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From ScienceDaily: Scientists have looked at all 14,500 participants in Children of the 90s and found that if a girl’s maternal grandmother smoked during pregnancy, the girl is 67 percent more likely to display certain traits linked to autism, such as poor social communication skills and repetitive behaviors. … The discovery, published today in Scientific Reports, is part of an ongoing, long-term study of the effects of maternal and paternal grandmother’s smoking in pregnancy on the development of their grandchildren, who are all part of Children of the 90s. By using detailed information collected over many years on multiple factors that may affect children’s health and development, the researchers were able to rule out other potential explanations for their results. Read More ›

From Bob Holmes at New Scientist: How can we search for life on other planets when we don’t know what it might look like? One chemist thinks he has found an easy answer: just look for sophisticated molecular structures, no matter what they’re made of. The strategy could provide a simple way for upcoming space missions to broaden the hunt. Until now, the search for traces of life, or biosignatures, on other planets has tended to focus mostly on molecules like those used by earthly life. Thus, Mars missions look for organic molecules, and future missions to Europa may look for amino acids, unequal proportions of mirror-image molecules, and unusual ratios of carbon isotopes, all of which are signatures of Read More ›

From board member Barbara Cargill via Evolution News & Views: On Friday, April 21, the State Board of Education voted on the final language for the streamlined TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). Some news reports have given erroneous information about the revised standards. The streamlined TEKS in biology continue to call for critical thinking in the study of theories such as evolution. They specifically call for students to “analyze and evaluate” the evidence for common ancestry and Darwinian natural selection. They further call for students to “compare and contrast scientific explanations for cellular complexity.” And they call on students to “examine scientific explanations of abrupt appearance and stasis in the fossil record” and “examine scientific explanations for the origin Read More ›

Still another reason? From Leah Crane at New Scientist: Grimaldi assumed that signals from an extraterrestrial emitter might get weaker or be blocked as they travel, so they would only cover a certain volume of space. It’s relatively simple to calculate the probability that Earth is within that space and so able to detect the signal. “Not all signals can be visible at the same time – only those that intersect with the Earth,” says Grimaldi. He found that even if half of our galaxy was full of alien noise, the average number of signals that we would be able to detect from Earth is less than one (Scientific Reports, doi.org/b562). This implies that, even if there are lots of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: From sediment samples collected at seven archaeological sites, the researchers “fished out” tiny DNA fragments that had once belonged to a variety of mammals, including our extinct human relatives. They retrieved DNA from Neandertals in cave sediments of four archaeological sites, also in layers where no hominin skeletal remains have been discovered. In addition, they found Denisovan DNA in sediments from Denisova Cave in Russia. These new developments now enable researchers to uncover the genetic affiliations of the former inhabitants of many archaeological sites which do not yield human remains. … “By retrieving hominin DNA from sediments, we can detect the presence of hominin groups at sites and in areas where this cannot be achieved with other methods,” Read More ›

From Jesse Singal at New York Mag: Perhaps no new concept from the world of academic psychology has taken hold of the public imagination more quickly and profoundly in the 21st century than implicit bias — that is, forms of bias which operate beyond the conscious awareness of individuals. That’s in large part due to the blockbuster success of the so-called implicit association test, which purports to offer a quick, easy way to measure how implicitly biased individual people are. When Hillary Clinton famously mentioned implicit bias during her first debate with Donald Trump, many people knew what she was talking about because the IAT has spread the concept so far and wide. It’s not a stretch to say that Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: It’s not the size of your brain, it’s how you organise it. The most recently discovered species of early human had a skull only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s, but its brain looked surprisingly like our own – particularly in an area of the frontal lobe with links to language. This could back suggestions that these mysterious early humans showed advanced behaviours, such as teamwork and burial, even though we still don’t know exactly when they lived. More. Throughout the animal kingdom, the relationship between a brain and intelligence is much more complex than is sometimes supposed. See also: Why is the recent dating of Homo Naledi to 250 kya a problem? We should Read More ›

From Ann Gibbons at Science: A remarkably complete skeleton introduced in 2010 as “the best candidate” for the immediate ancestor of our genus Homo may just be a pretender. Instead of belonging to the human lineage, the new species of Australopithecus sediba is more closely related to other hominins from South Africa that are on a side branch of the human family tree, according to a new analysis of the fossil presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.More. When you get kicked out of the human family, it’s not like there is a ceremony or anything. Or is there? See also: Choosing between Sediba and Naledi as human ancestor? Follow UD News Read More ›

From molecular cancer biologist Ahmed Alkhateeb at Aeon: Science is in the midst of a data crisis. Last year, there were more than 1.2 million new papers published in the biomedical sciences alone, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed biomedical papers to over 26 million. However, the average scientist reads only about 250 papers a year. Meanwhile, the quality of the scientific literature has been in decline. Some recent studies found that the majority of biomedical papers were irreproducible. The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite neurological capacity of the human mind. Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Our earliest hominin ancestors lived at least seven million years ago. The first species to look a little like modern humans appeared between about two and three million years ago. But our own species – Homo sapiens – evolved about 200,000 years ago. So, if H. naledi lived 300,000 to 200,000 years ago that’s a remarkable discovery. It means that a species of human with some surprisingly primitive features – including a tiny skull and brain – survived into the relatively recent past. Conceivably, H. naledi might even have met early members of our species, H. sapiens. One could even speculate we had something to do with it going extinct. More. It also means Read More ›

From ScienceDaily Paleontologists have uncovered a new fossil species that sheds light on the origin of mandibulates, the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, to which belong familiar animals such as flies, ants, crayfish and centipedes. Named Tokummia katalepsis by the researchers, the creature documents for the first time the anatomy of early mandibulates, a sub-group of arthropods with specialized appendages known as mandibles, used to grasp, crush and cut their food. … “The pincers of Tokummia are large, yet also delicate and complex, reminding us of the shape of a can opener, with their couple of terminal teeth on one claw, and the other claw being curved towards them,” said Aria. “But we think they might Read More ›

At least, that would be the outcome of his crackdown on kids: You’ve maybe already heard this one: In his Netflix series, Bill Nye asks, bluntly, ‘Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?’ The Internet is rightly mocking the complete disaster that is the Rachel Bloom “My Sex Junk” video that is part of the new Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World.” As bad as that is (it is BAD), another portion of the series is even worse. The 13th and final installment is titled “Earth’s People Problem,” and with a name like that, you know we could be in for some ideas that border on eugenics. … Nye (who, again, Read More ›

Toiling too long in a clean lab, micromanaging the lives of mice, can really put stress on a person. Something like that might have happened to the poor sot who wrote us the following, outlining a Drinking Game, to help get through March for Science coverage on the lunchroom TV: The “March for Science” Drinking Game Drinking Games can help you get through watching things that are excruciatingly tedious. It might be the best way – perhaps the only way – to get through the entire “March for Science” festivities. There are a few locations where you can watch the Washington Mall event online: four hours and five and a half hours, depending on how the beer holds out, or Read More ›

And won’t likely help his reputation: My Sex Junk is a message to the world about sexuality. We can probably miss the one where ice cream cones discover sex. Pop science is no match for identity politics, as we might have guessed. Someone asks, does Nye has a future as the ”Pee Wee Herman of popular science”? Maybe that’s what’s left now. See also: March for Science, Bill Nye, and constitutional government Follow UD News at Twitter!

Novelist Cormac McCarthy at Nautilus: There are influential persons among us—of whom a bit more a bit later—who claim to believe that language is a totally evolutionary process. That it has somehow appeared in the brain in a primitive form and then grown to usefulness. Somewhat like vision, perhaps. But vision we now know is traceable to perhaps as many as a dozen quite independent evolutionary histories. Tempting material for the teleologists. These stories apparently begin with a crude organ capable of perceiving light where any occlusion could well suggest a predator. Which actually makes it an excellent scenario for Darwinian selection. It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know. Read More ›