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Category: Science

Scientific research: ‘I fear we’ll lose a generation of talent that will take decades to recover’ — if at all

Scientific research: ‘I fear we’ll lose a generation of talent that will take decades to recover’ — if at all

Sam Stein writes: In the first month of the second Trump administration, the world’s richest man—underinformed, chronically online, and staffed by a coterie of teenaged and twentysomething former engineering interns—has been moving at warp speed to reshape, reduce, and even dismantle the United States government. But while Musk’s rampage has been feverishly covered, the scope of its impact remains largely underappreciated. Experts say it can’t be measured in weeks or months or even in government services affected. Rather, it will…

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How humanity moved from eternal to finite time

How humanity moved from eternal to finite time

Thomas Moynihan writes: Do you recall the first time you knew you would die? It’s a milestone, realising your time is limited. That things happened before you, and will happen afterward, in your absence. As we grow up, the understanding of death comes in stages, but it culminates in acknowledgment of one’s own – unavoidable yet unpredictable – mortality. Sometime between the ages of six and 10, children become aware that their time is inescapably bounded. Roughly the same might be said…

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To better understand the world, follow the paths of mathematics

To better understand the world, follow the paths of mathematics

Gordon Gillespie writes: In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P Snow delivered the esteemed Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge. Regaled with champagne and Marmite sandwiches, the audience had no idea that they were about to be read the riot act. Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’….

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Paleolithic ingenuity: 13,000-year-old raised-relief map discovered in France

Paleolithic ingenuity: 13,000-year-old raised-relief map discovered in France

University of Adelaide: Researchers have discovered what may be the world’s oldest three-dimensional map, located within a quartzitic sandstone megaclast in the Paris Basin. The research is published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. The Ségognole 3 rock shelter, known since the 1980s for its artistic engravings of two horses in a Late Paleolithic style on either side of a female pubic figuration, has now been revealed to contain a miniature representation of the surrounding landscape. Dr. Anthony Milnes from…

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How the search for beauty drives scientific enquiry

How the search for beauty drives scientific enquiry

Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan write: When Paulo was an undergraduate, he was tasked with taking photographs of neurons. ‘A single cell,’ he came to notice, ‘it’s a whole universe.’ Looking at cells beneath a microscope is not unlike gazing at stars in the sky, Paulo realised. ‘We all know they are there, but until you see them with your own eyes, you don’t have that experience of awe, of wow.’ It was then, as he put it, that he…

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All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — but no one’s really sure what it is

All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — but no one’s really sure what it is

David Spiegelhalter writes: Life is uncertain. None of us know what is going to happen. We know little of what has happened in the past, or is happening now outside our immediate experience. Uncertainty has been called the ‘conscious awareness of ignorance’ — be it of the weather tomorrow, the next Premier League champions, the climate in 2100 or the identity of our ancient ancestors. In daily life, we generally express uncertainty in words, saying an event “could”, “might” or…

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The extraordinary memories of food-caching birds

The extraordinary memories of food-caching birds

Matthew Hutson writes: A while ago, I searched for a beard trimmer in my bedroom. I spent probably forty-five minutes looking in every likely location at least twice, and every unlikely location at least once. I swore up a storm; the trimmer never turned up. I’ve played similar games with pants. There’s a reason for the burgeoning market in electronic tags that track your belongings. Our poor memories can seem mystifying, especially when you consider animals. This time of year,…

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‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research

‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research

The Guardian reports: World-leading scientists have called for a halt on research to create “mirror life” microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth. The international group of Nobel laureates and other experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could become established in the environment and slip past the immune defences of natural organisms, putting humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections. Although…

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The growing enthusiasm among tech elites for genetically engineering their children

The growing enthusiasm among tech elites for genetically engineering their children

Emily R. Klancher Merchant writes: In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their children’s acceptance into places like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and USC. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed athletic coaches to recruit their children for sports they did not play. Actress Felicity Huffman…

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The U.S. could soon face a threat ‘more powerful’ than nuclear weapons

The U.S. could soon face a threat ‘more powerful’ than nuclear weapons

Ashish K. Jha, Matt Pottinger and Matthew McKnight write: President Richard M. Nixon’s bold 1969 decision to renounce biological weapons and spearhead a treaty to ban them helped contain the threat of a man-made pandemic for half a century. But our inheritance from Nixon is now fading. And in this age of synthetic biology, unless we act quickly to deter our adversaries from making and using bioweapons, we could face disaster in the near future. The nightmare of a biological…

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‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election win

‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election win

Nature reports: Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency in the early hours of 6 November. Owing to Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and actions during his last term in office, many are now bracing for four years of attacks on scientists inside and outside the government. “In my long life of 82 years … there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,” says…

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A new field theory reveals the hidden forces that guide us

A new field theory reveals the hidden forces that guide us

Daniel W McShea and Gunnar O Babcock write: Why do rocks fall? Before Isaac Newton introduced his revolutionary law of gravity in 1687, many natural scientists and philosophers thought that rocks fell because falling was an essential part of their nature. For Aristotle, seeking the ground was an intrinsic property of rocks. The same principle, he argued, also explained why things like acorns grew into oak trees. According to this explanation, every physical object in the Universe, from rocks to…

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Without chaos theory social science will never understand the world

Without chaos theory social science will never understand the world

Brian Klaas writes: On 30 October 1926, Henry and Mabel Stimson stepped off a steam train in Kyoto, Japan and set in motion an unbroken chain of events that, two decades later, led to the deaths of 140,000 people in a city more than 300 km away. The American couple began their short holiday in Japan’s former imperial capital by walking from the railway yard to their room at the nearby Miyako Hotel. It was autumn. The maples had turned…

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How the human brain contends with the strangeness of zero

How the human brain contends with the strangeness of zero

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born. Hundreds of years later, in seventh-century India, zero took on a new identity. No longer a placeholder, the digit acquired a value and found its place on the number line, before 1. Its invention…

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When data is missing, scientists guess. Then guess again

When data is missing, scientists guess. Then guess again

Matt von Hippel writes: Data is almost always incomplete. Patients drop out of clinical trials and survey respondents skip questions; schools fail to report scores, and governments ignore elements of their economies. When data goes missing, standard statistical tools, like taking averages, are no longer useful. “We cannot calculate with missing data, just as we can’t divide by zero,” said Stef van Buuren, the professor of statistical analysis of incomplete data at the University of Utrecht. Suppose you are testing…

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Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion

Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion

Science reports: In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget—$2.6 billion in the last fiscal year—dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. As a leading federal ambassador to the research community and a chief adviser to NIA Director Richard Hodes, Masliah would…

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