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A fossilized skull discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s should be considered an entirely new species of human, scientists proposed this week in an effort to shed light on the very murky question of what to call our ancient ancestors.
In a study published on Thursday in Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews, researchers compared anatomical traits in fossil hominins—the group that includes present-day humans and our extinct close relatives—from Africa, Europe, and Asia. They concluded that two currently recognized species should be retired, and that the 600,000-year-old remains from Ethiopia, along with several other specimens, should be classified as a new species they’ve dubbed Homo bodoensis.
Not everyone is convinced that a new species name is needed—after all, none of these specimens represent lineages that have never been studied before. However, the researchers argue, the changes could help researchers decipher a murky period in human evolution and move past terms with vague meanings and racist legacies.
[Related: Your ancestors might have been Martians]
“We’re becoming increasingly aware that these groups did move and did interact, and that’s why it’s important to have a proper way of talking about them,” says Mirjana Roksandic, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba and coauthor of the paper. “It really opens the possibility to talk about who moved when, and what happened to them when they moved, and who actually interacted with whom.”
She and her colleagues focused on hominins who lived during the Middle Pleistocene age, which spanned from 774,000 to 129,000 years ago. Although paleoanthropologists refer to these hominins as different species, they’re not using the term as most of us normally think of it. “They interacted, they interbred, and they cannot be considered as definite biological species,” Roksandic explains. Instead, the category is used to describe groups of hominins with very similar anatomical features.
These differences are more obvious in some groups of hominins than others. European Neanderthal fossils from this period differ in numerous ways from modern humans, Roksandic says. However, many other hominin fossils look very similar, making it harder to determine how they relate to each other and to Homo sapiens.
In the past, new species were often declared on the basis of a few teeth or other fragmentary evidence, says John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the new research. One such case was Homo heidelbergensis, which was first named after a jawbone found in a gravel pit in Germany in the early 20th century, he says.
Then, in later decades, many fossils that didn’t seem to fit with Neanderthals, modern humans, or our ancestor Homo erectus were lumped in with Homo heidelbergensis. “The species was named after a mandible; we never knew what the head and face should look like,” says Shara Bailey, a biological anthropologist and director of the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University. “Basically it’s like a trash basket category.”
This helped spawn a “totally confusing” situation, Roksandic says, in which the name Homo heidelbergensis is sometimes used to refer generally to hominins from the Middle Pleistocene, and other times to refer to various specimens found in Europe. She and her colleagues argue that it’s time to abandon the name altogether, given that recent genetic evidence suggests that many fossils currently assigned to Homo heidelbergensis are actually early Neanderthals.
Then there’s Homo rhodesiensis, which was first known from a skull uncovered by mining activity in Zambia in the 1920s. The term is sometimes used to indicate a common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, but can also refer to all the hominin lineages represented in the Late Pleistocene. But the name is rarely used in either context, because of its association with the atrocities committed under British colonial rule in the region of Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). For these reasons, Roksandic’s team writes in the new study, Homo rhodesiensis has to go.
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“Homo bodoensis would fill that void that’s left by Homo rhodesiensis,” she says. The researchers selected the enigmatic skull from Ethiopia to represent the species in their description. However, they also consider the Zambian skull and several other sets of fossils from Africa, and possibly the eastern Mediterranean, as members of Homo bodoensis.
Like Neanderthals and some Asian hominins from the Middle Pleistocene, Homo bodoensis seems to have had an enlarged brain—a crucial development on the road to modern humans. It’s likely that Homo bodoensis was the first to split off from their shared common ancestor, with the remaining branch later splintering into Neanderthals and a group called Denisovans found in Asia, the researchers propose.
As a next step, she and her colleagues are planning to investigate whether fossils from Europe and Asia might be members of Homo bodoensis, which could shed light on whether and when the group might have moved out of Africa.
“It’s really hard to understand what is happening in terms of human evolution in that time period unless you look at it on a very global scale,” Roksandic says.
What’s in a name?Hawks agrees that the two species that Roksandic and her colleagues propose jettisoning are “a problem.”
“These are confusing names, they have bad histories, and it would be way better if we had names that actually could be [scientifically] tested and that can apply in a sense that all of us are willing to use,” he says.
However, he favors a different solution. “All of these populations interbred with each other, and it seems like they’re the same species—and the name for that species is Homo sapiens,” Hawks says. “Why don’t we recognize that they’re the same species, and all these fossils going back to the common ancestor are representatives of that evolving species?”
Bailey also isn’t sure that Homo bodoensis brings clarity to this phase of human evolution. Given that the fossils seem to belong to a direct ancestor to Homo sapiens, she says, “Why don’t we just call that archaic Homo sapiens?”
Nonetheless, Bailey says, the paper makes a good case for ditching Homo heidelbergensis and Homo rhodesiensis. “It also provides readers with kind of a glimpse into just how complex human evolution is, that it’s not this ladder-like [process in which] we evolved step-by-step into ‘Tada, we’re Homo sapiens!’”
The names we give bygone hominins reveal how we see them fitting into our family tree—and what makes the humans alive today unique. “That’s what people care about: what’s ‘us,’ when did we evolve, when did we develop the things we associate as being special about us?” Bailey says.
Names allow us to understand the relationships between different hominin lineages and how they interacted, Hawks says, but they needn’t be set in stone.
“It’s good to have these conversations,” he says. “Looking at the way that we describe groups, it’s really important to continue to have critical thinking about what are we accomplishing by naming them?”
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Ai Is The Future — And It’s Time We Start Embracing It
Par Chadha is the founder, CEO, and CIO of Santa Monica, California-based HGM Fund, a family office. Chadha also serves as chairman of Irving, Texas-based Exela Technologies, a business process automation (BPA) company, and is the co-founder of Santa Monica, California-based Rule 14, a data-mining platform. He holds and manages investments in the evolving financial technology, health technology, and communications industries.
Intelligence evolution is nothing new. These days, it’s just taking on a more electronic form. Some innovations seem to appear overnight, while others take decades to perfect. When it comes to the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), most people are probably content to take it slow, as the possibilities are exciting but admittedly a bit scary at times.
“Star Trek” first introduced us to the idea that a robot could be capable of performing a medical exam before the doctor comes in to see you. Robot-assisted surgery has already arrived and appears to be here to stay, making some procedures less invasive and less prone to error.
There’s no question that AI is powerful. And when it’s used for good, it’s a beautiful tool. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to keep powerful things out of the hands of the bad guys. So some of these incredible tools, like exoskeletons for soldiers, will also make more formidable enemies.
The discovery of DNA a century ago was transformative to our understanding of human biology. It took us a hundred years to get to the point where we could edit DNA, but what’s next? CRISPR has the potential to provide healing to millions of people, but the possibilities of DNA editing are about as vast as your imagination can go. “Attack of the Clones” no longer seems so far off.
The fears people experience about AI are significant: What if I lose my job? My livelihood? Is there a place for me in this future? AI is even beginning to break the order in some families, because the people of the younger generation working in knowledge-based jobs are already making more money than their parents did. So how do we adapt to and embrace this exciting yet possibly frightening future?
See more: Artificial Intelligence: Current and Future Trends
We have to stay flexible. With reskilling, all of us should be increasingly confident that AI may change our jobs but won’t render us unemployable. I have had to reinvent myself each decade since 1977 — sometimes more than once. But I’ve always found success, despite the challenges this brings, and the process has always been fulfilling.
Start with what is least offensive and difficult to acclimate to as you’re making peace with the future. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by all the change, try creating smaller and more manageable goals when it comes to your technology adoption. Enlist the help of a younger person who may have an easier time adapting to these changes.
We will likely lose the satisfaction we get from mowing our own lawn and many other tasks in the near future. We will have to find peace, fulfillment, pride, and happiness through other activities. This isn’t something to mourn. It’s something to get creative about. Consider the possibilities rather than dwelling on fear of the future.
Time is not likely to begin marching in the opposite direction, and technology doesn’t often work backward. We can choose to live in fear, or we can choose to embrace the future, counting our blessings for how these innovations will improve our lives and expand our horizons.
The worrisome aspect of AI is that if we can conceptualize it, we are likely to attempt it. We will need to continue to engage in conversations of ethics to ensure we stay focused on the right things: those that protect, aid, and bring value to human life.
Technology will only continue to evolve, and AI will be a part of everyone’s daily lives even more so than it is now. The change is inevitable. However, as with all change, we must be prepared to adapt to it. While we need to be cautious of how we use AI, the fact is that it’s a blessing, not a curse. Adapting to AI will be a lot less painful if we embrace it, ease into the new world it will bring, and understand that this technology will open more doors for humanity than it will close.
See more: Top Performing Artificial Intelligence Companies
The Clever Way Apple Lets You Record Time
Apple makes it easy to record cool time-lapse video on your iPhone, but do you know how time lapses work in the Camera app? Here’s the nitty-gritty.
It’s simple to record time-lapse videos on your iPhoneInstead of adjusting a bunch of parameters, you only need to start and stop recording, and iOS will handle the rest. In Apple’s “just works” fashion, no matter how long your recording session (ten hours or ten days or ten minutes, it doesn’t matter), your time-lapse will end up being between 20 and 40 seconds long.
Visit the StudioNeat website for a graph showing how Apple’s time-lapse mode works and at which intervals the Camera app takes individual images. Generally speaking, it comes down to the following numbers.
Apple Camera app: Time-lapse frame rates
0-9 minutes: One frame every two seconds
10-19 minutes: One frame every four seconds
20-39 minutes: One frame every four seconds
40-80 minutes: One frame every four seconds
Apple’s Camera app shoots time-lapses in 1080p resolution (1920×1080) at 30 frames per second, with no HDR, regardless of your iPhone model. There’s no way to adjust the frame rate and resolution for time-lapse videos in the stock Camera app.
How time-lapse photography worksTime-lapse is a photography technique that captures individual photos or video frames at a much lower rate to create the accelerated time effect. For example, if individual photos are captured at one frame per second and then played back at 30 frames per second, time will appear to lapse 30 times faster.
Buy a tripod. Or a gimbal.Recording time-lapse videos debuted in iOS 8, which arrived alongside iPhone 6 back in 2014. It’s been an iPhone staple since then, so it’s quite a shame that Apple hasn’t bothered to introduce any significant new time-lapse capabilities.
There isn’t a single option in Settings → Camera that would permit you to adjust how iOS captures time-lapse videos. You’ll need to download third-party apps from the App Store to shoot time-lapse footage the way you want.
The point of a time-lapse is to capture an experience over a period of time, like a setting sun or traffic flowing. Surely you don’t want to hold your iPhone steady for an extended period just to create a few seconds of a cool time-lapse.
We recommend getting a tripod or, better yet, a gimbal to stabilize your footage.
Night mode time-lapse videos on iPhone 12 and laterThe iPhone 12 and newer include imaging optimizations not found on older models for shooting time-lapses using a tripod. “On iPhone 12 models and later, use a tripod to capture time-lapse videos with more detail and brightness when recording in low-light situations,” clarifies a support document on the Apple website.
Unpacking this statement, what Apple wants to say is that capturing time-lapse videos of low-light scenes with iPhone 12 or later set on a tripod will cause Apple’s night mode to kick in. Night mode uses longer shutter speeds to boost the amount of light hitting the imaging sensor, resulting in longer, better light trails.
So if you plan on creating mesmerizing time-lapse videos of cityscapes and traffic at night, or the night sky and such, be sure to use an iPhone 12 or later with a tripod.
How to use time-lapse mode in the Camera appBefore you can record a time-lapse video, please be sure to set your iPhone to Do Not Disturb mode. This will avoid vibrations if you get a phone call that could ruin your footage. To record a time-lapse video, open the Camera app and swipe right to select TIME-LAPSE at the bottom. To start recording, hit the shutter button.
Your iPhone will periodically take individual images until you tap the shutter button again. The algorithm stitches the individual photos together and saves a time-lapse video. When such footage plays back at normal speed, time appears to be moving moves much faster. You can find all your time-lapses in the Time-lapse album within the Photos app. Read: How to slow down time-lapse videos on iPhone
The iPhone 13 and newer can shoot macro time-lapse videos: Swipe to the time-lapse mode in the Camera app, then hit the .5X button at the bottom to switch to the ultra-wide lens. Next, move close to the subject (as close as 2 centimeters) and hit the shutter button to start and stop recording a macro time-lapse.
Plastic Oled Is About To Come Back In A Big Way
The use of a plastic TFT layers means that POLED can be thinner than regular glass OLED.
When we spoke to LG Display during a media tour in Paju, the company stressed that its technology has been ready for quite some time, and is as good as competing products on the market already. However, sales have been held back by a lack of client demand and production capabilities. With LG Display expecting the market to demand some 120 million POLED units in 2023 and 370 million by 2023, the company is investing KRW 5 trillion into its 6th generation line in Paju, which follows KRW 7.8 trillion of other recent investments into OLED.
With that in mind, LG Display’s roadmap could cater for a OLED V30 launch in Q3, but perhaps a G7 launch next year would give the company more time to build up stock for a major global release. Rumors that LG OLED panels are being bought up for the iPhone 8 and possibly Google’s Pixel 2 would complicate LG’s own smartphone plans though. LG Display won’t be running at full capacity until late 2023 and so is unlikely to fill orders for three separate flagship launch windows so soon, even if Apple buys most of its panels elsewhere.
The V30, iPhone 8, and Pixel 2 are all rumored to feature OLED, but LG Display’s production capabilities are only just ramping up. Will there be enough panels?
While LG Display obviously backs its latest mobile panel technology, and LG’s OLED is proving very impressive in the TV space, the company’s early flexible mobile displays didn’t quite attract the same praise.
One of the criticisms leveled at the G Flex series was its low display resolution at the time. LG’s plastic OLED panels sported 720p and then 1080p resolutions at a time when other flagship phones were moving on to 1080p and then QHD respectively. This made the phones a hard sell, even though the displays themselves looked pretty good (notwithstanding the original G Flex’s ghosting issues).
During our tour at Paju, we came across some plastic OLED smartphone and smartwatch prototype displays in the showroom. These models showed off a design that was much closer to Samsung’s edge display technology than the G Flex curve. More importantly though, these panels were boasting 1080p and QHD display resolutions, meaning that LG now appears to be able to manufacture higher resolution POLED panels without issue. This is certainly good news for the flagship market and suggests that Samsung may soon have some serious OLED competition on its hands.
Plastic OLED does have its own benefits over the glass variant that we’re more familiar with too. Perhaps the biggest is durability. The slightly flexible nature of the display offers some additional shock absorbance over glass, which means a slightly smaller chance of cracking your panel if you happen to drop your phone and a longer lifetime from stress fractures. Plastic OLED is also up to half as thin as glass OLED. This enables manufactures to build slightly thinner devices, and we all know how much of a premium is placed on freeing up space in today’s smartphones.
As we mentioned, the flexible substrate makes plastic OLED suitable for a wide range of other form factors too. Wearables have already made good use of the technology, but the automotive industry will likely turn out to be a much bigger and important market, with use cases ranging from dashboards to infotainment systems. We saw a few examples of these form factors in Paju too, so vehicular applications are clearly already on LG’s radar.
POLED (and OLED in general) is the future of display techWhen it comes to production capabilities, Samsung still has a major head start over LG Display, as far as OLED is concerned, but that’s going to narrow over the next year or so. This doesn’t necessarily mean that LG Display is going to be selling all of its POLED panels to LG Electronics for smartphones though. We may see any number of third party manufacturers opt to pick up panels from LG Display, with Apple and Google both being tipped as major buyers and investors already.
Most importantly for us consumers, either way it means that we’re likely to see more OLED panels inside smartphones, along with all the benefits that this technology brings in terms of a wider color gamut, superior contrast, and HDR playback capabilities. Not to mention all the sleek and interesting form factors that manufacturers can flex POLED panels into.
Plastic OLED looks set to come back in a big way over the next 12 to 18 months, and could well end up inside your next smartphone.
Food Startups Changing The Way We Eat At Home
As an entrepreneur my mind is always racing – I’m thinking about that next big pitch, quarterly updates to our shareholders, what our competitors are doing, etc. Not a minute goes by where I’m not inundated with memories the past, or worried about things to come.
A favorite reprieve from the stresses of the day is when I’m preparing a meal. For that time alone in the kitchen I’m only thinking about what I’m about to cook, the vegetables that need to be cut, pre-heating the oven, watching my water rise to a boil, or the sounds of my blender in the background.
But this isn’t stressful at all.
In fact, the scents and sounds that surround me ease me into a zen-like state.
There are a lot of great articles out there as to why cooking can be a great stress release, but for some people the idea of planning a meal (let along following a recipe, or measuring out the right ingredients) can seem a little daunting.
Enter the age of meal kit delivery services. The rise of Blue Apron may mean we’re walking into our apartment buildings and seeing more and more of these decorative boxes. But what are meal kit delivery services? And who are some of those food startups disrupting our cooking at home?
Working with local farmers to deliver what’s freshHelloFresh launched their delivery meal-kits in 2012 in the United States. Their CEO, Seth Goldman was always passionate about food. After receiving his MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business, he started to pursue his passion of ecommerce and disruptive models. The rise of food tech and was at the core of his passion for food and entrepreneurship.
HelloFresh’s methodology is simple. Cook real food at home with loved ones – bringing freshness into your local routine. You select from that week’s recipes, and receive pre-portioned ingredients and the instructions right to your door. They work with local farmers to integrate what’s in season into HelloFresh’s meal plans. They do this by working with vetted partners, farmers and purveyors closest to one of their three distribution areas – Linden, NJ; San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. They deliver nation-wide except Hawaii and Alaska.
But recipe kit deliveries aren’t all about dinners. Along with the growing trend on healthier eating, the juicing age is still going strong in 2023. Juicing is a great way to provide our bodies with the nutrients and minerals needed to keep us healthy when you don’t have time to eat healthily.
Will it blend?But if you’re anything like me, you’ve taken a handful of kale, added some fruits, and come out with a not-so-delicious concoction. This is why the next best solution is a smoothie recipe kit delivery service.
Jenna Tanenbaum and Amir Cohen decided to start GreenBlender after Jenna’s active and healthy lifestyle started to rub off on Amir. What started as Jenna passing along her unique and delicious smoothie leftovers every morning to Amir, slowly morphed into him requesting full-size smoothies for himself. His “ah ha” moment was when he realized that if they had all the ingredients right there in their kitchen, juicing and being healthier came easily for them….and others.
GreenBlender is a recipe kit for blended seasonal smoothies. Similar to dinner meal services, you receive the recipes and pre-portioned ingredients at your door. They source from a number of farms and purveyors – with a focus on local farms, seasonal ingredients, and organic produce first. They’ve worked with the Brooklyn Grange, Hepworth Farms, Lancaster Farm Fresh Coop, and Foxy Organics to name a few. GreenBlender currently delivers to the Northeast – shipping to most parts of New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, West Virginia, and Washington DC.
And depending on how often you’re home, HelloFresh, GreenBlender, and others allow you start and stop your deliveries at any time.
Eating healthier at home just got a whole lot easier!
What Is Magacoin? Everything To Know About It
Welcome a new cryptocurrency to the market, MAGACOIN.
How would you feel when I say there is a
What is MAGACOIN?MAGACOIN was made with an end goal to apparently communicate strong support for the previous President, Donald Trump, in the wake of his loss in the November 2023 political race. The total number of coins made till now is an affirmation of the 75 million who decided in favor of Trump in the elections. MAGACOIN thus carries on its shoulder the super weight of a major expectation since it is on the side of the competitors related with the Make America Great Again applicants. The returns from the new cryptocurrency will be diverted towards funding their future campaigns and races. This coin is different from other
Should You Invest in MAGACOIN?Despite its goal and objectives, in any case, MAGAcoin isn’t yet listed among famous and trusted platforms including that of CoinMarketCap, Binance, and others. Further, according to RawStory’s report, despite the popularity and massive sign-ups of MAGACOIN, its users risk something and it is a data breach on their end. It was found that the MAGACOIN site uncovers user data including login credentials among others.
How would you feel when I say there is a new crypto coin , which is a Donald Trump-themed cryptocurrency? Funny, isn’t it? Well, then let’s welcome MAGACOIN. A lot has been happening around in the crypto world since the launch of MAGACOIN. Let’s explore more about it.MAGACOIN was made with an end goal to apparently communicate strong support for the previous President, Donald Trump, in the wake of his loss in the November 2023 political race. The total number of coins made till now is an affirmation of the 75 million who decided in favor of Trump in the elections. MAGACOIN thus carries on its shoulder the super weight of a major expectation since it is on the side of the competitors related with the Make America Great Again applicants. The returns from the new cryptocurrency will be diverted towards funding their future campaigns and races. This coin is different from other best cryptocurrencies to buy as MAGACOIN won’t hold an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), rather it will be parting with 100 coins to each new registrant to construct a powerful MAGACOIN ecosystem that will work together to get access to the crypto exchanges and backing the MAGA development. According to its website, 10 Million MAGACOINS have been given to the MAGACOIN Victory Fund, a SuperPAC made to help MAGA candidates across the nation who will battle for individual rights, religious liberty, protecting the unborn, the 2nd amendment, freedom of speech, and the entire America First Agenda. As MAGACOIN is acknowledged by crypto exchanges and the value of the SuperPAC’s coin holdings grows, these coins will be exchanged for U.S. Money and independent expenditures will be made to bolster MAGA candidates. The more prominent the value of each MAGACOIN, the more resources the MAGACOIN Victory Fund will have to support and choose MAGA applicants from one side of the country to the other. Lately, the country has been met with a ton of “far-right” movements in recent months, and this incorporates that of the Freedom Phone, which has been made for “free speech.” These far-right movements have been confronting gigantic popularity among the general population yet are blended in terms of support. The coin is additionally supposed to be available for mining, the alternative cycle of getting raw cryptocurrency.Despite its goal and objectives, in any case, MAGAcoin isn’t yet listed among famous and trusted platforms including that of CoinMarketCap, Binance, and others. Further, according to RawStory’s report, despite the popularity and massive sign-ups of MAGACOIN, its users risk something and it is a data breach on their end. It was found that the MAGACOIN site uncovers user data including login credentials among others. This is something that should be a warning for users, particularly as they can be accessed or have their cash taken from them by hackers. MAGACOIN is a genuinely new blockchain on the lookout and users should take precautions in case they are thinking of buying it. Moreover, Trump has not recognized the cryptocurrency or pronounced any apparent support. Trump hasn’t been exceptionally hopeful about crypto overall. He has even said that bitcoin appears to be a scam. And remember his extensive rant in 2023 on Twitter about crypto. One reason for his aversion toward cryptocurrency is their volatile nature and conflicting value due to which he doesn’t by and large belief them to be actual money.
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