A legally blind archaeology student uncovered one of the oldest depictions of childbirth yet found, inscribed on a pottery sherd from an Etruscan temple site, perhaps 2,700 years old.

"I am visually impaired, almost totally blind, so I needed to find an archeology role where I could work on new excavation strategies," says William Nutt of the University of Texas at Arlington. He found one at the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project field school run by Southern Methodist University at the site of Poggio Colla, in Italy.

Thought to hold the ruins of a 2,700-year-old pilgrimage site or religious sanctuary for an underworld deity, the site allowed Nutt and his wife Hannah, also a student, to work out a method of using a trowel with his right hand, while feeling layers of earth with the other.

"It was almost the first thing I found," he says of the inscribed pottery. Inspection reveals what may be one of the oldest depictions of childbirth found in Europe. Although the Etruscans, who preceded the Romans as rulers of much of northern Italy, were famously frank in some of their tomb art, the child birth image represents a novel find. The inscription was likely repeated on a bowl left at the site, Nutt suggests. Researchers plan to present the inscription to other scholars at a Philadelphia archeology meeting in January, Nutt says.

Did early humans immediately give up on fishing, hunting and gathering as soon as they figured out how to farm and herd animals? Archeologists have thought it went pretty quickly. But research examining the residue on clay pots found in the western Baltic shows that the transition might have been much more gradual.

Agriculture appeared in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. Those farmers and the idea of farming moved out across the world, pushing acre by acre until either the farmers or the ideas got to the shores of the Baltic Sea around Denmark and Germany around 6,000 years ago.

The islands and coast there are very rich in sea life and sea mammals (seals, mostly) which made for a very good living for the people who lived there in the so-called Mesolithic period. There was such abundance that unlike most fisher-hunter-gatherer peoples who moved around a lot, they were able to stay somewhat stationary. And they also made clay pots, something that mobile hunter-gatherers seldom do.

That's what gave the researchers, at the University of York and the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, the opportunity to do the research. Their paper is in today's edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We're looking at the cuisine - what were people deciding to cook at night?" says Oliver Craig, of the Department of Archaeology at York.

The team gathered the rough, unglazed ceramic pots used by both groups. These are perfect for testing because when food containing oil or fat is cooked in them, it soaks into the first half a centimeter of the pottery and is "preserved there for thousands of years," says Craig. The researchers use an organic solvent to dissolve the residue and then analyze the resulting solution. By comparing stable isotopes and molecular characteristics, they could see biomarkers that told them if the foods were from the sea or cattle or plant-based.

What they found surprised them. Instead of an abrupt switch to a more agrarian and herding economy, as had been indicated in pervious research, these people's diets were very varied. Around one-fifth of coastal pots contained other biochemical traces of aquatic organisms, fats and oils not found in terrestrial animals and plants. At inland sites, 28% of pots contained residues from aquatic organisms, which appeared to be from freshwater fish.

To Craig, their findings indicate that while the peoples who lives in these islands and coastal areas were growing some grains and peas and eating dairy products, they hadn't turned their backs on the sea.

"There was cultural continuity - maybe there were a lot more cows around and people were changing to agriculture, but they were also choosing to cook marine foods in their pots."

What was the diet of these new farmers? It wouldn't have looked like Little House on the Prairie, that's for certain. These people were more herders than farmers. The biggest agricultural contribution to their diets was milk from cattle. They also had some pigs, though it's unclear if those were wild or domesticated.

In terms of crops, they grew einkorn and emmer wheat, both ancient wheat varieties. They also cultivated some peas.

Anyone who's eaten in Denmark, with its smoked fish, pickled herring, eel and other sea foods eaten at multiple meals alongside cheese, yogurt and coarse bread, will immediately recognize the mix.

Which brings up one of the great unknowns about those first Danish and Baltic farmers - were they the children and grandchildren of the hunter-gatherers who'd lived there before, or were they a new set of people who had migrated in from Central Europe and taken over given their more advanced technologies?

Certainly the material culture of the area changed significantly 6,000 years ago. The pots made by the hunter-gatherers suddenly shifted to newer types and new stone tools appeared and the burial of the dead became much more elaborate - they entered the Neolithic period.

There's work being done to test the DNA from the late Mesolithic forager peoples and comparing it to early Neolithic agricultural peoples. In Central Europe there appear to be big genetic differences between those two populations, which would indicate colonizing farming people coming in and taking over the land.

But that's in part because there simply weren't so many forager peoples in central Germany at the time, says Craig. On the Baltic coast, so rich in sea life, there were heavy concentrations of people already there. They wouldn't have been as easily overrun.

There are other, tantalizing, clues about who these people were and how they lived. For example, the herds of cattle they kept weren't mainly for meat, but for milk, says Craig. The remnants found in the pots were from dairy products. "It's really remarkable, as soon as you get domesticated animals they're milking them. You would have thought that diary would developed after domestication."

That raises another issue about their origins. Were these newly immigrated peoples or the previous people who'd just learned to farm? And had they already picked up the gene mutation that allows humans to digest lactose, or milk sugar, after weaning?

Today, most humans lack this mutation, but it's common in Europe, having developed about around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. When it got to Denmark isn't known exactly.

This could indicate that the early pastoralist farmers were newly arrived peoples who could already drink milk without stomach upset. Otherwise "how could they digest milk if they were foragers who'd never eaten dairy before?" asks Craig.

Though there's a counter argument to be made, he points out. Instead of drinking the milk, they could have been making it into yogurt and other fermented dairy products. That removes the lactose and allows people without the enzyme to consumer dairy products without the stomach troubles they would otherwise have.

In the end, Craig thinks it was the mix of both pastoralism, agriculture, fishing and gathering that made these people so successful. "Perhaps what they are doing is adapting their farming economy to incorporate the wild resources as well. So they're adjusting this kind of farming to the local situation." Having two food sources that were independent of each other would have given them even more food security. "If everything goes wrong with the harvest, we can still just go and get those fish over there," he says.

Ancient rock camps, cairns, tombs, traps and more, appear in the hundreds of thousands in aerial views of the Arabian desert.

Here's a sampling of archeological views of the structures increasingly observed from "harrat" volcanic rock regions and a Q&A with study leader David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia in Perth:

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Bacteria infecting parasitic worms that cause river blindness and elephantiasis in people, as well as heart worms in dogs, lead to bigger egg batches in some infected insects.

Wolbachia bacteria are widespread parasites, infecting both insects and nematode worms. Infected worms are linked to serious human diseases, but the bacteria also interest researchers who have found their infections can lead to parthenogenesis in some insects and kill male ones early in development.

In an electronic release from the journal Science, a team headed by Horacio Frydman of Boston University reports that the bug targets stem cell niches in the ovaries of female fruit flies, affecting cell division to produce more eggs in their broods. "The total number of eggs laid per Wolbachia-infected female was 3.5 times higher than that observed in non-infected flies," says the study. The study's lead author was a BU graduate student, Eva Fast.

Bigger broods gives the insects a leg up in evolutionary terms, the team suggests, another intriguing effect of the bacteria, suggesting a model of change from parasite to "mutualistic" status with the infected bugs that may drive the creation of new species.

Federal watchdogs Wednesday released a look at a 2010 university chemistry lab accident, calling for better college lab safety nationwide.

USA TODAY carried a news story on the release of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) case study of the 2010 accident at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The CSB will release a video presentation about the report Thursday. For folks interested in more details, here are the final recommendations from the investigation:

1. Occupational Safety and Health Administration

Broadly and explicitly communicate to the target audience of research laboratories the findings and recommendations of the CSB Texas Tech report focusing on the message that while the intent of 29 CFR 1910.1450 (Occupational Exposure to Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories Standard) is to comprehensively address health hazards of chemicals, organizations also need to effectively implement programs and procedures to control physical hazards of chemicals (as defined in 1910.1450(b)).

At a minimum:

a. Develop a Safety and Health Information Bulletin (SHIB) pertaining to the need to control physical hazards of chemicals; and

b. Disseminate the SHIB (and any related products) on the OSHA Safety and Health Topics website pertaining to Laboratories

2. American Chemical Society

Develop good practice guidance that identifies and describes methodologies to assess andcontrol hazards that can be used successfully in a research laboratory.

3. Texas Tech University

Revise and expand the university chemical hygiene plan (CHP) to ensure that physical safety hazards are addressed and controlled, and develop a verification program that ensures that the safety provisions of the CHP are communicated, followed, and enforced at all levels within the university.

Develop and implement an incident and near-miss reporting system that can be used as an educational resource for researchers, a basis for continuous safety system improvement, and a metric for the university to assess its safety progress. Ensure that the reporting system has a single point of authority with the responsibility of ensuring that remedial actions are implemented in a timely manner.

Algae might be nothing more than an unsightly water weed in most people's eyes, but as this video shows, a team of Scottish scientists see it as an alternative to fossil fuels.

The company featured in the video, Biomara, reports that "microalgae are one of the planet's most promising sources of renewable biomass" and that "the oceans cover more than 70% of the world's surface and ... the marine environment therefore offers the planet's largest area for cultivating biomass."

The billion-dollar weather disasters keep piling up, with the USA now at a record-shattering 12 for the year, according to Steve Bowen, a meteorologist at insurance broker AON.

Bowen says economic losses from Tropical Storm Lee — which drenched the East Coast in September but was never a hurricane — reached $1 billion, with most of the damage due to flooding along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

So far, damage from Hurricane Irene has reached at least $7 billion, he says.

"However, many locations in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are still in the midst of trying to separate out flood losses between Irene and Lee," he says.

On a side note, Bowen adds that the National Climatic Data Center, which tracks these disasters, will likely need to add another billion-dollar tally to a severe weather event that occurred in mid-June. Combined with Lee, that should make at least 12 separate billion-dollar events in the USA this year.

The previous single-year record for billion-dollar disasters was nine, set in 2008.

"The man killed the bear" may seem like the obvious 'right' way to structure a sentence to an English speaker, but a linguistic duo suggests that the original human language did it differently, saying instead "The man the bear killed." In a paper in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they dispute the assertion by some linguistics that the original human language was organized by Subject-Verb-Object, as English is.

Not that there's any better or best way to structure a sentence, say Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, at Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute respectively. There's no evidence that how a language is ordered has any affect on the ability to express oneself, or the clarity of expression. "You can't say that language with any of these word orders are somehow better, there's no evidence that speaking with these word order gives you any advantage," says Ruhlen.

The majority of human languages use S-O-V structure, "The man the bear killed." Early forms of Indic, Iranian, Italic and (early) Germanic all would have used that order. The Celts like V-S-O - "Ate the man the bear." And of course Star War's Yoda spoke a very rare O-S-V language - "Your father he is."

To come to their conclusion, the researchers looked at the word order of 2,135 languages in terms of their phylogeny, or by tracing back their origins. With three elements (Subject, Verb and Object) there are six possible variations, each of which exists in some language, somewhere. But some are much more common that others. Their analysis found that of the languages they looked at:

1,008 were SOV -- The man the bear killed

770 were SVO -- The man killed the bear

164 were VSO -- Killed the man the bear.

40 were VOS -- Killed the bear the man.

16 were OVS --The bear killed the man.

13 were OSV -- The bear the man killed.

What the original human language was and how it was constructed has always tantalized, from the time of the story of the Tower of Babel. Many comparative linguists believe that it's simply not possible to know what languages were like further back than 6,000 or 7,000 years ago. But Ruhlen and Gell-Mann believe it's possible to make inferences about language going back much further, by studying the broad outlines of all the world's languages.

Language appears to have come into being about 50,000 years ago. The first anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago, but "for the first 150,000 years they acted like Neanderthals," says Ruhlen. "Then suddenly 50,000 years ago, everything changed."

Many researchers believe that the new thing that turned anatomically modern humans into modern humans was a fully developed language. "What this had over the earlier language nobody knows, because they disappeared, we have no information," says Ruhlen.

Or, as he and Gell-Mann believe, that fully-formed language would have put it: "We no information have."

Perplexing neutrino news has nudged the noggins of the nation's nabobs of newsprint. So, we asked the experts to comment on the pundits starting to tackle physics.

In September, the Italian OPERA collaboration electrified particle physicists by reporting that neutrino packets were arriving at a target some 730 kilometers away about 60 nanoseconds (give or take 15 nanoseconds) sooner, on average, than the speed of light in a vacuum should have delivered them (i.e. they were traveling faster than the speed of light). "The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature," the group noted in a statement, asking other physics groups to replicate their results or find out whether they were correct.

"Probably not. But Maybe! Or in other words: science as usual," wrote Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, summing up the science community's reaction to the startling claim. At least two experiments, one in Japan and one U.S. project, are expected to look for similar results in their neutrino streams. And heavy-hitters such as Nobelist Sheldon Glashow have produced papers suggesting the experiment was likely an error.

The results are a big enough deal that the punditry has started to weigh in. Wall Street Journal op-ed writer Robert Bryce nodded to the results Thursday in a commentary on public policy responses to climate change, suggesting they called atmospheric science into question as well. "If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere," Bryce wrote. (The suggestion attracted widespread derision from online science writers, who created a Twitter hashtag, #WSJScience, to make similarly reasoned arguments.)

Only a day later, syndicated talking head, Charles Krauthammer, a former member of the President's Council on Bioethics, devoted an entire column to the finding. "This will not just overthrow physics. Astronomy and cosmology measure time and distance in the universe on the assumption of light speed as the cosmic limit. Their foundations will shake as well," he wrote.

But knowing how pundits tend to not always get things perfectly right (a bit like news reporters perhaps), we asked some physics folks to comment on their efforts:

Physicist and science historian Spencer Weart and Columbia University's Peter Woit gave Krauthammer credit for trying.

"I think the pundits are right to get excited and convey the excitement to the public... so long as they make it clear (as Krauthammer does) that the result is a long way still from confirmation. This is pretty good science reporting. It would be better if he said that this is most likely to be just a flash in the pan, like "cold fusion" and lots of other exciting claims," said Weart, by e-mail.

Woit called the column, "kind of silly, but not that inaccurate." Rutgers physicist Matt Strassler was less charitable however, noting errors in Krauthammer's description of the experiment (he seems to suggest that the neutrinos traveled backwards in time rather than just arriving earlier than expected) and its implications. "He does not understand science, or scientific history," Strassler wrote.

Even if the neutrino results prove true, the experts noted, they will only represent an addition to the description of reality provided by Einstein's theory of special relativity, which holds the speed of light in a vacuum as a maximum speed for a mass-bearing particle.

Overall, the experts were less kind to the Bryce column, with Woit echoing others by calling it "a flagrant attempt to score a political point by misrepresenting science (not exactly unknown in the climate change business)."

Pundits have developed a sweet tooth for science over the last decade, with such frequently-seen authors as the New York Times' David Brooks penning a novel stuffed with so-so social science and the Washington Post's George Will making Arctic sea ice pronouncements in climate columns, to much criticism.

"It seems to me that it has to do with a larger issue. Science underpins our technological society, and many people --- not just pundits --- wrap themselves in its authority the way a false king might wrap himself in a purple robe. But thanks to the Internet, it is now easier for the public to see that these self-appointed emperors lack clothes," Strassler says.

"In this particular case I think we'd all have been better off if the OPERA people were more cautious, more of the media ignored this, fewer physicists rushed out papers about it...," concludes Woit, author of Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. "People do love a "revolutionary new development", whether it's physicists who want to be responsible for one, journalists who want to report it, or the public that wants to be wowed by it. Given this hullabaloo, it's not surprising that columnists decide to relate it to their agenda."

Biologists have "cloned" human stem cells, but at the cost of stuffing them with excess genetic material.

In the journal Nature, a team led by Scott Noggle of the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory reports they have overcome past roadblocks to cloning human embryonic stem cells, while adding a new wrinkle. The stems cells produced by the process have DNA from both the original egg-donor and a separate adult cell, the would-be "clone."

Researchers in the past had removed the nucleus of an egg, replaced it with a donor's DNA (in the process called somatic cell nuclear transfer), and attempted to trigger the embryo cloning process pioneered with Ian Wilmut's Dolly the Sheep in the 1990's and commonly used to clone mice. Working with 270 eggs from 16 paid donors (the women are listed on the paper as contributors to the research), the Nature study team repeated past experiments showing this process halts early in cell division with human embryos.

"In contrast, if the somatic (clone's) cell genome is merely added and the oocyte (egg) genome is not removed, development to the blastocyst (embryonic stem cell) stage occurs," says the study. That means the cells have the genes from the egg donor as well as the desired cloned DNA. However these DNA-stuffed cells grew past the first stages of cell division, unlike in past attempts, to the "blastocyst" stage of a few hundred cells, and the researchers were able to collect the cells and grow them into colonies of embryonic stem cells containing genes from someone else, a first step towards cloned cells.

A related study Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, led by Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers had come to similar conclusions about differences between mice and men when it comes to cloning. Essentially, mouse eggs retain genetic "reprogramming" instructions absent in human eggs that undergo the nuclear transfer technique, allowing cloning to proceed.

In a commentary on the Nature paper, stem cell researcher George Daley of Childrens Hospital Boston says that, "although falling short of its ultimate goal, the paper stands as a stepping stone towards success, and raises the provocative question of how human (cloned embryonic stem) cells might perform," compared to other stem cells.

Prominent climate science critics copied from Wikipedia again in a 2009 review article, botching the text, again, suggests a new analysis.

George Mason University statistics professors Edward Wegman and Yasmin Said emerged as public figures in a 2006 Congressional investigation of climate scientists, as lead authors of an analysis that indicted climate science. However, following reports in the Deep Climate blog, USA TODAY last year confirmed with plagiarism experts that parts of the report appear cribbed from the same scientists they criticized, and from Wikipedia.

The practice contributed to a retraction of related study earlier this year. And the pair are under investigation by their university, following complaints by University of Massachusetts climate researcher Raymond Bradley, author of Global Warming and Political Intimidation, about his work being stolen.

Now, following work by Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman finding more botched copying of Wikipedia in a separate 2009 WIRES CompStats review article by Wegman, Deep Climate has released an analysis finding 13 blocks of copied Wikpedia text in the review article. Other text appears lifted from another researcher's textbook and Wolfram MathWorld. (Wegman and Said are editors in chief of the journal in which the review article appears, incidentally.)

Wegman and his attorney, Milt Johns, have not replied to an e-mailed request for comment on the complaints about the WIRES CompStat article. Johns has previously denied any plagiarism by the researchers. Copying the article from Wikipedia apparently led to math errors in the text, Gelman reports, part of a series intended as an instructional summary for students and researchers on the use of statistics.

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An ugly bug has won a beauty contest, snagging one of photography's big prizes for a scientist.

The Green Lacewing captured by Igor Siwanowicz of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology nabbed the 2011 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition. Siwanowicz wins $3,000 for his fast-acting microscope-assisted snapshot at the bug that landed on him last year.

All of the science image contest-winners are worth a look. (I can assure you as the least distinguished of the a contest's judges this year.) Voting is still open for the Public Winner, until the end of the month. Enjoy.

Should trauma victims be offered memory-blunting drugs to dim emotions associated with their suffering and possibly head off post-traumatic stress syndrome?

A USA TODAY story looked at Brooklyn Law School neuroethicist Adam Kolber's call for increased study of such drugs, and the issues raised. "Dampening the emotional edges of these awful memories could help a lot of people," says Kolber. "The issue is public acceptance of drugs that exhibit this flattening effect."

A growing number of drugs — some approved for other uses, inexpensive and with few side effects — show signs of leaving memories intact but dampening the emotions plaguing PTSD victims, Kolber and some neuroscientists argue. In the Aug. 18 Nature journal, Kolber called for researchers to expand research into memory effects of drugs, such as propranolol, commonly given to treat high blood pressure, which shows signs of lowering a memory's emotions if given within a few hours of trauma. If, for example, researchers showed that about 30% of assault victims developed PTSD, Kolber says that patients should be told this and offered drugs that lower their emotional response to their memories, once they have been demonstrated to be safe.

Other drugs, such as surgical sedatives and one this summer demonstrated to wipe out memories in cocaine-addicted rats, show even stronger effects on memories, Kolber notes. "I would be more cautious on those drugs," he says.

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Another punishing winter is likely for the north-central USA, according to a forecast released today by the private weather forecasting firm AccuWeather.

While the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic shouldn't see a winter as severe as last year, bitterly cold blasts of arctic air are expected in the northern Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes in December and January, with above-average snowfall, according to AccuWeather long-range meteorologist Paul Pastelok.

Chicago, which endured several blizzards last winter, could be one of the hardest-hit U.S. cities in terms of both snow and cold, he says.

In the South, there is little hope for Texas to escape its epic drought this winter, as below-average precipitation is predicted for most of the state.

However, severe weather and flooding rains could again batter the lower Mississippi Valley and Southeast in February, AccuWeather forecasts.

The main climate factor this winter is La Nina, a phenomenon that occurs when sea-surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean are below normal. La Ninas often produce a volatile weather pattern for the Midwest and Northeast during the winter but also tend to produce drier-than-average conditions across the southern tier of the USA.

Predicting hurricanes is one thing, but forecasting when and where an earthquake will hit is something else entirely, and typically considered impossible by most scientists. But a new study has laid the groundwork for future research into the topic.

About 40 minutes before the the devastating and deadly 9.0 earthquake that rocked Japan on March 11, a disturbance in the ionosphere above the area was recorded, according to a recent study.

The ionosphere is a region of the upper atmosphere that contains atoms ionized by radiation from the sun. It begins about 30 miles above the surface of the Earth.

The study, led by Kosuke Heki of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, was published in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Heki found that the total electron content (TEC) in the ionosphere above the center of the earthquake reached about 8 percent above the background electron content roughly 40 minutes before the quake occurred.

The increase in TEC was greatest above the earthquake epicenter and diminished with distance from the epicenter.

Heki also analyzed records from previous earthquakes and found that similar ionospheric anomalies occurred before the 2010 magnitude 8.8 Chile earthquake, possibly the 2004 Sumatra magnitude 9.2 earthquake, and possibly the 1994 magnitude 8.3 Hokkaido earthquake.

Although previous studies have shown that earthquakes could trigger atmospheric waves that travel up and disturb the ionosphere, it remains unclear how an ionospheric disturbance could occur before an earthquake begins.

Heki says that further research is needed to determine if disturbances in the ionosphere could be used to predict large earthquakes.