Author: jplucas

Ever since Europeans first uncovered mastodon fossils along Big Bone Lick in Kentucky in 1739, the demise of these huge animals and other lumbering contemporaries at the end of the last ice age has been an enduring puzzle to paleontologists. Now, a team of researchers has evidence that woolly mammoths, huge ground sloths, and other Pleistocene giants became extinct earlier than previously thought.

Whenever modern humans reached a new continent in the expansion from their African homeland 50,000 years ago, whether Australia, Europe or the Americas, all the large fauna quickly disappeared. This circumstantial evidence from the fossil record suggests that peopleâ??s first accomplishment upon reaching new territory was to hunt all its all large animals to death. But apologists for the human species have invoked all manner of alternative agents, like climate change and asteroid impacts.

A research team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have studied levels of dung fungus in an attempt to work out exactly when the population of woolly mammoths started to decline. The research found that mammoths started to die out about 15,000 years ago – well before the development of sophisticated spears.Jaqueline Gill, who headed the research team, says the research also rules out the theory that an asteroid could have wiped out the animals.

Woolly mammoths and other large, lumbering beasts faced extinction long before early humans perfected their skills as spearmakers, scientists say. The prehistoric giants began their precipitous decline nearly 2,000 years before our ancestors turned stone fragments into sophisticated spearpoints at the end of the last ice age.

“Some people thought humans arrived and decimated the populations of these animals in a few hundred years, but what weâ??ve found is not consistent with that rapid â??blitzkriegâ?? overkill of large animals,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led the research team.

Mammoth dung has proved to be a source of prehistoric information, helping scientists unravel the mystery of what caused the great mammals to die out. The study sheds light on the ecological consequences of the extinction and the role that humans may have played in it. Researchers describe this development in the journal Science.The study was led by Jacquelyn Gill from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US.

Any parent of an autistic child will tell you that their life is forever changed by their childâ??s condition. A recent study in The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders quantifies exactly how different that life can be. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison followed a groups of mothers and their autistic children (adolescents and adults) for eight days. They were interviewed at the end of each day, and saliva samples were taken every four days.

The US Department of Energy considers a recent achievement â??a world recordâ? in gas reactor particle fuel use, according to Kathy McCarthy, Deputy Associate Lab Director for Nuclear Science & Technology at Idaho National Laboratory. UW-Madison nuclear engineering students have been strongly contributing to the projects research.

Research from the UW Madison indicates that early voting results in lower turnout.The political scientists found that in Wisconsin, the impact is muted by the fact that the state allows voters to register at the polls.Still, researchers found that early voting reduced the buzz that builds around Election Day, which they say is key to bringing less-dedicated voters to the polls.

Chalk up another effect of climate change: itâ??s getting windier over Lake Superior. The water has warmed faster than the air, creating instability in the air mass that results in stronger winds. Ankur R. Desai of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an author of the study in Nature Geoscience, said the effect was due to ice, or lack of it.

Lake Superior, the worldâ??s largest body of fresh water, is getting windier as the inland sea warms, increasing the danger to shipping and sailing interests.Winds above the lake, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border, have increased 5 percent a year since 1985, according to a study by Ankur Desai, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.