2015

From “oddball” study? From New Scientist: Doubts are emerging about one of our leading models of consciousness. It seems that brain signals thought to reflect consciousness are also generated during unconscious activity. … Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in the UK is impressed by the rigorous methods used in the study, but cautions against interpreting the P3b signal as indicative of complex cognition. “The subject isn’t doing anything that need involve complex, sustained cognitive activity,” says Seth. Still, he agrees that the study raises questions about neural correlates of consciousness. “The neural signatures of conscious processing are likely to be more complex and interesting than just a P3b,” says Seth. “[The study] is pushing us towards more Read More ›

From Dan Falk at Cosmos: A century ago Einstein sweated blood to give us his mind-bending theory of gravity. As technology caught up, his predictions were verified, one by one. Now only gravitational waves remain. Yet for all its triumphs, general relativity faces a couple of big challenges. Einstein wrestled unsuccessfully with one of them: reconciling the theory with its great nemesis, quantum mechanics. Each theory has been outstanding in its own domain – relativity in the cosmos, quantum mechanics in the subatomic world. But occasionally the domains overlap. To understand the Universe’s earliest moments, as well as the insides of black holes, we still need a theory that bridges the very large and the very small. No one knows Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Among social insects, why does it pay for workers to help the queen in some situations but then also pay to kill her in others? What explains why some queens get killed and not others, and why kill her at all? One expert explored these questions, and found that by eliminating the queen, a matricidal worker frees the way for workers to lay male eggs. “Workers are assessing the situation in their colony and deciding to revolt against the queen only when the genetic makeup of the colony makes it favorable to do so,” Loope said. “The main advantage is to allow your sister workers to lay male eggs, rather than the queen, who typically stops worker reproduction Read More ›

Maybe not: We might just have found evidence of another universe bumping into planet Earth, a scientist has very tentatively suggested. While mapping the cosmic microwave background – the light left over from the early universe – Ranga-Ram Chary found a mysterious glow. Chary, a researcher at Planck’s US data centre in California, was mapping CMB when he spotted the unexpected glow. In his paper, Spectral Variations of the Sky: Constraints on Alternate Universes, he said that while there is a 30% chance the fluctuations are nothing unusual, there is also the possibility they provide evidence of a multiverse. “It could also possibly be due to the collision of our Universe with an alternate Universe whose baryon to photon ratio Read More ›

Here at Fortune: Elsevier Mutiny: Cracks Are Widening in the Fortress of Academic Publishing The editorial staff of a research journal have resigned to protest the company’s failure to embrace open access. A prestigious academic journal has just experienced the closest thing to outright mutiny: All six editors and the entire editorial board of the well-respected linguistics journal Lingua resigned en masse last week. And the reason says a lot about the ongoing disruption taking place in the formerly sleepy world of academic publishing. … In many ways, academic publishers are going through the same kind of wrenching change that traditional media companies like newspaper and magazine publishers are. Subscription-based business models that worked for decades are coming apart at the Read More ›

From bFast, appended to Baffling but undead physics results: Physicists always seem to end up with puzzles: what is dark energy, what is dark matter, what caused the big bang, how big is a proton. I love the honest puzzles that physicists bring to the table. Evolutionary biologists, however, never seem to be puzzled about nuthin’. First life? Don’t know how yet, but its not a problem. Cambrian explosion, wasn’t mutch,a and it had millions of years. Irreducible complexity? No deal, we did this experiment that produced two mutations to produce a single function — after 1/2 million years worth of evolving. HAR1F pulls off 18 mutations, no problem, millions of years. No issues, not problems, no puzzles. Its as Read More ›

Earth still in orbit, last we heard. Recently, I (O’Leary for News) have had skeptical things to say about D. S. Wilson’s Evolution Institute’s anticipated triumphal march for “evolutionary theory” throughout all disciplines in the21st century.* That said, I came across an interesting post on the site by science writer Dan Jones (The Philosopher In The Mirror) standing up to Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne. Coyne wishes to claim that religious belief in general leads to terrorism and that those who offer a more focused inquiry are stooges. In fact, it’s easy to show that Coyne is attacking a strawman. He would have you believe that radicalisation researchers are a bunch of “self-flagellating liberals” who ignore the role of Read More ›

From Nature: When a scientific result seems to show something genuinely new, subsequent experiments are supposed to either confirm it — triggering a textbook rewrite — or show it to be a measurement anomaly or experimental blunder. But some findings seem to remain forever stuck in the middle ground between light and shadow. Here’s one of the six: Diabolical proton discrepancy Given that protons are among the most common and well-studied particles in the Universe, one would expect physicists to have a solid grasp of their size. But in 2010, Randolf Pohl of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and his team measured the radius of the proton and found it to be 4% smaller than Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Chimpanzee language claims lost in translation, researchers conclude Unbelievably, some researchers tried examining one these claims instead of just accepting it and pontificating about it. The scholarship in question, published in the journal Current Biology in February, centered on the examination of two sets of chimpanzees in the Edinburgh Zoo: one that had been captive for several years in the facility and one that had recently arrived from the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands. Over a three-year period, the researchers claimed that the latter set had altered their sounds to those of the former set when communicating about a common object, apples, resulting in what they saw as a newly shared vocalization. … But a review Read More ›

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has written a post mocking an anthropologist for claiming that human beings aren’t apes. Not only is Coyne’s reasoning muddle-headed, but his biology is embarrassingly wrong. Heck, even I could spot his mistakes – and I’m not a scientist. The anthropologist who has had the temerity to declare that humans are not apes is Professor Jonathan Marks, who teaches biological anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In an article on his PopAnth blog titled, Are we apes? No, we are humans, Marks insists that we are related to apes: “indeed,” he writes, “we are closer to a chimpanzee than that chimpanzee is to an orangutan” and “we know Read More ›

It’s possible, says a recent Biology Direct paper: Here’s the abstract: Background: Microbial genetic diversity is often investigated via the comparison of relatively similar 16S molecules through multiple alignments between reference sequences and novel environmental samples using phylogenetic trees, direct BLAST matches, or phylotypes counts. However, are we missing novel lineages in the microbial dark universe by relying on standard phylogenetic and BLAST methods? If so, how can we probe that universe using alternative approaches? We performed a novel type of multi-marker analysis of genetic diversity exploiting the topology of inclusive sequence similarity networks. Results: Our protocol identified 86 ancient gene families, well distributed and rarely transferred across the 3 domains of life, and retrieved their environmental homologs among 10 Read More ›

In science journals: Because of super-specialization, the authors of papers themselves are nowadays often asked to suggest referees for peer review of their own work, but this, of course, leaves an opening for the practice of fraud. In a modern variant on Gogol’s Dead Souls, some scientists have been caught sending their papers for peer review to non-existent reviewers, complete with a curriculum vitae and an e-mail address. The article quotes the author of a blog on scientific research called “Retraction Watch,” who said “This is officially becoming a trend:” an odd way to put it, since either it is a trend or it isn’t, official recognition having nothing to do with it. There are even companies in China, apparently, Read More ›

Further to Jonathan Marks on why “evolutionary” “psychology” is neither (Marks: And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.): Also from the Evolution Institute, Historians will look back upon the 21st century as a time when the theory of evolution, confined largely to the biological sciences during the 20th century, expanded to include all human-related knowledge. As we approach the 1/6th mark of the 21st century, this intellectual revolution is already in full swing. A sizeable community of scientists, scholars, journalists, and their readers has become fully comfortable with the statement “Nothing about X makes sense except in the light of evolution”, where X Read More ›

At the Evolution Institute, UNC Charlotte biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, who blogs on the cultural significance of Darwinism at Anthropomics, writes, ”Evolutionary Psychology Is Neither”: … It’s presumably better than creationist psychology, but nobody practices creationist psychology – so presumably the word “evolutionary” is doing a bit more work here than it may seem at first blush. Indeed, the word seems to encode, in this context, a series of propositions that most people actually working in human evolution believe to be false, if not ridiculous. Foundationally, where students of human evolution have generally emphasized the adaptability of the human mind, evolutionary psychologists have rather attempted to call attention to the adaptedness of the human mind. From these opposed starting points, Read More ›

Over at The Best Schools, James Barham introduces an updated preface by Pierre van den Berghe, author of an older classsic on the ways academic life subverts honest enquiry: 1. Perhaps the most glaring change facing job-seeking PhD holders is a sharp deterioration in career opportunities and employment conditions. A glut of PhDs in many fields produced a shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. When AG appeared in 1970, US academia was approaching the end of its enormous expansion, becoming the juggernaut of world higher education. PhD production continued unabated, but job numbers stagnated or even contracted. Colleges and universities began to restrict tenure-track positions, and created a rapidly growing, semi-nomadic proletariat of instructors and lecturers on one-year, Read More ›