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Minnesota officials certified last week’s primary vote Tuesday, confirming it as the lowest primary turnout since 2016.

Fifteen percent of registered voters cast ballots on Aug. 13. This translates to only 12 percent of all eligible voters. In 2016, 7 percent of eligible people voted.

“The thing about primaries is it is so dependent on who or what is on the ballot. If there's a hot contest somewhere, then people show up. If not, they tend not to,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Secretary of State.

A large-scale study of fossil human teeth from Ice Age Europe shows that climate change significantly influenced the demography of prehistoric humans.

Using the largest dataset of human fossils from Ice Age Europe to date, an international research team shows how prehistoric hunter–gatherers coped with climate change in the period between 47,000 and 7,000 years ago.

Population sizes declined sharply during the coldest period, and in the West, Ice Age Europeans even faced extinction, according to the study published August 16 in the journal Science Advances.

Cooking is important — in fact, some researchers believe it's what allowed our human ancestors to unlock the extra calories needed to grow larger brains. So when was cooking invented?

The timing is uncertain, but evidence suggests people were cooking food at least 50,000 years ago and as early as 2 million years ago. This evidence comes from two fields: archaeology and biology.

One piece of archaeological evidence for cooking is cooked starch grains found in dental calculus, or hardened dental plaque. "People can find it in teeth that are 50,000 years old," said Richard Wrangham, a retired professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University and the author of "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" (Basic Books, 2009).

But earlier than that, the evidence is less clear. Generally, scientists look for evidence that people were controlling fire. But evidence of controlled fire isn't necessarily evidence of cooking; — people could have used that fire for heat or to make tools, for example.

Residents gathered Friday to celebrate the closure of Smith Foundry, ending more than 100 years of production and pollution in south Minneapolis’ East Phillips neighborhood.

“Every little ingredient that went into this fight led to this victory,” Joe Vital, an organizer with the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute, told a crowd in Cedar Field Park.

Vital grew up in East Phillips, and was one of the first residents to hear about the federal pollution violations that led to the foundry’s closing. He and dozens of residents gathered, shared food and enjoyed the moment. They screen printed fresh t-shirts with the slogan, “When we fight, we win,” and basked in the rhythm of an Indigenous drum circle.

The group included neighbors who complained about the foundry for years, citing the acrid smell and black dust the building emitted. Their fears were substantiated in May 2023, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted a surprise inspection. The EPA found that from 2018 to 2023, the foundry emitted nearly double the amount of pollution allowed by its state-issued permit. The EPA cited the foundry in August 2023 for nine violations of the Clean Air Act.

Michael Rubke, a desk attendant at La Rive condo complex in Minneapolis, is fighting for a union against a behemoth building management company, FirstService Residential of Minnesota, that has a near-monopoly on high-rise condos in the Twin Cities. It’s been a difficult battle so far. The unionization campaign is “at square one,” the 41-year-old explained over the phone after working an overnight shift. “They’re pretending we’re not there.”

But that lack of formal union representation did not stop Rubke and his colleagues throughout the Twin Cities from fighting for—and winning—statewide legislation this summer that improves the terms of their jobs, by beating back a little-known provision used to erode the job security of contracted workers.

Under the legislation, which went into effect on July 1, companies in Minnesota are barred from entering into new contracts that contain restrictive covenants, which function like noncompete agreements but have previously slipped past the prohibitions on noncompetes in Minnesota because they have a slightly different structure. Existing restrictive covenants, however, are left in place.

'Since Inuvialuit ancestors arrived in the Mackenzie Delta around 800 years ago, beluga whales have been central to their livelihood and culture,' said archaeologist and co-senior author Professor Max Friesen from University of Toronto.

'However, little is known of the impact of centuries of sustained subsistence harvests on the beluga population'.

Integrating paleogenomics, genetic simulations, and stable isotope analysis of 45 zooarchaeological beluga remains, and comparing the findings with contemporary data from tissue samples provided by Inuvialuit hunters from their beluga subsistence hunts, the team characterised the effect of 700 years of subsistence harvests on beluga genetic diversity, population structuring, and foraging ecology.

*Results update every 15 minutes or less.

(Probably won't start trickling in until after 9 pm)

An ancient DNA (aDNA) study at the 17th-century English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, has identified two of the town's earliest settlers, and revealed an unexpected family secret.

Founded in AD 1607, Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Excavations at the site discovered human remains in the 1608–1616 church.

As such, it was thought that they were the bodies of some of the original colonists.

"These graves were purposely buried near the altar in the Church Chancel," says co-author of the research Dr. William Kelso, Emeritus Director of Archaeology at Jamestown Rediscovery. "This prominent location suggests the graves contained the remains of high-status individuals."

Consider this scenario: An absentee ballot in Wisconsin gets returned with an error, like the voter failing to sign the envelope, but it mistakenly gets counted anyway, because a municipal election worker initially didn’t catch the error when taking the ballot out of the envelope.

Later, perhaps during a recount, a worker catches the error and has to mark that voter as invalid. And now the number of ballots in the counting pile is one greater than the number of valid voters.

The solution? Just pull one random ballot out of the pile and set it aside to not be counted. Now the numbers match up. But someone — it’s impossible to know who — got their valid vote tossed.

It may not seem fair, but it actually happens from time to time in Wisconsin — and almost nowhere else — because of an election law that’s nearly as old as the state. Election officials aren’t crazy about the practice, called a ballot drawdown, and say it is reserved only for extraordinary cases.

A company developing an industrial-scale solar panel array on Badger Mountain in Eastern Washington has paused permitting activities on the project amid concerns about impacts to Indigenous cultural sites.

The decision comes on the heels of an investigation by High Country News and ProPublica this year, which found that a land survey funded by the developer, Avangrid Renewables, had omitted more than a dozen sites of archaeological or cultural significance on the public parcel included in the project area. This survey is required by the state before it can permit the project so construction can begin.

In a June 27 letter to the state agency responsible for approving the project, Avangrid wrote that it will be pausing project planning for two to three months “while we re-evaluate public comments, including from our project landowners and affected tribal nations.”

The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation have objected to the Badger Mountain solar project for years, according to tribal business councilmember Karen Condon. They officially registered their opposition in May 2023, citing the foods, medicines, archaeological heritage sites and other cultural resources found on the mountain. They were joined shortly after by the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. Both tribal nations have the right to access and use public lands in their ancestral territory, which includes the state-owned parcel on Badger Mountain.

The Minnesota state primary will be held Tuesday, Aug. 13. Polls close at 8 p.m. Here’s what to expect.

A Eurasian eagle owl at the Minnesota Zoo flew away from its handler during a training exercise and landed in the tiger habitat, where it was killed by one of the big cats.

“Before staff could intervene, the tiger within that habitat preyed upon the owl,” said Zach Nugent, a Minnesota Zoo spokesman, in an email.

Officials at the zoo in Apple Valley confirmed that the death happened in April. It was written up in a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) report in early July during a routine inspection.