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From Haroon Siddique at Guardian: The UK’s rocketing demand for high-protein products is being fuelled by consumers buying foods unlikely to deliver the benefits they are seeking, experts have said. Weetabix, Shreddies, Mars, Snickers and Batchelors Cup a Soup were among the brands that launched enhanced protein versions this year as the trend hit the mainstream. Most Brits, even athletic ones, get enough protein but supplements sales have rocketed upwards. Tom Sanders, professor emeritus of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London, said people were being taken in by “nutri-babble”. “There’s been a lot of hype in gyms pushing high-protein shakes, there’s also a need to get rid of a waste product from the dairy industry, which is whey protein,” Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy’s ultimate list of Top Ten science stories at RealClearScience: Artificial Intelligence Defeats Go World Champion This year we witnessed artificial intelligence master a new game: Go. Lee Sedol, the reigning world champion predicted victory at the outset, but by the end of the five-game series he had won only a single bout against Google’s AlphaGo computer program. Google technicians trained AlphaGo using 30 million positions from 160,000 games of Go played by human experts. They later made the program play games against itself to grow in skill even further. Programs like AlphaGo with an enormous potential to learn could one day be harnessed to solve real-world problems.More. Physicist Rob Sheldon offers a different take: There have been Read More ›

From Kevin Mooney at Daily Signal: Just before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, seven state-level attorneys general huddled with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The political activist, Peter Frumhoff, called for them and other elected officials to move decisively against major corporations and institutions for “denying” climate change. The seeds of that call to action in March were planted four years earlier at a gathering of environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics across the country in San Diego. The Daily Signal found this and other revealing bits of information among material produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against Virginia’s Read More ›

We get round to this every eighteen months or so. From Noelle Dahm at Nautilus: Absent signs of life, astronomers are starting to look for extraterrestrial nuclear wars and pandemics. The aliens may have found their grave. As we sweep the radio frequencies, we hear only noise; as we slew our telescopes, we see barren pixel after pixel. Is that because our fellow inhabitants of the galaxy have done themselves in, reducing their home planets to cinders? Is the night sky a charnel house hidden under a veil of tranquility? Last year Jack O’Malley-James, an astrobiologist at Cornell University, and his colleagues Adam Stevens and Duncan Forgan published their analysis of this macabre possibility. Just as astrobiologists have started to Read More ›

Three days ago: Why does climate change “denial” matter in a “post-truth” society? From Clare Foran at Atlantic: The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world. A comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain. … Clare Foran, meet Julie Shaw: A scientist on the benefits of a post-truth society: I’m Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Rapid evolution of other species happens all around us all the time — and many of the most extreme examples are associated with human influences. Consider three examples: Commercial fishing. When fishing pressure is high, the fish evolve to reproduce when they are younger and smaller, and thus tend to have fewer, smaller offspring. This evolutionary change can, in turn, reduce fisheries yields and the sustainability. But is this really a form of evolution? That is, are the changes irreversible? Will speciation occur in the affected population, so that the two new groups cannot interbreed with each other? Or, if the bottom fell out of the fish market, would everything be pretty much the same a couple of Read More ›

From Drake Baer at New York Mag: Maybe it’s built into the structure of science itself. Oxford zoologist Antone Martinho makes the case in a new essay for Aeon. Martinho’s lab studies ducklings, while at home, he’s just adopted a pair of “celestial parrotlets,” a sublimely named species of mini-parrot indigenous to South America and suitable for a professorial apartment. As a pet owner, Martinho thinks that his new companions think, but he’d never say that as a scientist, even as his ducklings crane their necks at a new stimulus, in the classic body language of a confused dog. … Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Science can’t infer much about animal consciousness — if it’s there Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: Different “grand unified theories” or “GUTs” tying together the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces make a range of predictions about how long protons take to decay. Super-K’s latest analysis finds that the subatomic particles must live, on average, at least 16 billion trillion trillion years, an increase from the minimum proton lifetime of 13 billion trillion trillion years that the team calculated in 2012. The findings, released in October and under review for publication in Physical Review D, rule out a greater range of the predicted proton lifetimes and leave the beloved, 1970s-era grand unification hypothesis as an unproven dream. “By far the most likely way we would ever verify this idea is proton decay,” Read More ›

Terraforming means trying to make Mars capable of supporting lots of life, like Earth. From Monash philosopher Robert Sparrow at Nautilus: Enthusiasts often advertise space exploration as an opportunity to be virtuous. “To boldly go”—as they say in Star Trek—is valuable mostly because courage is a virtue. But one can’t have the opportunity to develop virtues without the possibility of demonstrating vices, and terraforming Mars would exhibit two major vicious character traits. One is insensitivity to beauty. Mars has many features of extraordinary natural beauty. It’s is home to the tallest known volcano on any planet, Olympus Mons, whose cap reaches 13.6 miles high—two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. Mars also has arguably the most spectacular Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: The streaks, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), occur seasonally on steep, relatively warm slopes at many locations on the Red Planet. They were discovered in 2011 by scientists studying images captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). … But it may be prudent to rein in that excitement a bit, according to a new study. Hydrated salts are crystalline solids, and it’s possible that the water the RSL salts contain comes from the Martian atmosphere rather than liquid water at or near the surface, said Raina Gough, a research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.More. On the bright side, we are now, as noted earlier, looking at specific locations and the hypotheses generated Read More ›

From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: Evidence suggests that the Martian atmosphere was declining as early as 4.1 billion years ago, and any surface water likely dried up long ago. With a thin atmosphere, bombardment by deadly cosmic radiation and likely no modern flowing water, any life that emerged on Mars likely did so very early on in the planet’s history, during a time known as the Noachian period (from 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago), Cabrol said. If that life is still hanging on, it likely went deep underground, where it is protected from Mars’ current harsh environment, she said. … Another way to determine what to look for is to find the most Martian-like places on Earth. The Read More ›

Maybe that explains the buzz re post-truth in science, blowing through recently. From sociologist Frank Furedi at Spiked: Consider the recently invented phrase, ‘post-truth’. It has been selected as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. According to the Oxford University Press, after the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, the use of ‘post-truth’ sky-rocketed. How did the term ‘post-truth’ acquire such a large public profile? This is not a phrase that emerged from the conversations of everyday life. Most people do not use it — at least not yet. Unlike ‘awesome’, ‘chilled out’ or ‘cool’, words whose origins are in the linguistic practices of ordinary people, ‘post-truth’ is the invention of individuals who are part of the political and Read More ›

Could have done without him, maybe. Part of a long form article on the “great man” theory in science, by Philip Ball at Nautilus: So I asked historian and philosopher of science James Lennox of the University of Pittsburgh, an expert on the history of Darwinian theory, who might have done the job in place of Darwin and Wallace. His answer was striking: The story might not have gone that way at all. “When you read through Darwin’s Species Notebooks and see the struggle he went through, and then you compare his first and second attempts to present it coherently (in 1842 and 1844) with the Origin, I think it is equally plausible that some very different theory of evolution Read More ›

From political analyst Michael Barone at TownHall: Liberal elites tell us that “the science is settled” and that people must have faith in their predictions. But science is never settled. Scientists produce theories and test them against observations. When Albert Einstein announced his relativity theory in 1905, he didn’t ask people to have faith. He claimed that his theory would do a better job than Isaac Newton’s of predicting observations in a solar eclipse in 1919. It is religion, not science, that demands that people have faith in things that otherwise seem unlikely, brands those who do not as “heretics” and “deniers,” requires participation in repeated rituals (recycling, anyone?), and permits sinners to purchase indulgences (carbon offsets for Al Gore’s Read More ›

From Clare Foran at Atlantic: The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world. A comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain. Scientific reality does not seem to have escaped the distorting influence of political polarization in the United States. A paper published in Environment earlier this year suggests that as Read More ›