Tracing the identity of the first toolmakers

Who were the first toolmakers? For years, scientists pondering which hominid species were capable of making tools have relied on a simple test based on anatomical traits in the human thumb. Now new work reported at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in St. Louis suggests that data from the whole hand are needed to identify toolmakers--and that the human hand was evolving to accommodate tool use as far back as 3.3 million years ago.

Did birds sail through the K-T extinction with flying colors?

By now, everyone knows of the giant asteroid that slaughtered the dinosaurs at the end of Cretaceous—but did the extinction really wipe out thousands of terrestrial animals? Not according to a new study of the genes in modern birds. The molecular study on page 1109 of this week's issue of Science suggests that many bird lineages (including those of penguins, parrots, and chickens) arose before the extinction and flew through it unscathed.

DNA computing

DNA computation is a novel and exciting recent development at the interface of computer science and molecular biology. We describe the current activity in this field following the seminal work of Adleman, who recently showed how techniques of molecular biology may be applied to the solution of a computationally intractable problem.