Our modern society is filled with stressful stimuli that impact our daily lives, and lead to problems that eventually threaten our mental and psychological wellbeing. Expanding urban life and urbanizing people's interactions have drastically increased and resulted in more stressful circumstances. Unfortunately, the role of nature and nature-based design in our urban societies as an alternative ...

With the recent increase in the available number of high-quality, full-length mitochondrial sequences, it is now possible to construct and analyze a comprehensive human mitochondrial consensus sequence. Using a data set of 827 carefully selected sequences, it is shown that modern humans contain extremely low levels of divergence from the mitochondrial consensus sequence, differing by a mere 21....

This study investigates cross sectional growth patterns in the human skeleton using a recent skeletal sample of known age and sex. Measurements were selected to reflect different functional regions of the cranium, mandible and post cranial skeleton, and growth is evaluated using a single phase Gompertz curve. Different parts of the skeleton vary in the proportion of adult size attained at birth...

P often think of the human skeleton as a symbol of death. In one sense this is true: Bone resists decomposition better than flesh, so it has a greater chance of being preserved after death. However, bone is also a living tissue. The skeleton is remarkably dynamic during life—even in adults—and it responds to metabolic needs and mechanical requirements. When muscles grow stronger, the underlying...

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a discipline which aims at an established understanding and designing of different interfaces between humans and computers in a way that it defines systems that are enjoyable to use, are engaging and are accessible. In 1970’s, the development in HCI was majorly inclined towards “usability” of the interaction systems. Since then, HCI has set a positive growth ...

This paper reviews statistical methods for inferring population history from mitochondrial mismatch distributions and extends them to the case of geographically structured populations. Inference is based on a geographically structured version of the coalescent algorithm that allows for temporal variation in population size, in the number of subdivisions, and in the rate of migration between sub...

Modern humans have large and globular brains that distinguish them from their extinct Homo relatives. The characteristic globularity develops during a prenatal and early postnatal period of rapid brain growth critical for neural wiring and cognitive development. However, it remains unknown when and how brain globularity evolved and how it relates to evolutionary brain size increase. On the basi...

The evolution of modern human life history has involved substantial changes in the overall length of the subadult period, the introduction of a novel early childhood stage, and many changes in the initiation, termination, and character of the other stages. The fossil record is explored for evidence of this evolutionary process, with a special emphasis on middle childhood, which many argue is eq...

The emergence of more refined chronologies for climate change and archaeology in prehistoric Africa, and for the evolution of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), now make it feasible to test more sophisticated models of early modern human dispersals suggested by mtDNA distributions. Here we have generated 42 novel whole-mtDNA genomes belonging to haplogroup L0, the most divergent clade in the mate...