From Eric Worrall at Watt’s Up with That?: The alleged weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation appears to be triggering a growing amount of speculation about abrupt cooling, like the plot of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. More. We’ll see. Good thing I didn’t put away my parka. Please. No more persecution of dissenters. See also: Scientific dissent can never be securities fraud Follow UD News at Twitter!
From ScienceDaily: The fossilised remnants of tube-like ‘dwellings’ which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study. According to researchers, the long, perforated tubes may have looked like narrow chimneys reaching up from the sea bed, and were made by a creature called Oesia, which lived a solitary existence inside them about 500 million years ago. … The study suggests that in some cases these structures exceeded 50cm in height and that they were typically at least twice the width of the worm, giving it plenty of room. The ends were sealed off, making life inside a rather lonely experience. “Only single worms are found within tubes, suggesting a Read More ›
No, really. From Emma Young at New Scientist: HUMILITY. Empathy. Selflessness. These are qualities most of us associate with being a “nice person”. But being nice doesn’t often help you in the fierce competition to get that job, win a project or secure a promotion. No one likes an egocentric big-head but if, as they say, “you are your own brand”, perhaps in this modern world it pays to be a bit narcissistic. More. You’d have to pay to read much more. From O’Leary for News: I am beginning to like New Scientist. I used to trash them, but that was before serious people started wondering about things like rethinking evolution and the impact of the war on falsifiability. And Read More ›
From National Geographic: New research published in Behavioral Ecology suggests that the small reef fish, no more than three inches long, may switch sex roles with their partner up to 20 times each day. Chalk bass use a reproductive strategy known as “egg trading,” wherein they subdivide their daily egg clutch into “parcels” and alternate sex roles with their mating partner throughout a sequence of spawning bouts. More. This suggests that what sex even is in the fish is different from what we find in mammals or birds. See also: Can sex explain evolution?
At Nature: PhDs are assessed in very different ways around the world. Almost all involve a written thesis, but those come in many forms. In the United Kingdom, they are usually monographs, long explanations of a student’s work; in Scandinavia, science students typically top-and-tail a series of their publications. The accompanying oral examination — also called a viva voce or defence — can be a public lecture, a private discussion or not happen at all. There is wide variation across disciplines and from one institution to the next. “It is a complicated world in doctoral education. One format does not fit all,” says Maresi Nerad, founding director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education at the University Read More ›
From Nature: Peer review is touted as a demonstration of the self-critical nature of science. But it is a human system. Everybody involved brings prejudices, misunderstandings and gaps in knowledge, so no one should be surprised that peer review is often biased and inefficient. It is occasionally corrupt, sometimes a charade, an open temptation to plagiarists. Even with the best of intentions, how and whether peer review identifies high-quality science is unknown. It is, in short, unscientific.More. Couple things: Peer review got started, some tell us, as a means of helping U librarians decided what journals to subscribe to. Einstein didn’t have peer reviewers because, back then, his peer were fellow Nobelists. After WWII, science became Big Business so millions Read More ›
From reader Gutman Levitan: I am a computer scientists and communications engineer with “unlikely” interests in nature of information and information in the nature. The interest stems basically from my research in applied AI. That was decades ago in the Soviet Union but only recently I was able to concentrate on the issues. More. From his online publication, Information: Connecting Two Sides of Reality, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics [1] famously noted that information is information, not matter or energy. Really, the three are fundamentally different in their relationship to space. A material object cannot exist simultaneously at two or more distant places; it occupies a certain place in space and no two objects can occupy the same place Read More ›
From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: The first question asked: Rate your level of agreement or disagreement with the following statement: Teachers and students should have the academic freedom to objectively discuss both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution. Fully 94 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed. Democrats and Republicans were very close at 93 percent and 95 percent agreement respectively. Admittedly, Republicans were a little more passionate, with 65 percent strongly agreeing compared to 54 percent among Democrats. Still, that’s clear bipartisan support. Theists and atheists were also in agreement, at 96 percent and 86 percent. Theists were the somewhat more enthusiastic, with 62 percent strongly agreeing compared to 51 percent Read More ›
From Adam Frank at NPR: To begin with, it’s important to understand how much cosmology and physics has gotten right. Our ability to map out the history of the universe back to a fraction of an instant after its inception is a triumph of the human intellect and imagination. And because that history could not be told without a detailed description of matter and forces at a fundamental level, it’s clear we’ve done something remarkable — and remarkably correct. It’s the next steps down into reality’s basement, however, where the trouble seems to begin. Some researchers now see popular ideas like string theory and the multiverse as highly suspect. These physicists feel our study of the cosmos has been taken Read More ›
In response to a claim at New York Times that there is no scientific method. From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: There are lots of different ways to do science that are equally valid; one scientific method does not necessarily fit all cases. In astronomy, experiments are virtually impossible, as all you can do is make observations of what the Universe gives us. In the early days of quantum physics, the results were so surprising that it took many years before it was even possible to hypothesize in a sensible fashion, as the rules defied intuition. And in many fields, there are too many variables at play to accurately model the system even when all the underlying, governing equations are 100% Read More ›
From Jeffrey Guhin at Slate: First, experts usually don’t know nearly as much as they think they do. Experts often get it wrong, thanks to their inherently irrational brains that, through overconfidence, bubbles of like-minded thinkers, or just wanting to believe their vision of the world can be true, mislead us and misinterpret information. Rationality is subjective. All humans experience such biases; the real problem is when we forget that scientists and experts are human too—that they approach evidence and reasoned deliberation with the same prior commitments and unspoken assumptions as anyone else. Scientists: They’re just like us.More. Well, rule by science doesn’t really mean anything, any more than rule by ecology or religion would. What are the specifics? Does Read More ›
Here: Interactive Tree Of Life is an online tool for the display, annotation and management of phylogenetic trees. Explore your trees directly in the browser, and annotate them with various types of data. More. This is absolutely not a tree. Not the remotest resemblance to a tree. Just sayin’ is all. How about a rotunda of life with many alcoves? See also: Tree of life problematic The tree of life is mostly a complete mystery (so then how do we know it’s a tree?) Kirk Durston on the new tree of life Tree of life morphs into … leaf? Maybe the Tree of Life is more of an art exhibit than a science pursuit? Follow UD News at Twitter!
From James Blachowicz at New York Times: When a scientist tests a hypothesis and finds that its predictions do not quite match available observations, there is always the option of forcing the hypothesis to fit the data. One can resort to curve-fitting, in which a hypothesis is patched together from different independent pieces, each piece more or less fitting a different part of the data. A tailor for whom fit is everything and style is nothing can make me a suit that will fit like a glove — but as a patchwork with odd random seams everywhere, it will also not look very much like a suit. The lesson is that it is not just the observed facts that drive Read More ›
From Gary Schwitzer at Health News Review: Since many papers on clinical research spawn, in turn, dozens or hundreds of news stories, one can easily see how a tsunami of not-ready-for-prime-time medical research news and information drowns the public daily. Ioannidis makes this link with one line in his article – “Public media and related commentators of health news [53] may also help by focusing on the need to obtain clinically useful research and not compromise for less.” That citation is a paper we published about our work. More. Truth to tell, science writing has not always been a gift to science research. Like peer review, it must be evaluated every now and then. See also: Butter will not kill Read More ›
From New York Times: A paper in The British Medical Journal in December reported that cognitive behavioral therapy — a means of coaxing people into changing the way they think — is as effective as Prozac or Zoloft in treating major depression. In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water. Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications. … This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly Read More ›