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Ecosystems
To Walk or to Climb
May 24, 2013 09:21 AM - Andy Soos, ENN
To walk on two or four limbs, that is the question... Jeremy M. DeSilva an anthropologist at Worcester University in Massachusetts has published Functional Morphology of the Ankle and the Likelihood of Climbing in Early Hominins, in the peer-reviewed journal, Proceeding of the National Academies of Sciences of the USA current issue. The study includes data gathered by DeSilva in Uganda's Kibale National Park of modern chimpanzee and comparisons of hominin fossil skeletal remains dating back some 4.12 million to 1.53 million years ago. The findings appear to show that if early hominins depended on tree climbing as part of their survival repertoire, they were performing it decidedly different from modern chimpanzee locomotor activity. The question DeSilva addresses is whether early man's adaptation to full bipedalism involved a swift shedding of the ability to climb and swing from trees. DeSilva compared the great apes and early hominin ankle joint, the tibia and the talus in the foot. He discovered marked differences between the structure and capacity of these two skeletal fossils.
When I first read about NASA’s $125,000 grant to Systems and Materials Research Corporation to create a 3-D food printer, I was excited, confused, and a little weirded out. A range of thoughts and questions ran through my mind. What would the food be made out of? Would it taste and feel like real food, [...]
Brandon Cheshire, Owner & Chief Technical Officer at Arizona-based SunHarvest Solar, recently spoke with Sierra Club Green Home about the benefits of going solar. During the interview, they discovered that his home is not only solar powered, it’s carbon neutral. This means it’s completely energy independent and emissions-free. Here’s how he did it...
Each day, our industry sits down and whittles the unsightly knots off the tree we call solar energy. We, as a group, spend more time than we should pointing to one of a growing number of reasons why solar energy isn’t taking hold in America: that perhaps our government incentives were cut too quickly, that our state’s SREC program is broken, that the net metering requirements aren’t strong enough...