News

From Lisa Grossman at Science News, on an effort to update the Drake Equation: If the civilization lasted less than 100,000 years — the time it takes light to cross the galaxy — then the odds of the signals reaching Earth while the civilization is still broadcasting are vanishingly small, the researchers report February 27 at arXiv.org. Humans, for example, have been transmitting radio waves for only about 80 years, so our radio waves cover less than 0.001 percent of the Milky Way. “If the civilization emitted from the other side of the galaxy, when the signal arrives here, the civilization will already be gone,” says Grimaldi, of the Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne in Switzerland.More. The space aliens have Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: why, and when, can we use mathematics to learn something about our physical Universe? We don’t know the answer to why, but we do know the answer to when: when it agrees with our experiments and observations. So long as the laws of physics remain the laws of physics, and do not whimsically turn on-and-off or vary in some ill-defined way, we know we can describe them mathematically, at least in principle. Mathematics, then, is the toolkit we use to describe the functioning of the Universe. It’s the raw materials: the nails, the boards, the hammers and saws. Physics is how you apply that mathematics. Physics is how you put it all together to make Read More ›

From Andrew Urevig at National Geogaphic: Contradicting some previous accounts, the team argues that this new evidence appears to show that the common ancestor of all panarthropods did not have a complex three-part brain—and neither did the common ancestor of invertebrate panarthropods and vertebrates. … That structure can be traced back through the fossil record. Kerygmachela’s relatively simple brain, preserved as thin films of carbon, includes only the foremost of the three segments present in living arthropods. The researchers are relying on the remarkably hardy tardigrade (water bear) as a surviving example. Not everyone agrees: Tardigrade brains may or may not develop based on segments at all, says Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona who was not Read More ›

From NASA: The Twin Study propelled NASA into the genomics era of space travel. It was a ground-breaking study comparing what happened to astronaut Scott Kelly, in space, to his identical twin brother, Mark, who remained on Earth. The perfect nature versus nurture study was born. The Twins Study brought ten research teams from around the country together to accomplish one goal: discover what happens to the human body after spending one year in space. NASA has a grasp on what happens to the body after the standard-duration six-month missions aboard the International Space Station, but Scott Kelly’s one-year mission is a stepping stone to a three-year mission to Mars. More. So what did they find? Among other things, After Read More ›

Here’s my (O’Leary for News) review of James O’Keefe’s American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News (off-topic, unless you intend to rely on them in any way for communications): — Has North American journalism gone undercover? If traditional media were doing their job, few people would have heard of James O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s career as a provocateur started as a prank. On St. Patrick’s Day, 2005, he persuaded an unusually dense Rutgers administrator that persons of Irish descent might be offended by Lucky Charms cereal. She took the bait and removed the “offensive” boxes of cereal from the dining hall. … He was later propelled to fame by his exposure of community organizing group ACORN for Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at New Scientist, No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it’s there; we just haven’t been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter “dark DNA”. And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature. The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how Read More ›

Justin Stover writes at Chronicle Review: he reality is that the humanities have always been about courtoisie, a constellation of interests, tastes, and prejudices that marks one as a member of a particular class. That class does not have to be imagined solely in economic terms. Indeed, the humanities have sometimes done a good job of producing a class with some socioeconomic diversity. But it is a class nonetheless. Roman boys (of a certain social background) labored under the rod of the grammaticus because their parents wanted to initiate them into the community of Virgil readers — a community that spanned much of the vast Roman world, and which gave the bureaucratic class a certain cohesion it otherwise lacked. In Read More ›

Now there’s a psych research question for you. From Mike Klymkowsky at PLOS, more public handwringing about popular distrust of science: Is the popularization of science encouraging a growing disrespect for scientific expertise? So why do a large percentage of the public ignore the conclusions of disciplinary experts? I would argue that an important driver is the way that science is taught and popularized [3]. Beyond the obvious fact that a range of politicians and capitalists (in both the West and the East) actively distain expertise that does not support their ideological or pecuniary positions [4], I would claim that the way we teach science, often focussing on facts rather than processes, largely ignoring the historical progression by which knowledge Read More ›

From Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Digest: Best-selling introductory psychology books give a misleading view of intelligence A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University has analysed the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US – some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive – and concluded that they present a highly misleading view of the science of intelligence (see full list of books below). Russell T Warne and his co-authors found that three-quarters of the books contain inaccuracies; that the books give disproportionate coverage to unsupported theories, such as Gardner’s “multiple intelligencies”; and nearly 80 per cent contain logical fallacies in their discussions of the topic.More. Article here. (public access) No surprise there. We Read More ›

From Barbara J. King at NPR: Historical explanations can be found for why Neanderthals, early on, were portrayed in stereotyped terms: In 1911, a French anatomist, through a series of misconceptions (and preconceptions), mis-reconstructed a male Neanderthal skeleton from the site of La Chappelle aux Saints in France as shambling and stooped. This male looked downright dim. For decades, the image — now representing Neanderthals everywhere — stuck. Evidence amassed over the last century, though, indicates that Neanderthals are symbolic thinkers. As I have written here before, it’s a perfectly reasonable (if not 100 percent airtight) way of reading the evidence to conclude that Neanderthals carried out rituals in ways both symbolic and religious. When Neanderthal communities buried their dead Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur in a profile of and interview with computational biologist Lisa Manning at Oscillations: A half dozen or so years ago, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld characterized biology as the new condensed matter physics. More recently, Eugene Koonin advised “biology has to become the new condensed matter physics”. It’s an area of scientific research that is indeed ramping up, and not a moment too soon, after decades of puffery about a so-called selfish gene. But what exactly is meant by “the new condensed matter physics”? I decided to contact Syracuse University physicist Lisa Manning to help sort it all out in a conversation that follows. … The promo for your upcoming Simons Foundation lecture titled: “A Body Made Read More ›

From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: The idea, from Caltech physicist Kimberly Boddy, and colleagues, is somewhat speculative, and it has an interesting catch. The argument that the true vacuum of the universe is stationary relies on a version of quantum theory known as the many-worlds formulation. In this view, the wave function of a quantum system doesn’t “collapse” when observed. Rather, different outcomes of the quantum system “decohere” and simply evolve along different paths. Where once the universe was a superposition of different possible outcomes, quantum decoherence creates two definite outcomes. Of course, if our minds are simply physical states within the cosmos, our minds are also split into two outcomes, each observing a particular result. In solving the Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Ancient microbes may have been producing oxygen through photosynthesis a billion years earlier than we thought, which means oxygen was available for living organisms very close to the origin of life on earth. In a new article in Heliyon, a researcher from Imperial College London studied the molecular machines responsible for photosynthesis and found the process may have evolved as long as 3.6 billion years ago. … One surprising finding was that the evolution of the photosystem was not linear. Photosystems are known to evolve very slowly — they have done so since cyanobacteria appeared at least 2.4 billion years ago. But when Dr. Cardona used that slow rate of evolution to calculate the origin of photosynthesis, Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: All of viral evolution is murky: Different groups of viruses likely had very different origins. Some may have been degenerate “escapees” from cellular genomes, while others descended directly from the primordial soup. “Still others have recombined and exchanged genes so many times in the course of evolution that we will never know where they originally came from,” Fischer said. As examples of this diversity, giant viruses could help illuminate more about how viruses operate and evolve. But even their own origins and evolutionary path are unsettled. One side holds that the giant viruses evolved from smaller viruses over 2 billion years by adding genes, through processes such as horizontal gene transfer and gene duplication. The Read More ›

From Jasmin Fox Skelly at New Scientist: A 520-million-year-old fossil shows an ancient shrimp-like creature caring for its four offspring. It is the oldest ever example of a parent actively looking after its young after they hatch. More. (paywall) The arthropod may be the ancestor of insects and spiders (or maybe not). We have one “snapshot” and that’s from billions of lives. What it mainly shows is that, contrary to what we might expect, there seems to have been little evolution of animal psychology since then. See also: The cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion of life 541 million years ago