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...team of archaeologists discovered a fossilized fragment of a pinkie finger in the secluded Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The finger was buried with bracelets and other artifacts typical of early human sites dating back about 35,000 years. It was sent to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for routine genetic analysis. When the results came back, Johannes Krause, a researcher at the institute, called his colleague Svante Pääbo on his cell phone. "You'd better sit down," he said. "The finger is not human." (See TIME's photo...
...anatomical reference. But the researchers stop short of declaring the human-like creature a brand-new species. Instead of giving it a Latin name, they refer to the creature publicly as "the Denisova hominin" and in internal e-mails and discussions simply as "X." But privately, scientists at Max Planck - a world leader in the painstaking process of separating genomes from other DNA (of viruses and bacteria, for instance) that typically contaminate fossils - believe that the sequencing of the Denisova hominin's nuclear genome, which will offer a complete genetic picture, will confirm a new species. Krause says the sequencing...
Exactly what this means for climate change, however, isn't at all certain. Eight teragrams of anything, let alone a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, sounds dangerous, but as Martin Heimann of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, points out, the newly discovered methane leak represents a small piece of the overall global total of methane emissions - about 500 teragrams annually - from wetlands, termites and agriculture (including belching cows, rotting manure and rice paddies...
Almost exactly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck and other dazzling minds of the era gathered at the Solvay Library in Brussels for a major physics conference. Meeting in the same neo-classical library on Thursday to find an urgent solution to Greece's debt crisis and save the imperiled euro, European Union leaders would probably have relished the chance to connect with those bygone eggheads for inspiration. But no matter - their decision, as it turns out, was a no-brainer. In an emphatic message to the speculators around the world who are betting billions...
Going to the Dogs Some scientists acquired their fascination with dogs directly, but Hare's grew out of his research on chimpanzee cognition in the late 1990s, when he was part of a team of primatologists led by Michael Tomasello, now at Max Planck. A chimp can follow the gaze of other chimps and figure out what they can and cannot see. That's a skill that seems to be limited to great apes and humans. Tomasello and his team wondered if such a rare ability extended to hand gestures and tested chimps to see if they could understand pointing...