From ScienceDaily: Planetary scientists have long believed that Earth formed from planetary objects similar to meteorites. Then, a decade ago, perplexing new measurements challenged that assumption by showing that Earth and its supposed “building blocks” actually contain significantly different isotopic compositions. … “These recent measurements contribute to the growing evidence that the meteorites delivered to Earth provide an imperfect match to Earth’s composition,” said Richard Carlson, director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Carlson was one of the scientists who found the compositional mismatch between meteorites and Earth 10 years ago. “This realization opens new views both to how Earth formed and to the bulk chemical composition of our home planet.” Paper. (paywall) – Read More ›

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: Scientists had assumed from fossil evidence that an ancient predecessor called the straight-tusked elephant (Paleoloxodon antiquus), which lived in European forests until around 100,000 years ago, was a close relative of Asian elephants. In fact, this ancient species is most closely related to African forest elephants, a genetic analysis now reveals. Even more surprising, living forest elephants in the Congo Basin are closer kin to the extinct species than they are to today’s African savannah-dwellers. And, together with newly announced genomes from ancient mammoths, the analysis also reveals that many different elephant and mammoth species interbred in the past. More. This is happening so often now that there is clearly something wrong with the way Read More ›

From Douglas Hoffman, interviewed at Quanta: Quanta Magazine: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.” Hoffmann: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those Read More ›

From Lizzie Wade at Science: The “necklaces” are tiny: beads of animal teeth, shells, and ivory no more than a centimeter long. But they provoked an outsized debate that has raged for decades. Found in the Grotte du Renne cave at Arcy-sur-Cure in central France, they accompanied delicate bone tools and were found in the same layers as fossils from Neandertals—our archaic cousins. Some archaeologists credited the artifacts—the so-called Châtelperronian culture—to Neandertals. But others argued that Neandertals were incapable of the kind of symbolic expression reflected in the jewelry and insisted that modern humans must have been the creators. Now, a study uses a new method that relies on ancient proteins to identify and directly date Neandertal bone fragments from Read More ›

From Huw Price and Ken Wharton at Aeon: Over the past forty years, a lot of ingenuity has gone into designing experiments to test the quantum predictions on which Bell’s result depends. Quantum mechanics has passed them all with flying colours. Just last year, three new experiments claimed to close almost all the remaining loopholes. ‘The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the “spooky action-at-a-distance” that [Einstein] famously hated… is an inherent part of the quantum world,’ as Nature put it. Our authors propose another solution: Retrcausality, or the present an future can shape the past: Some readers may raise a more global objection to retrocausality. Ordinarily, we think that the past is fixed Read More ›

I know a young man.  Let’s call him John.  John’s father was a criminal and raised him to be one too.  John has five brothers, and every one of them is either currently in prison or on parole.  John dropped out of school and joined a gang where he began his criminal career in earnest, specializing in robbery and drug dealing when he was not binge drinking and high on meth.  His first prison stretch was seven years for armed robbery.  His second was three years for possessing a firearm in violation of his parole.  John has spent nearly one-third of his life locked up. After he got out of prison the last time, John decided to try to turn Read More ›

From Jason Bittel at National Geographic: This week, headlines have been swirling about a paper published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics that seemed to offer tantalizing signs of dolphinese. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins were recorded exchanging a series of sounds that resembled “a conversation between two people.” The dolphins took turns producing the sounds and did not interrupt each other, according to study author Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station in Russia. Ryabov suggests that the variation seen in these pulses represents the equivalent of phonemes, or words, and that the strings of pulses could reasonably be considered dolphin sentences. However, many of the world’s leading experts Read More ›

From Peter Ellerton at RealClearScience: Claims that the “the science isn’t settled” with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works. So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong? The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general. More. Ellerton writes an average good article on the scientific method but it has almost no relationship to why people doubt the human-caused global warming a-crock-a-lypse. Most doubters suspect that marketing doomsday is a means of raising taxes and Read More ›

From forester Peter Wohlleben at Daily Mail: There’s increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn. If that’s true — and my experience as a forester convinces me it is — then they must be able to store and transmit information. And scientists are beginning to ask: is it possible that trees possess intelligence, and memories, and emotions? So, to cut to the quick, do trees have brains? It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it’s hard to be sceptical.More. No one familiar with the area now Read More ›

  Offered by author Bruce Buff via Evolution News & Views: For months, he and Alex Robertson had spent a nearly continuous stream of long nights toiling in secret, trying to crack what had to be the most extraordinary encryption ever devised. What they had encountered should have been unbreakable. It was remarkable that, through a series of astounding discoveries, they had gotten as far as they had, only to be stymied by a final puzzle that had defied solving. It was even more remarkable that the answer to hat last obstacle had suddenly come to him this morning. Realizing the implications of what they were about to obtain, he had decided to wait until he was certain what it Read More ›

We usually save these treats for Sunday but, oh well: From Daily Mail: TV shows designed to inspire awe at the natural world could make viewers less inclined to believe scientific theories about existence, a study suggests. It found religious people who watch programmes such as BBC’s Planet Earth, presented by Sir David Attenborough, are more likely to have their faith in God reaffirmed by the beauty they see on screen. Atheists, meanwhile, are more likely to believe scientific theories that involve order rather than randomness in the universe. More. Well, the obvious solution is to mainly air nature shows about ugly, boring places and tell people to watch them out of a sense of duty. Or pass laws making Read More ›

Apparently, the US House is on an anti-science rampage. From himself at New Yorker: From climate change and evolution to sex education and vaccination, there has always been tension between scientists and Congress. But Smith, who has been in Congress since 1987 and assumed the chairmanship of the Science Committee in 2013, has escalated that tension into outright war. Smith has a background in American studies and law, not science. He has, however, received more than six hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions from the oil-and-gas industry during his time in Congress—more than from any other single industry. With a focus that is unprecedented, he’s now using his position to attack scientists and activists who work on climate change. Under his Read More ›

Adam Frank confronts the question at NPR: One difference, he says, is data: There are literally thousands of studies now of those rotating-too-fast galaxies out there — and they all get the same, quite noticeable result. In other words, data for the existence of dark matter is prevalent. It’s not like you see the effect once in a while but then it disappears. The magnitude of the result — meaning its strength — also stays pretty consistent from one study to the next. The same holds true for studies of dark energy. No such luck with ghosts. Sure, but a true believer in ghosts would be sure to point out that ghosts are considered intelligent, not inanimate. So seeing them Read More ›

Readers will surely remember Stanford’s John Ioannidis, scourge of bad data. Now, at Milbank Quarterly: The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses Currently, there is massive production of unnecessary, misleading, and conflicted systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Instead of promoting evidence-based medicine and health care, these instruments often serve mostly as easily produced publishable units or marketing tools. Suboptimal systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be harmful given the major prestige and influence these types of studies have acquired. The publication of systematic reviews and meta-analyses should be realigned to remove biases and vested interests and to integrate them better with the primary production of evidence. Context: Currently, most systematic reviews and meta-analyses are done retrospectively with Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey at ScienceNews: Color vision may actually work like a colorized version of a black-and-white movie, a new study suggests. Cone cells, which sense red, green or blue light, detect white more often than colors, researchers report September 14 in Science Advances. The textbook-rewriting discovery could change scientists’ thinking about how color vision works. Like a coloring book. The large number of cells that detect white (and black — the absence of white) create a high-resolution black-and-white picture of a person’s surroundings, picking out edges and fine details. Red- and green-signaling cells fill in low-resolution color information. More. Maybe that helps explain the craze for adult coloring? Not just that some people have too much time on Read More ›