From Darren Curnoe at RealClearScience: Geneticists have found clear evidence that the choices people make can have profound impacts on the evolution of entire populations, and ultimately, our species as well. Some striking examples have been found like that both women and men are currently under selection for earlier age at first birth across a wide range of societies. Other work has shown that women are under selection for later age at last birth in some pre-industrial groups, but a later age at menopause in some post-industrial populations. The upshot is that in some groups the reproductive span seems to be getting longer for both women and men. Yet other research has shown that women are under selection for increased Read More ›

From Russell Brandom at Verge: While some predict mass unemployment or all-out war between humans and artificial intelligence, others foresee a less bleak future. Professor Manuela Veloso, head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions a future in which humans and intelligent systems are inseparable, bound together in a continual exchange of information and goals that she calls “symbiotic autonomy.” In Veloso’s future, it will be hard to distinguish human agency from automated assistance — but neither people nor software will be much use without the other. Veloso is already testing out the idea on the CMU campus, building roving, segway-shaped robots called “cobots” to autonomously escort guests from building to building and ask for human help Read More ›

From Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience: And scientists recently discovered a spider that uses a unique masquerade to hide in plain sight. It is the only known spider to have a body that bears an uncanny resemblance to a dangling, partly dried-up leaf. The species is not yet named. Apparently, mimicry is much more common in insects than in arachnids like spiders, of which only about 100 species are mimics. This is the only known leaf-haped one. Leaves close by the female spider on the branch were attached with silk, which hinted that she had placed them there deliberately to further camouflage herself. However, additional observations would be necessary to confirm this behavior, Kuntner told Live Science. More. Well, maybe spiders Read More ›

From Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus at Stat News: As it stands now, according to a new study, the pool of peer reviewers is able to keep up with the massive number of new papers published each year in biomedicine — more than 1 million, and climbing. … As we and others have argued, peer review is a deeply flawed system, but one that deserves fixing, not scrapping. The latest study does nothing to change that view. It does, however, point to a few simple changes that could go a long way toward shoring up the structure. More. They recommend paying reviewers for their time, fewer papers, and different forms of peer review, for example, sites like PubPeer.com and PubMed Read More ›

From Johnny Bartlett at the Blyth Institute: Description of the organization and its target audience We do research and education in biology, engineering, and computer science focusing on new avenues of research. This is for a book investigating alternative approaches to scientific and academic discovery and analysis. Content details Description We need a cover for the book “Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies”. The book is the result of a conference we held earlier this year. There is a template for the cover attached. US$499. A previous book that we published is this one – https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-…283863/ref There is no need to match anything about this cover, but I thought you should see what won the last competition. I usually Read More ›

From Alice Klein at New Scientist: A crafted piece of bone found in Australia looks as if it were designed to be worn in the nasal septum – making it the oldest bone jewellery belonging to Homo sapiens to be identified anywhere in the world. The finding shows that the first humans to reach Australia 50,000 years ago were as culturally advanced as their counterparts in Africa and Europe. More. Why are people who are so willing to believe nonsense about chimpanzees surprised when humans turn out to have been much more sophisticated much earlier than we had supposed? Could there be an agenda that does not rely on evidence here? See also: Code written in Stone Age art? Australia: Sophisticated Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Repeated binge drinking during adolescence can affect brain functions in future generations, potentially putting offspring at risk for such conditions as depression, anxiety, and metabolic disorders, a Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine study has found. “Adolescent binge drinking not only is dangerous to the brain development of teenagers, but also may impact the brains of their children,” said senior author Toni R. Pak, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. … The study, which was based on an animal model, found that adolescent binge drinking altered the on-off switches of multiple genes in the brains of offspring. When genes are turned on, they Read More ›

It seems the impact of Brexit followed by Trump [= “Amer-exit” ?] is stirring up a sharp reaction in global halls of power, leading for instance to resort to a loaded, one-word, barbed dismissal of the presumed ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked masses:   U/D: Let’s add a clip on the wave of upcoming elections in Europe: Thus, we see in the just linked and clipped Bloomberg report: >>The rise of populism in developed nations is tearing at the political fabric of Europe, unsettling markets and undermining growth prospects, top European bankers said in Frankfurt on Friday. “The uncertainty in the market, especially the political and economic instability, has never been as pronounced as it is today,’’ Commerzbank AG Martin Read More ›

From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: Stephen Hawking thinks humanity has only 1,000 years left of survival on Earth and that our species needs to colonize other planets. The famed physicist made the statement in a speech at Oxford University Union, in which he promoted the goal of searching for and colonizing Earth-like exoplanets. Developing the technology to allow humans to travel to and live on faraway alien worlds is a challenge, to say the least. But is Hawking right that humanity has only 1,000 years to figure it out? The dangers Hawking cited — from climate change, to nuclear weapons, to genetically engineered viruses — could indeed pose existential threats to our species, experts say, but predicting a millennium into Read More ›

Most perplexing mystery in astronomy. From Elizabeth Gibney at Nature: What causes split-second blasts of radio waves that appear in the sky from billions of light years away is one of the most perplexing mysteries in astronomy. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen a flash of high-energy γ-rays [gamma rays] that looks as if it was emitted by the same event that produced a fast radio burst (FRB) — a correlation that was predicted to help whittle down the zoo of possible explanations for the origin of FRBs. “If FRBs have γ-ray counterparts, it would be hugely constraining of models and extremely interesting,” says Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. But as well as exciting Read More ›

Yes. From astrophysicist Caleb Sharf at Nautilus: Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics. After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox. … In Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A subtle change occurred in our evolutionary history 100,000 years ago which allowed people who thought and behaved differently – such as individuals with autism – to be integrated into society, academics from the University of York have concluded. The change happened with the emergence of collaborative morality – an investment in the well-being of everyone in the group – and meant people who displayed autistic traits would not only have been accepted but possibly respected for their unique skills. It is likely our ancestors would have had autism, with genetics suggesting the condition has a long evolutionary history. Okay, so morality emerged and people who were different were not just cast out. But… Many people with autism Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Our current understanding is that mice have either no — or extremely limited — neural circuitry and genes similar to those that regulate human speech. According to a recent study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, this understanding may be incorrect. … Dr. Jarvis and colleagues report the results of their investigation into the effect of a genetic mutation in the Forkhead box protein #2 (FOXP2) on the vocalization patterns of adult male mice. FOXP2 regulates speech production in humans. Individuals with deficiencies in FOXP2 protein have difficulty forming complex syllables and complex sentence construction. Although mice are unable to communicate using speech in the same way as humans, they do vocalize as a means of communicating with Read More ›

From James M. Chappell et al. at Frontiers in Physics: The proper description of time remains a key unsolved problem in science. Newton conceived of time as absolute and universal which “flows equably without relation to anything external.” In the nineteenth century, the four-dimensional algebraic structure of the quaternions developed by Hamilton, inspired him to suggest that he could provide a unified representation of space and time. With the publishing of Einstein’s theory of special relativity these ideas then lead to the generally accepted Minkowski spacetime formulation of 1908. Minkowski, though, rejected the formalism of quaternions suggested by Hamilton and adopted an approach using four-vectors. The Minkowski framework is indeed found to provide a versatile formalism for describing the relationship Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The formation of different languages and language groupings appears to have happened in the same broad period and geographical locations as the development of facial features in various human populations, according to linguistics professor, Gerhard Jäger, and paleoanthropologists, Professor Katerina Harvati and Dr. Hugo Reyes-Centeno. In their study, the researchers examined 265 skulls from Africa, Asia, and Oceania and the vocabularies of more than 800 languages and dialects from those regions. If these findings are confirmed in further investigations, it would give researchers a characteristic which would help them to follow the development of various language families as far back as the early development of humankind. The linguists developed a method to measure the degree of similarity between Read More ›