the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Morning Person? You Might Have Neanderthal Genes to Thank.​

Hundreds of genetic variants carried by Neanderthals and Denisovans are shared by people who like to get up early.

Neanderthals were morning people, a new study suggests. And some humans today who like getting up early might credit genes they inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors.

The new study compared DNA in living humans with genetic material retrieved from Neanderthal fossils. It turns out that Neanderthals carried some of the same clock-related genetic variants as do people who report being early risers.

Since the 1990s, studies of Neanderthal DNA have exposed our species’ intertwined history. About 700,000 years ago, our lineages split apart, most likely in Africa. While the ancestors of modern humans largely stayed in Africa, the Neanderthal lineage migrated into Eurasia.

About 400,000 years ago, the population split in two. The hominins who spread west became Neanderthals. Their cousins to the east evolved into a group known as Denisovans.

The two groups lived for hundreds of thousands of years, hunting game and gathering plants, before disappearing from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago. By then, modern humans had expanded out of Africa, sometimes interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

And today, fragments of their DNA can be found in most living humans.

Research carried out over the past few years by John Capra, a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, and other scientists suggested that some of those genes passed on a survival advantage. Immune genes inherited from Neanderthals and Denisovans, for example, might have protected them from new pathogens they had not encountered in Africa.

Dr. Capra and his colleagues were intrigued to find that some of the genes from Neanderthals and Denisovans that became more common over generations were related to sleep. For their new study, published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, they investigated how these genes might have influenced the daily rhythms of the extinct hominins.

Inside the cells of every species of animal, hundreds of proteins react with each other over the course of each day, rising and falling in a 24-hour cycle. They not only control when we fall asleep and wake up, but also influence our appetite and metabolism.

To explore the circadian rhythms of Neanderthals and Denisovans, Dr. Capra and his colleagues looked at 246 genes that help to control the body clock. They compared the versions of the genes in the extinct hominins to the ones in modern humans.

The researchers found over 1,000 mutations that were unique only to living humans or to Neanderthals and Denisovans. Their analysis revealed that many of these mutations probably had important effects on how the body clock operated. The researchers predicted, for example, that some body-clock proteins that are abundant in our cells were much scarcer in the cells of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Next, the scientists looked at the small number of body-clock variants that some living people have inherited from Neanderthals and Denisovans. To see what effects those variants had on people, they probed the UK Biobank, a British database holding the genomes of half a million volunteers.

Along with their DNA, the volunteers provided answers to a long list of health-related questions, including whether they were early risers or night owls. To Dr. Capra’s surprise, almost all the ancient body-clock variants increased the odds that the volunteers were morning people.

“That was really the most exciting moment of the study, when we saw that,” Dr. Capra said.

Geography might explain why the ancient hominins were early risers. Early humans lived in Africa, fairly close to the Equator, where the duration of days and nights stays roughly the same over the course of the year. But Neanderthals and Denisovans moved into higher latitudes, where the day became longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. Over hundreds of thousands of years, their circadian clocks may have adapted to the new environment.

When modern humans expanded out of Africa, they also faced the same challenge of adapting to higher latitudes. After they interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, some of their descendants inherited body-clock genes better suited to their new homes.

All of these conclusions, however, stem from a database limited to British people. Dr. Capra is starting to look at other databases of volunteers with other ancestries. If the links hold up, Dr. Capra hopes ancient body clocks can inspire some ideas about how we can adapt to the modern world, where circadian rhythms are disrupted by night shifts and glowing smartphones. These disruptions don’t just make it hard to get a good night’s sleep; they can also raise the risk of cancer, obesity and a host of other disorders.

Michael Dannemann, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Tartu in Estonia who was not involved in the new study, said one way to test Dr. Capra’s variants would be to engineer various human cells in the lab so that their genes were more like those of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Then scientists could grow clusters of the cells and watch them go through their daily cycles.

“This step forward not only advances our knowledge of how Neanderthal DNA influences present-day humans,” he said, “but also offers a pathway to expanding our understanding of Neanderthal biology itself.”
 
Continuing the paleo history...

A Tyrannosaur Was Found Fossilized, and So Was Its Last Meal​

A 75-million-year-old Gorgosaurus fossil is the first tyrannosaur skeleton ever found with a filled stomach.

Some 75.3 million years ago, a dinosaur swallowed the Cretaceous equivalent of a turkey drumstick. It would turn out to be the predator’s final feast.

Within days of eating that haunch, the dinosaur — a juvenile Gorgosaurus that stood 5 and a half feet tall at the hip — ended up dead in a river. By a stroke of geological luck, sediments rapidly covered much of the carcass and protected the dinosaur, and its dinner, from decay.

The resulting fossil, unveiled Friday in the journal Science Advances, is the first tyrannosaur skeleton ever found with stomach contents still preserved inside, yielding an exquisite snapshot of its feeding behavior. The fossil also preserved much of the skull, pelvis and left side of the Gorgosaurus’s body.

Gorgosauruses were ancestral relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex, but this fossil doesn’t contain a speck of the large herbivores on which adult tyrannosaurs feasted. Instead, this Gorgosaurus ripped the hind limbs off two small feathered dinosaurs. Researchers say the fossil provides the first direct evidence that tyrannosaurs changed what they ate as they aged, which paleontologists had predicted from existing fossil evidence.

“With this specimen, we have physical proof that young tyrannosaurs not only fed on different animals than their adult counterparts, but they also attacked or dissected them differently,” said François Therrien, the curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, and an author of the study.

Previously discovered coprolites — fossilized poop — and bones damaged by teeth or stomach acid show that adult tyrannosaurs feasted on large plant-eating dinosaurs such as Triceratops with bone-crunching gusto. But before they could take down megaherbivores, tyrannosaurs had to grow larger, and their skulls and teeth had to grow wide and robust enough to generate one of nature’s most powerful bites.

1702641239486.webp

Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary, left, and François Therrien, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, with the young Gorgosaurus specimen.Credit...Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

1702641307642.webp

The Gorgosaurus’s left side, with green dots indicating its rib cage and red dots indicating its prey. The larger bones are the dinosaur’s foot.Credit...Darla Zelenitsky/University of Calgary

Juvenile tyrannosaurs, however, had skinny skulls, narrow jaws, blade-like teeth and long legs. Paleontologists had interpreted these traits as signs that young tyrannosaurs must have been nimble, an idea supported by the new fossil. “I jokingly refer to them as the ballerinas of doom: fast-running, fast-turning and able to go after small, fast-running prey,” said Tom Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved with the study.

Tyrannosaurs’ ability to behave as speedy midsize predators in their youth before maturing into adult apex predators may have given the group an evolutionary edge by crowding out other predatory dinosaurs. Young tyrannosaurs’ prowess may even explain a quirk of North America’s fossil record during the late Cretaceous period: a “missing middle” predator size between heavyweight adult tyrannosaurs and a menagerie of dinosaurs no larger than humans.

“What makes sense is that these juveniles were filling that midsized predator niche,” said Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary and an author of the study. “They were the coyotes of the Cretaceous.”

The Gorgosaurus specimen was discovered in August 2008 by Darren Tanke, a technician at the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Weathering had exposed its ribs in a hillside in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. However, the lucky find came during the final 45 minutes of the museum’s 2008 field season, complicating the Gorgosaurus’s recovery. Mr. Tanke did not get it into the museum until March 2010.

As Mr. Tanke then removed excess rock from the fossil, he decided to dig deeper into the animal’s rib cage. To his shock, he uncovered several toe bones too small to belong to the Gorgosaurus, within a distinctive area later found to represent its stomach contents.

“This find will be the find of my career,” Mr. Tanke said, while reflecting on the more than 11,000 fossils he has collected for the museum. “I don’t think I could ever beat this.”

The stomach contents consist of hind limbs and a partial tail from beaked dinosaurs known as Citipes, which resembled shrunken cassowaries. Each of the two Citipes was less than a year old when eaten, and, based on the bones’ degree of acid wear, the Gorgosaurus ate them during the final week of its life, one a few days before the other. Despite stewing in the Gorgosaurus’s gastric juices, the Citipes bones are so well preserved that they are the most complete fossils of the animal ever found.

In all likelihood, this Gorgosaurus had several years left of hunting small animals before moving to bigger prey. In 2021, a team including Dr. Therrien and Dr. Zelenitsky found that Gorgosaurus could not exert higher bite forces — and take on large herbivores — until the age of 11. This dinosaur’s bones indicate that it died between the ages of 5 and 7.

Though this Gorgosaurus never graduated to the adult table, Dr. Therrien thinks there is little doubt that it fed well. “Everybody loves some drumsticks,” he said.
 
I guess there's well-off, rich and STOOPID RICH. I guess it's not just the North Fork & The South Fork getting invaded...

A Ski Resort Rebrands as Ultraexclusive, and Some Locals Feel Left Out​

The Windham Mountain Club, with $200,000 memberships, is looking to seize on the potential of luring the wealthy from New York City.

Windham Mountain, a ski resort just over two hours north of New York City, was in need of revamping. The lift lines were too long. The food and drink quality had declined.

So when word got out that a new ownership group was taking over, the change was initially welcomed.

But then the new owners, led by the founder of a national restaurant chain and a hotel group scion, unveiled a slick website that laid out their plans for an ambitious rebrand in October. Windham Mountain would now be known as the Windham Mountain Club. The resort promised skiers “a rare time in rarified air.” The club’s restaurants would receive a “gastronomique glow up.”

Memberships to access the new amenities would come at a steep price: $175,000 for those who joined right away, and $200,000 for those who waited until March. If current members, some of whom paid as little as $25,000 for their spots, did not opt in, their memberships would be terminated on May 1.

“It’s no secret that they’ve managed to alienate and, frankly, piss off a lot of people,” said Nick Bove, who owns Windham Mountain Outfitters, a local equipment store.

The changes at Windham Mountain, seemingly designed to attract wealthier clientele from New York City, typify the accelerating gentrification of the Catskills in recent years, particularly after the coronavirus pandemic led many city dwellers to move upstate.

Chip Seamans, who has been president of the mountain’s ski resort for more than a decade, said in an interview that the new owners’ initial investment had exceeded $70 million. The ownership group is led by Sandy Beall, the founder of the restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday, and Webb Wilson, an heir to the Holiday Inn fortune.

“The Catskills are hot,” said Mr. Seamans, 65. “The Catskills are happening right now. Sandy Beall and his partners saw that and wanted to be part of it.”

In September, Windham residents circulated a Change.org petition calling on town leaders to block the mountain’s transformation into a semiprivate club. Its authors hoped to prevent the town from becoming “an enclave for just a few wealthy downstate families.”

“This is a bad plan for everyone,” the petition reads.

As the ski season approached, that plan began to take shape. A popular bike park, shuttered in October, will not reopen. The mountain’s golf course will be renovated and become members-only. And a $10 million dining overhaul includes an Italian restaurant that charges $30 for spaghetti and meatballs.

Members will also face annual dues starting at $9,000 and increasing each year “as more amenities come online,” according to a frequently asked questions document distributed to existing members last month and obtained by The New York Times.

The old memberships granted access to a members-only lodge, among other perks, and had been offered for about 15 years. In recent years, the price rose to $125,000 with annual fees of $3,900, but slope access was not contingent on membership status, so there was no need to pay that premium. Many loyal Windham skiers simply relied on season passes, which cost around $1,400, and paid roughly $1,000 for locker rentals.

Season passes and lift tickets will remain available for purchase under the new plan, but the goal, according to the membership document, is to limit public access in order to ensure member priority.

There are around 1,800 ski homes in the Windham Mountain area. The plan’s detractors fear that both residents and visitors could eventually be left without access to the mountain.

“People in the town definitely feel betrayed about it,” said Gregory Santollo, 38, who has a house on the backside of the mountain. Mr. Santollo has snowboarded at Windham since he was 10 years old, but he said that if plans proceeded as advertised, he would abandon the mountain and head to Vermont.

Mr. Seamans dismissed concerns that the new owners hoped to fully privatize the resort.

“I assure people that they will be able to have access to the mountain,” he said.

For this ski season, which opened on Nov. 24, much remains unchanged except for a new rule: During peak season between January and March, skiers and snowboarders who wish to use the mountain on Saturdays must buy a two-day pass, which could cost up to $450. A single-day weekend lift ticket would have cost around $175 last year.

That presents a problem for Windham, a town that relies on so-called “weekenders” to fuel its economy.
The mountain is a short drive from New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut, giving it an advantage over ski resorts in Vermont or New Hampshire. It was also long seen as more affordable.

Mr. Bove, 58, said that almost all of the 1,700 year-round residents of Windham derive their income from activity related to the mountain. People visiting to ski or snowboard — and in the summer, hike and bike — frequent the shops and restaurants on Main Street.

“There’s no other way to look at it — Windham Mountain is the most major economic driver for this town by far,” Mr. Bove said.

Ryan Gutierrez, 44, who lives at the base of the mountain and runs a local painting business, said he doesn’t think people can complain until the plan fully unfolds. Plus, Mr. Gutierrez noted, some of the perks are already available — there wasn’t a sushi restaurant in town before, he said, and now there’s one at the lodge.

“The town is not losing out, that’s my opinion,” he said, adding that the new direction could help his business. “Nothing’s really changed, and all I hear is good things.”

But the backlash on social media to the rebrand was swift. After the club’s carefully edited Instagram posts became flooded with negative feedback, comments were turned off.

On other social platforms, the mountain’s many fans have bemoaned the looming changes to its identity as an accessible mountain. They have taken particular exception to the “rarified air” language, which has since been removed from the website.

Mr. Seamans said that the resort had not tried to “put something out that infuriates people or insults them” and that the website had been changed to reflect that.

Mr. Santollo, who met his wife in line for the ski lift at Windham Mountain and proposed to her there in 2008, said that the rebrand failed to take into account the personal connection many people felt with the mountain.

“We were offended,” Mr. Santollo said. “We all make mistakes with social media, but it was a big fail. We found it to be very disrespectful.”

Josh Fromer, a snowboarding coach and substitute teacher at a high school in Windham, grew up in nearby Hunter and said his family first moved to the area in the 1860s. He also works at an auto shop and produces local comedy nights, embodying what he described as “the hustle in a mountain town.”

Windham has slowly been changing over the years, he said, increasingly catering to city people with high salaries. But this new attempt at a luxury ski experience strikes him as a stretch.

“I’m very much the definition of a local, and I don’t quite see the appetite for this kind of thing,” said Mr. Fromer, 39. “These are not the type of people who would spend that kind of money. And if they were willing to spend that type of money to go skiing, they’d be in Verbier or Chamonix or Aspen or someplace like that.”

And while Windham has been gentrifying for years, Mr. Fromer said the town had not yet been overrun by high-end retailers and luxury amenities. He fears that the transformation of the mountain will accelerate a shift in that direction and that locals will get priced out.

“There’s not going to be five generations of families that are going to be able to justify staying up here like mine has,” he said. “As somebody who has a truly vested interest in the welfare of this community, it kind of breaks my heart and scares me, to be honest with you.”

The Catskills have been experiencing a “renaissance” for several decades now, according to Marisa Scheinfeld, a visual historian. She published “The Borscht Belt,” which illustrated the region’s transition from its heyday as a vacation destination for Jewish families in the mid-20th century to now.

But the pandemic sped up the transformation, as people began traveling north and buying real estate. Between June 2019 and May 2022, the number of houses available for sale in Greene County, which includes Windham, fell to 213 from 595, contributing to an affordable housing crisis.

“It is an American epidemic, where we hear about the next hot spot, so we go there, so the prices get jacked up,” Ms. Scheinfeld said. “It presents these dilemmas for locals who cannot afford it.”

The optimists, which include Mr. Bove, hope that the club can find a happy medium — and a way to succeed.

“Without a doubt, we would be a whole different town without Windham Mountain,” he said.
 
WhatKnot said:
Used to be a nice doable place to ski for a day trip.
Click to expand...
Still is IF you hit Megaball or Powerball.

I just don't understand why people would throw that amount of money at a mediocre ski hill at best. If they can afford to do that, they sure could head out to the Rockies or Alps and ski real mountains.

Guess it's the same mentality as the Uberrich buying megayachts that they may use for a total of 4 weeks a year...
 
Chevy1 said:
I always went to Windham over Hunter. Always was less crowded and they had night skiing
Click to expand...
I was a Hunter rat. Will never forget, one time in HS, I was asked to drive everyone in a classmate's family car up there because I was the only one in the group who could drive a shift. So I get into this Renault, IIRC, to find FOUR ON THE TREE!! That is the only fourspeed shift on the wheel I've ever encountered in my life!!
 
Roccus7 said:
Still is IF you hit Megaball or Powerball.

I just don't understand why people would throw that amount of money at a mediocre ski hill at best. If they can afford to do that, they sure could head out to the Rockies or Alps and ski real mountains.

Guess it's the same mentality as the Uberrich buying megayachts that they may use for a total of 4 weeks a year...
Click to expand...

Difference is that the uberrich charter those yachts when they're not on them.

Hmmmm,.... I wonder if it would pay to buy a membership and then rent out your spot every week. :unsure:
 
Roccus7 said:
I was a Hunter rat. Will never forget, one time in HS, I was asked to drive everyone in a classmate's family car up there because I was the only one in the group who could drive a shift. So I get into this Renault, IIRC, to find FOUR ON THE TREE!! That is the only fourspeed shift on the wheel I've ever encountered in my life!!
Click to expand...

Might have been a Peugeot
 
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