New radiocarbon testing on 27 skulls that were found in Mexico 100 years ago shows some of them are almost 13,000 years old, the oldest found so far in the Americas. Domestic tools 14,500 years old have been discovered in Chile, but no human remains were found with them. The two oldest skulls are long and narrow, while more recent skulls are short and broad, like those of American Indians. This suggests that a race of narrow-headed humans were living in the Americas before the arrival of the ancestors of present-day Native Americans. Before this, archeologists thought Indians were the first people to arrive on the continent, by way of a temporary land bridge from Asia.
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It sounds like a scene out of a horror movie, but it’s really happening: baby rats are being decapitated and their heads are grafted onto the thighs of adult rats by Japanese scientists. The transplanted brains develop normally for at least three weeks, with the mouth sucking as if it’s trying to drink milk. Other scientists say these experiments aren’t necessary.

The Japanese removed heads from 12-day-old rats and waited 90 minutes before connecting them to the blood supply in the thigh of an adult rats. “The grafted brain developed normally provided the operation was done at the low temperature of 19

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New fuel has been added to the long-burning question about whether cellphone use causes car accidents. Harvard researchers have researched government figures for auto accidents, and report that drivers talking on their cellphones are responsible for about 6% of U.S. auto accidents each year, killing an estimated 2,600 people and injuring 330,000 others. The Harvard study found that a cell-phone user has about 13 chances in 1 million of being killed in an accident while making a call, which compares with 49 in 1 million for driving without a seat belt.
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Surgical techniques already exist that would allow doctors to transplant faces from one person to another, but no one has yet dared to do it. At first, this would be done for patients whose faces have been disfigured by cancer, burns or accidents, but it?s likely that in the future, it would be used by people who simply want to look better or look like someone else.

It’s difficult to reconstruct a patient’s face, because it needs to be able to move in order to convey expressions and feelings. Especially in badly-burned patients, skin grafts cause the face to have a mask-like quality. But transplants would involve muscle and nerves as well as skin, so the resulting face could move normally.
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