect only those races which historically have no natural defense against certain "enzyme inhibitors."

Larson is listed as head of the "Department of Human Genetics at the Institute of Genetics, Lund, Sweden" as well as a licensed physician. The Hippocratic oath was apparently not administered in Sweden when Larson received his accreditation.

Larson explains that many of the chemical activities and functions within the human body are caused by the interactions of enzymes. One of the more significant activities enabled by enzyme chemical reactions are the contraction and relaxation of muscle tissue. If the activities of these enzymes are blocked, the victim will be paralyzed, even to the point of death by asphyxiation.

Not coincidentally, the enzyme-blocking action of compounds called organophosphates were discovered in Germany in the 1930s when experimental insecticides killed the people unlucky enough to have used them. This discovery led to the mass production of a substance named "Trilon," later used to impressive effect in the extermination of groups of people the Nazis considered little more than insects. This substance and others of similar makeup became known as "nerve gas."

A concentration of 40 milligrams per cubic meter can kill in about 10 minutes. Stronger agents were later developed which can do the job with a single drop on the skin.

[...] Larson is even more explicit in a way that would probably never make it into the mainstream press. In a passage that would make Doctor Strangelove proud, he muses uncontrollably on the possibilities of genetically-sensitive chemicals to subdue enemy populations:

"Friendly forces would discriminatingly use incapacitants in entangled situations to give friend and foe a short period of enforced rest to sort them out. By gentle persuasion, aided by psychochemicals, civilians in enemy cities could be reeducated. The adversary would use incapacitants to spare those whom he could use for slaves."

This was published in a serious, staid professional journal read by US military strategists. He concludes with the statement that "the functions of life [now] lie bare to attack."

According to Charles Piller and Keith Yamamoto in their 1988 book Gene Wars, Larson's article was the first time that the subject of ethnically targeted CBWs was broached publicly, and that in "the military's private circles it was old news." The authors further state that in 1951 the Mechanicsburg, PA Naval Supply Depot was the site of a classified test using a benign organism delivered to personnel to mimic the behavior of an actual bioweapon: "

According to documents declassified in the late 1970s, the site was chosen because 'Within this system there are employed large numbers of laborers, including many Negroes, whose incapacitation would seriously affect the operation of the supply system."

The black workers in the Depot were supposedly more susceptible to a strain of Valley Fever than were whites, but instead of using the actual virus, a substitute fungal organism was used. Valley Fever is more often fatal to blacks than to whites. It was recently revealed that the truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa had presented witnesses who testified that scientists working for the apartheid regime had pursued efforts along similar lines.

Another possible example of field testing of ethnic weapons (or at least an interesting case for study by those interested in their development) may be the famed "Four Corners" virus, which seems only to affect Native Americans living in northern New Mexico and Arizona. Most reports identified or compared the disease to the Hantavirus, which killed victims relatively quickly following the occurrence of a prolonged fever and fluid which rapidly filled the lungs and asphyxiated the patient. Supposedly contracted through deer mice droppings, the mystery disease has claimed at least a dozen victims in the last ten years.

The most recent outbreak occurred this last summer [1999], coming on the heels of El Niño, which the major news media blamed for the renewed threat. Some area residents believe that the virus may have been released either accidentally or intentionally from a bioweapons cache at Fort Wingate, an army facility a few miles east of Gallup. The munitions storage at Wingate is now officially closed.

We learn that the work on such weapons was begun in Nazi Germany. The victims of these weapons were largely Jews. When Larson published his paper in 1970, "the military's private circles it was old news." Which means it had been discussed for a long time by the US military, most likely with the Nazis brought into the US after World War II via Operation Paperclip. Tests were carried out as far back as 1951 on Blacks working at the Mechanicsburg, PA Naval Supply Depot. For more information on tests carried out by the US government against its own citizens, refer to our timeline.

An early form of ethnic specific weapon were the malororants, developed to control crowds (of people dissenting against the Bush Reich, perhaps?).

Pentagon Tests Ethnically-Targeted Crowd Control Weapons

Sunshine-Project
19. February 2002

Almost sixty years ago, the US developed a nauseating 'bathroom odor' chemical for use as a weapon. But according to the Army, the old malodorant will not work outside of the US and Western Europe, because "it was found that people in many areas of the world do not find 'fecal odor' to be offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis." Therefore, according to the Army, new agents are needed for overseas missions. These new malodorants are to be specifically adapted for their victims. According to a 1998 document: "The objective of this work is the development of a comprehensive set of [malodorants] that can be applied against any population set around the world to influence their behavior."

The documents describe the Army research procedure. A group of subjects selected "based on a diversity of geographic origins and cultural heritage" is systematically exposed to candidate malodorants to develop "culture-response data" based on ethnic categories. That data is aggregated into "odor response profiles" that suggest the types and quantities of malodorants necessary to "elicit a favorable behavioral response" (i.e. incapacitation, panic, or flight) when used for crowd control on a particular ethnic group.

[...] Whether the malodorants work or fail, research on any ethnic weapon raises serious legal questions and could set a very dangerous precedent. If the Pentagon saw any major legal barriers to ethnic weapons it would not have approved the malodorant research. The Pentagon's conclusion that ethnic weapons are permissible must be challenged.

As horrible as these weapons are in their practice and in what they reveal about the people developing them, it was the work on the Human Genome that really opened the door to a new generation of bioweapons, weapons that could be fine-tuned to one's genetic make-up. We have been subjected to reams of paper and hours of air-time discussing the benefits of genetic research, the ability to target individual genes to "repair" them. Look at the flip-side:

GE Biological "Ethnic" Weapons Loom on the Horizon

Date: Thu, Jan 21, 1999
By Patricia Reaney
Reuters

The designer weapon works on a similar principle to gene therapy but instead of replacing faulty genes that don't work it exploits genetic variations to target its victims.

For example, micro-organisms could be genetically engineered to attack known receptor sites on the cell membrane or viruses could be targeted at specific DNA sequences inside cells.

This is the technology that Israel is using. But it did not originate in Israel:

Biowar and the Apartheid Legacy

By Salim Muwakkil, In These Times
June 6, 2003

A two-part story in the Washington Post on April 20 and 21 revealed that biological agents developed by the South African government during its apartheid days have fallen into private hands. Written by Post reporters Joby Warrick and John Mintz, the piece noted that unique, race-specific strains of biotoxins were available on the world market – for the right price or the right ideology.

[...] The top-secret program that Basson directed was called Project Coast, and it lasted from 1981 to 1993. The South African National Defense Force created it at a time when the white-minority regime was under increasing threat by indigenous black South Africans. Daan Goosen, the former director of Project Coast's biological research division, told the Post he was ordered by Basson to develop ways "to suppress population growth among blacks" and to "search for a 'black bomb,' a biological weapon that would select targets based on skin color."

[...] The Washington Post even noted, "Goosen says many scientists kept copies of organisms and documents in order to continue work on 'dual-use' projects with commercial as well as military applications." A May 2002 story on Project Coast in the Wall Street Journal reported that Goosen said he has been "visited by scores of people looking for 'stuff to kill the blacks.'" Race-specific weapons naturally are in hot demand among racists, so it's no surprise that South Africa's race-specific research is highly coveted.

[...] Reported links between Israel's ethnic weapons and South Africa's Project Coast are tentative; some would say tenuous. But the possibility of such links is terrifying, and justifies as much scrutiny as was focused on Iraq's imaginary arsenal.

It also appears that the anthrax incidents of 2001, in which five people died and 13 were sickened, may also have a South African connection. The Post noted that officials found evidence in a Frederick, Maryland, pond that may explain how the perpetrators of the deadly attacks used water to handle the lethal toxin without infecting themselves or loosing the anthrax spores.

On May 11, the Post said the water theory is the result of the FBI's interest in one person, Steven J. Hatfill, a medical doctor and bioterrorism expert who formerly worked for the U.S. Army, and who lists South African diplomas in diving and underwater medicine on his résumé.

A June 2002 article in the Hartford Courant reported that Hatfill also worked with a guerilla unit of the white-supremacist Rhodesian army from 1978 to 1980, when "an anthrax outbreak killed hundreds and sickened thousands of villagers." He also lived in South Africa, "where he completed various military-medical assignments."

The Apartheid regime in South Africa. Israel. The United States. Not the most progressive regimes in the world.

Note the reference to the Great Anthrax Scare following 9/11, the ability to manipulate the anthrax virus without getting infected. And the connection of this to Steven J. Hatfill. Curious, isn't it, how the anthrax story just died when it was discovered that the strain used to attack Americans wasn't from a foreign sourse but came a military base in Maryland?

Anthrax Attacks Pushed Open an Ominous Door

22 September, 2002

PURCHASE, N.Y. -- On this first anniversary of the anthrax attacks, a number of conclusions can be drawn even without an arrest by the FBI. First, the strain and properties of the weaponized anthrax found in the letters show that it originated within the U.S. biodefense program, where the necessary expertise and access are found. Government officials recognized that the anthrax source was domestic less than two weeks after they learned of the letters, and nothing in their investigation has led them to say otherwise since.

One can also conclude that, given the origin of the anthrax and the warnings contained in the letters, the perpetrator's motive was not to kill but rather to raise public fear and thereby spur Congress to increase spending on biodefense. In this, the attacks have been phenomenally successful.[...]

Although biodefense has gotten a shot in the arm, it is important to understand that the goal of defending against bioweapons is not primarily public protection--which is largely impossible, as last year's attacks demonstrated.

It is rather "to allow the military forces of the United States to survive and successfully complete their operational missions ... in battlespace environments contaminated with chemical or biological warfare agents," according to the annual report of the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense Program. [...]

Two weeks ago, I attended an informal meeting in Geneva where diplomats from six continents struggled in the face of U.S. Intransigence to map out a joint strategy for combating the global biological threat. The United States had demanded that a formal Biological Weapons Convention conference, scheduled to take place during two weeks in November, should instead disband in one day with only an agreement not to meet again until 2006.

To make sure that the American resolve prevails in this setting where international consensus is de rigueur, the U.S. demand was accompanied by an overt threat to disrupt any further proceedings with accusations that would make productive international action impossible.

At that Geneva meeting, the assembled diplomats, representing the political spectrum from our closest allies to declared enemies, were uniformly frustrated. They find it hard to comprehend why a country that has just been the victim of bioterrorism should stand in the way of peaceful efforts supported by all its allies to deter bioterrorism.

The following article suggests that the evidence for a link between the Israeli program and the South African program is neither tentative nor tenuous as the above would suggest. It is the same author writing earlier. Perhaps he found new info. Perhaps something else happened...

DOUBLE STANDARDS HAUNT AMERICA'S FOREIGN POLICY

By Salim Muwakkil.
Published: Monday, November 23, 1998

Goosen's comments jibe well with conclusions reached by South Africa's recently concluded Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard testimony that Wouter Basson, the director of the country's chemical-biological warfare program, conducted extensive research on weapons that exclusively targeted blacks.

Incidentally, the commission's concluding report noted that South Africa's chemical-biological weapons team received considerable assistance from their American counterparts during the apartheid era. And it's easy to see why: Ethno bombs are a dream weapon on a planet so preoccupied with ethnic conflicts. Of course, that's also why such weapons are so remarkably menacing.

[...] The article noted that the ethno-bomb claims were given further credibility by a report in "Foreign Report," a publication of the respected Jane's group, that Israeli scientists used some of "the South African research in trying to develop an 'ethnic bullet' . . ."

Once more the thread comes back to the US: "South Africa's chemical-biological weapons team received considerable assistance from their American counterparts during the apartheid era".

So let's look more at America's links to the development of these weapons. We saw above that this started after World War II. But, in fact, there are links back to the Eugenics program started in the US at the turn of the century.

#16 Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific Bioweapens

The U.S. has a long history of interest in such genetic research. The current home of the Human Genome Project is the Cold Springs Harbor laboratory on Long Island, NY—the exact site of the notorious Eugenics Research Office that was started in 1910 by the Harriman family. The project’s 1910 agenda included governmental imposition of sanctions on such human rights as reproduction, and on U.S. immigration, based on the alleged inferiority of particular ethnic groups.

The Eugenics Research Project established medical and psychological conditions that would qualify one for sterilization or euthanasia. Prominent advocates of the program such as the Rockefeller family, Henry Ford, and Margaret Sanger helped smooth the way for the passage of forcible sterilization laws in 25 states. These laws allowed the forcible sterilization of tens of thousands of people, mostly of minority status, during the first half of the 20th century.

So we have one policy, begun in the early 20th century, funded by the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, the Harrimans, many of the same people who were financing the Nazi Party in Germany during the thirties. The work goes underground after the Second World War until it reemerges as part of the new "genetic research".

Biological Warfare: Genetically-Engineered Weapons Cannot Be Excluded

By K.P. Kavanaugh
Journal of the Federation of American Scientists (F.A.S.)
Volume 52, Number 2
March/April 1999

It has long been rumored that modern biological weapons could be designed to attack specific vulnerabilities of particular ethnic groups. Early in the development of the US offensive biological weapons program Colonel Creasey, Chief of Research and Engineering of the US Chemical Corps, suggested that agents may be selected because of known susceptibility of the target population.

This shows that the differential susceptibility of different populations to various diseases had been considered at that time and, according to scientists at Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is continuing today.

Indeed ethnic-specific biological warfare predated the advent of the biotechnology revolution. Smallpox was almost certainly deliberately used against the Native Americans centuries ago and there are other examples. U.S. and British officials believe an ethnic-specific weapon would be used today if it became available during a severe conflict between two deeply antagonistic groups. [...]

Today, warnings are coming not only from the medical community, but also from other specially credible sources. There have been indications, for example, that the US Secretary of Defense is concerned about the possible development of genetic weapons.

In June 1997, Jane's Defense Weekly reported that Secretary Cohen "quoted other reports about what he called 'certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could eliminate certain ethnic groups or races.'" Then after a later interview with the Defense Secretary in August 1997, it was stated again in Jane's Defense Weekly that "he also continued to insist that the science community is 'very close' to being able to manufacture 'genetically engineered pathogens that could be ethnically specific'".

Early Accounts, Then Silence

In accounts during the 1980s of the possible development of genetic weapons, a frequent source of scientific data was a paper by Carl A. Larson, then head of the Department of Human Genetics, University of Lund, Sweden, published in the journal Military Review in November 1970. Larson's paper was mainly concerned with the possible development of a new range of chemical weapons, including incapacitants.

Individual differences in response to chemical agents had been known for some time, but Larson reviewed what was known of differences between populations in reaction to drugs and saw the basis of such population differences as genetic. Larson seems to have been pointing to possible future developments rather than near-term practical possibilities. The question is whether, almost 30 years later: have genetically engineered weapons become a practical possibility?

There does not appear to have been subsequent detailed open publication by reputable scientists of the application of modern biotechnology to genetically -engineered weapons until the 1990s. Then in 1992 the journal Defense News carried a report which noted a scientist arguing that genetic engineering may enable us to:

...recognize DNA from different people and attach different things that will kill only that group of people...You will be able to determine the difference between blacks and whites and Asians and Jews and Swedes and Finns and develop an agent that will kill only a particular group.

Shown this quotation in February, scientists within the DOD confirmed that defensive research was being done specifically in this area. Thus the threat would appear to slide along the spectrum from the merely theoretical through the potentially possible to the patently workable.

Such arguments have been set out at greater length in an appendix to the 1993 Stockholm Peace Research Institute's Yearbook . The most pertinent aspect of the appendix entitled, "Benefits and threats of developments in biotechnology and genetic engineering," reads:

While modern biotechniques are revolutionizing medicine and agriculture, the possibility exists of their misuse for political ends, for clandestine production and refinement of biological weapons (BW), and for future development of weapons of mass extermination which could be used for genocide.

Particular reference is then made to the possible misuse of knowledge gained from the Human Genome Project and knowledge about genetic diversity. The element of critical significance here is contained in the last sub-section of section VI where the question is clearly stated, "Can't genetic weapons be developed?" The answer is that if:

investigations provide sufficient data on ethnic genetic differences between population groups, it may be possible to use such data to target suitable micro-organisms to attack known receptor sites for which differences exist at a cell membrane level or even target DNA sequences inside cells by viral vectors... [...]

Flashback: Scientists' deaths are under the microscope

So we have governments financing the development of these weapons, envisioning them as the Ultimate Weapon in their battles against their enemies. Or should we say "Final Solution" because it is racially based. It makes targets of people because of their genes.

Note: It is governments that do these things. But when this is discussed in the press, where are our fears turned? Who are portrayed as the real villains?

Genetic weapons: a 21st-century nightmare?

Ethirajan Anbarasan

Most of the nearly 30,000 scientists who were involved in biological research in the USSR during the 1980s are now out of a job because of the country’s economic difficulties. Last year, some of them disclosed that they had been approached by certain countries which have shown particular interest in learning about microbes that can be used in war to destroy or protect crops, as well as genetic engineering techniques that could be used to make deadly germs for which there may be no antidotes.

One prospect that alarms arms control experts is that biological weapons will fall into the hands of terrorist or cult groups.

But they are already in the hands of the Israelis who have not ratified a single international treaty allowing inspections of their nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. No, what is important is to vilify the invisible "terrorist", the "cult", to inculcate in the minds of the readers that the danger is widespread, invisible, and ready to pounce at any moment. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Yes. But be afraid because these governments are prepared to use them on their enemies...and that may well include their own citizens.

Mystery pneumonia is being caused by America's weapons of mass destruction: A theory

by Steve Hesske August 8, 2003

Could America's mainstream media be any more perfidious and derelict in its so-called reporting of the current so-called pneumonia epidemic among U.S. service personnel in Iraq and a few nearby countries?

A quick, informal survey of this week's coverage of the pneumonia story by our bastions of truth and enlightenment — CNN, Fox, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post — shows that while all covered the story, none mentioned Gulf War Syndrome which befell maybe as much as 20% of the 700,000 Americans who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War (PGW) or depleted uranium (DU) a radioactive weapon of mass destruction (WMD), outlawed by international treaty and world courts, that was used exclusively and extensively by the United States during the PGW and that was used by the U.S. during the recent invasion of Iraq at 10 times its PGW rate.

Here's what the mainstream press does tell you: Army brass have dispatched teams to Iraq and to Landstuhl Army Hospital in Germany to investigate over 100 mysterious cases of pneumonia that have stricken American troops currently serving in the Persian Gulf. The puzzling disease has killed two and put another dozen or so in serious peril. According to the Army, a common geographical thread can not be established, a common bacteria can not be isolated.

True enough. A military spokeswoman goes on to say that those who have fallen ill have not been exposed to biological or chemical weapons, a bald-faced lie. DU is a chemical WMD of the most destructive and virulent kind. The documentation is in. And the connection between DU and a "mysterious pneumonia-like disease" was established over 10 years ago. [...]

The [British] government's microbiological research establishment at Porton Down spread bacteria through the London Underground system in the 1960s are contained in two files released to the public record office in Kew yesterday.

The trials, which were revealed in the Guardian last year, show how a powder compact filled with bacteria was dropped on to the Northern line and samples taken to see how contamination spread over the network.

We again refer you to our Timeline of Cosmic COINTELPRO subversion through the last few centuries to see more of this.

Given that these new strands of bioweapons need to be tested, we might think that the recent outbreak of SARS could be a field test. The pneumonia from Iraq. But these are not the only ones. There have been so many of these new strains recently that the US Government has set up centers to watch for "Unexplained Deaths" in four US states:

Unexplained Deaths Due to Possibly Infectious Causes in the United States: Defining the Problem and Designing Surveillance and Laboratory Approaches

EID Volume 2 * Number 1
January-March 1996

Many new infectious diseases have been identified in the United States during the last several decades (1). Among these are AIDS, Legionnaires' disease, toxic-shock syndrome, hepatitis C, and most recently, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome; all caused serious illness and death.

In each instance, the disease was recognized through investigation of illness for which no cause had been identified. Retrospective studies of these and other newly recognized infectious diseases often identified cases that occurred before the recognition of the new agent; therefore, a more sensitive detection system may make the earlier recognition of new infectious agents possible.

[...] A more systematic public health approach for the early detection of unknown infectious agents is needed. This need was acknowledged in Addressing Emerging Infectious Diseases Threats: A Prevention Strategy for the United States, a CDC publication about emerging infections (13). CDC has established an emerging infections program (EIP) network to conduct special population-based surveillance projects, develop surveillance methods, pilot and evaluate prevention strategies, and conduct other epidemiologic and laboratory studies.

In late 1994, CDC funded four programs based at state health departments and academic institutions in California (Alameda, Contra Costa, Kern, and San Francisco counties), Connecticut, Minnesota, and Oregon. Some projects are conducted at all program sites and others, depending on local interest and expertise, at only one or two sites.

Surveillance for unexplained deaths due to possibly infectious causes (UDPIC) for early detection of new infectious diseases is one of the core activities being conducted at all sites.

Great way to track the field tests, is it not?

In looking over the press reports in the last few years, we see that Israel is being singled out, especially since the "suicide" of David Kelly. This is somewhat normal because much attention has been focused in recent years on the barbarity of the Israeli actions against the Palestinians.

As Greg Bishop writes above, the Germans considered the Jews "insects". Now the Jews turn on the Palestinians in the same way. So Israel, from the Balfour Declaration through today, is being set up and portrayed as villains, maneuvered into a particular situation.

What they do is odious. But is there something even more odius behind the curtain?

Relations Between Israel and the Apartheid Regime in South Africa

We looked yesterday at the issue of Ethnic Weapons, biological and chemical weapons that can be built to single out populations by their genetic characteristics. We saw evidence that Israel may be building such weapons to be used in their final solution against the Palestinians.

The technology for this program came from the apartheid regime of South Africa, that is, the Boers who ruled over the Blacks until the last decade of the 20th century.

The close relations between Israel and the apartheid regime go back to the mid seventies.

Profile of Bilateral Relations

State of Israel
HISTORY OF RELATIONS

Israel established a Legation in South Africa in 1952 and in 1974 it was upgraded to an Embassy. In 1972 South Africa established a Consulate General in Tel Aviv which was upgraded to an Embassy in December 1975. Israel continued to enjoy close relations with the Apartheid Government in South Africa.

While many African countries had seen Israel as an ally in the fifties and early sixties, another country struggling to survive in a hostile climate, after the wars of 1967 and 1973, their view had changed and Israel was now the neighborhood bully. For more on this, see the article Africa, Arabia, and Israel: Forty-Five Years of Relations.

South Africa had seen two of its neighbors become "Popular Republics" under Marxist-inspired "People's Armies" after the fall of the Salazar regime in Portugal in 1974. So both Israel and South Africa had a siege mentality, believing they were surrounded by enemies.

Africa, Arabia, and Israel
Forty-Five Years of Relations

(Originally published as Sheen-File #053)

[…] In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the joint forces of Egypt and Syria, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa broke off diplomatic relations with Israel completely. And in 1975, the Arab League states succeeded in passing a motion on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism and South African apartheid. It passed in large measure to the near-automatic support the resolution received from the sub-Saharan African states.

Although there is evidence that several African nations wished to maintain covert relations with Israel, privately insisting that its public condemnation of Israel was merely an act for show, designed to placate the Arab states, to many Israelis, this hypocrisy was an unimaginable slight that could not easily be forgiven. It was said that, in response to this overwhelming rejection, "Israel pursued its relationship with South Africa with an element of vindictiveness."

Israel and South Africa

excerpted from the book
Israeli Foreign Policy
by Jane Hunter
South End Press, 1987

Israel has also been connected with the mercenary forces deployed by South Africa against Angola and Mozambique. In the 1970s Israel aided the FNLA (Angolan National Liberation Front) proxy forces organized and trained by the CIA to forestall the formation of a government led by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola-now the ruling party of Angola).

John Stockwell, who ran the CIA operation against Angola, recollected three arms shipments Israel made in cooperation with the CIA: a plane full of 120 mm shells sent via Zaire to the FNLA and Unita; a shipment of 50 SA-7 missiles (all of which were duds); a boat-load sent to neighboring Zaire in a deal that the Israelis had worked out with President Mobutu, even though the Zairian strong man had broken ties with Israel two years earlier.

South Africa's Nuclear Policy

Ruchita Beri, Research Fellow, IDSA

The political changes in the Southern African region heightened the security concerns of South Africa. The end of Portuguese rule in Africa after the 1974 Lisbon coup and the subsequent accession to power of Communist regimes in Angola (MPLA) and Mozambique (Freelimo) enhanced the encirclement by Communist forces regionally. The mid- 1970s also saw the intensification of the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa-in the apartheid government's perception, sponsored by the Communist forces.

Thus, perceiving itself to be encircled by Communist forces, the South African government promoted a militarist ideology legitimising the use of force by the state to counter that threat, codified in the concept "Total National Strategy" to coordinate its national security planning. This ultimately involved a nuclear deterrent capability.

The arrival of Cuban troops in Angola after the establishment of the MPLA regime provided the final stimulus. Defence Minister P.W. Botha spelled out the defence requirements to meet this challenge as "South Africa can establish a balanced defence force to defend itself against terrorism...and this we are fully able to do....Secondly, we must have a deterrent to be able to resist a fairly heavy conventional attack on South Africa."3 This statement was quite ambiguous; however, one could reach the conclusion that both conventional and nuclear capabilities would be pursued by South Africa. Ambiguity became the trademark of the South African nuclear policy in the apartheid era.

The attitudes of the two countries can be summed up by this comment from Jane Hunter, cited above:

It has also been said that those arms sales are understandable, given the striking similarities between the two countries in their day-to-day abuse and repression of their subject populations, South African blacks and Palestinians under Israeli rule; in their operating philosophies of apartheid and Zionism; and in their similar objective situations: "the only two Western nations to have established themselves in a predominantly nonwhite part of the world," as a South African Broadcasting Corporation editorial put it. That understanding, however, is somewhat superficial, and the focus on similarities of political behavior has somewhat obscured the view of the breadth and depth of the totality of Israeli-South African relations and their implications.

As she suggests, this understanding is "somewhat superficial, as we will see below.

Another factor cementing the relationship was the embargo placed on South Africa following the riots of 1975 and the international outcry over the death of Stephen Biko.

S O U T H A F R I C A: 1 9 6 2 - 1 9 8 9
Access to Critical Events in Recent U.S. Policy Toward South Africa

The second period (1976-1980) deals primarily with the response of the U.S. government and the international community to the South African government's brutal reaction to the June 1976 student revolt, the death of Steve Biko (the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement), South Africa's subsequent security crackdown on opponents of apartheid and the adoption of the U.N. Security Council Resolution that called for a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa.

Because of this, South Africa was isolated, at least "officially", from the world.

One of the projects Israel and South Africa undertook together was the development of nuclear weapons. Hunter continues:

Israel's relations with South Africa are different than its interactions with any of its other arms clients. That Israel gave South Africa its nuclear weapons capability underscores the special nature of Tel Aviv's relations with the white minority government and begins to describe it - a full-fledged, if covert, partnership based on the determination of both countries to continue as unrepentant pariahs and to help each other avoid the consequences of their behavior.

Arms industry

Nuclear Apprentice

There are few areas where the respective needs and advantages of Israel and South Africa dovetailed so perfectly as in the field of nuclear cooperation.

"The most powerful reason for Israeli willingness to bear the undesirable consequences of expanded and more open trade with South Africa may be her desire to acquire material necessary to manufacture nuclear weapons," wrote a military analyst in 1980.' To that must be added Israel's great desire to test the nuclear weapons it already had, and the attractions of South Africa's vast territory and proximity to even vaster uninhabited spaces-the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Then at the point in its nuclear development where it was fashioning sophisticated bombs (devices which use less nuclear material but have infinitely greater explosive force than the "primitive" bomb dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima), Israel would find it particularly helpful to observe the performance, explosive force and fallout of a detonated weapon.

Since 1984, Israel had been operating a plutonium extraction plant in a secret underground bunker at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Built by the French in the late 1950s, the Dimona plant also included facilities for manufacturing atomic bomb components. At the time of the 1976 accords, Israel was preparing to build an adjoining plant for the extraction of lithium 6, tritium and deuterium, materials required for sophisticated thermonuclear weapons.

Israel's reasons for devoting what had to have been a significant portion of its scant resources to such an ambitious nuclear weapons program - nuclear experts have recently ranked it as the world's sixth nuclear power, after the U.S., the USSR, Britain, France and China - have been variously offered as the desire to develop a credible deterrent to attack by its neighbors and the desire to substitute that deterrent for at least part of the costly conventional arsenal that Israel, with one of the world's most powerful military forces, maintains, and also (with much less frequency) as an "umbrella" over a partial withdrawal from the occupied territories.

This cooperation is discussed as well here:

Abstract:

Note: Details about the Blaauw case are provided in the Africa Confidential article. ..... According to information released regarding the secret mid-1980s extortion trial of Johann Blaauw, a brigadier in the South African army, South Africa and _Israel_ participated in four clandestine nuclear deals in the mid-1970s. Blaauw was found not guilty of trying to extort mining concessions from Minister of Mines Fanie Botha in a trial in 1989 [1].

The first nuclear deal occurred in shortly after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when "Benjamine," a member of the Israel Council for Scientific Liaison, asked Blaauw to acquire South African yellowcake which Israel could use for weapon-grade plutonium. ("Benjamine" is believed to be Benjamin Blumberg, the head of the Israeli Intelligence division Lish Ka l-Kishrei (Lakam) [2].)

After discussions with Gen. Hendryk van den Bergh, head of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), South African Prime Minister John Vorster eventually agreed to sell 50 metric tons of yellowcake to Israel. The deal was handled by Minister of Mines Fanie Botha, who replaced Piet Koornhog [Koornhof] after Koornhog opposed the sale. Uranium Enrichment Corporation Chairman Ampie Roux was also aware of the deal.

During his testimony, Blaauw said that "a high degree of confidence was developing between the South African and Israeli governments which involved the exchange of military technology, joint aeronautic ventures, and the supply of 'know-how' by Israel to South Africa in regard to the manufacture of weaponry."

There is evidence of a joint nuclear test carried out in the Indian Ocean in September, 1979. Ruchita Beri, cited above, writes:

1979 Nuclear Test

On September 22, 1979, a US Vela satellite detected an unusual "double flash" indicative of a nuclear test, in an "area of the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic including portions of the Antarctic continent, and the southern part of Africa." In fact, some have claimed it to be a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test. South Africa denied that it had conducted a nuclear test. As late as March 1993, the AEC's Chairman, Waldo Stumpf, is reported to have said, " If it was a nuclear explosion, South Africa was definitely not involved.

I doubt that it was a nuclear [test] because no radioactive fallout was detected." Eighteen years after the event, Aziz Pahad, the Deputy Foreign Minister, confirmed that South Africa conducted a nuclear test in the South Indian Ocean in 1979. This admission has laid to rest the controversy surrounding the test.

We can see that the relations between the two countries were very close.

Not only were nuclear weapons part of the partnership, but strategy and tactics in dealing with their enemies, both internal and external were also an important part of the collaboration. Jane Hunter again:

The South Africans began teaching the lessons of Israel's 1967 war at their maneuver school, and Israeli advisers began teaching the Boers the arts of suppressing a captive population and keeping hostile neighbors off balance...

The white government's practice of domestic counterinsurgency combines outright military brutality with the extensive use of informers and collaborators. It is impossible to know how many refinements of these age-old techniques have been borrowed from the Israelis' occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

The Israeli system of village leagues is obviously comparable to the hated town councils imposed on segregated townships by the apartheid government. The collective punishment employed by the Israelis, such as the destruction of a whole family's home when one of its members is arrested as a suspect in an act of resistance, has lately been matched by the recent South African practices of sealing off townships, and assaulting entire funeral processions.

What is perhaps more salient is the South African victims' perceptions of Israel's involvement in their oppression and how readily that perception is communicated...

And when the population you are systematically trying to annihilate fights back, how do you justify it? Of course, you call it "terrorism". Hunter continues:

The Frontline States

The South Africans noted that their May, 1983 aerial attack (dubbed Operation Shrapnel) on Mozambique's capital, Maputo, was analogous to Israel's attack on Beirut the previous summer. One analyst, Joseph Hanlon, believes that one of South Africa's objectives in the attack was to see how its version of events would play in the media. It was received very well indeed, according to Hanlon, with the Western press accepting South Africa's claim that its attack was in "retaliation" for an ANC attack and that ANC "bases" were hit.

Instead, the South African Air Force hit a child-care center and private houses with "special fragmentation rockets," leaving 6 dead and 40 wounded. This follows the Israeli practice in Lebanon of speaking about PLO installations while civilians are the actual targets, and attacking with particularly heinous anti-personnel weapons-cluster bombs and phosphorous bombs.

The victims of South Africa's angst are not blind to the similarity of attacks-or motives.

President Samora Machel likened the Israeli Government to the Pretoria regime. He said that because of its inability to contain the fury of the Palestinian people led by the PLO, the Zionist regime is trying to transfer the war to other regions.

So reported Mozambican radio shortly after Israeli aircraft bombed PI headquarters in Tunisia in October 1985.

The model provided by Israel, which punishes every internal act of resistance and violent act outside its jurisdiction with a bombing raid on Palestinian targets in Lebanon-almost always refugee camps cynically identified by the Israelis as "terrorist bases" or "headquarters"-has served South Africa well. In January 1986, the white government's radio delivered a commentary on "the malignant presence" of "terrorism" in neighboring states and said "there's only one answer now, and that's the Israeli answer." Israel had managed to survive "by striking at terrorists wherever they exist."

In May 1986, South Africa demonstrated that it had assumed the right to attack its neighbors at a time and on a pretext of its own choosing. The chosen time was during a visit by the Eminent Persons Group of the Commonwealth of Nations, which was attempting to establish negotiations between the apartheid regime and its opposition. The victims-Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, all Commonwealth members-were chosen for their alleged harboring of "terrorists"; the real victims were South African exiles and an employee of the government of Botswana. The South Africans said they had attacked "international terrorism" and compared their raids to the Israeli attack on Tunisia and the U.S. attack on Libya in April 1986.

The attack was similar in style to Israel's 1985 attack on Tunisia. Initially, the Israelis had been threatening Jordan and perhaps because King Hussein of Jordan was at the time on an official visit to the U.S., the Israelis chose to take revenge for the killing of three Israelis (believed to be top Mossad agents) in Larnaca, Cyprus on the PLO in Tunisia.

Two weeks after its three-pronged attack on its Commonwealth neighbors, South Africa attacked the Angolan harbor of Namibia, firing their version of the Israeli Gabriel missile.

When Israel reestablished relations with Zaire (in 1982) and began to train Zairian forces in the Shaba border province, Angola had cause for concern. The leader of the FNLA had been Holden Roberto, brother-in-law of Zairian president Mobutu, Israel's new client. In 1986, it would be established that Zaire acted as a funnel for "covert" U.S. military aid for the Unita forces of Jonas Savimbi.

In 1983, the Angolan News Agency reported that Israeli military experts were training Unita forces in Namibia. Since Zaire began receiving military aid and training from Tel Aviv, Angola has been ill at ease. Its worries increased after discovering that:

Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was personally involved in the organization, training and equipping of "commando" units of the army of Zaire, especially organized for missions along the borders of the RPA [Angola].

In 1984, the Financial Times (London) wrote of "joint Israeli-South African support for Unita forces." Other sources also report the transfer of Israeli arms and financial support to Unita.

In 1983, Angola's President Jose Eduardo dos Santos told Berkeley, California Mayor Eugene (Gus) Newport that an Israeli pilot had been shot down during a South African attack. The Angolan President showed Newport pictures of captured Israeli weapons. The following year, Luanda reported the capture of three mercenaries who said they had been trained by Israeli instructors in Zaire.

Israel has also been involved with the Mozambican "contras," the South African-backed MNR (Mozambique National Resistance or "Renamo"), which has brought great economic and social distress to Mozambique. Renamo has a particular reputation for ideological incoherence, being regarded by most other right-wing insurgencies as a gang of cutthroats. For several years there have been stories coming from Southern Africa of captured mercenaries of Renamo who say they were trained in neighboring Malawi-one of the four nations to maintain relations with Israel after the Organization of African Unity (OAU) declared a diplomatic embargo in 1973-by Israelis. And more than one report has told of "substantial Israeli aid" to the MNR, thought to have been funded by the CIA and Saudi Arabia as well as South Africa and former Portuguese nationalists.

Two countries, both with the mentality of the "besieged", begin carrying out attacks against their neighbors under the cover of "defence". Sometimes "to see how its version of events would play in the media".

In fact, it looks as if they were field-testing the strategies and tactics that the Bush Reich is now imposing upon the US population and the rest of the world.

The links between Israel, the apartheid regime, and the CIA are well-established. It is not too much to suspect that this information was being shared by the intelligence agencis of the three countries.

But as we are trying to see "behind the scenes", as it were, we leave you with one last item to reflect upon. Remember a few years ago how the anti-globalization forces were growing stronger? Remember the Conference Against Racism held in South Africa? Remember how Israel was becoming isolated because of its butchering of the Palestinians in the period following Sharon's provocative visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000?

Israel and US walk out of UN conference on racism

By Chris Marsden
6 September 2001

The joint US-Israeli walkout from the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa was something of a foregone conclusion. It was a stage-managed affair, the purpose of which was to portray all opposition to the Zionist state's persecution of the Palestinians as inherently racist.

The original draft resolution to the UN conference stated its "deep concern" at the "increase of racist practices of Zionism and anti-Semitism" and spoke of the emergence of "movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement, which is based on racial superiority." It made direct criticisms of Israeli repression against the Palestinians on the West Bank as a "new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity."

The US and Israel insisted on the removal of any direct reference to Israel.

[…] Israel has also achieved some success in winning a more friendly response from Russia, which is again seeking to challenge US domination of Middle Eastern affairs by offering itself as an honest broker between Israel and the Arab regimes. During the Durban conference Sharon visited Moscow for talks with President Putin to discuss the common threat posed by Islamic terrorism-Sharon has even indicated sympathy for Russia's bloody suppression of Islamic rebel forces in Chechnya-the possibility of a further one million Jewish immigrants from Russia to Israel, armaments and other trade deals.

[…]Shimon Samuels, the head of the Jewish caucus in Durban, declared, "We saw an NGO document that would have made [Hitler's Nazi Party propaganda chief] Goebbels happy. And now it is clear that we are going to see, at the end of the government conference, resolutions that can be called the UN's Mein Kampf."

Mordechai Yedid, Israel's official spokesman at the conference, insisted there could be no condemnation of Israel in the resolution. He told the plenary meeting prior to the US-Israeli departure, "anti-Zionism, the denial of Jews the basic right to a home, is nothing but anti-Semitism, pure and simple." Yedid derided the Arab regimes proposals to criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as "a group of states for whom the terms 'racism', 'discrimination', and even 'human rights' simply do not appear in their domestic lexicon". The UN resolution, he continued, was "the most racist declaration in a major international organization since World War Two".

His remarks prompted a walkout by Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, who represents one of the most pro-US of all the Arab states.

Announcing its withdrawal from the conference, US Secretary of State Colin Powell denounced any attempt to single out "only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse'" and any suggestion that apartheid existed in Israel. For his part, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres proclaimed, "We were portrayed in an insulting and baseless manner as a colonial nation... The Arab League, all of it, has come out against peace."

The right-wing media in Israel marched to the same tune. An article in the September 4 Jerusalem Post by Yossi Olmert described the Durban conference as "the mirror image of the Nuremberg rallies, in which the Nazis propagated their anti-Jewish messages, striving hard to delegitimise the Jews, as an inevitable step leading to their eventual liquidation." He conceded reluctantly that "not all the participants in Durban are Nazis, maybe not even a majority of them, but too many are, and they clearly give this shameful gathering its true character".

Ref: Sign Times

Maybe this is inherent to all analysis-junkies and artists.  Pretty graphs that explain complex data sets.  Poignant songs that sum up intricate social and political circumstances.  Equations that encompass beautiful realities. Etceteras, etceteras.

In that vein, what could be more meaningful than the blueprints of life, genes?  I've seen them literally represented with some pizazz through circular graphs (thanks to Circos for the image), but I'm not quite satisfied.  The circle graphs, however useful, seem a bit overwhelming and "all at once" to present a comprehendible/enjoyable experience without a two-week tutorial in modern genetics.

So, how about music?  We could translate each nucleotide into a note, like the cute gene2music web application, but I think that approach conceals the true richness of the data.  Without delving into full gene-parsing, perhaps a solid intermediary route would be to step it up one level of abstraction and use amino acids.

So, each amino acid parsed from a raw genetic sequence would relate to a specific note.  The different codons that correspond to a given amino acid could be translated as different note-lengths or octaves.  The general function of a gene (so far as biologists know it) could set tempo or other flourishes.

I can think of no geekier a way of generating one's own intensely personalized theme music...

La prolongada lactancia y la dificultad de criar a la prole explica otra de las características más peculiares de la especie humana, ya comentada, y que no se da entre las especies más próximas a la nuestra: la necesidad de que los machos contribuyan a esta crianza, aportando recursos y protección. De aquí debió surgir la constitución de la ‘pareja’ como elemento característico de nuestra especie. Recordemos que los machos de chimpancé no contribuyen en nada al cuidado de su prole, en buena parte porque los machos individuales no pueden estar seguros si una cría dada es suya o no (sigo hablando en sentido figurado; esto no quiere decir literalmente que un chimpancé macho tenga que tener el concepto de paternidad). Al mismo tiempo, la disminución de la poligamia debió contribuir a equilibrar el tamaño corporal de ambos sexos. Por una parte, a los machos ya no les resultaba tan ventajoso monopolizar a muchas hembras porque no podían generar los suficientes recursos alimenticios para contribuir a su alimentación y las de sus hijos. Por otra parte, para las hembras debía ser ventajoso un tamaño corporal grande para facilitar el parto. Existen buenas razones para creer que el mencionado conflicto ‘cabeza-pelvis’ originó una cascada de cambios esenciales en nuestra evolución como especie y contribuyó a perfilar numerosos aspectos de nuestra psicología, tales como la (relativa) tendencia a la monogamia o las preferencias innatas en la elección de pareja.

La aparición de la ‘pareja’ como ‘institución’ debió producirse en paralelo a otro proceso no menos importante: el aumento del tamaño y cohesión del grupo. El carácter ‘desvalido’ de los primeros humanos en la sabana abierta debió hacer de la vida social un elemento particularmente importante en la supervivencia. Es lógico pensar que nuestros antecesores tuvieran que actuar de forma coordinada para defenderse de animales más grandes y fuertes, así como para llevar a cabo estrategias colectivas de caza o recolección. Muchos etólogos y antropólogos evolutivos han argumentado que la vida social impone a los individuos una fuerte demanda de ‘capacidad mental’ para sacar el máximo partido de un ambiente donde hay una fuerte competencia por alimentos y privilegios reproductivos. Según este argumento, los individuos con gran ‘inteligencia social’ serían capaces de formar alianzas ventajosas (o desertar ventajosamente) y de cooperar o engañar a otros individuos según lo requirieran las circunstancias. Esta ‘inteligencia maquiavélica’ habría conferido una ventaja reproductiva a los que la tuvieran y por eso la hemos acabado heredando nosotros, aunque las ventajas reproductivas que en la actualidad nos pueda ofrecer sean dudosas.

La crianza en parejas es algo relativamente normal; casi todas las aves la practican. Lo que es excepcional en los humanos es la doble necesidad de formar parejas estables dentro de grupos sociales más amplios. Esta situación debía ser particularmente conflictiva para nuestros antecesores; de hecho, sigue siéndolo para nosotros en la actualidad ¿Cómo se resolvió este nuevo conflicto entre el grupo y la pareja? Seguimos sin saberlo, aunque se ha aventurado alguna hipótesis, pero para poder entrar en ello tenemos que regresar a la cuestión del lenguaje.

]]> http://scienceguy288.wordpress.com/?p=229 Fri, 02 May 2008 14:02:50 +0000 scienceguy288 http://scienceguy288.wordpress.com/?p=229 An international research team has discovered a genetic mutation that causes a normally healty person's blood sugar (up to 5 percent) to rise more than is natural.  This causes medical problems like heart disase and diabetes although the gene does not exactly link directly to the problems.

A Strand of DNA

The gene is called G6PC2 and when it is mutated, it prevents glucokinase, a protein enzyme, from regulating blood glucose levels.  Glucokinase signals to cells known as beta cells in the Pancreas which secretes insulin to keep blood glucose levels down by turning it into a storage carbohydrade: glycogen.  The team discovered this by comparing the genetic map of people with diabetes or otherwise high BGLs (blood glucose level) and those with a normal BGL.

The team also found five areas of human DNA that could account for up to 70 percent of the genetic mutations that cause type 2 diabetes (not the genetic disease type (that is type 1)).  The researchers hope to use this discovery to find new treatments for unnaturally high blood sugar.

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian scientists may have discovered how to help people lose weight without cutting back on food, a breakthrough that could pave the way for fat-burning drugs.

Researchers in Melbourne found that by manipulating fat cells in mice they were able to speed up the animals' metabolisms.

They found that when a particular enzyme, known as angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE), was removed, mice were able to eat the same amount as other mice but burn more calories and therefore gain less weight.

Animals without the enzyme were on average 20 percent lighter than normal mice and had 50 to 60 percent less body fat, senior researcher at the Howard Florey Institute Michael Mathai said.

"It is very clear that they do have less body fat," he told AFP.

Mathai, who is also a lecturer in nutrition at Victoria University, said the slimmer mice also appeared to have less chance of developing diabetes because they processed sugar faster than normal mice.

He said the research, to be published Tuesday in the US-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could be used to develop drugs to assist weight loss.

Drugs which impair the action of ACE already exist and are mostly used to combat high blood pressure.

"The drugs are out there because they are used for hypertension," he said.

"So we know their safety and their tolerability. What we don't know is whether or not they will work in humans. And we don't know whether it will work in all obese humans."

Mathai said it could be a question of finding the right dosage of hypertension medication, or developing a new type of drug of the same class, to be used as weight-loss pills.

"This might be one way in which you can increase metabolic rate in combination with managing nutrition to limit the intake of calories," he said.

Mathai said the research, conducted at the Howard Florey Institute, Victoria University, La Trobe University, Deakin University, the Baker Institute and the University of Melbourne, was yet to pinpoint why the genetic manipulation led to weight loss.

"Because we deleted the gene, the gene is gone from the whole body, that means that it is gone from all tissues including the brain," he said.

"And so we don't know whether it's a direct effect of the deficiency in the tissue or whether it's something coming from the brain." Australian scientists report weight loss breakthrough

And the abstract:

Angiotensin II (AII), acting via its G-protein linked receptor, is an important regulator of cardiac, vascular, and renal function. Following injection of AII into rats, we find that there is also a rapid tyrosine phosphorylation of the major insulin receptor substrates 1 and 2 (IRS-1 and IRS-2) in the heart. This phenomenon appears to involve JAK2 tyrosine kinase, which associates with the AT1 receptor and IRS-1/IRS-2 after AII stimulation. AII-induced phosphorylation leads to binding of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase) to IRS-1 and IRS-2; however, in contrast to other ligands, AII injection results in an acute inhibition of both basal and insulin-stimulated PI 3-kinase activity. The latter occurs without any reduction in insulin receptor or IRS phosphorylation or in the interaction of the p85 and p110 subunits of PI 3-kinase with each other or with IRS-1/IRS-2. These effects of AII are inhibited by AT1 receptor antagonists. Thus, there is direct cross-talk between insulin and AII signaling pathways at the level of both tyrosine phosphorylation and PI 3-kinase activation. These interactions may play an important role in the association of insulin resistance, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Cross-talk between the insulin and angiotensin signaling systems

I think this may be why low carbohydrate diets help so many people with food chemical intolerance. Lower your insulin levels, and I bet you lower your ACE output.

This is an Image of the New Dating Process which Uses Genetic Analysis

Researchers' genetic analysis of the ancient preserved proteins in bones can be used to fill in all sorts of gaps in the evolutionary tree.  It does however, also prove that just comparing mechanical and physical animal structures is also a valid way of discerning animal lineages.  The researchers also reiterated the connection between ancient, extinct Mastadons and modern elephants by analyzing the DNA from Mastadon hair.

Scientists also have more accurately pinpointed the extinction of the dinosaurs thanks to this new molecular comparison.   Their improved process put the end of the Cretaceous (the last period of dinosaur dominance) around 65.95 million years ago (give or take 40,000 years).  Earlier estimates put that date at around 65.5 million years ago.  The older study had a 300,000-year margin for error.

Neil Bowdler
BBC¿Qué va a hacer ahora? ¿Va a subirle el volumen al radio? ¿Va a calentar agua para el té?Es muy probable que su cerebro ya lo haya decidido, incluso antes de que usted lo sepa.Al menos, eso parece indicar una investigación realizada en el Centro Bernstein de Neurociencia Computacional de Berlín, Alemania, cuyas conclusiones se publicaron en la revista especializada Nature Neuroscience.

Hace 2.5 millones de años, el clima de la región africana donde habitaban los australopitecinos comenzó a cambiar haciéndose más árido. La sabana arbolada, a la que con tanto éxito se habían adaptado, se fue reduciendo, dando lugar a una sabana abierta, con arbustos pero sin árboles. Indudablemente, este cambio debió afectarles muy gravemente, ya que en este nuevo ambiente debieron encontrarse totalmente a merced de los depredadores. Ya no había un árbol cerca donde subirse en caso de peligro, y no podían correr tan rápido como un león o un grupo de hienas, ni tampoco hacerlos frente ¿Cómo pudieron sobrevivir? Es posible que fueran capaces de utilizar palos y piedras como armas, aunque no tenemos pruebas directas de que esto ocurriera. En ocasiones, se ha visto que los chimpancés pueden hacer estas cosas. En cualquier caso, las nuevas condiciones debieron imponer una fuerte ‘presión selectiva’ que permitiera la adaptación a este mundo nuevo y extraño.

Sin embargo, no todas las zonas de sabana arbolada desaparecieron, y en las que quedaron siguieron habitando los australopitecinos durante mucho tiempo. Tampoco puede dudarse que muchas poblaciones no lograron adaptarse a las nuevas condiciones y se extinguieron. Sin embargo, algunas se adaptaron y los cambios que dio lugar esta adaptación trazaron la senda hacia la aparición del hombre. A estas primeras especies pertenecientes al género Homo, las denominaremos colectivamente Homo habilis, aunque el nombre es con seguridad incorrecto, ya que se trata de varias especies y su filogenia todavía no está claramente establecida.

Los cambios que se observan en el registro fósil correspondiente a esa época son rápidos y fundamentales. En primer lugar, se observa el mayor incremento en el tamaño del cerebro. En segundo lugar, el dimorfismo sexual disminuyó desde el 50% típico de los autralopitecinos hasta cerca del 15% que existe en la actualidad. En tercer lugar, se produjo un cambio notable en la dentición, apreciándose una disminución del tamaño de los molares. Además, se observa un acortamiento de los brazos y un alargamiento de las piernas ¿Qué significan todos estos cambios? A ciencia cierta, no lo sabemos, pero los expertos han construido un escenario ‘razonable’, aunque especulativo. Veamos.

La desaparición del bosque debió suponer un cambio mucho más radical que el paso de la selva tropical a la sabana arbolada. Cabe pensar que la adaptación se produjo fundamentalmente en dos direcciones: hacia un completo bipedalismo y hacia un aumento del tamaño del cerebro. En ausencia de árboles, las ventajas del bipedalismo son evidentes. Esta forma de desplazamiento permite cubrir distancias mucho más largas en campo abierto. Además, la posición erguida permite ‘ver más lejos’ en un terreno despejado y estar sometido a una menor insolación. Finalmente, libera las manos para otros usos –significativamente, para utilizar palos y piedras como armas. No obstante, el cambio esencial hacia la posición erguida ya se había producido en los australopitecinos.

El cambio más importante radica probablemente en el aumento del tamaño del cerebro. Las ventajas potenciales que se derivarían de una mayor capacidad mental son, en principio, numerosas. Por ejemplo, podría haber permitido a los primeros humanos recorrer un terreno más amplio, ya que se necesita memoria y sentido de la orientación para encontrar la comida y poder ‘regresar’. Sin duda, una mayor capacidad mental es necesaria para el uso y fabricación de herramientas. Las primeras herramientas de piedra que han llegado hasta nosotros fueran fabricadas por Homo habilis. Hay una gran diferencia entre emplear un palo como bastón, como a veces hacen los chimpancés, y fabricar expresamente un instrumento cortante golpeando dos piedras. La segunda acción exige planificación, capacidad de abstracción y enorme destreza manual.

Por otra parte, un cerebro grande también tiene inconvenientes. En primer lugar, gasta mucha energía. Aunque sólo representa el 2% del peso del cuerpo, el cerebro gasta el 20% de la energía en reposo. En definitiva, un buen cerebro es útil pero sale caro. Es razonable que la selección natural no favoreciera el aumento del cerebro entre los chimpancés o los australopitecinos, debido a los costes que ello apareja. Sin embargo, es posible que en las nuevas y duras condiciones a las que se enfrentaban los primeros hombres, las ventajas derivadas de tener un cerebro mayor sí fueran los bastante grandes como para compensar los inconvenientes.

Dos factores han sido propuestos como los cambios claves en este proceso de transición: el uso del fuego y el paso de una dieta vegetariana a otra omnívora, donde la caza jugara un papel importante. En ambos casos, las hipótesis son muy controvertidas, sobre todo porque no están claras las fechas en que estas actividades se originaron y muchos investigadores piensa que no se produjeron sino muy posteriormente. Es plausible que el manejo del fuego fuera un elemento esencial en la ‘conquista’ de la sabana abierta, ya que habría permitido mantener a raya a muchos depredadores nocturnos, sustituyendo así al refugio que proporcionaban los árboles. El inicio de la caza en este periodo ha sido otra fuente de discusión entre los expertos. Algunos científicos se inclinan a pensar que Homo habilis era capaz de abatir presas de buen tamaño y que, justamente, las nuevas demandas derivadas de esta actividad habrían sido el motor de subsiguientes cambios evolutivos. Los partidarios de la ‘hipótesis del cazador’ argumentan que hace falta un cerebro muy grande para seguir los rastros de otros animales y para coordinar la caza dentro de un grupo de individuos. Por otra parte, la disminución de los molares podría reflejar este cambio en la dieta. En cambio, otros investigadores argumentan que eran, a los sumo, cazadores oportunistas y carroñeros, y que los cambios en la dentición pueden explicarse en función del manejo del fuego, que habría permitido ablandar alimentos recolectados de origen vegetal.

Aunque no podemos estar seguros de la fecha exacta en que se produjeron todos estos cambios, es razonable pensar que este proceso ya se había completado con la aparición de Homo erectus, hace unos1.9 millones de años. Esta especie resultó ser extraordinariamente exitosa y fue capaz de salir del continente africano y extenderse por Asia y Europa, por lo que podemos considerar a erectus como el ‘primer turista’. Existen pocas dudas de que esta especie llegara a dominar el fuego y a ella se asocia la primera gran industria de herramientas de piedra, denominada achelense.

The study of 3,546 female twins, ages 18 to 29, examined how genes and environment influence drinking at different stages of life. The researchers found that genes accounted for about 30% of the timing of the first drink and for about 47% of the speed at which women progressed to alcohol dependence. But environmental factors, overall, seemed more influential, particularly earlier in life.

La depresión y el trastorno bipolar (también conocido como depresión maníaca), son enfermedades muy tratables. Desafortunadamente, muchas personas no reciben la ayuda que necesitan por no comprender los problemas asociados a estas enfermedades o por el miedo asociado con el estigma. Las siguientes son breves descripciones de la depresión y el trastorno bipolar. Para obtener información más a fondo, asegúrese de ver nuestras páginas sobre depresión y trastorno bipolar .Practíquese una prueba confidencial para la depresión y el trastorno bipolar.Depresión: No está solamente en su cabeza :Todos, en diferentes momentos de la vida, nos sentimos tristes o melancólicos. Es normal sentirse triste en algunas ocasiones. A veces esta tristeza es producto de los sucesos que se presentan en su vida: se muda a una ciudad diferente y deja atrás a sus amigos, pierde su empleo o un ser querido muere. Pero ¿cuál es la diferencia entre un sentimiento 'normal' de tristeza y el sentimiento causado por la depresión clínica?Magnitud en los cambios del estado de ánimo: La depresión es más que un simple mal humor.