On July 11, public celebrations will mark the 800th anniversary of the completion of London Bridge. Now, a new study at the University of Leicester has uncovered a tale of corruption, mismanagement, financial crisis and a property crash that resulted in the downfall of the Old London Bridge -- the capital’s last ‘living bridge’.

The research, which is due to be published in the London Journal, provides a stark warning from history as plans are discussed for a new ‘inhabited’ London Bridge – between Waterloo and Blackfriars – with luxury flats, shops and restaurants. London Mayor Boris Johnson has revived plans for the £80m scheme.

But doctoral research conducted by Mark Latham at the University of Leicester’s Centre for Urban History discovered the houses built on the Old London Bridge to attract the gentry didn’t have the pulling power as expected. This combined with an economic slump and other factors to ensure that the grand vision of an inhabited bridge across the Thames was not sustainable.

“Old London Bridge is familiar to many of us in the form of the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is fallen down”, said Mr Latham, “but what is not generally known is why commerce and housing on the bridge did collapse.

“It was previously assumed by historians that the removal of the structures from the Bridge was part of a more general movement within the Corporation of London to “improve” the City via a series of infrastructure projects. However it is clear from my research that a far more complex and intriguing set of factors were at play.”

The removal of the houses and shops from Old London Bridge occurred in 1756. Mr Latham’s study has examined why.

He said: “I am fascinated by the question of why the houses were removed from the Bridge as in medieval times they were viewed as one of London’s great attractions, and the rental income from the houses on the Bridge, alongside others within the City of London, financed the maintenance of the structure.

“What I discovered was that the organisation that managed the bridge at that time was plagued with incompetent management and corruption. Both workmen and their managers charged inflated prices for materials and labour, the management left rents uncollected, and on several occasions the workmen were found to have deliberately and almost fatally damaged the Bridge in order to charge for its repair.

“Furthermore, managers often paid for improvements to their own houses out of the coffers of the Trust running the Bridge.”

Problems were compounded by a “highly risky, costly and poorly timed project” undertaken in the teeth of a credit crisis to construct a series of gentrified houses on the Bridge in the belief that such houses would prove attractive to middle class Londoners and increase the organisation’s rental income. However, the authorities had grossly miscalculated the demand for such properties and the houses attracted only a handful of tenants.

A London wide property crash ensued and soon the Trust running the bridge was haemorrhaging income, the maintenance budget for the Bridge itself was being squeezed and so the vacant houses on the Bridge began to rapidly fall into a state of dangerous disrepair. London Bridge was indeed close to being “fallen down”, said Mr Latham.

“At this point reality dawned on the members of the Trust, and they faced up to the fact that it was no longer financially viable to maintain structures on the Bridge, and by the early 1755 they had begun to petition Parliament in a desperate plea for the money to fund their demolition.”

One further interesting insight from the study is that the removal of the houses and businesses from the Bridge marks a break from London’s medieval past.

Said Mr Latham: “The renovation of the Bridge in the mid eighteenth century was such an important event in the history of London as in many ways the demolition of these characterful medieval houses and the subsequent transformation of the Bridge into the type of bland utilitarian functional structure - very similar to the London Bridge we see today - represents a rupture with London’s medieval past and can be taken as symbolic of London’s emergent modernity.”

Researchers from the University of Southampton have drawn together 200 years' worth of oceanographic knowledge to investigate the distribution of a notorious deep-sea giant - the king crab. The results, published this week in the Journal of Biogeography, reveal temperature as a driving force behind the divergence of a major seafloor predator; globally, and over tens of millions of years of Earth's history.

In deep seas all over the world, around 100 species of king crabs live largely undiscovered. The fraction that have been found includes some weird and wonderful examples - Paralomis seagrantii has its eight walking legs and claws entirely covered in long fur-like setae; while related group Lithodes megacanthus grows to lengths of 1.5 metres, and has 15-20-cm long defensive spines covering its body. At temperatures of around 1- 4ºC, these crabs thrive in some of the colder waters on Earth; living and growing very slowly, probably to very old ages. Only in the cooler water towards the poles are king crabs found near the water surface - though temperatures found around some parts of the Antarctic (below 1ºC) are too extreme for their survival.

A paper, published 15 years ago in Nature is thought to show that king crabs evolved from shell-bound hermit crabs - similar to the familiar shoreline animals. Soft-bodied, but shell-free intermediate forms are found only in the shallow waters off Japan, Alaska, and Western Canada.

By looking at 200 years' worth of records from scientific cruises and museum collections, Sally Hall and Dr Sven Thatje from the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton discovered that the soft-bodied forms can live at temperatures about ten degrees higher than the hard-bodied forms, but that both groups can only reproduce when temperature is between 1ºC up to 13-15ºC.

"It seems that most shallow-water representatives of this family are trapped in the coastal regions of the North Pacific because the higher sea surface temperatures further south prevent them from reproducing successfully and spreading," said Dr Thatje.

In order to leave this geographic bottleneck and spread around the world, the shallow water ancestors of current deep-sea groups had to go deep and adapt to the challenges of life in the deep sea. The process of adaptation to constant low temperatures (1-4ºC) prevailing in the deep sea seems to have narrowed the temperature tolerance range of the crabs where they have emerged to the surface waters in the Southern Hemisphere. With differences of only a couple of degrees in temperature affecting the distribution of the king crab, it is difficult to predict the consequences of range expansion in the warming waters around the Antarctic Peninsular region.

King crabs are of great commercial value, and fisheries are established in high latitude regions of both hemispheres. "Understanding their evolutionary history and ecology is key to supporting sustainable fisheries of these creatures," said research student Sally Hall. She adds: "Recent range extensions of king crabs into Antarctica, as well as that of the red king crab Paralithodes camtchaticus in the Barents Sea and along the coast off Norway emphasise the responsiveness of this group to rapid climate change."

This study reveals temperature as a driving force behind the speciation and radiation of a major seafloor predator globally and over tens of millions of years of Earth's history.

The study has been supported by the National Environment Research Council (UK) through a PhD studentship to Sally Hall, and a Research Grant from the Royal Society awarded to Dr Thatje.

Suspending a life in time is a theme that normally finds itself in the pages of science fiction, but now such ideas have become a reality in the annals of science.

Cornell ecologist Nelson Hairston Jr. is a pioneer in a field known loosely as "resurrection ecology," in which researchers study the eggs of such creatures as zooplankton -- tiny, free-floating water animals -- that get buried in lake sediments and can remain viable for decades or even centuries. By hatching these eggs, Hairston and others can compare time-suspended hatchlings with their more contemporary counterparts to better understand how a species may have evolved in the meantime.

The researchers take sediment cores from lake floors to extract the eggs; the deeper the egg lies in the core, the older it is. They then place the eggs in optimal hatching conditions, such as those found in spring in a temperate lake, and let nature take its course.

"We can resurrect them and discover what life was like in the past," said Hairston, who came to Cornell in 1985 and is a professor and chair of Cornell's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. "Paleo-ecologists study microfossils, but you can't understand much physiologically or behaviorally" with that approach, he said.

Hairston first became interested in the possibilities of studying dormant eggs in the late 1970s, when he was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of Rhode Island. There, he noticed that the little red crustaceans -- known as copepods -- in the pristine lake behind his Rhode Island home disappeared in the summer, only to return as larvae in the fall.

The observation prompted him to study why they disappear, research that revealed the copepods stay active under the ice in the winter, but they die out as their eggs lie dormant on the lake floor through the summer when the lake's fish are most active. When the fish become less active in the fall, larvae hatch from the eggs, and the copepods continue their life cycle.

This time suspension, where zooplankton pause their life cycles to avoid heavy predation or harsh seasonal and environmental conditions, also increases a species' local gene pool, with up to a century's worth of genetic material stored in a lake bed, Hairston said. When insects, nesting fish and boat anchors stir the mud, they can release old eggs that hatch and offer a wider variety of genetic material to the contemporary population.

In 1999 Hairston and colleagues published a paper in Nature that described how 40-year-old resurrected eggs could answer whether tiny crustaceans called Daphnia in central Europe's Lake Constance had evolved to survive rising levels of toxic cyanobacteria, known as blue-green algae. In the 1970s, phosphorus levels from pollution rose in the lake, increasing the numbers of cyanobacteria. The researchers hatched eggs from the 1960s and found they could not survive the toxic lake conditions, but Daphnia from the 1970s had adapted and survived.

Hairston and colleagues have organized a resurrection ecology symposium in September 2009, in Herzberg, Switzerland, to bring together researchers in this growing new field.

A new way to classify sounds in some human languages may solve a problem that has plagued linguists for nearly 100 years--how to accurately describe click sounds distinct to certain African languages.

Cornell University professor Amanda Miller and her colleagues recently used new high-speed, ultrasound imaging of the human tongue to precisely categorize sounds produced by the N|uu language speakers of southern Africa's Kalahari Desert. The research potentially could change how linguists describe "click languages" and help speech scientists understand the physics of speech production.

The African languages studied by Miller use a series of consonants called "clicks" which are unlike most consonants in that they are produced with air going into the mouth rather than out. The N|uu clicks, produced using both the front and back of the tongue, are difficult to characterize.

"When we say 'k' or 't,' the sound is produced by air breathing out of our lungs," said Miller. "But click sounds are produced by breathing in and creating suction within a cavity formed between the front and back parts of the tongue. While linguists knew this, most didn't want to accept it was something people controlled." So they loosely classified these click consonants using imprecise groupings.

"For nearly a century, some of these sounds fell into an imprecise catch-all category that included every type of modification ever reported in a click language," said Miller. "The movements of the tongue at the front of the mouth were quite accurately classified. But tongue movements at the back part of the mouth were not classified properly."

The reason was that prior tools were either too large to carry to fieldwork situations in Southern Africa, or too unsafe. Ultrasound imaging changed that by allowing Miller's research team to use safer, faster, non-invasive technology in the field to view the back part of the tongue.

Early ultrasound tools captured images only at about 30 frames per second, and thus are not able to keep up with the tongue's speed in fast sounds like clicks. The new ultrasound imaging tool is capable of capturing more than 125 frames per second, producing clearer images.

Miller and her colleagues used the high-speed ultrasound imaging to group the clicks more accurately. Her colleagues included Johanna Brugman, Cornell University; Bonny Sands, Northern Arizona University; Levi Namaseb, The University of Namibia; Mats Exter, University of Cologne; and Chris Collins, New York University.

"We wanted to classify clicks in the same way we classify other consonants," said Miller, who was a visiting faculty member at the University of British Columbia during the 2008-2009 academic year. "We think we've been pretty successful in doing that."

N|uu is severely endangered with fewer than 10 remaining speakers, all of whom are more than 60 years of age. Linguists are working diligently to document the unique aspects of this language before it disappears.

She explains her findings in the online version of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association posted on July 10. The National Science Foundation supports the research.

Paleontologists have made the most important discovery to date at the Arlington Archosaur Site, a prolific fossil site in North Arlington, Texas. The disassembled skull of a crocodile with two and a half inch long teeth that lived nearly 100 million years ago has been unearthed.

"We have over 50 bones exposed," said The University of Texas at Arlington dinosaurs lecturer Derek Main, who heads the project. "They are truly impressive. The teeth measure 6.5 centimeters, larger than my thumb."

To date, more dinosaur fossils have been recovered from the Arlington Archosaur Site, where excavation began little more than a year ago, than from any other site in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The site lies within Cretaceous rocks, formed 95 million years ago when Arlington was the beachhead for a giant sea that divided the continent.

The site has yielded fossils from various species of animals, including dinosaurs. A skeleton of a large herbivorous "duck billed" dinosaur was excavated from the northern hillside at the site. Crocodile fossils are among the most commonly found.

Main said the site is unique because it is a major dinosaur excavation in the middle of a large metropolitan setting and it preserves many fossils from different animals. he site also has fossils from turtles, lungfish, fish and sharks. The excavation of the Arlington Archosaur Site began in the spring of 2008 when the Huffines Group obtained the property and granted land access to UT Arlington.

In the French cave of Arago, an international team of scientists has analyzed the dental wear of the fossils of herbivorous animals hunted by Homo heidelbergensis. It is the first time that an analytical method has allowed the establishment of the length of human occupations at archaeological sites. The key is the last food that these hominids consumed.

For many years, the mobility of the groups of hominids and how long they spent in caves or outdoors has been a subject of discussion among scientists. Now, an international team headed by researchers from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) in Tarragona has based its studies on the dental fossils of animals hunted by hominids in order to determine the vegetation in the environment and the way of life of Homo heidelbergensis.

Florent Rivals is the main author and a researcher from the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), attached to the IPHES in Tarragona. "For the first time, a method has been put forward which allows us to establish the relative length of the human occupations at archaeological sites as, up until now, it was difficult to ascertain the difference between, for example, a single long-term occupation and a succession of shorter seasonal occupations in the same place", he explained to SINC.

In the study, recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution, the researchers analyze the dental wear of the ungulates (herbivorous mammals) caused by microscopic particles of opaline silica in plants. These marks appear when eating takes place and erase the previous ones. This is why they are so useful.

Thanks to the "last supper phenomenon", the scientists have been able to analyze the last food consumed by animals such as the Eurasian wild horse (Equus ferus), the mouflon (Ovis ammon antiqua) and the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). "This method allows us to confirm the seasonal nature of the occupation", Rivals added. According to the team, the microwear of the teeth is sensitive to seasonal changes in the diet.

The application has allowed the researchers to estimate the length of the occupation of the site from the Lower Paleolithic Age in the cave of Arago (France) by the number of marks on the fossils and, therefore, the variation in the diet of several species of herbivores, as "each season presented food resources which were limited and different in the environment", the paleontologist clarified.

High and low periods of occupation

After confirming the hypothesis in present-day animals whose age and date of death was known to the scientists, the researchers demonstrated that, if a group of animals is seen during a specific season (a short-term occupation), the signs of dental wear undergo little variation. But if the occupation lasts several seasons, the dental marks are more diverse.

"If the animals are hunted during long periods of occupation, more variable dental wear would be expected", Rivals declared. In the case of the French cave of Arago, the study of the dental wear confirms that it was occupied in different ways. "With this method, we were able to prove that at the site, which belonged to Homo heidelbergensis, there is evidence of differing mobility, as there were highly mobile groups and others with little mobility", the scientist confirmed.

The Spanish and German researchers have combined this application with multidisciplinary studies of archaeological sites in order to apply it to other settlements of the Mid-Paleolithic Age such as Payre (France), Taubach (Germany) and Abric Romani (Spain).

Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs’ 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.

In her recent paper in a special issue of the journal, Behavioural Processes, Lord and co-authors from nearby Hampshire College also provide the scientific literature with its first consistent, functional and acoustically precise definition of this common animal sound.

As Lord, a doctoral candidate in organismic and evolutionary biology at UMass Amherst, explains, “We suggest an alternative hypothesis to one that many biologists seem to accept lately, which seeks to explain dog barking in human-centric terms and define it as an internally motivated vocalization strategy.” In the researchers’ view, however, barking is not a special form of communication between dogs and humans. “What we’re saying is that the domestic dog does not have an intentional message in mind, such as, ‘I want to play’ or ‘the house is on fire,’” explains Lord.

Rather, she and colleagues say barking is the auditory signal associated with an evolved behavior known as mobbing, a cooperative anti-predator response usually initiated by one individual who notices an approaching intruder. A dog barks because she feels an internal conflict―an urge to run plus a strong urge to stand her ground and defend pups, for example. When the group joins in, the barks intimidate the intruder, who often flees.

“We think dogs bark due to this internal conflict and mobbing behavior, but domestic dogs bark more because they are put, and put themselves into, conflicting situations more often,” she says.

The reason traces back to the first dogs that started hanging around human food dumps about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. They would have experienced a serious disadvantage if they had run a mile away every time a human or other animal approached. As Lord explains, “In evolutionary terms, dogs self-selected the behavior of sticking around, overcoming their fear and being rewarded by getting to eat that meal before some other dog got it. Thus these animals allow people to get unusually close. The scared ones die while those less scared stay, eat, survive and reproduce. So they inherit the tendency.”

She adds, “By contrast, wild animals like wolves have a very long flight distance. They hear something and they run before you’d ever see them. Dogs hang around, but now they have committed to holding their ground and the closer an ‘intruder’ gets, the more likely mobbing is to occur rather than running away.”

An example of the domestic environment (rather than the dog’s own behavior) that increases barking is the animal stuck behind a fence with a person approaching, says Lord. “The dog may either feel anxiety or excitement at seeing a stranger but in either case the dog is prevented from approaching or fleeing. This creates conflict, and thus barking.”

Several technical pages of the researchers’ recent paper identify eight different parameters in three categories which must be met in order to classify a given vocalization as a bark. These include tonality, noise, pitch, volume or amplitude, abrupt onset and pulse duration, for example.

In their view, barking is not self-referential communication to convey a message, but a short, loud sound characterized by combining both noise and tonal sounds, which is unusual in animal calls. This definition widens the bark’s usefulness as a functional behavior seen in many animals, though domesticated dogs display it more often. “Using this definition, even birds bark, and certainly many mammals besides canines, including baboons and monkeys, rodents and deer also bark,” Lord explains. “In a whole bunch of mammals and birds, what they do in such conflicted situations is bark.”

This evolutionary view of barking does not sit well with some pet owners who insist that Buffy communicates with them by barking, the researchers acknowledge. “We understand the objection when people say their dogs bark for supper or to get out and play,” Lord says. “Dogs do quickly learn the simple cause-and-effect relationship between their bark at 10 p.m. and the fact that you’ll get right up and take them outdoors. It’s true, but in our view it’s going too far to suggest the animal is intentionally referring to a specific activity. Rather, it has just learned cues, as it does when it learns to sit or beg for a treat.”

Freshwater fish are an important part of the diet of many peoples around the world, but it has been unclear when fish became an important part of the year-round diet for early humans.

A new study by an international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows it may have happened in China as far back as 40,000 years ago.

Chemical analysis of the protein collagen, using ratios of the isotopes of nitrogen and sulfur in particular, can show whether such fish consumption was an occasional treat or a regular food item.

The isotopic analysis of a bone from one of the earliest modern humans in Asia, the 40,000 year old skeleton from Tianyuan Cave in the Zhoukoudian region of China (near Beijing), by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Washington University in Saint Louis has shown that this individual was a regular fish consumer.

Michael Richards of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explains "Carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of the human and associated faunal remains indicate a diet high in animal protein, and the high nitrogen isotope values suggest the consumption of freshwater fish." To confirm this inference the researchers measured the sulphur isotope values of terrestrial and freshwater animals around the Zhoukoudian area and of the Tianyuan human.

This analysis provides the first direct evidence for the substantial consumption of aquatic resources by early modern humans in China.

Since this occurs before there is consistent evidence for effective fishing gear, the shift to more fish in the diet likely reflects greater pressure from an expanding population at the time of modern human emergence across Eurasia.

The mode of reproduction seen in modern sharks is nearly 400 million years old. That is the conclusion drawn by Professor Per Erik Ahlberg, Uppsala University, from his discovery of a so-called "clasper" in a primitive fossil fish earlier this year. The research results are published in Nature.

In February this year, a paper published in Nature by a team of Australian and British researchers showed that placoderms, a group of ancient fishes that died out more than 350 million years ago, gave birth to live young. Beautifully preserved fossil embryos in the body cavity of the placoderm Incisoscutum showed that these fishes, close to the common origin of all jawed vertebrates, had a mode of reproduction similar to modern sharks.

Live birth requires internal fertilization. Sharks achieve this by using a "clasper", an extension of the pelvic fin that functions like a penis. The authors looked for a clasper in their placoderm fossils but couldn't find one, so they were forced to argue that it had been made of soft cartilage and had not been preserved.

Shortly afterwards, Per Erik Ahlberg from Uppsala University visited one of the Australian researchers and spotted a perfectly preserved bony clasper in one of their Incisoscutum fossils.

"It was lying in plain view but had been misinterpreted as part of the pelvis and overlooked," he says.

Together with the original authors he is publishing a short paper in the journal Nature that presents this missing piece of the puzzle and completes the picture of placoderm reproduction from mating to birth.

"It provides a pedigree of nearly 400 million years for the "advanced" and seemingly specialized reproductive biology of modern sharks," says Per Ahlberg.