Month: July 2016

Archaeologists scraped fecal bits off these ancient wipe sticks, discovered in a 2,000-year-old latrine at a pit stop along the Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. (credit: Hui-Yuan Yeh)

For almost 1,500 years, the many trade routes known today as the Silk Road joined eastern China with western China, India, the Middle East, Europe, and the Swahili Coast of Africa. These trade routes created their own culture, uniting empires and connecting distant civilizations through trade goods like books, textiles, and precious substances. But the most important use for the Silk Road was immigration. Now, a new analysis of 2,000-year-old toilet wipes found near Dunhuang in western China has revealed that these immigrants traveled vast distances on roads maintained by the Han in 100 CE. Unfortunately, these wanderers brought their diseases with them.

In a new paper published this week in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, a group of archaeologists in China and England describe how they found preserved fecal matter on wipe sticks used in a latrine at the Silk Road's Xuanquanzhi rest stop. Archaeologists excavated the rest stop roughly 20 years ago and discovered that it was one of many such oases maintained by the Han government during the early centuries of the Silk Road. Weary travelers with the right documents could stop there to refresh themselves and their pack animals. They could also, apparently, use the bathrooms. What made the Xuanquanzhi rest stop special was its location near the deadly hot Taklamakan Desert. The arid region has preserved countless treasures from the heyday of the Silk Road, including a bundle of sticks wrapped in rags near the Xuanquanzhi latrines.

While analyzing a collection of excavated goods from Xuanquanzhi, a group of archaeologists realized that these were no ordinary sticks. "These have been described in ancient Chinese texts of the period as a personal hygiene tool for wiping the anus after going to the toilet. Some of the cloth had a dark solid material still adhered to it after all this time," Cambridge anthropologist Piers Mitchell wrote.

Bicycle racers—even those on different teams—often cooperate to allow the entire group to go faster. (credit: Flickr user Hans905)

Human cooperation is thought to have evolved because it benefits everyone involved. But we also know that cooperation doesn’t always make sense when subjected to a cost-benefit analysis. For example, people will often do favors for others when there is no expectation of a personal reward—or without even bothering to think about whether there might be a reward.

A recent study published in PNAS presents evidence that humans may engage in these types of uncalculating cooperative activities because it helps their reputation. By cooperating in the moment, people signal to others that they can be trusted to cooperate in the future.

The authors of the paper used a two-stage incentivized economic game to study this phenomenon. The first stage of the game asked participants to decide if they wanted to pay to benefit another player. Players could decide to help without looking at the cost, which was considered to be an uncalculating behavior, or they could check the cost before deciding to assist, which was interpreted as a calculating behavior. This calculating behavior was thought to be analogous to the type of cost-benefit analysis people often do before deciding to be cooperative.

Solar Impulse on the ground in New York City. (credit: John Timmer)

Right now the Solar Impulse aircraft is over the Persian Gulf, approaching Abu Dhabi, its final destination. As Abu Dhabi is also the location that the craft started on its round-the-world flight, its extended journey is near an end. The Solar Impulse flight marks the first circumnavigation of the globe by a piloted solar aircraft.

Bertrand Picard is at the controls, having started the flight in Cairo and taken the craft over Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Persian Gulf. The final flight has taken about a day and a half so far and has suffered a lot of turbulence as the desert below it heated up and cooled off.

At the moment, Solar Impulse is making slow loops back and forth offshore, suggesting that the team is waiting for either traffic or weather conditions to improve at its destination. Since it's currently night, it's also possible that the team wants to bring the aircraft down at a time when it will be possible for everyone to see it.

The suspected hacking of a Democratic National Committee consultant's personal Yahoo Mail account provides new evidence that state-sponsored attackers penetrated deeper than previously thought into the private communications of the political machine attempting to defeat Republican nominee Donald Trump.

According to an article published Monday by Yahoo News, the suspicion was raised shortly after DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa started preparing opposition research on Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Upon logging in to her Yahoo Mail account, she received a pop-up notification warning that members of Yahoo's security team "strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors." After Chalupa started digging into Manafort's political and business dealings in Ukraine and Russia, the warnings had become a "daily occurrence," Yahoo News reported, citing a May 3 e-mail sent to a DNC communications director.

(credit: Yahoo News)

It was one of more than 19,000 private DNC messages posted to WikiLeaks on Friday. The massive e-mail dump came five weeks after DNC officials said hackers with backing from the Russian government had breached its network and made off with opposition research into Trump and almost a year's worth of private e-mail. The airing on WikiLeaks, which included messages in which DNC officials derided Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, has already led to the resignation of Chair Debra Wasserman Schultz. Now, the revelations about Chalupa's Yahoo account suggest the hack may have gone deeper than previously reported.

A fuel-sipping uber-luxo SUV? Not quite. A technological marvel? Not exactly. If one definition of luxury is the lack of worry, then this Land Rover Range Rover Td6 achieves it, but for an unexpected reason.

Range Rovers have long been the manifold destiny of the modest-yet-moneyed equine set—those who want to slog through unpaved slop to reach the perfect lake or meadow. And nobody driving one has failed to make it anywhere due to shortcomings off-road; Land Rovers and Range Rovers are the virtual poster dogs for exploring the wooded backlands. But until now, no Land Rover has beached itself onto American shores with diesel power, even though diesel has been an option in Europe for more than 30 years. It's been all-gasoline Range Rovering in the US, be it with a V8 or a supercharged V6.

However, the upper-crustiest party segment of SUVing has been crashed recently with Bentley's splash into the vat of beluga caviar with the Bentayga. It's another leather-lined and hyper-coiffed dreadnought SUV that won't get out of bed for less than $231,825—the base Range Rover tips the finance scale at just $85,945. The HSE Td6 diesel logs a comparative pittance at a base price of just $94,445, even though the two Brits don’t really compete directly for the same demographic. The uppermost Range Rover—aside from the Holland & Holland Edition, with its outdoor picnic seating and ability to do your taxes—is the V8 Supercharged SV Autobiography long wheelbase model at $200,490.

Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) addresses a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton on Saturday. Wasserman Schultz has said she'll resign after the Democratic convention. (credit: GASTON DE CARDENAS/AFP/Getty Images)

Late Friday, WikiLeaks published 20,000 internal e-mails from the Democratic National Committee acquired in a hacking attack last month. The dumped messages, including some that had a derisive tone toward primary candidate Bernie Sanders, roiled the Democratic Party on the eve of its convention and led to the resignation yesterday of DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The DNC hack was discovered on June 14, and soon after, some evidence of a Russian connection was found. Now, the belief that the hack was sponsored by the Russian government on some level has been explicitly endorsed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union," Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said Russian hackers are explicitly trying to get Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, elected in November.

"I don't think it's coincidental that these e-mails were released on the eve of our convention here, and I think that's disturbing," Mook told program host Jake Tapper. The leak took place just after the Republican Party changed its platform "to make it more pro-Russian," Mook added.

If you're not interested in the upcoming Xbox One S and its 4K and HDR color capabilities, now might be the perfect time to pull the trigger on the standard, bulkier edition of the Xbox One. As part of a limited time "Summer Sale," Microsoft is now offering the console at $249 with a 500GB hard drive and your choice of one of a number of games, including Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Quantum Break, Forza Motorsport 6, Rise of the Tomb Raider, or Rare Replay.

This is actually the third time that the Xbox One has seen its price drop in the last two months. Microsoft lowered the asking price to $299 in late May, just weeks before E3 (though that price had been offered a few times before). Then, during E3, the company announced a new "promotional" price of $279 that was supposed to last through October 1.

This weekend's additional price drop, coming so soon after E3, could be seen as an indication that the "legacy" consoles aren't selling so well now that the redesigned and slightly more powerful Xbox One S is about to hit stores. That redesigned system will launch August 2 in a $399 edition sporting a 2TB hard drive. Versions with 1TB and 500GB hard drives will be available for $349 and $299, respectively, at a later date.

Preventable medical error leads to an estimated 200,000 deaths per year in the US, and many of these deaths are caused by mistaken diagnoses. Clearly, making it easier for doctors to avoid errors should be a priority.

One promising avenue could be collective decision-making: pooling the diagnoses of various doctors and using their joint wisdom to hit on the most likely answer. According to a paper in this week’s PNAS, though, this method is only likely to work if all the doctors in the group have the same level of skill.

Obviously, ethics committees are unlikely to allow a team of researchers to toy with patients’ potentially life-or-death diagnoses. So in order to figure out whether collective decision-making would help with the problem, the team combined real-world data with a computer simulation.