Will that be cash, or charge?

Dear Readers:

I just saw a couple of headlines in the Huffington Post that gave me pause to wonder!

The first was: "Average home price in Canada now half a million dollars!"

And right underneath that: "Are millennials choosing to rent, or just not buying?"

Am I missing something here?

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One second she’s there, the next she’s gone. 

A woman appeared to vanish during a live news report on Danish TV. But did she really? (Video going viral shows the blonde woman standing in the background of the shot as a man is being interviewed at an airport’s baggage claim for TV2’s Sports Center show.)

Another woman walks past her, pushing a trolley, and then she seemingly disappears.

But if you look closer — and we’re talking really close — you can actually see what happens. The woman just coincidentally happens to move off at exactly the same time as the trolley-pusher.

It looks spooky, but it’s not down to paranormal activity.

The clip’s garnered more than 4 million views since it was posted to Reddit on Thursday — and freaked out half the Internet in the process.

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Here's a headline that says a lot: "Police say criminals love iPhones and call the encryption feature a ‘gift from God.’"

As the feud between Apple and the FBI over a locked iPhone has grown increasingly heated, both sides have sought to convince the public — and, next week, will try to do the same with a California judge — about their stances on encryption, safety and security.
Tucked into the reams and reams of legal filings submitted earlier this month in the fight between Apple and the FBI was an argument from law enforcement officers saying that the technology giant’s efforts to strengthen encryption — something the company, other technology firms and security experts call essential to protecting privacy in a digital age — have also been a blessing for criminals.

  Since September 2014, Apple has issued iPhones with operating systems — first iOS 8 that month, now iOS 9 — that do not let the company extract data because the information is encrypted with a key using a password set by the phone’s owner or user.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/03/18/police-backing-the-fbi-in-fight-with-apple-say-criminals-love-iphones-and-call-the-encryption-a-gift-from-god/

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I'm sure that by now everyone has heard about the mixing of Neanderthal DNA with human DNA in our recent past, but they are not the only branch of the human race that contributed to Homo Sapiens eventual  ascendancy to being the B.M.O.C. (Big Man on Campus)

We were also helped along in our evolutionary development by a group called the "Denisovans!" (If you're an avowed 'creationist' ya might as well stop reading right now!)

Very little is known about the Denisovans. The first evidence of them was discovered in Denisova Cave in Siberia in 2008, and DNA from their fossils suggests they shared an origin with Neanderthals but were nearly as genetically distinct from Neanderthals as Neanderthals were from modern humans.

The researchers also discovered that Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA was not scattered evenly in the modern human genome. Rather, it was concentrated more heavily in some regions than others, they said. This may be because, in certain sections of the DNA, mixing sequences from Neanderthals or Denisovans with those of modern humans was detrimental in some way to the individuals who had those mixtures, the researchers said. Thus, over time, evolution purged those deleterious mixes from the modern genome, they added.

Future research can investigate the imprints of Denisovan ancestry in other modern human populations, Akey said. "We want to understand what it means to be a modern human," Akey said — and, by that light, what it might have meant to be a Neanderthal or a Denisovan.

Modern Denisoyan male! -->

NOW, to add even more confusion into the mix,  this is a picture of a Denisovan cave and it makes your humble reporter curious as to why they didn't have more of an impact as a distinct group since they were apparently very good toolmakers ........., as we can see from these stairs they built at the entrance to their cave!

 http://www.livescience.com/54084-denisovan-dna-helped-modern-humans-survive.html

The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science.

The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded.

“This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models of human evolution,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a research scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the study.

The new study expands on a series of findings in recent years showing that the ancestors of modern humans once shared the planet with a surprising number of near relatives — lineages like the Neanderthals and Denisovans that became extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

Before disappearing, however, they interbred with our forebears on at least several occasions. Today, we carry DNA from these encounters.

The first clues to ancient interbreeding surfaced in 2010, when scientists discovered that some modern humans — mostly Europeans — carried DNA that matched material recovered from Neanderthal fossils.

Later studies showed that the forebears of modern humans first encountered Neanderthals after expanding out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago.

But the Neanderthals were not the only extinct humans that our own ancestors found. A finger bone discovered in a Siberian cave, called Denisova, yielded DNA from yet another group of humans.

Research later indicated that all three groups — modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans — shared a common ancestor who lived roughly 600,000 years ago. And, perhaps no surprise, some ancestors of modern humans also interbred with Denisovans.

Some of their DNA has survived in people in Melanesia, a region of the Pacific that includes New Guinea and the islands around it.

Those initial discoveries left major questions unanswered, such as how often our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists have developed new ways to study the DNA of living people to tackle these mysteries.

Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and his colleagues analyzed a database of 1,488 genomes from people around the world. The scientists added 35 genomes from people in New Britain and other Melanesian islands in an effort to learn more about Denisovans in particular.

The researchers found that all of the non-Africans in their study had Neanderthal DNA, while the Africans had very little or none. That finding supported previous studies.

But when Dr. Akey and his colleagues compared DNA from modern Europeans, East Asians and Melanesians, they found that each population carried its own distinctive mix of Neanderthal genes.

The best explanation for these patterns, the scientists concluded, was that the ancestors of modern humans acquired Neanderthal DNA on three occasions.

The first encounter happened when the common ancestor of all non-Africans interbred with Neanderthals.

The second occurred among the ancestors of East Asians and Europeans, after the ancestors of Melanesians split off. Later, the ancestors of East Asians — but not Europeans — interbred a third time with Neanderthals.

Earlier studies had hinted at the possibility that the forebears of modern humans had multiple encounters with Neanderthals, but hard data had been lacking.

“A lot of people have been arguing for that, but now they’re really providing the evidence for it,” said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/science/neanderthals-interbred-with-humans-denisovans.html?_r=0