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...administer a nationwide smallpox vaccination program in the U.S. Cheney said that doing so would be a prudent counterterrorism step. Bush overruled him because the program could have resulted in dozens of deaths. (Statistical analysis has shown that the smallpox vaccine kills between one and two people per million inoculated.) Health officials don't always get the decision right. In March 1976, the U.S. government ordered a mass vaccination program against a swine flu virus they feared would cause a pandemic. Within weeks, reports surfaced of people developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease that can be caused...
...hand in the dusty Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. Within weeks, more than 100 additional bone fragments were found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this week: the 4.4 million-year-old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus). (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...series of studies published in the Oct. 2 special issue of Science - 11 papers by a total of 47 authors from 10 countries - researchers unveiled Ardi, a 125-piece hominid skeleton that is 1.2 million years older than the celebrated Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and by far the oldest one ever found. Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-leader of the Middle Awash research team that discovered and studied the new fossils, says, "To understand the biology, the parts you really want are the skull and teeth, the pelvis, the limbs and the hands and the feet...
...earliest potential forebears. The skeleton allows scientists to compare Ardipithecus directly with Lucy's genus, Australopithecus, its probable descendant. Perhaps most important, Ardi provides clues to what the last common ancestor shared by humans and chimps might have looked like before their lineages diverged about 7 million years ago. (See pictures of ancient skeletons...
...what does that mean? Based on Ardi's anatomy, it appears that chimpanzees may actually have evolved more than humans - in the scientific sense of having changed more over the past 7 million years or so. That's not to say Ardi was more human-like than chimplike. White describes her as an "interesting mosaic" with certain uniquely human characteristics: bipedalism, for one. Ardi stood 47 in. (120 cm) tall and weighed about 110 lb. (50 kg), making her roughly twice as heavy as Lucy. The structure of Ardi's upper pelvis, leg bones and feet indicates she walked upright...