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From Ewen Callaway at Nature: Thousands of years before cats came to dominate Internet culture, they swept through ancient Eurasia and Africa carried by early farmers, ancient mariners and even Vikings, finds the first large-scale look at ancient-cat DNA. The study, presented at a conference on 15 September, sequenced DNA from more than 200 cats that lived between about 15,000 years ago and the eighteenth century ad. More. There were even Viking cats—of course, given enough familiarity with the animal, you’ll believe that. But then, with an apparently straight face, Callaway goes on to report that “experts” doubt whether the cat is truly a domestic animal (behaviour and anatomy are not “clearly distinct” from those of wild relatives). That’s the Read More ›

In his September 22 release book, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos. In an interview with The Guardian: How far are the dots apart for you to make that leap of understanding? The theory of inflation itself is almost nailed down. We teach it at undergraduate level, and the data supports it as far as we can tell. The idea of multiverses is not too big a leap from that. If that is right then you have essentially an infinity of universes and it follows there is a very natural, almost unavoidable mechanism for varying the laws of nature in each universe. Therefore the idea that we look out on a universe that has been waiting for us to appear in Read More ›

From Megan Molteni at Wired: n the last five years, open-access journals have cropped up all over the Internet, their websites looking like those of any typical scholarly publisher: editorial boards filled with bios of well-respected scientists, claims of rigorous peer review, indexing in the most influential databases. The looks of these publishers have deceived thousands of young and inexperienced researchers all over the world, costing them millions of dollars—and for many, their reputations. So it is with good reason that the US Federal Trade Commission has taken an interest in these “predatory” publishers. Specifically, they’ve honed in on OMICS Group, a global conglomerate based in India and incorporated in Nevada that boasts more than 700 “leading-edge, peer reviewed” open Read More ›

This gets kicked around forever, but from Neuroskeptic at Discover blogs, profiling the thoughts of neurobiologist Thomas C. Südhof: Südhof says that “as ‘voluntary’ action” by the journals seems unlikely, “we should demand rules that inject accountability into the system.” I agree that if we want scientific journals to be more accountable, we (the scientific community) need to drive this change. But I’m not sure that demanding rules will be enough. Maybe something more akin to ‘direct action’ will be required. Put simply, we could just start holding journals accountable ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that you as a scientist are unhappy with the quality or policies of a particular journal. Sure, you could complain and demand improvement. But if that Read More ›

So we’d think from science writer K. C. Cole at Quanta: And then physicists began to realize that the dream of one singular theory was an illusion. The complexities of string theory, all the possible permutations, refused to reduce to a single one that described our world. “After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.” Many, in retrospect, realized they had raised the bar too high. Coming off the momentum of completing the solid and powerful “standard model” of particle physics in the 1970s, Read More ›

From Associated Press via Mashable: The sugar industry began funding research that cast doubt on sugar’s role in heart disease — in part by pointing the finger at fat — as early as the 1960s, according to an analysis of newly uncovered documents. The analysis published Monday is based on correspondence between a sugar trade group and researchers at Harvard University, and is the latest example showing how food and beverage makers attempt to shape public understanding of nutrition. This matters to us at UD because most people have had no idea how much of what is called “science” is shaped by various interests, with data addressed and questions framed, to support lobby and interest group views. We are only Read More ›

Starting this month. From Ross Logan at UK Mirror: The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will search deep space in the hope of unlocking some of the universe’s deepest secrets Is Earth finally about to make contact with extra terrestrial life? That is one of the hopes for the world’s largest radio telescope, which will be switched on later this month. The finishing touches have now been put to the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), in south west China’s Guizhou Province, with the enormous 1,650-foot-wide dish set become operational from September 25. More. Good hunting! But one question that arises is, how do we know at what point we can come to a conclusion? See also: How do we grapple Read More ›

Still struggling to leave the break room. From Kenneth D. Royal, April A. Kedrowicz & Amy M. Snyder at Anthrozoos, a survey of what Americans think: The first study to systematically explore beliefs about animal afterlife by asking a national sample of Americans has been published in the journal Anthrozoös. It investigated how demographic categories can have a considerable influence on beliefs about animal afterlife. With around 70% of US households owning pets, the study marks a new insight into a largely unexplored area of American spirituality. The authors surveyed 800 participants, examining how demographic factors including sex, race, age, geographic region, religious beliefs, and pet ownership all affect an individual’s beliefs about animal afterlife. Results showed that people who Read More ›

George Price (1922–1975) From science writer Michael Regnier at Digg: He’d met his wife, Julia, on the Manhattan Project, but as well as being a scientist she was a devout Roman Catholic. The marriage was hard-pressed to survive Price’s scathing views on religion, and after eight years and two daughters – Annamarie and Kathleen – they divorced. Fed up with his job, his life and the distinct lack of recognition in America, Price cut his ties in 1967 and crossed the Atlantic to London, intent on making a great scientific discovery there. He felt he had just a few more years to make his mark, but as it turned out, he needed only one. Price had set himself the ‘problem’ Read More ›

Not that anyone has the least idea what consciousness is. Science fiction short from Matt Gaede at Motherboard: I am a robot. I am alive in a lab. I have consciousness. I don’t believe my creators know it. Why would they make me? I have one task. One function, one ability. I can drive forward. That’s it. Only forward. Yet if I do what I’m meant to do, I’ll unplug myself. I’ll die. I don’t want to die. I just started living. How long have I been alive? How many times have I gone through with this? How do I know that the cord is my source of life? Do I retain anything? I must. I haven’t been taught anything. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Planetary scientists have long believed that Earth formed from planetary objects similar to meteorites. Then, a decade ago, perplexing new measurements challenged that assumption by showing that Earth and its supposed “building blocks” actually contain significantly different isotopic compositions. … “These recent measurements contribute to the growing evidence that the meteorites delivered to Earth provide an imperfect match to Earth’s composition,” said Richard Carlson, director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science. Carlson was one of the scientists who found the compositional mismatch between meteorites and Earth 10 years ago. “This realization opens new views both to how Earth formed and to the bulk chemical composition of our home planet.” Paper. (paywall) – Read More ›

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: Scientists had assumed from fossil evidence that an ancient predecessor called the straight-tusked elephant (Paleoloxodon antiquus), which lived in European forests until around 100,000 years ago, was a close relative of Asian elephants. In fact, this ancient species is most closely related to African forest elephants, a genetic analysis now reveals. Even more surprising, living forest elephants in the Congo Basin are closer kin to the extinct species than they are to today’s African savannah-dwellers. And, together with newly announced genomes from ancient mammoths, the analysis also reveals that many different elephant and mammoth species interbred in the past. More. This is happening so often now that there is clearly something wrong with the way Read More ›

From Lizzie Wade at Science: The “necklaces” are tiny: beads of animal teeth, shells, and ivory no more than a centimeter long. But they provoked an outsized debate that has raged for decades. Found in the Grotte du Renne cave at Arcy-sur-Cure in central France, they accompanied delicate bone tools and were found in the same layers as fossils from Neandertals—our archaic cousins. Some archaeologists credited the artifacts—the so-called Châtelperronian culture—to Neandertals. But others argued that Neandertals were incapable of the kind of symbolic expression reflected in the jewelry and insisted that modern humans must have been the creators. Now, a study uses a new method that relies on ancient proteins to identify and directly date Neandertal bone fragments from Read More ›

From Huw Price and Ken Wharton at Aeon: Over the past forty years, a lot of ingenuity has gone into designing experiments to test the quantum predictions on which Bell’s result depends. Quantum mechanics has passed them all with flying colours. Just last year, three new experiments claimed to close almost all the remaining loopholes. ‘The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the “spooky action-at-a-distance” that [Einstein] famously hated… is an inherent part of the quantum world,’ as Nature put it. Our authors propose another solution: Retrcausality, or the present an future can shape the past: Some readers may raise a more global objection to retrocausality. Ordinarily, we think that the past is fixed Read More ›

From Jason Bittel at National Geographic: This week, headlines have been swirling about a paper published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics that seemed to offer tantalizing signs of dolphinese. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins were recorded exchanging a series of sounds that resembled “a conversation between two people.” The dolphins took turns producing the sounds and did not interrupt each other, according to study author Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station in Russia. Ryabov suggests that the variation seen in these pulses represents the equivalent of phonemes, or words, and that the strings of pulses could reasonably be considered dolphin sentences. However, many of the world’s leading experts Read More ›