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Comment Re:So did they interbreed with Neandertals? (Score 1) 228

It's easy to find Neanderthal markers, but it's extremely difficult to tell what function they have. I share more or less the same % of Neanderthalness with a Pakistani and a Chinese. We are very similar in some things and very different in other things. For each of those hundreds of millions of base pairs you need to compare thousands of people who have them, with other thousands who don't have them, and check which difference keeps appearing. It can be anything. Or it can an innocuous mutation, you never know. It took them years to find which 12 genes determined eye color, they're still trying to sort out hair and height; and google's just started with intelligence in nordic europeans. Moore's law's been a great help, as crowdsourcing.

Comment Re:are they modern humans then? (Score 1) 228

About interbreeding with older populations, there's been a lot of research lately. Widespread Denisovan admixture in Papuans and Australians, Archaic admixture in Africa confirmed. We have always mixed, and we will always mix. It is beneficial for natural selection: the "best genes" of population A+B are always better than the best genes of A, or those from B, separated.

Comment CONAE (Score 1) 64

"This mission is the most outstanding project in the history of scientific and technological cooperation between Argentina and the United States,"

That's why the acronym is SAC and not SSA (Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas - Satellite for Scientific Applications). I think it's just another satellite... This was newsworthy in Argentina only because there are very few local satellites (I can only recall past iterations of SAC). Even the president talked about this, "it is a matter of great pride for our people" (elections are near - the uranium enrichment facility is timed for 2 weeks before the presidential election's second round). But generally anything built by INVAP is newsworthy in the country: they are the big guys in engineering so they get all the important government tasks like reactors, submarines, radars, etc.

Science

Submission + - Cow cloned to produce human milk (thehindu.com) 2

aBaldrich writes: "Argentinian scientists have introduced modified genes in a cloned calf that are to cause it to produce a kind of human breast milk when it grows up.
The cow named Rosita ISA had two human genes introduced, which guide the production of two proteins contained in human milk and which are important for the nutrition of babies, Argentina’s National Institute of Agrobusiness Technology near Buenos Aires said Thursday. (SpanishGoglenglish."

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