Sorry, we're not becoming post-human yet. But that is probably in the cards. One of the authors of the study, John Hawks, is an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin and a prolific blogger. He's writing a series of helpful posts to go with the scientific article, explaining everything you might want to know about accelerating evolution.

So what's changed most over the last 40,000 years? Humans' skeletal structures, skin color, teeth, disease resistance, and ability to metabolize certain foods (like milk). So if history is any guide, our entire bodily structures and phenotypes, as well as what we can eat, are still changing. With the help of a little genetic engineering, we might be six-limbed glass-eaters before you know it. Image courtesy of AFP/Getty Images.

Selection Spurred Recent Evolution [New York Times]

A company called Anacova has won an award for its new embryo-baking technology, a special stick full of "embryo environments" that gets stuck in a woman's womb for a week or so. Usually when embryos are fertilized for IVF, they live the first few cell divisions of their lives in an incubator. Apparently this lowers the quality of the embryos, so the Anacova device — which exposes embryos to the womb environment — is expected to produce higher-quality proto-humans for harvesting. That means you can add one more person to your outsourced womb list. There's the surrogate who gives you her egg, then the embryo-cooker who gives you her womb for a week or so while your embryo ripens, and then the surrogate who carries the baby to term. [Medgadget]

A new longitudinal study in Canada proves that divorce does not affect parenting skills. [Eurekalert]

A researcher in Chicago figured out that drugs regulating synaptic behavior can make fruit flies gay within hours. Apparently homosexual behavior in fruit flies is biological, but not hardwired. It's extremely unlikely that such a drug would work in humans, since our brains are so different and our sexualities much more complex. Still, a girl can dream, can't she? Christina Ricci, you will be mine! [Science Daily] Image of nanotech device courtesy of Cornell University.

According to a release from the University:

In football, a hit can easily jerk the head, for milliseconds, at 50g, and hits above 100g are common. One player in the study experienced 168g. It was previously suggested that a forces above 75g would likely result in a concussion, but these new results call into question that finding. Less than .35 percent (only one-third of one percent) of impacts greater than 80g resulted in concussions.

High tech helmets reveal new information [Eurekalert]

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• "Chimera" mice grown with livers made of human cells are the ultimate test bed for new liver drugs, say scientists. Already, bio geeks have been growing mice with human brain cells, so this liver stuff is just icing on the genetic cake. [Salk Institute]
  
• A new study shows that the more manly you are, the more likely you are to want to punish immigrants. I think this explains a lot about certain episodes of Battlestar Galactica. [Eurekalert] Why bugs love rough sex after the jump.

• Insects love violent sex, often inflicting lots of wounds during the insemination process. Now scientists know it's not because there's a sadomasochistic sex gene that we've inherited from bugs. Instead, it's because female insects need to have their immune systems activated when sperm enter them, in order to get rid of pathogens that might get inside along with all that desirable bug spunk. [Science Blog]
  
• OMG "BISPHENAL A" IS A TOTALLY FUCKING DANGEROUS CHEMICAL IN YOUR BODY HOLY CRAP HERE IS A SUPER SENSATIONALISTIC ARTICLE ABOUT IT. The headline alone is worth the click. [Knight Science Journalism Tracker]

• It's official: the Earth is getting more tropical. Global warming has expanded the tropical band around the center of the planet over the past two decades, and it looks like it will expand more over the next century. [Reuters]
• Researchers repaired major skull damage in mice using human embryonic stem cells. They grew new bone on a special tissue-engineering edifice and popped it right into the mouse skulls. So stem cells are good for something, after all. [Science Daily] Why chimps are smarter than humans and dinosaurs had hooves after the jump.

• Get humble, homo sapiens. We may have invented cars, but chimps remember numbers better than humans do in a simple memory test. [New Scientist]
  
• A sixteen-year-old dinosaur enthusiast discovered the frozen, mummified remains of a dinosaur in Montana, complete with muscle tissue and skin. That was back in 1999, and now the high-tech paleontological research is in. Turns out this dino had hooves and scales [National Geographic].
  
• In England, the National Lottery funded a psychology research study which proved that money doesn't make people happy. Not exactly the outcome the Lottery was hoping for, I'd wager. [Science Daily]

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• Massive quantities of helium were discovered leaking out of the ground in Nevada. This mysterious gas emission is even stranger because usually geologists only see this kind of thing near volcanoes. Is Nevada about to become a volcanic hellhole? [Discovery News]
• 10,000-year-old trees were discovered during a construction project on a farm in Michigan. They are among the best-preserved fossilized trees ever found, and scientsts speculate that they were crushed under the last glacier to stretch across North America. [Science Daily]
  

• A Japanese court ruled today that a grieving widow would receive compensation from Toyota because the company killed her husband with overwork. The 30-year-old man died after working 60 hours/week for a month, and then 70 hours/week for an additional month. In Japanese, there is a word for death from overwork: karōshi. [Autoblog]
  
• Scientists have just announced a "map of genetic aging" in mice. The map shows a series of genes whose behavior changes as the mice age. Since human and mouse genomes are fairly similar, researchers hope to use this map to find similar "aging genes" in humans, and perhaps tinker with those genes to reverse the aging process. [PLoS Genetics]
  
• If you're thinking of getting a genetic test, think again. Most experts say the tests are a total waste of money and tell us next to nothing. Even though there are more and more genetic tests every day, they aren't getting any more accurate or reliable. [Reuters]
  

• Turns out the time-honored "dudes fighting over a lady" thing isn't really that common outside the human world. If you look at how most species behave in nature, often the ladies are fighting to the death to get a few ounces of precious sperm. A new study looks at how lionesses and female antelopes go into sexual frenzies and fight each other for the right to get with males. [LiveScience]
• Now you can make cash if you save the forest. At least, that's the promise that's luring a lot of countries to the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference, where everybody is trying to go green but still rake in the same amount of dough they'd get from filling the atmosphere with carbon. [Eurekalert] Hot pix of Venus and why you are stupid after the jump.
• Yes, Venus has lightning. Why is that such big news? Oh right, it's the pictures. [Space.com]
  
• People are living way too long, and that's screwing up everybody's pension plans. A recent British study showed that dying younger is better for retirement. [Eurekalert]
  
• Apparently you're stupid not just because your parents are. Maybe it was your environment that made you dumb. New Scientist reports on several findings that show there is no one "intelligence gene" that determines whether you'll get that Ph.D. or not. In fact, even people with genes that indicate potential intelligence can be ground down into dumbasses through exposure to toxins or bad teachers. [New Scientist] AP Photo by Don Ryan.

• Scientists can now ogle my breasts from the inside-out and in 3D. A new technique called "stereoscopic digital mammography" lets researchers image breasts more accurately to check for cancer or gestating alien beings. Sounds almost as good as the 3D boobs in Beowulf. [RSNA]
• Good news! Humans are going to Mars! NASA has a plan to do it . . . at least, you know, sometime in the next century [BBC News]. Populating the solar system may take just as long as it took our distant ancestors to cross the Bering Strait from Siberia . . . after the jump.
• New genetic evidence suggests that people arrived in the Americas about 12,000 years ago from Siberia, in a single mass migration. One big clue: there is apparently a genetic mutation that is shared by most native Americans that shows up in only one other place, and that's Siberia. Pretty cool genetic anthropology sleuthing! [PLoS Genetics]
• Weirdos at the Indiana School of Medicine have determined through careful study that we release a quart of gas a day via burping. WTF? Can you even have a quart of gas? I thought quarts were for liquid. OK that is just gross. [LiveScience]

• General Electric is investing in artificial spinal discs that could replace parts of your diseased backbone. The springy metal discs are inserted directly into your spine and use a bearing to create motion. [Spinal Motion]
• Apparently brain surgeries aren't going very well in Rhode Island, where doctors have operated on the wrong side of people's brains three times this year. [WSJ] After the break, a gene that kills cancer cells and Washington's nuclear waste.
• Cancer-resistant mice have been created who won't grow tumors even when bathed in radiation. The secret? A gene that stops cancer in its tracks. Could a human version of the gene be next? [Science Daily]
  
• What has happened to the millions of gallons of toxic waste stored underground near Hanaford in Washington State? Apparently nobody thought to check until a bunch of scientists wondered the same thing. Find out what horrors they discovered. [Eurekalert]
  
• Viruses are getting nastier. A new strain of the common cold virus is causing severe pneumonia and has already killed 10 people. Time to start wearing those surgical face masks everywhere you go! [New Scientist]

• Heat emitted by smokestacks belching gloop could be harvested for thermal energy. Apparently there are nearly 50 thousand smokestacks in the United States alone whose emissions are hot enough to produce 50,000 megawatts of power. [Worldchanging]
  
  
• A University of Minnesota researcher has proven that materialism in young people is connected to low self-esteem. Apparently kids want to buy stuff more when they're going through puberty because they hate themselves. [Eurekalert]
  
  Who's afraid of nanotech after the jump.

• Apparently people haven't been reading enough science fiction about gray goo because a recent national study shows that nobody is worried about nanotechnology except egghead scientists. Maybe molecular machines that can rewrite our DNA are just too small to worry about? [Science blog]
• It turns out that people can understand each other even if they don't understand themselves. A recent study of brain-damaged people with no sense of their own identities could still put themselves in other people's shoes. Apparently this completely messes up anthropologists' theories of how self-consciousness developed in humans. [John Hawks Anthropology Blog]

• Wind power may not be a clean energy source of the future after all. Though Sweden has just built a massive wind farm at sea, most countries have found wind an inefficient and unreliable energy source. [New York Times]
  
  Why brain damage is okay and MySpace experiences white flight after the jump.

• Just because you're brain damaged and lose a huge part of your memory, it doesn't mean you don't care. A study published today shows that people with profound memory loss can still empathize with other people and figure out what they are feeling. In other words, you don't need specific memories of your life in order to have social skills. So that whole subplot about the hot, romantic amnesiac on Gray's Anatomy is based in scientific fact, OK? [Scienceblog]
  
• Apparently, your race and parents' educational background are the main things that determine whether you'll join MySpace. Researchers at Northwestern found that Latinos prefer MySpace, as do the children of people with less than a high school education. White kids whose parents went to college prefer Facebook. Could mass social network abandonment for Facebook be the white flight of the future? [Northwestern University]
  
• Mars doubled in brightness over the past month, and backyard astronomers are taking pictures of its blue-white polor ice caps. Meanwhile, it turns out the sun may be smaller than we thought. [NASA and New Scientist]

• A bunch of researchers say they can turn any cell into a stem cell. There's always a big problem with stem cells, despite their potential to regrow brains and stuff, because they're harvested from human embryos. That's why the Bush Administration outlawed making them for a while. But if these researchers are right, researchers could harvest stem cells from a cheek swab and sidestep a lot of moral gray areas.
  
  Grow an electronic nose after the jump.

• Are you missing a nose? Perhaps you just want to replace the one you have because it's always running, snoring, or stuffy. Now you can get rid of it and replace it with a nano-wire-enabled electronic nose that does your smelling for you.
  
• Behold the giant claw of the undersea scorpion who apparently was considerably larger than a human. Of course it's about 390,000,000 years old. Way before our time.
  
• Most people believe that suicide rates go up over the holidays. But, according to a new study, that's a myth perpetuated by the media every year around this time. Apparently you're no more likely to off yourself during T-Day than at any other time when you're surrounded by drunken relatives eating tofurky.