2017

From Ann Gibbons at Science: A remarkably complete skeleton introduced in 2010 as “the best candidate” for the immediate ancestor of our genus Homo may just be a pretender. Instead of belonging to the human lineage, the new species of Australopithecus sediba is more closely related to other hominins from South Africa that are on a side branch of the human family tree, according to a new analysis of the fossil presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.More. When you get kicked out of the human family, it’s not like there is a ceremony or anything. Or is there? See also: Choosing between Sediba and Naledi as human ancestor? Follow UD News Read More ›

From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: Welcome to one of the more provocative-sounding explanations of how the brain works, outlined in a set of 26 original papers, the second part of a unique online compendium updating us on current thinking in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. In 2015, the MIND group founded by philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, set up the Open MIND project to publish papers by leading researchers. Unusually, the papers were published in open access electronic formats, as an experiment in creating a cutting edge online resource – and it was free. The first volume, spanning everything from the nature of consciousness to lucid dreaming, was a qualified success. The Read More ›

From Wesley J. Smith at First Things: Science is never truly settled. Indeed, challenging seemingly incontrovertible facts and continually retesting long-accepted theories are crucial components of the scientific method. Examples of perceived truths overturned by subsequent discoveries are ubiquitous. Here’s just one: So-called junk DNA that does not encode proteins was, until relatively recently, thought by a large majority of scientists to have no purpose, and was even used as evidence of random and purposeless evolution. But continuing investigations in the field led to the discovery that most “junk DNA” actually serves important biological functions. Think what might have happened if scientists seeking to continue exploring this area of inquiry had been warned away because of the “scientific consensus.” What Read More ›

From molecular cancer biologist Ahmed Alkhateeb at Aeon: Science is in the midst of a data crisis. Last year, there were more than 1.2 million new papers published in the biomedical sciences alone, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed biomedical papers to over 26 million. However, the average scientist reads only about 250 papers a year. Meanwhile, the quality of the scientific literature has been in decline. Some recent studies found that the majority of biomedical papers were irreproducible. The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Our earliest hominin ancestors lived at least seven million years ago. The first species to look a little like modern humans appeared between about two and three million years ago. But our own species – Homo sapiens – evolved about 200,000 years ago. So, if H. naledi lived 300,000 to 200,000 years ago that’s a remarkable discovery. It means that a species of human with some surprisingly primitive features – including a tiny skull and brain – survived into the relatively recent past. Conceivably, H. naledi might even have met early members of our species, H. sapiens. One could even speculate we had something to do with it going extinct. More. It also means Read More ›

From ScienceDaily Paleontologists have uncovered a new fossil species that sheds light on the origin of mandibulates, the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, to which belong familiar animals such as flies, ants, crayfish and centipedes. Named Tokummia katalepsis by the researchers, the creature documents for the first time the anatomy of early mandibulates, a sub-group of arthropods with specialized appendages known as mandibles, used to grasp, crush and cut their food. … “The pincers of Tokummia are large, yet also delicate and complex, reminding us of the shape of a can opener, with their couple of terminal teeth on one claw, and the other claw being curved towards them,” said Aria. “But we think they might Read More ›

From Nancy Atkinson at LiveScience: Now, researchers have produced what they say is the first composite image of a dark matter filament that connects galaxies together. … In their paper, they explained that in order to study the weak lensing signal of the dark matter filaments, they required two sets of data: a catalog of galaxy cluster pairs that were lensed, and a catalog of background source galaxies with accurate distance measurements. They combined lensing data from a multi-year sky survey at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with information from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that mapped luminous red galaxies (LRGs), which are massive, distant, and very old galaxies. … Hudson and Epps combined or “stacked” more than 23,000 galaxy pairs, all Read More ›

At least, that would be the outcome of his crackdown on kids: You’ve maybe already heard this one: In his Netflix series, Bill Nye asks, bluntly, ‘Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?’ The Internet is rightly mocking the complete disaster that is the Rachel Bloom “My Sex Junk” video that is part of the new Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World.” As bad as that is (it is BAD), another portion of the series is even worse. The 13th and final installment is titled “Earth’s People Problem,” and with a name like that, you know we could be in for some ideas that border on eugenics. … Nye (who, again, Read More ›

Toiling too long in a clean lab, micromanaging the lives of mice, can really put stress on a person. Something like that might have happened to the poor sot who wrote us the following, outlining a Drinking Game, to help get through March for Science coverage on the lunchroom TV: The “March for Science” Drinking Game Drinking Games can help you get through watching things that are excruciatingly tedious. It might be the best way – perhaps the only way – to get through the entire “March for Science” festivities. There are a few locations where you can watch the Washington Mall event online: four hours and five and a half hours, depending on how the beer holds out, or Read More ›

  From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Croatian philosopher of science and politics Neven Sesardic (b. 1949) retired from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, in 2015. He wrote a book shortly thereafter, When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics (Encounter Books, 2016). He was wise to wait till he had his pension… He chronicles the way in which 20th Century luminaries in science, philosophy, and their mutual colleagues excused and aided totalitarian rule. As a survivor of totalitarian rule himself, Sesardic does not focus on acknowledged racists or Nazi Party members in science, the ones that we are all taught to reject by popular science journalism. He spotlights brilliant thinkers we are encouraged to look up to as Read More ›

Of course, he allows us to know, he did not read Jonathan Wells’ book, Zombie Science: I will be accused of having “reviewed” Wells’s book here without having read it, but this isn’t a review: it’s a notice that a scientifically rejected charlatan has published another book, and has even issued a “teaser trailer” for it. Here it is below. There’s no intellectual content there, but of course the buyers of the book aren’t looking for truth and reason; they’re looking to confirm their own religiously-based biases. Reading a book signals that one intends to address the information therein. When people are sufficiently well established, they do not need to know information in order to dismiss it. Indeed, that may Read More ›

From Alex Hern at the Guardian: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign. Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology. Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on. And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and subedit published articles.More. The process described is elsewhere called propaganda. Translation: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is Read More ›

From Karla Lant at Futurism: The revelation that observing and measuring quantum effects changes their behavior is troubling, but it also suggests to many people that consciousness itself is part of quantum theory. Moreover, as humans creating AI that, for all its achievements still can’t master some of the things that come so easily to our own minds (at least not yet), we are bound to see a blurry reflection of ourselves in quantum computers, which promise to achieve so much more than ordinary computers ever could. However, it was the British physicist Roger Penrose who pointed out that, observer effect aside, quantum mechanics may be involved in consciousness. More specifically, he thought it might be possible that quantum events Read More ›

And won’t likely help his reputation: My Sex Junk is a message to the world about sexuality. We can probably miss the one where ice cream cones discover sex. Pop science is no match for identity politics, as we might have guessed. Someone asks, does Nye has a future as the ”Pee Wee Herman of popular science”? Maybe that’s what’s left now. See also: March for Science, Bill Nye, and constitutional government Follow UD News at Twitter!

Novelist Cormac McCarthy at Nautilus: There are influential persons among us—of whom a bit more a bit later—who claim to believe that language is a totally evolutionary process. That it has somehow appeared in the brain in a primitive form and then grown to usefulness. Somewhat like vision, perhaps. But vision we now know is traceable to perhaps as many as a dozen quite independent evolutionary histories. Tempting material for the teleologists. These stories apparently begin with a crude organ capable of perceiving light where any occlusion could well suggest a predator. Which actually makes it an excellent scenario for Darwinian selection. It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know. Read More ›