News

Further to: Geologist on why a scientists’ march on Washington is a bad idea, oceanographer Helen Czerski writes at Guardian: Now, in the age of Google, the frontiers of knowledge are misleadingly comprehensible rather than inaccessible. Their very accessibility means that we may not see the complex context before arriving at each nugget of information and often, we don’t want to. One of the most contentious statements of 2016 was “Britain has had enough of experts”, but perhaps a more useful starting point for debate is “have people have had enough of complexity”? It applies to science as well as politics. The problem is that the world really is complex. And the other problem is that no-one has time to Read More ›

From coastal geologist Robert S. Youngjan at New York Times: Talk is growing about a March for Science on Washington, similar to the Women’s March the day after President Trump’s inauguration. It is a terrible idea. Among scientists, understandably, there is growing fear that fact-based decision making is losing its seat at the policy-making table. There’s also overwhelming frustration with the politicization of science by climate change skeptics and others who see it as threatening to their interests or beliefs. But trying to recreate the pointedly political Women’s March will serve only to reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data, research and findings for their own ends. More. Good points but he Read More ›

From Jane Qiu at Nature: Giant pandas and the distantly related red pandas may have independently evolved an extra ‘digit’ — a false thumb — through changes to the same genes. The two species share a common ancestor that lived more than 40 million years ago. Giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are distant relatives of other bears, whereas red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) are more closely related to ferrets. Both species subsist on a diet composed almost entirely of bamboo, with the help of a false digit. … In a new study, Wei Fuwen and Hu Yibo, conservation geneticists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology in Beijing, and their colleagues, produced the first genome sequence of the red panda Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A Japanese research team has discovered an evolutionary model for the biological function that creates carbon dioxide from glucose in photosynthesis. They found the mechanism in a primitive, non-photosynthesizing microbe. … By clarifying part of the primitive metabolic pathway for photosynthesis, these findings could help to reveal how the photosynthesis system formed during evolution, a mystery that scientists have so far been unable to solve. – Paper. (public access) Takunari Kono, Sandhya Mehrotra, Chikako Endo, Natsuko Kizu, Mami Matusda, Hiroyuki Kimura, Eiichi Mizohata, Tsuyoshi Inoue, Tomohisa Hasunuma, Akiho Yokota, Hiroyoshi Matsumura, Hiroki Ashida. A RuBisCO-mediated carbon metabolic pathway in methanogenic archaea. Nature Communications, 2017; 8: 14007 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14007More. Wait a minute. We’ve just learned that the mechanism existed Read More ›

By limiting what cells can become. From Joshua A. Krisch at The Scientist: The results suggest that a particular class of noncoding RNA works in concert with the latent viral elements of the genome work to limit stem cell potential, and that removing a key miRNA can lift this limitation—at least in vitro. “At first we were a bit dubious about our findings,” said coauthor Lin He, an associate professor of developmental biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “In this experiment, we definitively show that the progeny [of embryonic stem cells] can go to both embryonic and extra-embryonic lineages. That was a pretty incredible moment for us, because we actually convinced ourselves that this finding was real.” More. See Read More ›

From Steve Petersen of Niagara University a paper (2014) arguing for a “normative yet coherent naturalism”: Naturalism is normally taken to be an ideology, censuring non-naturalistic alternatives. But as many critics have pointed out, this ideological stance looks internally incoherent, since it is not obviously endorsed by naturalistic methods. Naturalists who have addressed this problem universally forswear the normative component of naturalism by, in effect, giving up science’s exclusive claim to legitimacy. This option makes naturalism into an empty expression of personal preference that can carry no weight in the philosophical or political spheres. In response to this dilemma, I argue that on a popular (but largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as a commitment to inference to the best explanation, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, on Tom Bethell’s new Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, he records his own investigation of the evidence, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper. Lo and behold, it’s not beyond the intellectual reach of a reporter to get to the bottom of the controversy and to estimate the plausibility of Darwin’s theory. Not a religious apologist or a cheerleader for any competing view, but rather an old-fashioned skeptic, Bethell has been doubting Darwin since he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. … Evolutionary science is in a depressed condition, despite all that the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Adults and children in the US, adults from a ‘low numeracy’ tribe in Bolivia and rhesus monkeys ALL possessed the ability to distinguish between large and small quantities of objects, regardless of the surface area they occupy. This ability is likely a shared evolutionary trait, according to a study. This is news? They’re surely reaching now. The ability to distinguish between more and less is, one need hardly be surprised, found among animals of all types. For example, In a study published last summer in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kevin C. Burns of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and his colleagues burrowed holes in fallen logs and stored varying numbers of mealworms (beetle larvae) Read More ›

Deuterostomes are animals with true body cavities, featuring a mouth and usually an anus. From Telegraph: The 540 million-year-old “exquisite” fossil was unearthed during an excavation in China by led by University of Cambridge researchers, who say its discovery means humanity can now trace its roots back a further 30 million years. The creature is now thought to be the most primitive example of the deuterostome, one of three “superphylum”, and the group from which human beings and countless other species evolved. Most other early deuterostome groups date from about 510 to 520 million years ago, when they had already begun to diversify into vertebrates, as well sea squirts, as well as animals like starfish, sea urchins and acorn worms. Read More ›

In an age where “science” poaches everything religious, yet another end-of-the-world story whistles into the box, this time via Benjamin Groggin at Digg: The power of science has enabled humans to do everything from study distant galaxies to take high-res photos of Pluto. But one thing science has struggled with is understanding the limits of our universe, and particularly how it will end (or not end). To try to fill this gap in human knowledge, theoretical physicists have come up with a litany of possible ends for the universe, and they’re pretty darn interesting. More. The ends are scattered all over the map, actually. Big Freeze. Big Rip. Big Crunch. Big Slurp… Big everything but insight. And it says a Read More ›

The mystery, that is, of why the universe is matter and not equal and oppositely charged antimatter: From Sarah Charley at Symmetry: “We’re looking for hints,” says Stefan Ulmer, spokesperson of the BASE collaboration. “If we find a slight difference between matter and antimatter particles, it won’t tell us why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, but it would be an important clue.” The BASE measurement shows that the magnetic moments of the proton and antiproton are identical, apart from their opposite signs, within the experimental uncertainty of 0.8 parts per million. The result improves the precision of the previous best measurement by the ATRAP collaboration in 2013, also at CERN, by a factor of six. This Read More ›

At the Economist, anyway: One common tactic in brain science is to compare damaged brains with healthy ones. If damage to part of the brain causes predictable changes in behaviour, then researchers can infer what that part of the brain does. In rats, for instance, damaging the hippocampuses—two small, banana-shaped structures buried towards the bottom of the brain—reliably interferes with the creatures’ ability to recognise objects. When applied to the chip, though, that method turned up some interesting false positives. The researchers found, for instance, that disabling one particular group of transistors prevented the chip from running the boot-up sequence of “Donkey Kong”—the Nintendo game that introduced Mario the plumber to the world—while preserving its ability to run other games. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In a new study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, researchers have now found a new principle for how epigenetic changes can occur. They have showed that one enzyme, tryptase, can be found in the nucleus of cells and that tryptase can cleave off the tails of histones. In this way, certain epigenetic modifications of the histone tails are removed. A very interesting finding was that this mechanism is important for maintaining the identity of the cells. Cells that lacked tryptase showed major changes, including a loss of their cellular identity and they also started to proliferate in an uncontrolled way. These effects were seen in mast cells which are central in allergic reactions. The Read More ›

From Joshua A. Krisch at The Scientist: Ninety-six hours after 43 zebrafish were frozen to death and 48 hours after 20 mice had their necks snapped, specific cells within their bodies were still hard at work. Gene transcription continued apace, and occasionally increased, according to a study published today (January 25) in Royal Society Open Biology. Genes linked to embryonic development, stress, and cancer were among those increasingly transcribed into RNA, researchers at the University of Washington and their colleagues reported. The results suggest that organismal death is an orderly, predictable process, and could help forensic scientists pinpoint time of death, plus help explain why organs from recently deceased donors seem to be more prone to cancer. “Death is a Read More ›

Via BeauHD at Slashdot: Popular Science reports that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now barred from communicating with the public. [And early this morning, BuzzFeed revealed that] The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has banned scientists and other employees from sharing the results of its taxpayer-funded research with the broader public. Here. However, UDPDATE 1/24/17: The USDA has disavowed the memo sent to employees at its Agricultural Research Service unit. USDA’s deputy administrator, Michael Young, clarified that the gag order specifically applies to policy-related statements in press releases and interviews, which need to be vetted with the secretary of agriculture. He told The Washington Post that peer-reviewed scientific papers from the unit should not be blocked, nor should food Read More ›