This just in! It's about your brother-in-law! We have met Neanderthals, and they are us. That's according to a just-completed mapping of the Neanderthal genome. The genome, as we all know, is the entirety of an organism's hereditary information, and carried in the DNA (except for viruses, which use RNA). It took five years and $3.8 million to painstakingly tease the genetic information from bone fragments of three Neanderthal women who lived in Croatia some 40,000 years ago. Comparing the Neanderthal DNA with that of modern humans, the researchers discovered that as much as four percent of Neanderthal DNA still reverberates in the majority of modern-day humans. "It is tantalizing to think that the Neanderthal is not totally extinct," said geneticist Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who pioneered the research project. "A bit of them lives on in us today." Robert Lee Hotz, a reporter for  the Wall Stree Journal, prepared a report on the project. You can read it here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703686304575228380902037988.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
     
     It takes a vision to join the burgeoning CSA movement. Blackberry Meadow Farm in suburban Pittsburgh is a Community Supported Agriculture enterprise that grew out of a vision shared by Jack and Dale Duff, brothers who bought a dairy farm in 1988 and, by 1992, had converted it to organic. They sold it to a group of dedicated-but-short-on-experience, but environmentally motivated Slippery Rock U. graduates who were looking for a place to sink their roots. Thanks in part to the Duffs' mentoring, Blackberry Meadow is a going, growing concern. You can read about it in the Rural Ventures special section of the Lancaster Farming edition due in your mailbox tomorrow.


     Four little puppies making piggies of themselves. http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/pig-adopts-dogs/uf49a1gp