Science 2.0

Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, according to a paper in Current Anthropology.

The paper argues that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that had been killed and eaten by other predators. The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans. This is anthropology, so they may be making a distinction without a difference; in a calorie-poor landscape all was eaten.

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I am very happy to report today that the CMS experiment just confirmed to be an excellent spectrometer - as good as they get, I would say - by discovering two new excited B hadrons. The field of heavy meson spectroscopy proves once again to be rich with new gems ready to be unearthed, as we collect more data and dig deeper. For such discoveries to be made, collecting as many proton-proton collisions as possible is in fact the decisive factor, along with following up good ideas and preserving our will to not leave any stone unturned.

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We recently conducted one of the largest-ever studies on perfectionism. We learned that perfectionism has increased substantially over the past 25 years and that it affects men and women equally.

We also learned that perfectionists become more neurotic and less conscientious as time passes.

Perfectionism involves striving for flawlessness and requiring perfection of oneself and others. Extremely negative reactions to mistakes, harsh self-criticism, nagging doubt about performance abilities and a strong sense that others are critical and demanding also define the trait.

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A team of scholars has found that magnetic waves in the Sun’s corona, its outermost layer of atmosphere, react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun.

Alfvénic waves are in plasma and have been found to play a crucial role in transporting energy around the Sun and the solar system. They were previously thought to originate at the Sun’s surface, where boiling hydrogen reaches temperatures of 6,000 degrees and churns the Sun’s magnetic field. However, researchers have found evidence that the magnetic waves also react – or are excited – higher in the atmosphere by sound waves leaking out from the inside of the Sun and the sound waves leave a distinctive marker on the magnetic waves.

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In 2011 I wrote a book with Dr. Alex Berezow of RealClearScience in which we noted the common cause among the anti-vaccine, anti-energy, and anti-GMO communities. They shared common beliefs about distrust of science and I made a challenge; I said if I drew a radius around a Whole Foods, I could predict with high accuracy how those people with those beliefs voted.

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Bees have tiny brains but that is all relative; It seems they also possess complex number skills.

Lots of animals count as shown by how many engage in foraging, shoaling, and resource management arithmetic, addition and subtraction, is rare, only a few nonhuman vertebrates do it.

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Senckenberg scientist Ingmar Werneburg, together with an international team, re-examined the An examination of the skull structure of Tyrannosaurus rex using “anatomical network analysis” found that the carnivorous dinosaur had an extremely flexible skull structure.

Tyrannosaurus rex – the “King of the Tyrant Lizards” – owes its name in part to its impressive teeth and skull. Researchers compared the skull of T. rex with the skull construction of modern terrestrial vertebrates  to examine which skull bones are connected to each other and found that different bone modules led to a highly flexible muzzle that aided in tearing apart prey animals. 

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In January, the Chang’e-4 lunar probe landed on dark side of the Moon but it's a tiny relay satellite that is getting all of the buzz today. 

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"Bud Light", a lower carbohydrate beer produced by  Anheuser–Busch InBev of Belgium, made waves at the Super Bowl, among beer experts and competitors at least, by assuring their customers they did not use corn syrup.

So corn syrup is bad? Well, no, they didn't say that, they just said they didn't have it, but such "nocebo" tactics - the opposite of placebo, making people feel healthier about a product they don't have - have been tried and true for 50 years.(1) 

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Journalists are invited to apply for the 33rd annual Logan Science Journalism Program fellowship to be held at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) May 28 to June 7, 2019. 

The two categories are Biomedical or Environmental research and the event will take place in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Travel plus room and meals are all paid.

The Biomedical Hands-On Research Course will teach essential techniques and concepts in cell, molecular, and developmental biology and genomics while the Environmental Hands-On Research Course will take place at a barrier beach, saltmarsh, and watershed ecosystem on Cape Cod.

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I got a butter shaper for Christmas. I asked for one because I make lot of butter in a mason jar and then just throw it in tupperware but my friends sometimes want butter and it feels a little dismissive to just hand them tupperware.

Imagine my disappointment when I read the instructions which stated that it needed to be treated with "Organic Coconut Oil." Butter used to be something almost everyone made and now it was the providence of uninformed hippies, it seems. Or maybe this company was trapped in 2016?

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From a great distance, our Milky Way would look like a thin disc of stars that rotates once every few hundred million years around its central region. Hundreds of billions of stars provide the gravitational glue to hold it all together.

But the pull of gravity is much weaker in the galaxy’s far outer disc. Out there, the hydrogen clouds that make up most of the Milky Way’s gas disc are no longer confined to a thin plane. Instead, they give the disc an S-like, warped appearance.

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When the HPV vaccine was first introduced, there were a number of reasons people listed for being critical. Some were just corporate cynicism - a company that just lost $5 billion in a Vioxx settlement was working its way under the same vaccine halo as polio and smallpox, they said. Others argued that it didn't work very well. And then there was a more subjective cultural claim that protecting teenage girls against a future cancer by making sex seem safer would lead to promiscuity.

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Mind reading and the ability to predict the future are not skills people generally associate with the human race. Yet, research shows many people genuinely believe in the existence of psychic powers.

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Data from 110 counties in 33 states from 1998 to 2014 has found that brute preservation efforts, the 'nature cannot be touched by humans' kind promoted by aggressive environmental groups, leads to more greenhouse gas emissions.

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Wildlife is abundant in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, found a month-long camera study which found 10 mammal and five bird species scavenging fish carcasses placed on the shoreline of rivers and canals there. Among the species were white-tailed eagles, American mink and river otter.

A previous study also found abundant gray wolves in this ecological zone of about 1,000 square miles that was abandoned by humans after the 1986 nuclear accident which made the name Chernobyl famous.  The new results provide evidence that aquatic nutrient resources can flow to terrestrial landscapes and become available to terrestrial as well as semiaquatic wildlife, like otter and mink.

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During the Super Bowl, you can predict there will be a lot of beer commercials. As a non-drinker, this always puzzles me - haven't fans already bought their beer? - but advertising is a trillion dollar industry and I instead run a small non-profit so I am certainly not going to debunk capitalism.

However, I am going to debunk junk science and their suggestion that because they use one type of sugar to help yeast and their competitor uses another theirs is superior is junk science.

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During the George W. Bush administration, American furniture makers had a crippling disadvantage. While American timber was tightly regulated, foreign supplies had no limitations on where their wood originated from, and could engage in destructive practices and undercut U.S. companies.

President Bush solved that by modernizing the Lacey Act, which was the conservation brainchild of Republicans a century earlier and had been modified a few times since. Under the new law, if a supplier could not show a legitimate trail of legal acquisition, it simply could not come into the U.S. 

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This is another of my articles to help people who get terrified by news stories, which often get exaggerated titles even by responsible journalists. In this case many are scared that withdrawal from the INF is going to lead to a nuclear war. So, yes, it's in the news now that US has announced it will withdraw from the INF treaty, and Russia has responded with an identical move the day after. The US withdrawal has been expected for some weeks now and the Russian symmetrical response is hardly much of a surprise. IT IS NOT A DECLARATION OF NUCLEAR WAR.

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In a recent experiment, participants were asked questions to gauge how religious they were and then about their willingness to purchase a fruit cup. Half were told the fruit cup was organic and half were told it was gluten-free.

People who were very religious had more favorable attitudes toward the gluten-free fruit cup and were more likely to say they would buy it than they would the organic kind.

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