NEW YORK (Reuters) - SoftBank Corp is playing it rough in its attempt to keep Dish Network Corp from breaking up its $20.1 billion deal to take control of Sprint Nextel Corp.

The Japanese telecom company, which owns 33 percent of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, has told banks that their financing of Dish's $25.5 billion rival offer for Sprint could hurt their chances of landing a role in a highly anticipated public offering of the Chinese e-commerce giant, two sources familiar with the situation said.

SoftBank, Dish and Sprint declined to comment. A source close to Alibaba said on Friday that while SoftBank is a major investor, it does not make decisions for Alibaba's management. Alibaba has no timetable for an IPO yet and has not hired underwriters.

Softbank's unusual move is the latest sign that the battle for the control of Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. wireless carrier, is fast turning into a no-holds-barred brawl between Softbank founder Masayoshi Son and Dish's Charlie Ergen.

SoftBank agreed in October last year to buy 70 percent of Sprint for $20.1 billion. In December, Sprint also made an offer to buy out the stake in Clearwire Corp it didn't already own. But Softbank's plans have run into trouble, thanks in large part to Dish. In January, Dish made a counterbid for Clearwire, and followed up in April with the bid for Sprint.

Softbank's latest move could make it more difficult for Dish to firm up financing for its Sprint bid. At least one major bank has withdrawn from financing the Dish bid after Softbank's move, the sources said.

Dish has said it would need to raise $9 billion in debt to finance the offer, and Softbank has criticized its rival for not having committed financing in place.

In an interview last month, Son described the U.S. media veteran as an "amateur" in mobile. "Charlie has no expertise in the mobile industry," the executive told Reuters.

For his part, Ergen has fought back against the criticism. Earlier this month, he said acquiring Sprint was so important to Dish that he could consider selling the company altogether if he loses a bidding war.

Softbank's move, though unusual, is legal, the sources said.

So-called anti-tying rules prohibit banks from offering a product to a company on the condition that it gets a role in another transaction. For example, a bank cannot say it will only give a loan to a company if the bank is chosen as an adviser on the company's next M&A transaction.

But banks' corporate clients are not subject to these restrictions. A company, for example, may select underwriters for an IPO on the condition that these banks not participate in a competitor's future public offering.

Alibaba's IPO, which could come as early as this year, is one of the most highly anticipated technology deals after Facebook Inc's $16 billion offering last year and would generate lofty fees for Wall Street banks. In Facebook's case, underwriters split about $176 million in fees.

BANKS TIED UP

Dish is in the process of lining up financing, but is encountering challenges in part because of Softbank's move, the sources said.

Barclays Plc, which is advising Dish, and Jefferies Group LLC, are lined up to provide financing, with Dish speaking to more banks to join the financing, one of the sources said. Jefferies and Barclays declined to comment.

Many Wall Street banks including Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc, UBS AG and Deutsche Bank are already conflicted and cannot provide financing to Dish because of their roles in other aspects of the bidding war.

Bank of America is advising Sprint's special committee, while Citigroup, UBS and Rothschild are advising Sprint. Deutsche Bank is financing SoftBank's proposal.

Meanwhile, Softbank has already removed Barclays from a role in financing its bid for Sprint after the British bank was revealed to be advising Dish on a rival offer, sources have said previously.

FINANCING ISSUES

Dish's lack of committed financing is a concern for the special committee of Sprint's board that is reviewing Dish's offer to determine whether it could lead to a better deal than Softbank's, the sources said.

Ergen said on Thursday that Sprint's special committee has not yet given Dish access to its data room to gain a closer look at Sprint's books. The committee is taking its time in part because Dish does not have committed financing, the sources said.

In a letter to Sprint's board of directors on April 15, Dish said it intended to fund the $17.3 billion cash portion of the deal using $8.2 billion in balance sheet cash and raising $9 billion in additional debt financing.

"We have a proven track record in raising capital to fund strategic initiatives and have received a Highly Confident Letter from our financial advisor, Barclays, confirming our ability to raise the required financing," the letter said.

(Reporting by Soyoung Kim, Olivia Oran and Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Paritosh Bansal, Matthew Lewis and Paul Simao)

The 63-year-old Sharif, who has twice served as premier, touted his success after unofficial, partial vote counts showed his Pakistan Muslim League-N party with an overwhelming lead. The party weathered a strong campaign by former cricket star Imran Khan that energized Pakistan's young people.

Sharif expressed a desire to work with all parties to solve the country's problems in a victory speech given to his supporters in the eastern city of Lahore as his lead in the national election became apparent based on vote counts announced by Pakistan state TV.

The results, which need to be officially confirmed, indicated Sharif's party has an overwhelming lead but would fall short of winning a majority of the 272 directly elected national assembly seats. That means he would have to put together a ruling coalition.

"I appeal to all to come sit with me at the table so that this nation can get rid of this curse of power cuts, inflation and unemployment," Sharif said, as his supporters clapped, cheered and danced in the streets.

Despite attacks against candidates, party workers and voters that killed 29 people Saturday, Pakistanis turned out in large numbers to elect the national and provincial assemblies. The high participation was a sign of Pakistanis' desire for change after years of hardship under the outgoing government, and it offered a sharp rebuke to Taliban militants and others who have tried to derail the election with attacks that have killed more than 150 people in recent weeks.

"Our country is in big trouble," said Mohammad Ali, a shopkeeper who voted in Lahore. "Our people are jobless. Our business is badly affected. We are dying every day."

The vote marked the first time a civilian government has completed its full five-year term and transferred power in democratic elections in a country that has experienced three coups and constant political instability since it was established in 1947.

The election was being watched closely by the United States, which relies on the nuclear-armed country of 180 million people for help fighting Islamic militants and negotiating an end to the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

Passion and energy were seen throughout Pakistan, as millions of people headed to the polls, waving flags and chanting slogans in support of their party. Some were young, first-time voters and others elderly Pakistanis who leaned on canes or friends for support as they dropped their vote in the ballot box.

One man, Bilal Masih, even came to a polling station in the central city of Multan dressed in his wedding attire, saying his bride could wait until he voted. He decorated his wedding car with flowers and a stuffed tiger, the symbol of the Pakistan Muslim League-N party he supports.

"I thought that this was my national duty," said Masih, who was wearing a white and red turban and had garlands of flowers around his neck.

The Pakistani Taliban, which has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for years, tried to disrupt the election because the militants believe the country's democracy runs counter to Islam. The government responded by deploying an estimated 600,000 security personnel across the country to protect polling sites and voters.

Many Pakistanis seemed determined to cast their ballots despite a series of gun and bomb attacks.

"Yes, there are fears. But what should we do?" said Ali Khan, who was waiting to vote in the northwestern city of Peshawar, where one of the blasts took place. "Either we sit in our house and let the terrorism go on, or we come out of our homes, cast our vote, and bring in a government that can solve this problem of terrorism."

Many of the attacks in the run-up to the vote targeted secular parties. That raised concern the violence could benefit hard-line Islamists and others who take a softer line toward the militants, like Sharif and Khan, because they were able to campaign more freely.

The chief of Pakistan's election commission, Fakhruddin Ebrahim, said turnout was near 60 percent of registered voters, the highest since the 1970 election. Many Pakistanis expressed pride that so many of their fellow citizens chose to vote.

"More political activity means more awareness," said Nasira Jibran in Lahore. "More awareness means more accountability."

The apparent victor, Sharif, is the son of a wealthy industrialist, and his party is seen to have a pro-business stance. He is perhaps best known for testing Pakistan's first nuclear weapon in 1998.

Sharif was toppled in a military coup by then-army chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 1999 and spent years in exile in Saudi Arabia before returning to the country in 2007. His party came in second in the 2008 elections to the Pakistan People's Party and is seen as more religiously conservative.

Sharif faced a strong challenge from Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. The winner of the 1992 cricket World Cup tapped into the frustrations of many Pakistani youths fed up with the country's traditional politicians.

"It's now our turn. We youngsters want our say in national affairs," said voter Rubina Riaz in Lahore.

Khan couldn't vote Saturday because he was in the hospital following a horrific accident this week at a campaign event in Lahore in which he fell off a forklift and broke three vertebrae and a rib.

Sharif countered the challenge from Khan by pointing out how much more experience in government he has and touting key projects he completed while in office, including a highway between the capital Islamabad and his hometown of Lahore.

"It's all about delivering," said Nayyar Naseem, a voter in Lahore. "Nawaz Sharif has delivered. He is experienced."

Sharif also relied on old-style Pakistani politics, which focuses on doling out political patronage, such as government jobs, to win the loyalty of voters.

The battleground between Sharif and Khan was in Pakistan's most populous province, Punjab, where both parties appealed to urban middle class voters. The province contains nearly half of the 272 directly-elected seats in the national assembly.

The outgoing Pakistan People's Party was expected to fare poorly in the election because of unhappiness with its performance leading the last government. The party, which rose to power in 2008 in part by widespread sympathy after the death of party leader Benazir Bhutto, has carried out what many called a lackluster campaign.

The vote in the southern city of Karachi was not only marred by violence Saturday, but also threats to election commission staff. The commission said it would re-do the vote at 40 polling stations in one constituency in the city.

Sharif inherits a country struggling on a number of fronts. Pakistanis suffer from rolling blackouts that can be as long as 18 hours a day as well as a stuttering economy. The government's shaky financial situation means it will likely have to seek another unpopular bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

The country is also battling Taliban militants who want to overthrow the government, while on the western border there are fears that a U.S. military departure from Afghanistan will send violence spilling over into Pakistan.

Sharif has favored negotiations with militants in the country's tribal areas. That could put him at odds with the country's powerful military, potentially exacerbating a relationship that is already prickly because of the coup carried out against the former prime minister.

While Pakistan has been under civilian rule for the last five years, the military still is considered the country's most powerful institution and usually makes the major decisions when it comes to militancy or foreign policy issues such as Afghanistan or India.

In what appeared to be a show of support for democracy in Pakistan, the country's most powerful military officer, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, went to the voting booth himself instead of mailing in his ballot. His gesture was broadcast live on local TV.

___

Associated Press writers Munir Ahmed and Zarar Khan in Islamabad, Atif Raza in Karachi, Riaz Khan in Peshawar, Rasool Dawar in Mir Ali, Anwarullah Khan in Khar, Abdul Sattar in Quetta, Matiullah Achakzai in Chaman, and Asif Shahzad in Lahore contributed to this report.

LONDON (Reuters) - A new strain of bird flu that is causing a deadly outbreak among people in China is a threat to world health and should be taken seriously, scientists said on Wednesday.

The H7N9 strain has killed 24 people and infected more than 125, according to the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO), which has described it as "one of the most lethal" flu viruses.

The high mortality rate, together with relatively large numbers of cases in a short period and the possibility it might acquire the ability to transmit between people, make H7N9 a pandemic risk, experts said.

"The WHO considers this a serious threat," said John McCauley, director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Influenza at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research.

Speaking at a briefing in London, experts in virology said initial studies suggest the virus has several worrisome characteristics, including two genetic mutations that make it more likely to eventually spread from person to person.

"The longer the virus is unchecked in circulation, the higher the probability that this virus will start transmitting from person to person," Colin Butte, an expert in avian viruses at Britain's Pirbright Institute, said.

Of the some 125 people infected with H7N9 so far, around 20 percent have died, approximately 20 percent have recovered and the remainder are still sick. The infection can lead to severe pneumonia, blood poisoning and organ failure.

"This is a very, very serious disease in those who have been infected. So if this were to become more widespread it would be an extraordinarily devastating outbreak," Peter Openshaw, director of the centre for respiratory infection at Imperial College London, told the briefing.

Scientists who have analysed genetic sequence data from samples from three H7N9 victims say the strain is a so-called "triple reassortant" virus with a mixture of genes from three other flu strains found in birds in Asia.

Recent pandemic viruses, including the H1N1 "swine flu" of 2009/2010, have been mixtures of mammal and bird flu - hybrids that are likely to be milder because mammalian flu tends to make people less severely ill than bird flu.

Pure bird-flu strains, such as the new H7N9 strain and the H5N1 flu, which has killed about 371 of 622 the people it has infected since 2003, are generally more deadly for people.

Human cases of the H7N9 flu have been found in several new parts of China in recent days and have now been recorded in all of its provinces.

Last week a man in Taiwan became the first case of the flu outside mainland China, though he was infected while travelling there.

The H7N9 strain was unknown in humans until it was identified in sick people in China in March.

Scientists say it is jumping from birds - most probably chickens - to people, and there is no evidence yet of the virus passing from person to person.

Jeremy Farrar, a leading expert on infectious diseases and director of Oxford University's research unit in Vietnam, said the age range of those infected so far stretched from toddlers to people in their late 80s - a range that appeared to confirm the virus is completely new to the human population.

"That suggests there truly is no immunity across all ages, and that as humans we have not seen this virus before," he said.

"The response has to be calm and measured, but it cannot be taken lightly," he said.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Michael Roddy)

BRASILIA (Reuters) - President Dilma Rousseff added a new minister to her Cabinet on Thursday, further enlarging a federal government whose rapid growth since her leftist party came to power a decade ago has increased Brazil's heavy tax burden.

Rousseff, who is seeking re-election next year, swore in Guilherme Afif Domingos to head the newly created Ministry of Micro and Small Businesses, the country's 39th ministry.

When civilian rule replaced military dictatorship in 1985, there were only 17 ministries in Brasilia. The number of Cabinet posts has almost doubled since the Workers' Party took office under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2003.

Brazil's Cabinet now has twice the number of ministers that Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development nations have on average.

Rousseff said the new ministry's priority would be to cut bureaucracy and red tape that strangle small businesses as her government strives to inject new life into the fragile recovery of the world's seventh largest economy.

Political analysts say, however, the main reason is to widen support for the president's re-election by bringing Afif Domingos' fast-growing PSD party, the third largest in Congress, into her unwieldy 18-party coalition.

"The number of ministries is a result of the president's political need to accommodate such a variety of different parties," said Octavio Amorim Neto, a political science professor at Brazil's Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Their leaders range from former communists to conservative evangelicals, such as Bishop Marcelo Crivella who became fishing minister last year, even though he admitted publicly to understanding little about fishing.

Even Rousseff's top adviser from the business sector, steelmaker Jorge Gerdau, criticized the new ministry, saying the government could operate with "half a dozen" key ministries and did not need 39.

"But as the number of parties grows, this is all but impossible," Gerdau, who heads an advisory group on making government more efficient, told the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.

TAX BURDEN

Officials in Rousseff's administration say that while the federal government has grown steadily in size, revenues have risen even faster.

But economists warn that the increasing cost of government is to blame for Brazil's tax burden, which at 36 percent of GDP is close to the average for rich OECD countries, but far too high for an emerging middle-income nation, economists say.

Over the past decade, Brazil greatly expanded social programs to lift more than 30 million Brazilians from poverty through conditional cash transfers, to the point where spending on social assistance, pensions, health and education now account for 91 percent of the government's current expenditure.

That has come at the expense of public investment in Brazil's deficient infrastructure that has become a costly hurdle to economic growth, said economist Mansueto de Almeida of the government think tank IPEA. Add Brazil's high taxes and labor costs and that has undermined Brazilian industries' ability to compete in the world, he said.

The once-booming Brazilian economy grew a mere 0.9 percent last year and the government has resorted to a barrage of tax breaks, lower interest rates and other incentives over the past two years to try to restore solid growth, so far to no avail.

De Almeida said the Rousseff government had begun to see the tax burden as a problem, but had no solution, especially since it was cranking up spending as it enters an election year.

"We have a large government that increased the number of ministries, expanded social spending, but wants to increase investment to grow: something has to give," he said.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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LONDON (Reuters) - A panel of UK lawmakers will next week grill representatives from Google Inc and its auditor, Ernst & Young, following a Reuters report that highlighted inconsistencies in Google's statements about its UK activities.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said on its website that the representatives would testify on May 16.

Google has attracted the ire of British lawmakers for the way it pays almost no income tax on billions of dollars of UK sales each year.

At an earlier hearing in November, Google's Northern Europe boss, Matt Brittin, said that all UK sales were conducted from Ireland and that no sales took place from Britain.

At a PAC hearing in January, John Dixon, head of tax policy at Ernst & Young in London, told lawmakers his firm checked to ensure a tax client's activities on the ground matched what was claimed in their accounts.

Last week, the committee's chairwoman, Margaret Hodge, said she planned to recall Google and Ernst & Young, after Reuters revealed that the Internet search giant had described its London offices on its website as a base for sales teams and advertised dozens of London-based sales vacancies.

Google declined comment on the scheduled hearing but referred to its comments last week before it received a formal invitation, in which it denied that Brittin had misled the PAC in November and said it would be happy to testify to the committee again to explain its position.

Ernst & Young said it welcomed the opportunity to help the committee's inquiry.

"We support improving certainty and transparency in the global tax system and compliance with it," it said in a statement.

Last week a spokeswoman said the auditor and tax adviser stood by Dixon's testimony and said it followed all audit rules.

(Editing by David Cowell and Kenneth Barry)

In appealing the ruling, the administration recommitted itself to a position Obama took during his re-election campaign that younger teens shouldn't have unabated access to emergency contraceptives, despite the insistence by physicians groups and much of his Democratic base that the pill should be readily available.

A day earlier, the Food and Drug Administration lowered the age that people can buy the Plan B One-Step morning-after pill without a prescription to 15 younger than the current limit of 17 and decided that the pill could be sold on drugstore shelves near the condoms, instead of locked behind pharmacy counters.

That decision appeared to fly in the face of a judge's decision last month that women of any age should be allowed to buy both Plan B and its cheaper generic competition as easily as they can buy aspirin. U.S. District Judge Edward Korman of New York gave the FDA 30 days to comply, and the Monday deadline was approaching fast, prompting the administration on Wednesday to ask the court to put the ruling on hold while it reconsiders.

With the appeal, the Obama administration is making clear that it's willing to ease access to emergency contraception only a certain amount not nearly as broadly as doctors' groups and contraception advocates have urged. Still, the FDA decision moving the pill from behind the counter to drugstore shelves reflected a societal shift in the long battle over women's reproductive rights, marking a major milestone for those who believe all forms of birth control should be easy to buy.

Reluctant to get drawn in to a messy second-term spat over social issues, White House officials insisted Wednesday that both the FDA and the Justice Department were acting independently of the White House in deciding how to proceed. But the decision to appeal was certain to irk abortion-rights advocates who say they can't understand why a Democratic president is siding with social conservatives in favor of limiting women's reproductive choices.

"We are deeply disappointed that just days after President Obama proclaimed his commitment to women's reproductive rights, his administration has decided once again to deprive women of their right to obtain emergency contraception without unjustified and burdensome restrictions," said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the lawsuit that prompted Korman's ruling.

Current and former White House aides said Obama's approach to the issue has been heavily influenced by his experience as the father of two school-age daughters. Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have also questioned whether there's enough data available to show the morning-after pill is safe and appropriate for younger girls, even though physicians groups insist that it is.

In Wednesday's filing, the Justice Department said Korman exceeded his authority and that his decision should be suspended while that appeal is under way, meaning only Plan B One-Step would appear on drugstore shelves until the case is finally settled. If Korman's order isn't suspended during the appeals process, the result would be "substantial market confusion, harming FDA's and the public's interest" as drugstores receive conflicting orders about who's allowed to buy what, the Justice Department concluded.

Rather than take matters into his own hands, the Justice Department argued to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Korman should have ordered the FDA to reconsider its options for regulating emergency contraception. The court cannot overturn the rules and processes that federal agencies must follow "by instead mandating a particular substantive outcome," the appeal states.

The FDA actually had been poised to lift all age limits and let Plan B sell over the counter in late 2011, when Kathleen Sebelius overruled her own scientists. Sebelius said some girls as young as 11 were physically capable of bearing children but shouldn't be able to buy the pregnancy-preventing pill on their own.

Sebelius' move was unprecedented, and Korman had blasted it as election-year politics meaning he was overruling not just a government agency but a Cabinet secretary.

More than a year later, neither side in the contraception debate was happy with the FDA's surprise twist, which many perceived as an attempt to find a palatable middle ground between imposing an age limit of 17 and imposing no limit at all.

Any over-the-counter access marks a long-awaited change, but it's not enough, said Dr. Cora Breuner of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which supports nonprescription sale of the morning-after pill for all ages.

"We still have the major issue, which is our teen pregnancy rate is still too high," Breuner said.

Even though few young girls likely would use Plan B, which costs about $50 for a single pill, "we know that it is safe for those under 15," she said.

Most 17- to 19-year-olds are sexually active, and 30 percent of 15- and 16-year-olds have had sex, according to a study published last month by the journal Pediatrics. Sex is much rarer among younger teens. Likewise, older teens have a higher pregnancy rate, but that study also counted more than 110,000 pregnancies among 15- and 16-year-olds in 2008 alone.

Contraception advocates see a double standard. No one is carded when buying a condom, but under the FDA's decision they would have to prove their age when buying a pill to prevent pregnancy if that condom breaks.

"This isn't a compromise. This is wrong," said Cynthia Pearson of the National Women's Health Network.

Social conservatives were outraged by the FDA's move to lower the age limits for Plan B as well as the possibility that Korman's ruling might take effect and lift age restrictions altogether.

"This decision undermines the right of parents to make important health decisions for their young daughters," said Anna Higgins of the Family Research Council.

Obama aides bristled at the suggestion that the FDA decision was an attempt at political compromise, insisting the FDA merely responded to an application filed by Plan B's manufacturer. At the same time, however, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama's concern had been about girls younger than 15 having access, suggesting an age limit of 15 might be acceptable.

If a woman already is pregnant, the morning-after pill has no effect. It prevents ovulation or fertilization of an egg. According to the medical definition, pregnancy doesn't begin until a fertilized egg implants itself into the wall of the uterus. Still, some critics say Plan B is the equivalent of an abortion pill because it may also be able to prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, a contention that many scientists and Korman, in his ruling said has been discredited.

___

Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.

It will take more fossil discoveries to sort that out.

The human branch of the evolutionary tree, called Homo, is thought to have arisen from a group of ancient species called australopithecines. The newly studied species is a member of this group, and so its similarities to humans are enticing for tackling the riddle of how Homo appeared.

It's called Australopithecus sediba (aw-STRAL-oh-PITH-uh-kus se-DEE-bah), which means "southern ape, wellspring." It lived some 2 million years ago, and it both climbed in trees and walked upright. Its remains were discovered in 2008 when the 9-year-old son of a paleoanthropologist accidently came across a bone in South Africa.

A 2011 analysis of some of A. sediba's bones showed a combination of human and more apelike traits, like a snapshot of evolution in action. That theme continues in six papers published online Thursday by the journal Science, which complete the initial examination of two partial skeletons and an isolated shinbone.

Jeremy DeSilva of Boston University, lead author of one of the papers, said the fossils reveal an unexpected "mosaic of anatomies."

"I didn't think you could have this combination, that hand with that pelvis with that foot... And yet, there it is," he said.

DeSilva said he has no idea how A. sediba is related to humans, noting that the different traits argue for different conclusions.

Among the new analyses, the ribs show the creature's upper trunk resembled an ape's, while the lower part looked more like a human's. Arm bones other than the hand and wrist look primitive, reflecting climbing ability, while earlier analysis of the hand had shown mixed traits.

The teeth also show a mix of human and primitive features, and provide new evidence that A. sediba is closely related to early humans, said Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg of Ohio State University, a co-author of a dental analysis. It and an older South African species, A. africanus, appear more closely related to early humans than other australopithecines like the famous "Lucy" are, she said.

But she said the analysis can't determine which of the two species is the closer relative, nor whether A. sediba is a direct ancestor of humans.

Another study found a mix of human and apelike traits in leg bones, and concluded that A. sediba walked like no other known animal.

Its heel was narrow like an ape's, which would seem to prevent walking upright, but the more humanlike knee, pelvis and hip show A. sediba did just that, DeSilva said.

When people walk, they strike the ground with the heel first. But that would be disastrous from A. sediba's narrow heel bone, so instead the creature struck the ground first with the outside of the foot, DeSilva and co-authors propose. The foot would react by rolling inward, which is called pronation. In people, chronic pronation can cause pain in the foot, knees, hip and back, said DeSilva, who tried out the ancient creature's gait.

"I've been walking around campus this way, and it hurts," he said.

But the bones of A. sediba show features that evidently prevented those pain problems, he said. The creature apparently adopted this gait as a kind of compromise for a body that had to climb trees proficiently as well as walk upright, he said.

___

Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/malcolmritter

More Americans than not wrongly think that U.S. 15-year-olds rank near the bottom on international science tests, according to a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll. U.S. students actually rank in the middle among developed countries.

Even so, Americans are more likely to pick math or language skills over science when they are asked which subject they think deserves greater attention.

Among adults, there is wide variety in what they know about science and technology, the survey also found. For instance, two-thirds of those surveyed correctly said rust is an example of a chemical reaction and 77 percent correctly said the continents have been moving for millions of years and will continue to shift.

Yet only 47 percent correctly said electrons are smaller than atoms. Protons, neutrons and electrons are parts of atoms.

Education advocates have long warned that U.S. students need more science education if they are to keep pace with international peers. That perhaps has yielded the impression that the nation's students don't stack up to other nations on international tests.

About 35 percent of those surveyed by Pew correctly said U.S. 15-year-olds are about in the middle and 7 percent incorrectly said Americans ranked among the top nations. Yet the plurality 44 percent wrongly said American teens were ranked at the bottom of other developed nations.

International tests find U.S. scores aren't measurably different from the average of all other nations.Among the 33 countries measured in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, 12 had higher scores and nine had lower scores. Another 12 had scores that weren't that much different than Americans' scores.

The survey also asked participants an open-ended question about which single subject they thought deserved greater emphasis in elementary and secondary schools. Some 30 percent suggested math and arithmetic. Another 19 percent said English, grammar, writing and reading.

Science was the top choice for just 11 percent of participants. Among those who picked science, though, there was a partisan divide. Some 17 percent of Democrats said science should receive more attention, while 7 percent of Republicans agreed.

Republicans, however, were more likely to favor math and arithmetic than Democrats. Some 35 percent of Republicans picked math skills as the subject they thought deserved more attention while 24 percent of Democrats agreed.

Americans with college degrees were more likely than others to underestimate the students' international rankings. Those college graduates were also more likely to answer their own questions about science and technology correctly.

For instance, 76 percent of college graduates correctly identified carbon dioxide as the gas that most scientists blame for climate change. Just 55 percent of those with some college courses got the answer right, and that number reached 49 percent among adults who did not attend college.

Pew's poll was conducted March 7-10 and used landline and cellular telephone interviews with 1,006 adults. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. It is larger for subgroups.

The survey was conducted with Smithsonian Magazine for an upcoming edition focusing on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education.

In the past, researchers believed that the , which occurred around 65 million years ago, wiped out dinosaurs, but mostly spared lizards and snakes. But the new findings, published today (Dec. 10) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that about 83 percent of these reptiles went extinct.

"I think it is a pretty important piece of work," said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist from Columbia University who was not involved in the study. "It does a nice job of showing that extinction at the end of the Cretaceous really hit lizards and snakes hard."

The findings actually make the story of the end Cretaceous Era mass die-off more consistent, because it's hard to imagine a catastrophe capable of destroying thewould spare lizards and snakes, said study co-author Nicholas Longrich, a paleontologist at Yale University. []

"You can't wipe out the dominant carnivores and dominant herbivores on the planet without causing devastation of the ecosystem on a massive scale," Longrich told LiveScience.

Mass die-off

Most researchers think a giant meteor crashing to Earth at the Yucatan peninsula caused the mass extinction that . The impact likely released a sun-blocking cloud of dust into the atmosphere, preventing plants from making food and causing dinosaurs to die as a result.

To see if lizards and snakes were somehow shielded from the doom, Longrich and his colleagues collected fossil records from the reptiles across North America. Before the extinction, snakes and lizards were flourishing, with 27 lizard species and three snake species documented in the fossil record. In the years immediately afterward, only five species remained, with most disappearing from the fossil record quite abruptly, Longrich said.

If most plants died, then plant eaters and their predators would have died off too, he added. It's likely that only scavengers and animals that preyed on them came out of the Cretaceous period relatively unscathed.

"When everything starts dropping dead, and everything dies, there's probably bugs and grubs and worms eating them and that's probably what the survivors were eating," Longrich said.

Global death?

The findings are consistent with anand leading to the dino demise, Longrich said. (Just last week at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union, researchers presented an argument for volcanoes, not a space rock, .)

The new fossil analysis convincingly shows that reptiles faced a severe extinction in North America, wrote Richard Cowen, a geoscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, in an email. Because the meteorite hit Chicxulub in Mexico, you would expect the greatest death toll within North America, but the researchers' case for a worldwide die-off from the space rock is much shakier, he said.

"In order to justify a global discussion of the K-T, the authors try to persuade us that the same effect that they document for North America happened worldwide, but they only mention a few data points from Asia," Cowen wrote.

Unfortunately, that may be the best evidence scientists have, because there aren't many fossils from before, during and after the extinction anywhere but North America, Brusatte told LiveScience.

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