MOSCOW , Feb. 5 (Xinhua) -- Russia is ready to host constructive negotiations with partners so as to achieve agreements for resolving the crisis in eastern Ukraine, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said Thursday.
The tripartite talks among Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are scheduled to be held in Moscow, the Russian capital, at 5 p.m. Moscow time (1400 GMT) Friday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The three leaders are to discuss particular measures that could "contribute to the speedy end of the civil war in Ukraine which significantly deteriorated and led to multiple casualties in the recent days," Peskov said.
As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry , who are currently visiting Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is not coming to Moscow with Hollande and Merkel, though Moscow supports the idea of a visit by Kerry, so French President Hollande and German Chancellor Merkel also arrived in the Ukrainian capital late Thursday before heading for the Moscow meeting Friday.
Hollande and Merkel, who brokered a first ice-breaking meeting with Ukrainian and Russian leaders in June 2014, planned to discuss their new proposal with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko later Thursday.
Before leaving for Ukraine Thursday, Hollande said during a press conference in Paris that his visit to Kiev with Merkel was arranged in an attempt to strike a new deal acceptable for all confronting parties in Ukraine. He also stressed he would not support Ukraine's entry into the NATO , which is welcomed by Moscow.
According to Ushakov, Moscow hopes that the new settlement plan raised by French and German leaders would "take into account a lot of proposals that Putin has made lately."
It is expected that agreements would be reached Friday to help stabilize the situation in Ukraine, set up direct contacts between conflicting parties, facilitate the work of the contact group, as well as restore economic ties between Kiev government and eastern regions.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 19 (Xinhua) -- Researchers at Stanford University have theorized that it could be early human population growth and migration that led to an explosion of new tools, art and other cultural artifacts around 50,000 years ago.
While modern humans and their immediate ancestors had been using tools for a few million years prior , the repertoire was limited. However, in the transition fr om the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic, there seemed to be a burst of cultural innovation.
The sudden early human cultural advance was usually assumed to be the result from climate or biological changes, namely external changes.
In a 2015 paper, Oren Kolodny, a postdoctoral fellow, Nicole Creanza, a former postdoctoral fellow , and Marcus Feldman, a professor of biology and co-director of Stanford's Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics, argued that human culture could have evolved through three distinct kinds of advancement: first, some ideas emerge as "lucky leaps;" second, other ideas could emerge either as extensions of those leaps or as combinations of other ideas or technologies; finally, groups can also lose ideas.
Aided by computer simulations, the team showed that combining the three kinds of advancements could have led directly to bursts of innovation , as seen in the archaeological record. In addition, they found that at the point wh ere new ideas balance out with lost ones, the number of ideas a population can support increases dramatically with population size.
Building on previous work, the researchers integrated two new components into their model: first, they considered migrations between otherwise distinct populations and assumed that such travel is more likely in larger populations; second, they studied what would happen if certain major innovations, such as domesticating plants or developing hunting knives, helped grow the population. The theory was published in the May issue of Royal Society Interface.
A population twice the size of Kolodny , Creanza and Feldman's model could support much more than twice the number of ideas.
In their new study, they predicted that when population sizes are small and migration is relatively rare, a pattern of cultural booms and bursts is likely. Then, without a steady stream of new ideas or population growth, some ideas will be lost to time.
Innovations that encouraged population growth, meanwhile, can have lasting effects, since even slight increases in population size can support a disproportionate increase in innovation.
Those theoretical conclusions could help explain a number of puzzles in human history , such as the disappearance of Neanderthals long ago.
"People tend to assume modern humans were better and replaced them," Kolodny said, but how they were better remains unclear. A simpler explanation may lie in two observations: Neanderthals had roughly a third the population of other early humans, and migration was always out of Africa, not into it. In that case, modern humans migrating from Africa might have brought with them a more advanced repertoire of technologies, due in part to their larger population, and Neanderthals just could not keep up.
"We don't think that whenever we get a qualitative pattern that looks like the archaeological record , this is what necessarily happened," Kolodny was quoted as saying in a news release from Stanford. "But it is a proof of concept that it could have happened this way."
Just as important, Creanza said, the results show that researchers cannot use cultural bursts as evidence of external changes. Just because our culture advanced 50,000 years ago it does not imply our brains got bigger, the landscape changed or anything else. It might just be the way culture is.
Xi calls for public security forces to be loyal to CPC
China
British paper alleg.
The tripartite talks among Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are scheduled to be held in Moscow, the Russian capital, at 5 p.m. Moscow time (1400 GMT) Friday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The three leaders are to discuss particular measures that could "contribute to the speedy end of the civil war in Ukraine which significantly deteriorated and led to multiple casualties in the recent days," Peskov said.
As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry , who are currently visiting Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is not coming to Moscow with Hollande and Merkel, though Moscow supports the idea of a visit by Kerry, so French President Hollande and German Chancellor Merkel also arrived in the Ukrainian capital late Thursday before heading for the Moscow meeting Friday.
Hollande and Merkel, who brokered a first ice-breaking meeting with Ukrainian and Russian leaders in June 2014, planned to discuss their new proposal with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko later Thursday.
Before leaving for Ukraine Thursday, Hollande said during a press conference in Paris that his visit to Kiev with Merkel was arranged in an attempt to strike a new deal acceptable for all confronting parties in Ukraine. He also stressed he would not support Ukraine's entry into the NATO , which is welcomed by Moscow.
According to Ushakov, Moscow hopes that the new settlement plan raised by French and German leaders would "take into account a lot of proposals that Putin has made lately."
It is expected that agreements would be reached Friday to help stabilize the situation in Ukraine, set up direct contacts between conflicting parties, facilitate the work of the contact group, as well as restore economic ties between Kiev government and eastern regions.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 19 (Xinhua) -- Researchers at Stanford University have theorized that it could be early human population growth and migration that led to an explosion of new tools, art and other cultural artifacts around 50,000 years ago.
While modern humans and their immediate ancestors had been using tools for a few million years prior , the repertoire was limited. However, in the transition fr om the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic, there seemed to be a burst of cultural innovation.
The sudden early human cultural advance was usually assumed to be the result from climate or biological changes, namely external changes.
In a 2015 paper, Oren Kolodny, a postdoctoral fellow, Nicole Creanza, a former postdoctoral fellow , and Marcus Feldman, a professor of biology and co-director of Stanford's Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics, argued that human culture could have evolved through three distinct kinds of advancement: first, some ideas emerge as "lucky leaps;" second, other ideas could emerge either as extensions of those leaps or as combinations of other ideas or technologies; finally, groups can also lose ideas.
Aided by computer simulations, the team showed that combining the three kinds of advancements could have led directly to bursts of innovation , as seen in the archaeological record. In addition, they found that at the point wh ere new ideas balance out with lost ones, the number of ideas a population can support increases dramatically with population size.
Building on previous work, the researchers integrated two new components into their model: first, they considered migrations between otherwise distinct populations and assumed that such travel is more likely in larger populations; second, they studied what would happen if certain major innovations, such as domesticating plants or developing hunting knives, helped grow the population. The theory was published in the May issue of Royal Society Interface.
A population twice the size of Kolodny , Creanza and Feldman's model could support much more than twice the number of ideas.
In their new study, they predicted that when population sizes are small and migration is relatively rare, a pattern of cultural booms and bursts is likely. Then, without a steady stream of new ideas or population growth, some ideas will be lost to time.
Innovations that encouraged population growth, meanwhile, can have lasting effects, since even slight increases in population size can support a disproportionate increase in innovation.
Those theoretical conclusions could help explain a number of puzzles in human history , such as the disappearance of Neanderthals long ago.
"People tend to assume modern humans were better and replaced them," Kolodny said, but how they were better remains unclear. A simpler explanation may lie in two observations: Neanderthals had roughly a third the population of other early humans, and migration was always out of Africa, not into it. In that case, modern humans migrating from Africa might have brought with them a more advanced repertoire of technologies, due in part to their larger population, and Neanderthals just could not keep up.
"We don't think that whenever we get a qualitative pattern that looks like the archaeological record , this is what necessarily happened," Kolodny was quoted as saying in a news release from Stanford. "But it is a proof of concept that it could have happened this way."
Just as important, Creanza said, the results show that researchers cannot use cultural bursts as evidence of external changes. Just because our culture advanced 50,000 years ago it does not imply our brains got bigger, the landscape changed or anything else. It might just be the way culture is.
Xi calls for public security forces to be loyal to CPC
China
British paper alleg.