Herpes virus confirms ancient human 'out-of-Africa' migration saga

Washington: A new study of the full genetic code of a common human virus has offered proof of the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration, which earlier had been documented by anthropologists and studies of the human genome. 

Senior author Curtis Brandt, a professor of medical microbiology and ophthalmology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said that the virus under study, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), usually causes nothing more severe than cold sores around the mouth. 

Brandt said that the virus under study, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), usually causes nothing more severe than cold sores around the mouth. 

Brandt and co-authors Aaron Kolb and Cecile Ane compared 31 strains of HSV-1 collected in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, and the result was fairly stunning. 

He said that the viral strains sort exactly as you would predict based on sequencing of human genomes. 

Brandt asserted that they found that all of the African isolates cluster together, all the virus from the Far East, Korea, Japan, China clustered together, all the viruses in Europe and America, with one exception, clustered together. 

He said that what they found follows exactly what the anthropologists have said, and the molecular geneticists who have analyzed the human genome have said, about where humans originated and how they spread across the planet. 

Brandt said that the researchers broke the HSV-1 genome into 26 pieces, made family trees for each piece and then combined each of the trees into one network tree of the whole genome. 

The study has been published online in the journal PLOS ONE. 

Utah scout leaders who toppled ancient rock: 'We did something right the wrong way'

Under fire from the Boy Scouts of America and under investigation by law enforcement, two Utah troop leaders who taped themselves gleefully toppling a boulder from a Jurassic-era rock formation in a state park said Friday they should have been more hands-off.

Glenn Taylor and Dave Hall told NBC News that they acted with good intentions, pushing the massive rock before it could fall on its own and hurt someone, but now wish they had just alerted a ranger.

"We did something right the wrong way," Taylor said.

Taylor and Hall, who were on a trip to Goblin Valley State Park with eight Boy Scouts, recorded the moment they dislodged the rock from the spot it had been perched for 170 million years.

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The video, which was posted to YouTube by the Salt Lake Tribune, shows them cheering and high-fiving, crowing that they had saved lives. Taylor struck a pro-wrestling strongman pose and Hall sang the 1990 dance-party hit, "Wiggle It — Just a Little Bit."

“We have now modified Goblin Valley,” Hall declared on the video.

The footage brought a scolding from the Boy Scouts of America, which has a "Leave No Trace" policy for outdoors activities.

“We are shocked and disappointed by this reprehensible behavior," Deron Smith, a spokesman for the venerable scouting group, said in a statement on Friday.

"The isolated actions of these individuals are absolutely counter to our beliefs and what we teach," Smith said. "We are reviewing this matter and will take appropriate action.”

The Emery County Attorney's office is looking into possible criminal charges against the duo, although the state Attorney General's Office has decided not to intervene.

The longtime scout leaders were aghast that they could face a felony charge for their antics, and said the act was not malicious in any way, although an "adrenaline rush" may have made it look that way.

They said they were just enjoying a day of their young charges climbing over the rock formations, which is permitted under park rules.

"We came across this two- to three-thousand-pound boulder that was resting on about an inch-and-a-half-thick, razor-thin ledge of dirt," Hall said.

"Upon putting a little pressure on it, you could see that it was moving and just then a couple of families walked up right below that rock and went around it…and stopped for a family photo.

"And the thought that went through our minds was if this would have fallen while they were coming up that valley, up that very well-used walkway, numerous fatalities would have happened."

In retrospect, they say, they should have just told a ranger of the hazard.

Instead, Taylor went up to the rock "and with one arm put a little bit of pressure on that [and] it went right over," said Hall, who acted as cameraman.

Taylor admitted they were amped up by the sight, but said it wasn't done for kicks.

"It was spectacular to watch something like that," he said. "It was not 'let's go tear Goblin Valley down.'"

Hall said one of the scouts they were watching could easily have knocked over the boulder by accident.

"I wonder if we just jumped on the rock and it fell, would this be a felony?" he said.

But park officials said the pair were out of line.

“This is not behavior that is appreciated or should exist in state parks,” Eugene Swalberg, a spokesman for the park system, told the Deseret News.

“This has been formed for literally millions of years, and it’s supposed to last for a long time. It doesn’t need individuals doing the work of Mother Nature.”

China Smog Photos Show How Bad Its Air Pollution Problem Has Become

China has a serious smog problem. So much so that the northern city of Harbin, home to about 11 million people, was forced to cancel classes, close down the airport and suspend certain bus routes Monday.

According to The Associated Press, fine particulate matter readings taken in Harbin indicate that air pollution in the area is 40 times higher than the international safety standard set by the World Health Organization.

While visibility in the capital of the Heilongjiang province was less than 50 meters (164 feet), Harbin was not the only city in the region affected by smog. In the southeastern city of Shenyang, some 300 miles from Harbin, a heavy haze partially obscured a 75-story skyscraper from view. (Head over to The Daily Beast to see a comparison to a normal view of the landmark.)

Air pollution has been an ongoing problem in the country, with thick and heavy smog often forcing local governments to suspend transportation services and shutter businesses. Earlier this month, China announced that it would offer millions in rewards to regions that could successfully reduce air pollution levels.

See photos that illustrate the extent of air pollution in Harbin in the series (courtesy of Getty) below.

First Take: Investors are binging on Netflix as the new HBO

SAN FRANCISCO — Orange is the New Black may have helped make Netflix the new HBO with investors.

Netflix's on Monday reported a U.S. paid subscriber leap that puts the streaming service squarely ahead of Time Warner's HBO, according to analyst estimates.

The advances by Netflix spotlight a winning formula around original programming to attract new membership. Original titles such as Orange is the New Black and its Emmy-winning House of Cards were big attractions for subscribers. Binge viewing of such series titles have turned Netflix into a hits maker for a new generation.

"We went to a second season of Orange Is the New Black early because we had seen all 13 episodes (and) were highly confident in the forecast models and the quality of the show," Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said on a conference call.

Netflix's U.S. paid subscribers jumped to 29.9 million in the third quarter, up from 28.6 million in June, passing HBO's 28.7 million, according to market researcher SNL Kagan

Wall Street investors applauded Netflix's programming results. Shares of Netflix rocketed 10%, at $391.39, in after-hours trading on the news.

Overall membership at Netflix soared in the quarter from a year ago. Netflix reported a more than 33% jump in members from a year ago, at 40 million compared with less than 30 million in the prior period.

"I think Orange was a great success for us," Netflix CEO and founder Reed Hastings said on the call. "We're trying to do more great content like Orange."

Netflix quarterly results beat estimates, top to bottom, according to a survey of forecasts from Thomson Reuters. Company net income popped 315%, at $31.8 million, compared with a year ago. Revenue nudged past estimates by $6 million on just over $1.1 billion in the quarter. Earnings per share of 52 cents beat analyst forecasts for 49 cents in the period.

Netflix's international audience jumped by 1.4 million new members from a year ago, driven by Nordic and Netherlands expansion efforts, the company said.

Pollen Study Points to Culprit in Bronze Era Mystery

TEL AVIV — More than 3,200 years ago, life was abuzz in and around what is now this modern-day Israeli metropolis on the shimmering Mediterranean shore.

To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all.

Yet within 150 years, according to experts, the old world lay in ruins.

Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause.

In a study published Monday in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, researchers say it was drought that led to the collapse in the ancient southern Levant.

Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and a earthquakes. But while climate change has long been considered a prime factor, only recently have advances in science given researchers the chance to pinpoint the cause and make the case.

The journal of The Institute of Archaeology reports that an unusually high-resolution analysis of pollen grains taken from sediment beneath the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea, backed up by a robust chronology of radiocarbon dating, have pinpointed the period of crisis to the years 1250 to 1100 B.C.

Unlike studies examining longer-term processes that may require a pollen analysis of strata 500 years apart, this pollen count was done at intervals of 40 years — the highest resolution yet in this region, said Prof. Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

He added that the uniqueness of the study also lay in the combination of precise science and archaeological and historical analysis, offering the fullest picture yet of the collapse of civilization in this area at the end of the Bronze Age.

“Egypt is gone. Forever,” said Professor Finkelstein. “It never got back to that level of prosperity again.”

The first recorded hint of trouble in the north came in the mid-13th century, according to the study, when a Hittite queen wrote to Ramses II, saying, “I have no grain in my lands.”

Several years ago, Professor Finkelstein and Prof. Steve Weiner of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science received a grant from the European Research Council to conduct research aimed at reconstructing ancient Israel. The project consists of 10 tracks including ancient DNA and molecular archaeology — an effort to identify what 3,000-year-old ceramic vessels might have contained.

For the climate change part of the project, Professor Finkelstein joined forces with Dafna Langgut, a palynologist — or pollen researcher — at Tel Aviv University, and Professor Thomas Litt of the Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Paleontology at the University of Bonn in Germany.

Recent studies of pollen grains conducted by experts in southeast Anatolia, Cyprus, along the northern coast of Syria and the Nile Delta came up with similar results, though with less control over the chronology, indicating that the crisis was regional.

Dr. Langgut described in an interview how the team extracted about 60 feet of cores of gray muddy sediment from the center of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, passing through 1,000 feet of water and drilling 65 feet into the lake bed, covering the last 9,000 years. At Wadi Zeelim in the southern Judean Desert, on the western margins of the Dead Sea, the team manually extracted eight cores of sediment, each about 20 inches long.

“We carried them on our backs,” Dr. Langgut said.

Pollen grains are one of the most durable organic materials in nature, she said, best preserved in lakes and deserts and lasting thousands of years. Each plant produces its own distinct pollen form, like a fingerprint. Extracting and analyzing the pollen grains from each stratum allows researchers to identify the vegetation that grew in the area and to reconstruct climate changes.

The laboratory work was carried out partly at Bonn University and partly in Tel Aviv. To obtain the most precise results possible, Professor Finkelstein instructed the Tel Aviv scientists to focus on the period of 3,500 B.C. to 500 B.C. and analyze samples at intervals of 40 years. The process began in 2010 and took three years.

The results showed a sharp decrease in the Late Bronze Age of Mediterranean trees like oaks, pines and carobs, and in the local cultivation of olive trees, which the experts interpret as the consequence of repeated periods of drought.

The study also draws on a case study by Prof. Ronnie Ellenblum, a geographer and historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of another regional collapse 2,000 years later to explain why, unlike in the steppe regions, a decrease in precipitation would have such a destructive effect on established city-states in green areas like Megiddo. The droughts were likely exacerbated by cold spells, the study said, causing famine and the movement of marauders from north to south.

After the devastation came a wet period of recovery and resettlement, according to the experts — a new order that gave rise to the kingdoms of biblical times.

“Understanding climate is key to understanding history,” said Professor Finkelstein, a co-author of “The Bible Unearthed,” a book published in 2001 that viewed the Bible as a national epic and a product of the human imagination. Taking issue with traditional efforts to use archaeology to verify the historicity of the biblical record, the authors promoted archaeology as a means of reconstructing the history of ancient Israel.

But biblical stories like Joseph’s interpretation of the pharaoh’s dream about seven fat cows being eaten by seven gaunt cows, signifying a period of abundance followed by famine, he said, “reflects the idea that climate is not stable.”

He added, “The authors of the Bible knew very well the value of precipitation and the calamity that may be inflicted on people by drought.”

Message from France to U.S.: Stop intercepting our phone calls

London (CNN) -- French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met Tuesday morning with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss allegations that the National Security Agency intercepted more than 70 million phone calls in France over a 30-day period.

Fabius called the practice unacceptable and told Kerry that it must stop, the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The pair also discussed the situation in Syria ahead of a "Friends of Syria" meeting that's taking place in London on Tuesday.

The top diplomats huddled a day after the details of the alleged spying appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde.

U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande spoke Monday on the matter, according to a White House statement.

"The President and President Hollande discussed recent disclosures in the press -- some of which have distorted our activities and some of which raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed," the statement said. "The President made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share."

A news release from Hollande's office said he expressed his "deep disapproval with regard to these practices" to Obama and that such alleged activities would be unacceptable between allies and friends.

The two presidents agreed that French and American intelligence services will cooperate on investigating the report.

Intercepting millions of calls

The NSA monitored the phone calls made in France, Le Monde reported Monday, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The intercepts took place from December 10, 2012, to January 8, 2013, the article reported. An NSA graph shows an average of 3 million data intercepts a day.

According to Le Monde, this is how the system worked: "When a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS (text) messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target -- or the meta-data."

It wasn't immediately clear from the article if the conversations were recorded or just the data surrounding each call.

Other spying allegations

The report follows weekend article in the German news magazine Der Spiegel that said the NSA "systematically" eavesdropped on the Mexican government. It hacked the public e-mail account of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, which was also used by Cabinet members, according to Der Spiegel.

The magazine also quoted documents leaked by Snowden.

"This practice is unacceptable, illegitimate and against Mexican and international law," Mexico's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

It added that it would push for a speedy investigation.

"In a relationship between neighbors and partners, there is no room for the practices alleged to have taken place," the ministry said.

A senior U.S. State Department official told CNN that the Mexican government reached out about the report and that the two governments will be discussing it via diplomatic channels.

In September, Mexico and Brazil summoned U.S. ambassadors after media reports that the United States had spied on their countries' presidents. Those reports were also based on documents leaked by Snowden.

In race to launch insurance sites, states that started small win out

The federal health-insurance website may have tripped going out of the gate, but most of the state-run exchanges aren’t doing much better. Only some thousands of people have managed to sign up on any one website, and several have shut down more than once for a tune-up and a reboot.

Ironically, states that started out with the smallest ambitions seem to have led the pack.

Kentucky, with its slimmed-down exchange and small population to serve, and Washington, with its emphasis on window-shopping before getting out the wallet, may have enrolled more people — faster — than states like Maryland, which tried to emulate the federal do-it-all-at-once approach, experts say.

Brett Graham, a former insurance executive who directs Leavitt Partners’ health-insurance exchange practice, likens it to building a house.

“If you are building a house and you want to occupy it by a certain date, you have to have the plumbing and electricity done,” says Graham, whose company consults on private health exchanges.

“But if you choose not to finish the basement or you choose not the finish the deck or not to have the yard done … you will still be able to have shelter.”

Leaving off those extras appears to have worked for Kentucky, where officials say they've enrolled more than 15,000 people on the exchange, and Washington, which reports 30,000. Maryland, meantime, reports 16,000 people have filled out applications online but only 1,100 or so actually have enrolled. Maryland has about 800,000 people without health insurance, compared to Kentucky’s 650,000.

Logins create logjams in many states

“Many of the state websites, though not all, elected to simplify the process and allow you to shop without creating a login and submitting all your personal information,” says Caroline Pearson, a health reform expert at consulting firm Avalere Health.

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington all let users skip the login. Maryland and Washington, D.C., appear to have been bogged down at least in part by making users create a login identity. Only 164 people in Washington D.C. had managed to actually buy insurance online as of the last report. 

But even those states have had trouble. Covered California, the state’s health-insurance program, was taken down for work over the weekend. State officials said 16,000 Californians had completed applications online in the first five days but they’ve stopped reporting numbers now.

Most states have stopped, in fact. Connecticut offered daily updates until Oct. 11, when it said 1,443 people had signed up for private insurance and 1,544 had been directed to Medicaid. Minnesota’s state-run health-insurance exchange reported last week that about 5,600 households had completed applications for coverage in its first two weeks.

It’s not necessarily easy to make a state-by-state comparison of who has actually managed to enroll because each state reports it differently. The federal government is not reporting at all until November, officials said.

Actual enrollment figures will have to wait

Insurance industry sources say some states are not planning to send applications to the companies until Nov. 1, meaning it’s not clear how many of those applications are complete and will actually go through.

According to the Advisory Board Company, 134,801 customers had applied at 15 state-run exchanges as of Oct. 16 and 48,457 people had actually managed to enroll in a plan. The federal government is counting on getting 7 million signed up by the end of next year.

There’s time: People don’t have to sign up until Dec. 15 if they want insurance starting on the very first day possible, Jan. 1. And they have until March 31 to enroll for 2014.

The federal government has been stuck completely running or at least helping to run the health-insurance marketplaces in 36 states. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., are running their own.

“There is a high variability in the overall sophistication and searchability of the state websites,” Pearson says. Some let users see right away if a particular prescription drug is covered by a certain plan; others have left that off. “Whether you can see if your physician is part of the network was supposed to be part of the state exchanges, but they can add that later,” Pearson says.

Nevada, she says, has a “sophisticated” option for searching for drugs. But any site would find it easy to add a link to a formulary — a list of covered prescriptions.

Some states are taking a relaxed approach. Hawaii’s online site didn’t even go up until Oct. 15. Before that, people could sign up by phone or in person, as President Obama has urged users of the federal websites to do if they are in a hurry.

And Delaware didn’t seem even a little bit embarrassed to introduce its first successful customer, 59-year-old Janice Baker of Selbyville, two weeks after the exchanges opened.