[Quzor]

Originally Posted by JMvS

And what about Toumaï? The chap lived about 7 My ago. Well he had a lot more media coverage at the time. And it's true that his status as an ancestor is disputed (but australopithecus are neither our ancestors).

My suspicion is that this particular discovery did not garner much attention because of two reasons:
1.) This particular fossil points itself toward being either a common ancestor of both species, and so falls before the divide between modern apes and humans, or a simple relative of the two species with no actual direct lineage to them.
2.) Due to the deteriorated state of the fossil, very little information is able to be discerned about this particular finding.

Excerpts from the Wikipedia article:

Sahelanthropus may represent a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees; no consensus has been reached yet by the scientific community. The original placement of this species as a human ancestor but not a chimpanzee ancestor would complicate the picture of human phylogeny. In particular, if Toumaï is a direct human ancestor, then its facial features bring the status of Australopithecus into doubt because its thickened brow ridges were reported to be similar to those of some later fossil hominids (notably Homo erectus), whereas this morphology differs from that observed in all australopithecines, most fossil hominids and extant humans.

The teeth, brow ridges, and facial structure differ markedly from those found in Homo sapiens. Due to the distortion that the cranium has suffered, a 3D computer reconstruction has not been produced.

Another possibility is that Toumaï is related to both humans and chimpanzees, but is the ancestor of neither. Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford, the discoverers of Orrorin tugenensis, suggested that the features of S. tchadensis are consistent with a female proto-gorilla. Even if this claim is upheld, then the find would lose none of its significance, for at present precious few chimpanzee or gorilla ancestors have been found anywhere in Africa.

Now, on to the news!...


Space Tourism

The U.S. firm Space Adventures said on Friday it will be able to send two space tourists into orbit on Soyuz spacecraft from 2012 onwards.

At present, the price of a 10-day trip to the ISS for a tourist is estimated at about $35 million.

So...not really tourism, unless you're stupid rich.

Report Says Iran Has Data to Make a Nuclear Bomb

Senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

If Iran is designing a warhead, that would represent only part of the complex process of making nuclear arms. Experts say Iran has already mastered the hardest part, enriching the uranium that can be used as nuclear fuel.

Well, I guess Iran had those WMD's after all. =P

Bluehenge Unearthed

The find is already challenging conventional wisdom about how Stonehenge was built - and what it was used for.
Bluehenge was put up 5,000 years ago - around the same time as work began on Stonehenge - and appears to have been a miniature version of it.
The two circles stood together for hundreds of years before Bluehenge was dismantled. Researchers believe its stones were used to enlarge Stonehenge during one of a number of redevelopments.

An interesting find that opens the door for more questions about an artifact for which we already have almost no answers.