|  Whoa! Mind-Controlled Arm Lets Man Move Prosthetic Fingers  | A new mind-controlled prosthetic arm was used to help a patient wiggle the device's fingers simply by thinking about it, and required very little training on the patient's part, according to a new study. "We believe this is the first time a person using a mind-controlled prosthesis has immediately performed individual digit movements without extensive training," study senior author Dr. Nathan Crone, a professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement.
| Read More » Why 10,000-Plus Sharks Are Hanging Out in Florida Waters  | Approximately 10,000 to 12,000 blacktip sharks are currently swimming off the Florida coast, but while these numbers may seem menacing, shark researchers say it's not unusual to see these animals — visible as tiny dark spots in aerial photos and video — in the area at this time of year. These annual visitors are there to feed on fish and bask in warm coastal waters, according to Stephen Kajiura, a professor of biological sciences at Florida Atlantic University who conducts a survey of the migrating sharks every winter. Visitors to those beaches could even catch a glimpse of the blacktips breaching, leaping out of the water "like dolphins," Kajiura said.
| Read More » Bee Pollen Could Boost Battery Performance  | Pollen — the pesky, sneeze-inducing stuff that makes allergy sufferers everywhere miserable — could be the next greatest thing in battery research, according to a new study. Scientists at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, have been researching ways to make better batteries, and recently discovered that pollen grains, and their unique microstructures, could be put to use as a more efficient type of energy storage unit.
| Read More » Out of Africa, and into the arms of a Neanderthal  | By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Research showing that our species interbred with Neanderthals some 100,000 years ago is providing intriguing evidence that Homo sapiens ventured out of Africa much earlier than previously thought, although the foray appears to have fizzled. Scientists said on Wednesday an analysis of the genome of a Neanderthal woman whose remains were found in a cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia near the Russia-Mongolia border detected residual DNA from Homo sapiens, a sign of inter-species mating. Previous research had established that Homo sapiens and our close cousins the Neanderthals interbred around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, said geneticist Sergi Castellano of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
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