2016

From anthropologist Todd Wood at his blog: First up, in a surprisingly speculative paper in the South African Journal of Science, Wits professor Francis Thackeray proposed that the bones of H. naledi had lichen stains on them from exposure to light. If correct, the resting of the bones on the surface would imply that the bodies of H. naledi were not intentionally deposited in the Dinaledi chamber but just fell in there. I say this was speculative, since Thackeray’s argument (as I understood it) was based on visual similarity of some stains on the bones to stains on some rocks that might have been made by lichens. More. Colleagues say no, the stains are not consistent with lichen growth in Read More ›

Here: Multicopy plasmids potentiate the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria As well as allowing horizontal gene transfer, the increased copy number of plasmids could accelerate evolution. Here, it is shown that… More. One can browse four articles for free, include the above. Perhaps they are hoping to accommodate non-Darwinian evolution more formally. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Matthew R. Francis at Symmetry: One reason to think of dark matter as a thermal relic is an interesting coincidence known as the “WIMP miracle.”WIMP stands for “weakly-interacting massive particle,” and WIMPs are the most widely accepted candidates for dark matter. Theory says WIMPs are likely heavier than protons and interact via the weak force, or at least interactions related to the weak force. … Both the primordial light known as the cosmic microwave background and the behavior of galaxies tell us that most dark matter must be slow-moving (“cold” in the language of physics). That means interactions between dark matter particles must be low in strength. “Through what is perhaps a very deep fact about the universe,” Buckley Read More ›

From a Nature editorial: Do the academics of the Internet age still communicate as stiffly as their colleagues did at the time of the Apollo programme? Or, heaven forbid, has some scruffy informality crept into scholarly discourse? Yes, and no, according to an illuminating new analysis. Formal language is largely intact, the study finds, give or take a mildly more tolerant attitude to split infinitives and initial conjunctions. Yet there has been an explosion in the use of the first-person pronouns in academic papers by biologists. What, we wondered, is that all about? Ah, at last, a question UD News can answer with confidence: It’s “all about me.” The traditional scientist preferred an anonymous style out of a sense of Read More ›

Equally false. From Rik Smits at the Scientist, commenting on ethologist Frans de Waal’s recent book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: The essential burden of science is to replace dogma, sentiment, and superstition with an as-far-as-we-now-know theory based on verifiable facts, all the while striving for objectivity. Yet, in his work, de Waal replaces one dogma—the Cartesian/behaviorist stance that animals are mere oblivious response machines—with another. Following “Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind,” de Waal notes that there is no fundamental difference between man and beast—not even mentally. The problem is not the idea, it is that de Waal posits this Read More ›

From Alison George at New Scientist: A painstaking investigation of Europe’s cave art has revealed 32 shapes and lines that crop up again and again and could be the world’s oldest code Von Petzinger, a palaeoanthropologist from the University of Victoria in Canada, is spearheading an unusual study of cave art. Her interest lies not in the breathtaking paintings of bulls, horses and bison that usually spring to mind, but in the smaller, geometric symbols frequently found alongside them. Her work has convinced her that far from being random doodles, the simple shapes represent a fundamental shift in our ancestors’ mental skills. (paywall) More. See also: Australia: Sophisticated inland campsite 50 000 years ago The search for our earliest ancestors: Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Life took hold on land at least as early as 3.2 billion years ago, suggests a study. The team studied ancient rock formations from South Africa’s Barberton greenstone belt. These rocks are some of the oldest known on Earth, with their formation dating back to 3.5 billion years. … These rocks are some of the oldest known on Earth, with their formation dating back to 3.5 billion years. In a layer that has been dated at 3.22 billion years old, tiny grains of the iron sulfide mineral pyrite were discovered that show telltale signs of microbial activity. Paper. (paywall) – Sami Nabhan, Michael Wiedenbeck, Ralf Milke, Christoph Heubeck. Biogenic overgrowth on detrital pyrite in ca. 3.2 Ga Archean Read More ›

Sheldon, our physics and physics colour commentator, responds based on his personal experiences to the news from Nature that many scientists “stunned” by the Trump win: There’s been a lot of hyperventilating by the intelligentsia about the consequences of a Republican sweep of House, Senate and Presidency. Many fear that Republicans in general, and Trump in particular are “anti-science” and will put America back in the stone age. For those of you new to American politics, I’d like to dispel that myth and throw some cold water on the hysteria. First, universities and research scientists are by no means neutral politically. I’ve lost 3 jobs at universities both public and private, in part for being a Republican. Sociologists who measure Read More ›

Why? Doesn’t that speak poorly of the powers of the scientific method? From Jeff Tollefson, Lauren Morello& Sara Reardon at Nature: Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax Read More ›

An illusion like consciousness, right? Okay, never mind, let’s hear the solution. From Brian Koberlein at Forbes: What if the effects of gravity aren’t due to some fundamental force, but are rather an emergent effect due to other fundamental interactions? A new paper proposes just that, and if correct it could also explain the effects of dark matter. An anthropic force acts like gravity. Entropic gravity is an interesting idea, and it would explain why gravity is so difficult to bring into the fold of quantum physics, but it’s not without its problems. For one, since entropic gravity predicts exactly the same gravitational behavior as general relativity, there’s no experimental way to distinguish it as a better theory. There are Read More ›

From Marek Kohn at New Scientist, in a review of Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky: Researchers have devised different ways to create firebreaks between values and data. According to anthropologist Chris Knight, Chomsky’s strategy was as radical as his politics – and he developed it in order to enable himself to sustain his left-wing political commitments. In his new book Decoding Chomsky, Knight (who mounts his own critique from a position on the radical left) argues that Chomsky needed to deny any connection between his science and his politics in order to practise both while based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that was heavily funded by the US military. … This required detaching language from society altogether. Chomsky Read More ›

From Berit Brogaard at Psychology Today: A new volume of papers on panpsychism edited by philosophers Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla just appeared with Oxford University Press. It features paper by prominent philosophers David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Brian McLaughlin, among many others. According to the traditional version of panpsychism, everything around you is conscious: the chair your are sitting on, the rock you use as a doorstopper at home and the thick hurricane-safe windows in your office. Panpsychism literally means that particular kinds of psychological states are embedded in everything. An alternative to the traditional view is the view that everything around you has a form of rudimentary consciousness. More. Brogaard suggests, “…we can imagine that there is qualitative Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It’s the ultimate chicken-or-egg conundrum: What was the “mother” molecule that led to the formation of life? And how did it replicate itself? One prominent school of thought proposes that RNA is the answer to the first question. Now, in ACS Central Science, researchers in this camp demonstrate RNA has more flexibility in how it recognizes itself than previously believed. The finding might change how we picture the first chemical steps towards replication and life. Today, plants, animals and other organisms reproduce by making copies of their DNA with the help of enzymes and then passing the copies onto the next generation. This is possible because genetic material is made of building blocks — or bases A, T, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It has been known for quite some time that genetically modified bacteria, which have lost their ability to produce certain amino acids and retrieve these nutrients from their environment grow better than bacteria, which produce all nutrients themselves. This led researchers to inquire whether natural selection would favor the loss of abilities, thus making bacteria more dependent on their environment. Of course it did or they wouldn’t be writing about it but this has nothing to do with “natural” selection. The researchers had produced the bacteria themselves. A similar loss of traits has been observed not only in bacteria, but also in other groups of organisms. Many animals, including humans, are not able to produce vitamins themselves — Read More ›

From physicist Rob Sheldon, our physics colour commentator, on what’s wrong with the latest new theory of consciousness. That’s the one by Anil Seth that walloped through here quite recently, namely, Researcher: Never mind the “hard problem of consciousness”: The real one is… “Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind” Sheldon: The key point in this article is in this sentence: But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). Restating it, Read More ›