Quantifying the distribution of nanodiamonds in pre-Younger Dryas to recent age deposits along Bull Creek, Oklahoma panhandle, USA.

High levels of nanodiamonds (nds) have been used to support the transformative hypothesis that an extraterrestrial (ET) event (comet explosion) triggered Younger Dryas changes in temperature, flora and fauna assemblages, and human adaptations [Firestone RB, et al. (2007) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104(41):16016-16021]. We evaluate this hypothesis by establishing the distribution of nds within the Bull Creek drainage of the Beaver River basin in the Oklahoma panhandle.

Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas boundary sediment layer.

We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 +/- 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America.

Three-millennium antiquity of the lithokelyphos variety of lithopedion.

Identification of a 3100-year-old lithopedion in the Archaic Southwest antedates its first clinical notation by 2100 years. It was only the "autopsy" of time (excavation of the site) that allowed its presence to be brought to light.

A new protocol for assessing viseme perception in sentence context: the lipreading discrimination test.

Forty-six hearing-impaired young adults were tested with a newly developed instrument that requires a discrimination response to assess viseme perception as a component of lipreading performance. Stimuli were videotaped sentences that differed on half of the trials from a captioned target sentence by one viseme embedded in the middle of the sentence. Discrimination within six visual categories was tested: gross syllable pattern, consonant articulation--lips, consonant articulation--tongue, vowel articulation--extreme lip shapes, vowel articulation--graded lip shapes, and vowel articulation--jaw movement.