A piece of jawbone with teeth attached, uncovered in Ethiopia, is the earliest known fossil of the genus Homo, to which humans belong, researchers said Wednesday.

The earliest known record of the genus Homo -- the human genus -- represented by a lower jaw with teeth, recently found in the Afar region of Ethiopia, dates to between 2.8 and 2.75 million years ago, according to an international team of geoscientists and anthropologists. They also dated other fossils to between 2.84 and 2.58 million years ago, which helped reconstruct the environment in which the individual lived.

Scientists have possibly discovered the first human ever to walk the Earth, based on an ancient jaw fossil from Ethiopia dating back 2.8 million years ago, according to new research that also reveals the conditions under which the earliest humans evolved.

A fossil lower jaw found in the Ledi-Geraru research area, Afar Regional State, Ethiopia, pushes back evidence for the human genus --Homo -- to 2.8 million years ago, according to a pair of reports published March 4 in the online version of the journal Science.

There's been a lot of hubbub about the effort tech whiz Tony Hsieh and his crack team of acolytes have put into revitalizing downtown Las Vegas. In case you missed it, Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, in January 2012 announced that he was putting $350 million into the Downtown Project, which would fund new businesses in an economically depressed part of the city seven miles north of the Las Vegas Strip. He also wanted to create a tech hub in a city better known for gambling and tourism, which some journalists dubbed the newest "techtopia."

Seeded with a $2.5 million grant from the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and matching funds from UNLV, the institute will decode people’s genomes to predict individual susceptibility to disease, study treatment options and fine-tune drug dosages to minimize adverse effects, Executive Director Martin Schiller said.

What sounds a bit like science fiction is everyday hospital reality for Verma - and she's not the only one. Physician and researcher James Mah of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, for example, creates virtual 3D copies of patients, as he explained at the AAAS conference.

Best response to immigration injunction is to be transparent about returning policy decisions to elected officials