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4 weeks ago | 
science.org | Michael Price
For more than a century, scientists thought leprosy was an Old World disease with a single culprit. The bacterium Mycobacterium leprae had ravaged Europe, Asia, and Africa for thousands of years and was introduced to the Americas by European colonists and enslaved people from Africa about 500 years ago. But in 2008, researchers discovered a second species, M. lepromatosis, circulating in Mexico. Whether that, too, had arrived with Europeans or was native to the Americas was unclear.
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2 months ago | 
science.org | Michael Price
In 2008, Kun-Yu Tsai was shopping for antiques in southern Taiwan’s Tainan City when an unusual relic caught his eye: a brownish jawbone with blackened, thickset teeth that fishermen had dredged up from the nearby Penghu Channel. An amateur fossil hunter, Kun-Yu recognized the mysterious jawbone as human—but noticed it was distinct from modern mandibles. Intrigued, he bought the fossil and later donated it to Taiwan’s National Museum of Natural Science.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
science.org | Michael Price
Last month, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), one of the premier journals covering paleoanthropology, resigned en masse in a dispute with its publisher, the for-profit behemoth Elsevier. Their objections included a lack of adequate copyediting support and open-access fees too high for many authors to afford.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
arxiv.org | Michael Price |Colm Prendergast |Lauren Mentzer |Berk Iskender
Open access is only possible with YOUR support. Give to arXiv this week to help keep science open for all.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
science.org | Michael Price
If a fresh chewy baguette or a sweet roasted yam gives you a burst of energy, you can thank a chance genetic mutation that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago in our ancestors. That’s just one takeaway from a pair of studies—one published last month in Nature, the other out today in Science—that trace the evolutionary history of the gene that helps break down starch into sugars in our mouths. Most modern humans carry multiple copies of this salivary amylase gene, called AMY1.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
nber.org | John List |Ioannis Pragidis |Michael Price
This RCT was registered in the American Economic Association Registry for randomized control trials under trial number AEARCTR-0011882. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. John A. List John List is the Chief Economist at Walmart but this research is not part of work at Walmart.
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Aug 5, 2024 | 
science.org | Michael Price
A little over a year ago, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team made an extraordinary claim about a diminutive hominin, Homo naledi, whose fossils his team discovered a decade ago in the dark and twisting narrows of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave system. The researchers argued that despite having a brain about one-third the size of a modern human’s, H. naledi deliberately buried its dead about 250,000 years ago amid geometric designs carved deep in the cave.
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Aug 4, 2024 | 
canadiangeographic.ca | Michael Price
Swimming in the turquoise waters of a glacial stream in northern British Columbia is a relatively new population of Pacific salmon, homing in on gravel beds in which to lay their eggs. But high above, where glaciers release their meltwater, perch the exploration sites of mining companies drilling to find pay dirt.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
niche-canada.org | Michael Price
Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) are an abundant group of fishes whose distribution extends north from California to Alaska, and south from Russia to Japan. For thousands of years, salmon have fueled ecosystems and played a vital role in the cultural richness of Indigenous Peoples throughout their range. Over the last century and a half, these fishes have supported a lucrative commercial fishery.
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Jul 3, 2024 | 
science.org | Michael Price
We have only foggy notions of what our close cousins the Denisovans looked like, where they lived, and why they went extinct. But we can be sure of one thing: They had a taste for blue sheep. The remains of these curvy-horned grazers, as well as the bones of dozens of other small mammals and birds, have been found alongside a rib bone belonging to our mysterious relatives in a cave on the Tibetan Plateau.
