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This isn't exactly the stamp of approval most scientists look for, though, and in this case the puffery is especially unfortunate because the actual scientific finding, described in a paper published on May 19 in the online journal PLoS One, really is important. First, the young mammal, which would have looked like a cross between a lemur and a small monkey, is astonishingly complete. "Most of what we understand about primate evolution is pieced together from bits of teeth and jaws," says Michael Novacek, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. Ida, by contrast, has pretty...
...their part, the authors of the new paper clearly lean toward the idea that Ida is one of our distant ancestors. They don't claim they've proved it, though - in fact, they carefully include a disclaimer that "we are not advocating this here." Even if they were, though, and even if paleontologists all agreed on the matter, Ida could at best be considered a first step on an evolutionary pathway that took another 40 million years to reach the divergence point between chimps and our earliest hominid ancestors. (See the secrets of London's buried bones...
...renders the press release touting a "revolutionary scientific find that will change everything" absolutely true - as long as by "everything," you mean "whether the branch of the primate family that includes monkeys, apes and humans comes from the suborder strepsirrhinae or the suborder haplorrhinae," according to the PLoS One paper. And by "change," you mean "adds information that may or may not help settle the question, but whose implications won't be known for a long time in any case...
...French dailies traditionally publish on all holidays except the May 1 labor day. But Libération editors explained that sluggish sales on days off don't offset the cost of printing the cash-strapped paper. Rival publications reacted not with smug guffaws, but with more of the same. Conservative daily Le Figaro now says it will also suspend publication on three French holidays. That follows the earlier lead of financial dailies Les Echos and La Tribune to sit out national holidays - a sous-pinching habit to which Catholic daily La Croix and its communist opposite L'Humanité have...
...pressure they've come under from free papers has led dailies to consider similar practices as they seek to react to falling ad revenues and the threat from the Internet," says Jean-Clément Texier, a media expert and founder of the Compagnie financière de communication consulting group in Paris. "Of course, readers initially react by saying it's a terrible move that breaks French tradition and deprives them of their paper. But since a huge portion of French dailies come in the morning mail - which doesn't operate on holidays - will anyone really miss getting those...