2016

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Psychology’s Replication Crisis Can’t Be Wished Away Yes, when that “hey, we’re saved” story whistled past the News desk here, casting doubt on serious problems in social science, we held off. There was something troubling about the way the findings were phrased: “Researchers overturn landmark study on the replicability of psychological science” C’mon. It’s widely recognized that there are problems in social science, chiefly due to the monochromatic bias of the researchers. That makes them an easy mark for any flimflam that flies within their mass comfort zone. It’s all the worse if they imagine that won’t happen because they are a “science.” Anyway, Ed Yong: Last August, I wrote about a large initiative called Read More ›

Voids and supervoids: Cosmic voids, and supervoids, are large volumes of space that are devoid of matter. This includes normal matter, in the form of galaxies, and dark matter. Initially, astronomers were not sure if the voids contained dark matter, even though there were no galaxies, but recent observations show that the halos of dark matter are not present. The filamentary structure of galactic superclusters surrounds the voids. While space is mostly empty, voids are large volumes, tens of megaparsecs across. The largest confirmed supervoids are about 100 Mpc (325 million light-years) or more across . The larger known voids include the Boötes Supervoid, and the Northern and Southern Local Supervoids. To explain the cold spot in the cosmic microwave Read More ›

The retraction of a PLoS ONE paper on the hand that made repeated reference to a Creator shows that biologists are “very hostile to those who invoke the supernatural in their science,” writes Professor Jerry Coyne. But it turns out that the paper’s authors weren’t referring to God, but Nature. One of the paper’s authors, Ming-Jin Liu, explains: We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word “Creator” was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word “Creator.” What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendi[n]ous connective architecture Read More ›

From Lizzie Wade at Science: Archaeologists have long known that Neandertals… used fire, but they could have merely taken advantage of naturally occurring lightning strikes and forest fires to supply the flames. Out of interest, how practical would that be? The point of using fire is to have it handy. No cultural practice could have grown up from relying on occasional accidents and infrequent disasters. That would be like waiting for prey animals to drop dead of heart attacks instead of killing them. Excavations at the 50,000-year-old site Pech-de-l’Azé I in southwestern France have yielded blocks of manganese dioxide, which is abundant in the region’s limestone formations. It has been thought that the compound was used to make body paint, Read More ›

Just as chimpanzees are claimed to have sacred rituals, we now hear from New Scientist that Ravens’ fear of unseen snoopers hints they have theory of mind … The results [of the experiment] suggest ravens can generalise from their own perceptual experience to infer the possibility of being seen by others who are not visibly present. “This proves they have a basic understanding of seeing, which is a basic form of a theory of mind,” says Bugnyar. “This basically means that some non-human animals can indeed evolve this particular ability of attributing a mental state to another one, which has always been considered to be one of the unique human abilities.” More. If the experiment, which showed that ravens are aware Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: Author with seven retractions makes Thomson Reuters list of top scientists — plus another twist A cancer researcher who recently retired from MD Anderson Cancer Center — and also recently lost seven papers from one journal following a multi-year investigation — is one of the world’s top scientists, according to a new ranking. … We have a long history with Aggarwal — after he told us in 2012 that MD Anderson was investigating his work, he later threatened to sue us for reporting on the case. But there’s another twist to the story, and that’s the identity of the person stepping into Aggarwal’s endowed chair position (the Ransom Horne, Jr. Professorship for Cancer Research) at MD Anderson. Read More ›

Dumps photosynthesis. From New Scientist: A newly discovered Japanese plant spends most of its life hidden underground and steals nutrients from fungi rather than getting its energy from the sun. … The plant’s stem is about 3-9 centimetres long and has between nine and 15 purple star-shaped flowers, which push up above the ground. Suetsugu has named it Sciaphila yakushimensis after the island. The plant can’t photosynthesise and, like other mycoheterotrophs, steals the carbon it needs from a fungal host. The parasitic plant attracts strands of mycorrhizal fungus into its many hairy roots and then feeds off fungus growing inside the roots. … Because it doesn’t rely on photosynthesising the sun’s light for its energy, it can stay underground, reducing Read More ›

From Science: As it turns out, our universe seems to get it just about right. The existing cosmological constant means the rate of expansion is large enough that it minimizes planets’ exposure to gamma ray bursts, but small enough to form lots of hydrogen-burning stars around which life can exist. (A faster expansion rate would make it hard for gas clouds to collapse into stars.) Jimenez says the expansion of the universe played a bigger role in creating habitable worlds than he expected. “It was surprising to me that you do need the cosmological constant to clear out the region and make it more suburbanlike,” he says. Beyond what they reveal about the potential for life in our galaxy and Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: Monkeys Drive Wheelchairs Using Only Their Thoughts Neuroscientists at Duke Health have developed a brain-machine interface (BMI) that allows primates to use only their thoughts to navigate a robotic wheelchair. The BMI uses signals from hundreds of neurons recorded simultaneously in two regions of the monkeys’ brains that are involved in movement and sensation. As the animals think about moving toward their goal — in this case, a bowl containing fresh grapes — computers translate their brain activity into real-time operation of the wheelchair. The interface, described in the March 3 issue of the online journal Scientific Reports, demonstrates the future potential for people with disabilities who have lost most muscle control and mobility due to quadriplegia Read More ›

Except for losses. From Discovery: A fossil of a 520-million-year-old animal is so well preserved that its individual nerve fibers are still visible, according to a new study on the crustacean-like creature that once lived in southern China. The fossil represents the oldest and most detailed central nervous system ever found, reports the study, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. More. The animal is a Cambrian life form, Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis, considered “an early ancestor of modern insects, spiders and crustaceans,” and its nerve chord is “similar to the spinal cord that we and many other organisms have today. Bead-like ganglia, or bundles of nerve cells, controlled the animal’s single pair of walking legs.” Read More ›

From Templeton: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth who has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books, has been awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize. … He also boldly defends the compatibility of religion and science, a response to those who consider them necessarily separate and distinct. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean,” he wrote in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.More. Naturally, we wondered, so from our files, we found: Britain’s chief rabbi on the Brit riots: Restore civil Read More ›

From Detecting Design: Now, it is true that mitochondrial organelles are quite unique and very interesting. Unlike any other organelle, except for chloroplasts, mitochondria appear to originate only from other mitochondria. They contain some of their own DNA, which is usually, but not always, circular – like circular bacterial DNA (there are also many organisms that have linear mitochondrial chromosomes with eukaryotic-style telomeres). Mitochondria also have their own transcriptional and translational machinery to decode DNA and messenger RNA and produce proteins. Also, mitochondrial ribosomes and transfer RNA molecules are similar to those found in bacteria, as are some of the components of their membranes. In 1970, these and other similar observations led Dr. Lynn Margulis to propose an extracellular origin Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Up until now, a number of theories have sought to explain how cells came to acquire mitochondria [power plants]. Although there is consensus as to the “how” ?the first mitochondria must have been a bacterium that entered another, and remained there, becoming part of the cell? the “when” has so far been unclear. Some scientists advocated an early incorporation of mitochondria, and considered that step as the first necessary to begin advancing toward eukaryotic cells as they are known today. Other theories proposed a later inclusion of mitochondria, as a more complex host cell could favor the entry of another cell and that cell’s permanence within its interior. Now, predoctoral scientist Alexandros Pitis and ICREA research professor and Read More ›

From the New York Times: DNA Under the Scope, and a Forensic Tool Under a Cloud Marina Stajic worked for nearly three decades as director of the forensic toxicology lab at the medical examiner’s office in New York City. Last week Dr.. Stajic, 66, filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming she had been forced into retirement last year in part because of a disagreement with her superiors over the accuracy of certain DNA tests. There is more at stake here than Dr. Stajic’s retirement. The cutting-edge technique at the center of this legal dispute, called low copy number DNA analysis, has transformed not just police work, but also a range of scientific fields including cancer biology, in vitro fertilization, Read More ›