Somewhere, at this moment, a scientist is writing up a letter to admit they made a mistake. When scientists are wrong, it’s easy for some people to declare this a knock against science.
It’s not. In fact, you could make a pretty good argument that discovering mistakes is pretty much what science it about. That’s why I frequently try to showcase not just recent articles, but opposing positions and official retractions as they appear in prominent journals. These things are part of the fabric of science.
But that doesn’t mean science is invulnerable to intentional mistakes, intentional malfeasance. And there are multiple reasons to be concerned.
First, there are dozens of groups dedicated to passing bad science—often under names that seems authoritative, like the Heartland Institute or the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. These are just two out of dozens of groups that have sprung up to generate “research” that supports climate change denial. The people behind these groups are pros. But not pros at science. Before becoming involved in climate change, these same groups and same people worked to “disprove” acid rain. And before acid rain, many of them were dedicated to creating papers that showed no connection between smoking and cancer.
Though they’ve been around for decades, these groups are not fading away. Instead they’re enjoying a renaissance, with increased funding from Republican billionaires and more direct connections to conservative groups. They are forming a source of fact-free conservative ‘science’ that feeds into fact free conservative ‘news’ and is enjoys the social media support of millions of conservative ‘people.’ The merchants of doubt are having a heyday.
Supporting them is another phenomenon. Hundreds of new “scientific journals” are springing up, many of them based in China or India, that purport to be reputable, peer-reviewed publications. Some of these are simply article mills, willing to publish anything for a dollar.
It’s easy to understand the plight of young academics, desperate to add publications to their CV before the ever-turning mill at most universities shoves them out the door. For them, this expanded base of sites to publish may seem a godsend. But not only do these publications provide little prestige, they carry a heavy threat.
This murky world has a predator of its own – climate science deniers looking to take advantage of the questionable quality controls in return for getting their work published in what the publishers claim are “peer-reviewed journals” but that, in reality, are not.
Fake studies published after fake peer-review promoted by fake institutes, trumpeted on fake news, and used to generate and defend fake policy. That’s not a coming threat, that’s a current reality.
Okay, coming on in, let’s read some real science.
Looking the truth about the first humans to leave Africa right in the mouth.
This isn’t one of those announcements that scrambles the human evolutionary tree—and we’ve had plenty of those. This time, it’s the timeline taking a punch.
The oldest human fossils ever found outside Africa suggest that Homo sapiens might have spread to the Arabian Peninsula around 180,000 years ago — much earlier than previously thought. The upper jaw and teeth, found in an Israeli cave and reported in Science on 25 January, pre-date other human fossils from the same region by at least 50,000 years. But scientists say that it is unclear whether the fossils represent a brief incursion or a more-lasting expansion of the species.
Until recently, it was thought that modern Homo sapiens sapiens went back about 200,000 years and emerged from the same area of East Africa as many human ancestors. However, a study published just last year pushed that date back over 100,000 years and turned West Africa into the new hot spot when it comes to looking for the oldest members of our species.
What that additional time for wandering, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that modern humans strolled onto the Arabian Peninsula 180,000 years ago. After all, Homo erectus made it all the way to Asia by at least 1.6 million years ago, and even older species of humans, including Homo ergaster, may have left the mother continent over a hundred thousand years before that. There are also plenty of those Homo antecessor fossils to be slotted in. They were in Europe over a million years ago, but seem to be more closely related to Denisovans—a group of humans who lived about 40,000 years ago in Sibera and whose remains are not numerous enough to call “scant”—rather than the Neanderthals that moved into the same neighborhood where antecessor lived.
If additional remains are found, it could give a better sense of whether this exodus of modern humans from Africa represented a vacation or an early migration. It might also be interesting to see how the genetics of these specimens compare with those of earlier out of Africa waves.
Right now, it appears that the last few waves out of Africa look something like …
1.8 MM years ago, H. erectus —> H. florencis (in SE Asia)
1.2 MM years ago, H. antecessor (to Europe) → Denisovans (Siberia)
0.6 MM years ago, H. heidelbergensis → H. neanderthalensis (Europe, Middle East)
0.1 MM years ago, H. sapiens (everywhere)
Just 50,000 years ago, you could have probably given the Earth a good shake and found descendants of all of these waves still living. That’s pretty amazing. It also suggests that the final wave turned out to be a tsunami.
To Age, or Not to Age.
Beyond say … maybe 25? We’d all probably have the same answer to that question. A few weeks ago, ASR featured an article projecting the ideas of somatic evolution to suggest that a kind of internal competition makes aging inevitable among multi-cellular organisms. If that put a damper on your plans to catch Superbowl MCIX, a pair of competing letters give that idea a kick again this week.
First comes punch …
Paul Nelson and Joanna Masel are the most recent theorists to bypass evolution and seek an abstract answer to the question, “What is the cause of aging?” Their mathematics is not in question, but the process of somatic evolution that they model bears no obvious relation to aging as it has been characterized in humans. Regrettably, their result has been caricatured in the popular press to discredit medical research toward delayed aging.
Then counter-punch …
We stand by our claim that aging is inevitable in multicellular organisms. However, our model of somatic evolution uses sign arguments and so does not inform the rate of aging nor the extent to which aging can be delayed.
Which sounds like good news. If the math says aging is inevitable, but can be made very slow … then let’s do that.
Gender bias is science is a real thing, example number infinity.
In what could easily be a weekly series, here’s another example that those putting forward ideas that women don’t flourish in science because of some inate level of ability are spouting sexist bullshit.
In a study of 24,000 grant applications, some of the reviews focused on the applicants. Some on the quality of the proposals. And guess what … when the focus was placed on applicants, men had greater chance of winning a grant. The only surprise here is that the effect wasn’t larger.
The ancient grains, and ancient farms, that are all around you.
This isn’t a formal article, or a peer-reviewed journal, but Analee Newitz over at Ars Technica has a terrific piece on how Native Americans raised a whole variety of grains that you’ve likely never heard of, and how some of those grains are probably growing in a vacant lot near you.
Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven’t simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.
It’s fascinating, and certainly has me thinking about making some unique additions to my summer garden.
Squirmy, squirmy wigglebots.
Building tiny robots can be tough. First there’s all those nano-scale bits of machinery, and there are problems with friction, with how debris interferes with the work, and making mini legs or micro wheels that can navigate the world. So a group from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany bypassed a lot of what we think we we think about robots by making them squishy.
Here we demonstrate magneto-elastic soft millimetre-scale robots that can swim inside and on the surface of liquids, climb liquid menisci, roll and walk on solid surfaces, jump over obstacles, and crawl within narrow tunnels. These robots can transit reversibly between different liquid and solid terrains, as well as switch between locomotive modes.
At a millimeter in length, these tiny ‘bots are about the size of many flatwoms. They’re a bit large to be doing many of those nanobot tasks we think about—they won’t be climbing around tidying things inside your cells—but inside your intestines? Maybe.
They can additionally execute pick-and-place and cargo-release tasks. We also present theoretical models to explain how the robots move. Like the large-scale robots that can be used to study locomotion, these soft small-scale robots could be used to study soft-bodied locomotion produced by small organisms.
Sorry, guys.
Women live longer. But maybe that’s an environmental effect. Maybe that’s the result of being able to sit down on a cushion and snack on bon-bons while men track down the nearest wooly rhino (don’t hit me, I don’t really mean that). Maybe it’s … that men just have a crappy design.
Women live longer than men in nearly all populations today. Some research focuses on the biological origins of the female advantage; other research stresses the significance of social factors. We studied male–female survival differences in populations of slaves and populations exposed to severe famines and epidemics. We find that even when mortality was very high, women lived longer on average than men.
When time gets tough … the men die off. There’s one particular statistic that makes a large part of the difference, and it’s probably not what you think.
Most of the female advantage was due to differences in mortality among infants: baby girls were able to survive harsh conditions better than baby boys.
Careful for those babies with the blue onesies—they’re more delicate.
People, people who like people who make immoral decisions, are the …
Well, this explains a lot … unfortunately. A pair of Yale psychologists looked into the issue of what people actually look for in other people. Do people like those who make moral decisions, or those who make immoral decisions? The question may seem black and white. The answer, not so much.
It is commonly argued that humans have a dominant preference for morality traits vs. immorality traits in others—that is, irrespective of the surrounding context, morality fosters liking, and immorality fosters disliking. The results of four experiments oppose this view by showing that situational goals can eliminate and even reverse the preference for morality vs. immorality in others. These findings suggest that our preference for morality vs. immorality is conditional on the demands of our current goals and cannot be attributed solely to innate, “hardwired” links or personal learning experiences. They also suggest that immoral people sometimes win public adoration, and the power that comes with it, not in spite of but precisely because of their immorality.
People will hire an immoral bully, so long as he’s an immoral bully for their cause. Then they’ll praise him for being an immoral bully.
Last two years in a nutshell.
Insect wings come from two different sources.
Vertebrates have evolved wings at least three times. But if you look at the wing of a bat, a bird, and a pterosaur, you see very different structures. All of them built their wings out of their forelimbs, but pterosaurs built most of the wing spar from a single finger, bats constructed a a system that involves their whole “hand,” and birds evolved a system that’s something of a compromise and is heavily dependent on the support of flight feathers.
With insects, there had long been two competing theories of just what part of their bodies had gone into creating flight wings. Now a couple of researchers from Miami of Ohio have what looks to be the answer—and it’s “both.”
By studying various wing-related tissues in beetles, we demonstrated that two distinct lineages of wing-related tissues are present even outside the appendage-bearing segments. This outcome supports a dual evolutionary origin of insect wings, and shows that novelty can emerge through two previously unassociated tissues collaborating to form a new structure.
Working with Tribolium beetles, they generated a very detailed model of what parts of the shell were modified to create wings. If you don’t grok insects, there’s not a lot of this article that will read as other than gibberish. But if you do … it’s pretty cool stuff.
Lion vs. Zebra, Cheetah vs. Impala.
You’ve seen it a thousand times over voiceovers from Marlin Perkins to David Attenborough—the cheetah fires out of its hiding place, pounding after the impala with fantastic speed … and misses. A team from the University of London has put together the biomechanics of these encounters, and it pretty much hits what you’d expect. Predators are faster. Prey are more maneuverable.
We show that although cheetahs and impalas were universally more athletic than lions and zebras in terms of speed, acceleration and turning, within each predator–prey pair, the predators had 20% higher muscle fibre power than prey, 37% greater acceleration and 72% greater deceleration capacity than their prey. We simulated hunt dynamics with these data and showed that hunts at lower speeds enable prey to use their maximum manoeuvring capacity and favour prey survival, and that the predator needs to be more athletic than its prey to sustain a viable success rate.
The last thing a zebra wants to do is challenge a lion to a flat out race. Instead, prey keep the speed down to where they get their maximum maneuverability, a situation that not only gives them the best chance to evade the claws, but a better chance of exhausting their pursuers.
All of this makes me wonder (not for the first time) about what in the holy heck used to chase Pronghorns. Also (wrongly) called antelope, Pronghorns live in the Western United States and are unfrickin’godly fast. Adults can not only run at 55 mph, they can do it for hour, after hour. They can hit peak speeds of 61 mph. That’s not quite as fast as peak cheetah (70+), but it’s a good 10 mph faster than an impala.
If pronghorn were actually driven to that speed by predation, then the American plains once held an animal that could top 80 mph.
Ibuprofen can numb your little swimmers.
Keeping it brief (no pun inten… no, that’s not true) taking too much ibuprophen over a long period of time can make men infertile. Or, to put it terms that took me ten reads to understand …
The study shows that ibuprofen use results in selective transcriptional repression of endocrine cells in the human testis. This repression results in the elevation of the stimulatory pituitary hormones, resulting in a state of compensated hypogonadism, a disorder associated with adverse reproductive and physical health disorders.
It seems to go away if you stop, and also suggests that taking ibuprophen over a very extended period could cause other problems. Like loss of bone mass and maybe development of breasts. So … don’t take it for months on end.
Things to look for in the quite near future.
Nature asked a series of experts to give them their most-looked-for developments of 2018. Here are a few of the things they are looking out for…
Harvard Geneticist George Church says we now have the tools to do some serious large scale re-coding of the genome, including ...
‘Codon recoding’ is a completely generic way to make any organism resistant to most or all viruses and requires tens of thousands of precise changes per cell.
Xiaowei Zhuang, Director of Harvard’s Center for Advanced Imaging, wins the award for most brain-huring acronym of the year so far…
My lab is developing MERFISH, or multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization, an image-based, single-cell transcriptomics approach.
Elaine Mardis from the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is pressing forward on the rapidly changing field of immunotherapy for cancers.
One exciting technology that could be used to study these neo-antigens is CyTOF, a so-called mass-cytometry method for identifying cells that express specific proteins.
Swiss biologist Ruedi Aebersold is looking to connect better imaging to better treatment.
Such altered complexes can then be studied at the structural level using cryo-electron microscopy single-particle analysis or cryo-electron tomography (CET), both of which can image molecules at a resolution of around 5–10 ångströms. This is high enough to visualize how mutations change the composition, topology and structure, and by inference the function, of the affected complex.
Rebecca Calisi Rodríguez, reproductive biologist at UC Davis, is excited about how ubiquitous genetic tools are becoming.
It took around US$3 billion to sequence the human genome 15 years ago. It costs a few thousand dollars today, and the price is still falling. This is important because it allows us to investigate animals not usually studied in laboratories in the ecosystems and habitats in which they have evolved, which has the potential to yield more physiologically relevant data.
Neuroscientist Vivienne Ming from Socos Labs has a kind of scary idea about all those little devices sitting around our homes.
We think of a single Alexa device, the Internet-connected smart assistant developed by Amazon, as a lone personal assistant, but it is more accurate to recognize it as part of a massively distributed multisensor array extending into millions of homes and feeding an enormous experimentation system that is the true Alexa. Rather than millions of individual robots, it is a single artificial intelligence (AI) that is constantly learning about the world, with the actions of one family influencing its exploration, and exploitation, of another.
Ahhh! Running away till next week. Alexa, self-destruct, please.