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From ScienceDaily: The pied butcherbird, a very musical species, provided a wealth of intriguing data for analysis by co-author Eathan Janney, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at CUNY’s Hunter College. Janney based his analysis upon years of data collected and also analyzed by violinist and biomusicologist Hollis Taylor of Macquarie University, who has previously published extremely detailed analyses of butcherbird songs. “Since pied butcherbird songs share so many commonalities with human music,” Taylor writes, “this species could possibly revolutionize the way we think about the core values of music.” In the past, claims that musical principles are integral to birdsong were largely met with skepticism and dismissed as wishful thinking. However, the extensive statistical and objective analysis Read More ›

From Linda Geddes at Nature: Jeanne Calment outlived her daughter and grandson by decades, finally succumbing to natural causes at the ripe old age of 122. Calment, who was French and died almost two decades ago, is thought to be world’s longest living person. But if subsequent advances in medicine have lulled you into thinking that you might exceed this record, think again. An analysis of global demographic data published in Nature1 suggests that humans have a fixed shelf life, and that the odds of someone beating Calment’s record are low — although some scientists question this interpretation. They say that the data used in the analysis are not unequivocal, and that the paper doesn’t account for future advances in Read More ›

He can do it, what stops us? Meanwhile, others take a different view: Child Euthanasia Centre Soon To Open In Netherlands Civilizations must decide.

The most certain thing we know about early Earth is that we don’t know much about it. From ScienceDaily: For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn’t. Scientists thought they knew why, but a new modeling study has fired the lead actor in that long-accepted scenario. It’s been assumed that Earth depended on methane to stay warm for billions of years. Oxygen was building up and was thought to destroy the methane. The new study argues that sulfate was a much bigger menace to methane. Sulfate wasn’t a factor until oxygen appeared in the atmosphere and triggered oxidative weathering of rocks on land. The breakdown of minerals such as Read More ›

Further to a recent account of cyberbullying of GMO scientists, Brian McNicoll writes at Townhall: Hysterical predictions that haven’t panned out have taken a toll on the credibility of scientists, and one would think environmentalists would want to be more careful about how they state their case going forward. Just 39 percent have “a lot of trust” in information received from climate scientists, according to a Pew Research poll released this week. Only 28 percent say they believe climate scientists understand the causes of global warming, and 19 percent say climate scientists know what should be done to address it. One thought that comes to mind: If there really were a worldwide climate apocalypse, would not more people be experiencing Read More ›

From Jenny Morber at National Geographic, a look at five examples of “regressive evolution,” including: Now, in a shock to biologists, a close look at a 300-million-year-old hagfish fossil reveals that the [now blind] animals once had working eyes—and evolution took them away. The discovery challenges the way scientists think about the origins of the eye. Living hagfish are remarkably unchanged from their ancient counterparts, and so scientists long thought that modern, sightless hagfish eyes represented a kind of intermediate step between the primitive light-sensing spots in many invertebrates and the camera-like eyes of vertebrates, including humans. More. Not so, apparently. Stranger still is the fact that selective breeding of different populations of blind cave fish enabled sight to be Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have shown that when parts of a genome known as enhancers are missing, the heart works abnormally, a finding that bolsters the importance of DNA segments once considered “junk” because they do not code for specific proteins. … “The cardiac changes that we observed in knockout mice lacking these enhancers highlight the role of noncoding sequences in processes that are important in human disease,” said study co-senior author Axel Visel, senior staff scientist and one of three lead researchers at the Mammalian Functional Genomics Laboratory, part of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division. “Identifying and interpreting sequence changes affecting noncoding sequences is increasingly a challenge in human genetics. The genome-wide catalog of heart enhancers Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: I first learned about GMOs as a sophomore microbiology major in college. (They weren’t called GMOs then; they were simply referred to as “transgenic crops.”) I remember feeling exhilarated — the sort of thrill that only accountants or geeky academics can usually understand — at how basic knowledge of DNA sequences was leading to a huge technological revolution. The opportunities were limitless. Years later I entered journalism. And I saw breathtaking ignorance and vitriol aimed at scientists like me coming from supposedly educated people. Never in a million years would I have anticipated that our passion for science would be used as a bludgeon or as a scarlet letter. That Read More ›

From Nola Taylor Redd at Space.com: Although planets surround stars in the galaxy, how they form remains a subject of debate. Despite the wealth of worlds in our own solar system, scientists still aren’t certain how planets are built. Currently, two theories are duking it out for the role of champion. The first and most widely accepted theory, core accretion, works well with the formation of the terrestrial planets like Mercury but has problems with giant planets. The second, the disk instability method, may account for the creation of these giant planets. Now, as for Mercury: Like Earth, the metallic core of Mercury formed first, and then gathered lighter elements around it to form its crust and mantle. Mercury, like Read More ›

From Karen Zusi at The Scientist: The genetic code—the digital set of instructions often laid out in tidy textbook tables that tells the ribosome how to build a peptide—is identical in most eukaryotes. But as with most rules, there are exceptions. During a recent project on genome rearrangement in ciliates, Mariusz Nowacki, a cell biologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and his team stumbled across two striking deviants. Ciliates, complex protozoans with two nuclei, are known to translate RNA transcripts in unorthodox ways. Nowacki’s team, however, discovered that Condylostoma magnum and an unclassified Parduczia species had gone even further, reassigning all of the traditional “stop” codons (UGA, UAA, and UAG) to amino acids. “It didn’t make sense in Read More ›

Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute asks at Investors Business Daily: “Is modern science polluted?” What constitutes “bad science”? It’s the epidemic of positive results, in which a researcher reports that the data support his or her prior hypothesis. Stanford’s Daniele Fanelli has shown a distressing increase of positive results in recent decades, something that can’t be true in the real world. Think about it — we are not suddenly becoming more intelligent and getting everything right. What’s happening is that scientists are responding to incentives. Usually, hypotheses are put forward in some grant proposal. Financial backers don’t like negative findings, because negative findings don’t support the work that they’ve funded. Supervisors lose face and researchers can lose their Read More ›

Genetics researcher Bruno Lemaitre introduces his book, An Essay on Science and Narcissism at The Scientist: Psychological studies show that narcissistic individuals tend to use human relationships to attain positions of authority or to improve their own visibility, as illustrated by Monod’s strategic mate choice. The Monod case suggests that it would be naive to see scientists as simply seekers of truth. It is likely that the Nobel laureate enjoyed the position of power that science afforded him, and that it suited his personality. After all, a scientist is someone with expert knowledge who can reveal complex secrets to the public. But how does narcissism, a personality trait associated with dominance and short-term mating strategies, influence the scientific process? As Read More ›

 We’ve written a lot lately about the problems with peer review. So has Nature. The good news is that a number of innovative approaches are being tried. There is doubtless a winner or two entering the field; best clock ’em all. PeerJ offers peer reviewer matching. Its aims & scope: 1 PeerJ is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal. It considers articles in the Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Health Sciences. 2 PeerJ does not publish in the Physical Sciences, the Mathematical Sciences, the Social Sciences, or the Humanities (except where articles in those areas have clear applicability to the core areas of Biological, Medical or Health sciences). 3 PeerJ only considers Research Articles. It does not accept Literature Review Articles, Hypothesis Papers, Read More ›

From Space Telescope.org: The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field— and more The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (2012) combines all previous observations of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Published in 2012, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field is not a new set of observations, but rather a combination of many existing exposures (over 2000 of them) into one image. Combining the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field – Infrared, and many other images of the same small spot of sky taken over almost 10 years, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field pushes the limit even further. It is made up of a total of 22 days of exposure time (and 50 days of observing time, as the telescope can only observe Read More ›

No, says paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Steven Stanley of the University of Hawaii, arguing that the extinction rate was closer to 81% than 96%. From Phys.org: The Permian-Triassic mass extinction lasted for approximately 60,000 years, and was undoubtedly a tough time for the creatures that lived back then—prior research has suggested that there was an unusually large amount of volcanic activity and also possibly multiple large asteroid impacts, which together caused the planet to warm, and also resulted in an increase in ocean acidification—the conditions were so harsh that many species on land and in the sea went extinct. But, Stanley argues, it was not bad enough to wipe out most marine life entirely, as some have suggested. He points Read More ›