News

From ScienceDaily: Analysis supports a previous finding, that the best match for the marks is butchery by stone tools Not trampling. The paper supports the original interpretation that the damage to the two bones is characteristic of stone tool butchery, published in Nature in 2010. That finding was sensational, since it potentially pushed back evidence for the use of stone tools, as well as the butchering of large animals, by about 800,000 years. The Nature paper was followed in 2011 by a rebuttal in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggesting that the bones were marked by incidental trampling in abrasive sediments. That sparked a series of debates about the significance of the discovery and whether the Read More ›

Like humans take rap for killing off mammoths. Yes, August. Hot weather. Stories. From ScienceDaily: Competition from cats drove extinction of many species of ancient dogs Competition played a more important role in the evolution of the dog family (wolves, foxes, and their relatives) than climate change, shows a new international study published in PNAS. An international team including scientists from the Universities of Gothenburg (Sweden), São Paulo (Brazil) and Lausanne (Switzerland) analyzed over 2000 fossils and revealed that the arrival of felids to North America from Asia had a deadly impact on the diversity of the dog family, contributing to the extinction of as many as 40 of their species. “We usually expect climate changes to play an overwhelming Read More ›

No sooner did we hear that apes are close to speaking (no, they aren’t, and the claim is just another example of how, in our time, impossible ape achievement stories have replace impossible miracle claims)—than we are informed by National Geographic: Bonobo “Baby Talk” Reveals Roots of Human Language As we watch the bonobos, I think I hear a vocalization called peeping—a short, high-pitched sound bonobos make with their mouths closed. Peeping, which is very similar to the burbling of human infants before they form words, may tell us more about the evolution of human speech. That’s because while most animal sounds have a more narrow meaning, bonobos use peeping in several contexts, including eating, communicating danger, and resting, according Read More ›

In robots. From ScienceDaily: A computer science team at The University of Texas at Austin has found that robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations. … “Focused destruction can lead to surprising outcomes,” said Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science at UT Austin. “Sometimes you have to develop something that seems objectively worse in order to develop the tools you need to get better.” In biology, mass extinctions are known for being highly destructive, erasing a lot of genetic Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Apes may be closer to speaking than many scientists think In 2010, Marcus Perlman started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, where Koko has spent more than 40 years living immersed with humans — interacting for many hours each day with psychologist Penny Patterson and biologist Ron Cohn. … “She doesn’t produce a pretty, periodic sound when she performs these behaviors, like we do when we speak,” Perlman says. “But she can control her larynx enough to produce a controlled grunting sound.” In other words, Koko does not speak. “Decades ago, in the 1930s and ’40s, a couple of husband-and-wife teams of psychologists tried to raise chimpanzees as much as possible like human children and teach them to Read More ›

This is the time of year when pop science news recycles all the leftovers left over all over again, and this one was bound to come up—left over again: From ScienceDaily: Early humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of a variety of species of giant beasts, new research has revealed. The researchers ran thousands of scenarios which mapped the windows of time in which each species is known to have become extinct, and humans are known to have arrived on different continents or islands. This was compared against climate reconstructions for the last 90,000 years. Examining different regions of the world across these scenarios, they found coincidences of human spread and species extinction which illustrate that man was Read More ›

First, we hear something sensible: Paul Davies: Search for alien microbial life on Earth: (= He advocates a search for evidence where there is a good chance it may be found, instead of the usual faint hope feeding frenzy and unmoored speculation.) Now, just to prove silly season is here, we also learn the latest hot weather story abut intelligent aliens from New Statesman: Be careful what you say to aliens Seeking alien contact could be the thing that triggers our own implosion. … But even the benign scenarios about alien signals could be disruptive, in Davies’s view. Knowledge from an advanced civilisation would “change the economic and technological balance of the planet”, he says. And that’s what makes the Read More ›

Further to: Physicist Paul Davies’ killer argument against the multiverse (Vincent, Torley), here’s physicist and author Davies on the search for extraterrestrial life: A huge investment into the search for intelligent alien life has renewed public interest in the question of whether we’re alone in the universe. Paul Davies tells Late Night Live why he’s sceptical of the current search, and why he thinks we should look for ‘life as we don’t know it’ on our own planet. … Professor Davies is a supporter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)—in fact, he’s chair of the SETI Post-Detection Science and Technology Task Group, the body charged with responding if Earth is contacted by aliens. However, he thinks we may need Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Stripes might not offer protection for animals living in groups, such as zebra, as previously thought, according to research published in Frontiers in Zoology. Humans playing a computer game captured striped targets more easily than uniform grey targets when multiple targets were present. This rebukes assumptions that stripes evolved to make it difficult to capture animals moving in a group. Rebukes? Hey, guys, this is St. Darwin of Sandwalk we are talking about! Anna Hughes, University of Cambridge, says “We found that when targets are presented individually, horizontally striped targets are more easily captured than targets with vertical or diagonal stripes. Surprisingly, we also found no benefit of stripes when multiple targets were presented at once, despite the Read More ›

From The Scientist : After spending more than a decade developing tools to study patterns in gene sequences, bioinformaticians are now working on programs to analyze epigenomics data. Just a decade ago, epigenetics researchers used classic biochemistry to reveal key modifications involved in the control of gene expression. These days, discoveries in epigenetics are as likely to be made with a computer as they are to rely on freezers full of cells or stacks of petri dishes. Researchers working to understand the intricacies of methylation marks, histone patterns, and chromosome structure must use computational approaches. More. Epigenetics is not going away. It’s getting bigger equipment. See also: Experts: “Epigenetics can drive genetics” As opposed to natural selection acting on random Read More ›

Not at the  Economist, anyway. It’s mid-August and the pop science is in full bloom: Multiversal truths The idea of inflation was proposed in 1979 by Alan Guth. In the years after Dr Guth published his idea Andrei Linde extended it to suggest that the universe emerged from what he called an inflationary field. But if this field can spawn the universe humans see, there is no reason why it cannot spawn others. There is also no reason why the universes so spawned should have the same laws of physics as one another. Indeed, there is quite a good reason why they should not. This reason was worked out a decade or so ago by several physicists, including Leonard Susskind, of Read More ›

From the Atlantic: The Coddling of the American Mind In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. … Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and Read More ›

Generally, people who know them know that octopus/some squid are smart, compared to many similar life forms, but the mechanics by which their intelligence is mediated was unknown. Now, from Nature: Octopus genome holds clues to uncanny intelligence: DNA sequence expanded in areas otherwise reserved for vertebrates. With its eight prehensile arms lined with suckers, camera-like eyes, elaborate repertoire of camouflage tricks and spooky intelligence, the octopus is like no other creature on Earth. Added to those distinctions is an unusually large genome, described in Nature1 on 12 August, that helps to explain how a mere mollusc evolved into an otherworldly being. … Surprisingly, the octopus genome turned out to be almost as large as a human’s and to contain Read More ›

From National Geographic: The golden jackal, which lives in East Africa and Eurasia, is actually two distantly related species—and one of them is a new species of wolf, a new study says. (Also see “Wolves Identified by Unique Howls, May Help Rare Species.”) Dubbed the African golden wolf, it’s the first new species of canid—a group that includes wolves, coyotes, and jackals—discovered in 150 years. Africa is also home to two other wolf species, the gray wolf and Ethiopian wolf. (Read “Africa’s Last Wolves” in National Geographic magazine.) Though golden jackals look mostly the same—the Eurasian animals are slightly smaller than the African ones, with a narrower skull and slightly weaker teeth—in-depth analysis of their DNA revealed two species that Read More ›

From Chronicle Review: The Case Against Scholarly Consensus In July, the former federal prosecutor David Hoffman released a report<http://www.apa.org/independent-review/APA-FINAL-Report-7.2.15.pdf> on allegations that the American Psychological Association had colluded with the Department of Defense to change the APA’s ethics code, giving psychologists cover to participate in torturous interrogations. Hoffman had been commissioned by the association itself, following allegations by the New York Times reporter James Risen. When Risen made the assertions, in October 2014, the APA put out a press release<http://www.apa.org/news/press/response/risen-book.aspx> denying wrongdoing and, in effect, calling Risen a hack. But the Hoffman report substantiated Risen’s contentions. The APA created ethics tasks forces composed of members who had interests that would incline them to back the military’s interrogation practices. Critics of Read More ›