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… Johannes Kepler freelanced as an astrologer. From Wonders and Marvels, : There were a variety of specializations within the field of astrology, from the very respectable basics of using heavenly observations to make general predictions about the weather, finances, etc., to the more controversial practice of casting a chart based on the moment a question was posed and then providing an answer according to celestial aspects.[ii] And Catherine was hardly the only monarch employing astrology or astrologers in decision-making. The severe and devout Philip II of Spain consulted them, even upon the creation of his tomb. And who has not heard of John Dee in connection with England’s Elizabeth I? It was not until the opening years of the Read More ›

From New Scientist: Why one lake contains more than 1000 species of the same fish One thousand species of the “same fish” in Lake Malawi? We used to think the word “species” meant something. The huge number of closely related species living together has meant they feature prominently in models of species diversification. But what made them so diverse has remained a mystery. Some think environmental forces drove the diversification, others that the underlying cause was biological, says Scholz. For example, some females are colour-blind to males that are a different colour to them, which can drive sexual isolation between different groups of fish. In humans, we call that  behaviour “demography.” People who don’t speak the same language or move Read More ›

Statisticians interviewed for Five-Thirty-Eight think so: It may sound crazy to get indignant over a scientific term that few lay people have even heard of, but the consequences matter. The misuse of the p-value can drive bad science (there was no disagreement over that), and the consensus project was spurred by a growing worry that in some scientific fields, p-values have become a litmus test for deciding which studies are worthy of publication. As a result, research that produces p-values that surpass an arbitrary threshold are more likely to be published, while studies with greater or equal scientific importance may remain in the file drawer, unseen by the scientific community. More. P-values? From Rob Sheldon The “p-value” is a Fisher Read More ›

Brought to you by the team that uncovered the water crisis in Flint, Michgan: Citizens in Flint could smell, taste and see that their water was contaminated almost immediately following the switch. But when they tried to bring their concerns to public officials’ attention, they were ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. (pause for sneering at the anti-science rubes) We became involved in April 2015 when Lee Anne Walters, a Flint resident and mother of a lead-poisoned child, contacted Dr. Marc Edwards, our research adviser at Virginia Tech. After the city detected elevated lead in the Walters family’s water, and she was refused help by MDEQ, Mrs. Walters took her case to EPA Region 5 employee Miguel Del Toral, who collaborated with Read More ›

We asked physicist Rob Sheldon: “Front-loading” is something I picture as an elaborate “Rube Goldberg” machine. Here’s a sampling of real-life front-loading by brilliant engineers with too much time on their hands. Okay, if engineers could do that, couldn’t God make the flagellum out of spare parts by a properly front-loaded machine? I think the answer here is “yes”. But of course that begs the question, “doesn’t the machine show much more design than the thing it makes?” Of course. But our goal wasn’t to minimize design effort, our goal was to create a “front-loaded” machine, which is what was asked. Now we have another problem. Isn’t the “front-loading machine” a lot more fragile than the thing it made, the Read More ›

From Science: Scientists think that mitochondria were once independent single-celled organisms until, more than a billion years ago, they were swallowed by larger cells. Instead of being digested, they settled down and developed a mutually beneficial relationship developed with their hosts that eventually enabled the rise of more complex life, like today’s plants and animals. Most of their DNA is outsourced to the cell’s nucleus, but why not all of it? In humans, all but 37 are outsourced. In a large project involving more than 2000 mitochondrial genomes from a variety of life forms, researchers found All of the mitochondria’s remaining genes help produce energy in some way. But the team found that a gene was more likely to stick Read More ›

From Slate: early 20 years ago, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice, a married couple at Case Western Reserve University, devised a foundational experiment on self-control. “Chocolate chip cookies were baked in the room in a small oven,” they wrote in a paper that has been cited more than 3,000 times. “As a result, the laboratory was filled with the delicious aroma of fresh chocolate and baking.” … Baumeister and Tice timed the students in the puzzle task, to see how long it took them to give up. They found that the ones who’d eaten chocolate chip cookies kept working on the puzzle for 19 minutes, on average—about as long as people in a control condition who hadn’t snacked at Read More ›

From Real ClearScience: Recently, my colleagues and I published research in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that examined dietary data from almost 50 years of nutrition studies. What we found was astounding; these data were physiologically implausible and incompatible with survival. In other words, the diets from these studies could not support human life if consumed on a daily basis. The reason for this is simple; the memory-based data collection methods (M-BMs) used by nutrition researchers are unscientific because they rely on both the truthfulness of the study participant and the accuracy of his or her memory. Stated more simply, these methods collect nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotal estimates of food and beverage consumption. Importantly, vast amounts of taxpayer dollars are directed Read More ›

From Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at the Boston Globe: Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask … Ah, heritability. A term that is much maligned in disciplines like criminology and often serves as a wellspring of confusion. Well, in Carrie Buck’s case, it wasn’t exactly confusion, was it?: The vote was 8 to 1. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion dispensed with young Carrie Buck’s physical integrity in five paragraphs, the six cruelest words of which characterized Virginia’s interest in preventing Buck from burdening the state with her defective offspring: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” More from Boutwell and Barnes: Most of the evidence about the causes of crime overlooks genetic transmission. Yet, some Read More ›

So thinks Dr. 24hours: The “Creator” paper, Post-pub Peer Review, and Racism Among Scientists. So by now you probably know that PLOSONE retracted a paper about the mechanics of the hand for including phrases about “the mystery of the creator’s design”. Which sounds like an intelligent design argument sneaking into a scientific publication. Except it wasn’t. It was a poor translation of a Chinese idiom, which the author states would have been better translated as “nature”. The paper explicitly and accurately referenced evolution and the real timescale on which evolution occurs. But that didn’t matter. First the outspoken atheist PZ Myers, without apparently doing any investigation, blogged about it credulously asserting it was creationism in a scientific journal. Then twitter Read More ›

From Science Daily: Researchers at Michigan State University, with the help of some stickleback fish, have shown that intense competition among males most definitely has a big say in creating new species. The results, featured in the January issue of Ecology Letters, also show that such competition can reverse the process, actually erasing boundaries between species. “Our paper is of special interest because this is the first time that researchers have shown that intense competition between males for the chance to mate with females can have this kind of influence on splitting populations in two or fusing them together,” said Janette Boughman, MSU integrative biologist and the paper’s senior author.More. Good heavens, not the threespine sticklebacks again? Two stories blew Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Psychology’s Replication Crisis Can’t Be Wished Away Yes, when that “hey, we’re saved” story whistled past the News desk here, casting doubt on serious problems in social science, we held off. There was something troubling about the way the findings were phrased: “Researchers overturn landmark study on the replicability of psychological science” C’mon. It’s widely recognized that there are problems in social science, chiefly due to the monochromatic bias of the researchers. That makes them an easy mark for any flimflam that flies within their mass comfort zone. It’s all the worse if they imagine that won’t happen because they are a “science.” Anyway, Ed Yong: Last August, I wrote about a large initiative called Read More ›

Voids and supervoids: Cosmic voids, and supervoids, are large volumes of space that are devoid of matter. This includes normal matter, in the form of galaxies, and dark matter. Initially, astronomers were not sure if the voids contained dark matter, even though there were no galaxies, but recent observations show that the halos of dark matter are not present. The filamentary structure of galactic superclusters surrounds the voids. While space is mostly empty, voids are large volumes, tens of megaparsecs across. The largest confirmed supervoids are about 100 Mpc (325 million light-years) or more across . The larger known voids include the Boötes Supervoid, and the Northern and Southern Local Supervoids. To explain the cold spot in the cosmic microwave Read More ›

From Lizzie Wade at Science: Archaeologists have long known that Neandertals… used fire, but they could have merely taken advantage of naturally occurring lightning strikes and forest fires to supply the flames. Out of interest, how practical would that be? The point of using fire is to have it handy. No cultural practice could have grown up from relying on occasional accidents and infrequent disasters. That would be like waiting for prey animals to drop dead of heart attacks instead of killing them. Excavations at the 50,000-year-old site Pech-de-l’Azé I in southwestern France have yielded blocks of manganese dioxide, which is abundant in the region’s limestone formations. It has been thought that the compound was used to make body paint, Read More ›

Just as chimpanzees are claimed to have sacred rituals, we now hear from New Scientist that Ravens’ fear of unseen snoopers hints they have theory of mind … The results [of the experiment] suggest ravens can generalise from their own perceptual experience to infer the possibility of being seen by others who are not visibly present. “This proves they have a basic understanding of seeing, which is a basic form of a theory of mind,” says Bugnyar. “This basically means that some non-human animals can indeed evolve this particular ability of attributing a mental state to another one, which has always been considered to be one of the unique human abilities.” More. If the experiment, which showed that ravens are aware Read More ›