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Category: Science/mathematics

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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Scientific American: Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health and the environment

Scientific American: Vote for Kamala Harris to support science, health and the environment

The editors of Scientific American write: In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts. In…

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Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine

Biobots arise from the cells of dead organisms − pushing the boundaries of life, death and medicine

Biobots could one day be engineered to deliver drugs and clear up arterial plaque. Kriegman et al. 2020/PNAS, CC BY-SA By Peter A Noble, University of Washington and Alex Pozhitkov, Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences at City of Hope Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites. But the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death. Usually, scientists…

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The search for what shook the Earth for nine days straight

The search for what shook the Earth for nine days straight

Robin George Andrews writes: On September 16, 2023, the world began to rumble. A gargantuan rock-ice avalanche tumbled into the deep waters of a fjord in eastern Greenland, unleashing a megatsunami whose initial waves reached a height of 200 meters. The waves scoured the walls of the fjord before flowing into the open sea. Even for this avalanche-prone corner of Greenland, the collapse and subsequent megatsunami were shocking for their speed and ferocity. But what followed was considerably stranger. The…

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Do animals know that they will die?

Do animals know that they will die?

Ross Andersen writes: Moni the chimpanzee was still new to the Dutch zoo when she lost her baby. The keepers hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. Neither did Zoë Goldsborough, a graduate student who had spent months jotting down every social interaction that occurred among the chimps, from nine to five, four days a week, for a study on jealousy. One chilly midwinter morning, Goldsborough found Moni sitting by herself on a high tree stump in the center of…

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In an epic cosmology clash, rival scientists begin to find common ground

In an epic cosmology clash, rival scientists begin to find common ground

Science News reports: The biggest clash in cosmology might be inching closer to resolution, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. Scientists disagree over the universe’s expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. There are two main methods for measuring it — one based on exploding stars called supernovas and the other on the universe’s oldest light, the cosmic microwave background. The two techniques have been in conflict for a decade, in what’s known as the “Hubble tension.” If this…

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Safety threats undermine the freedom of science

Safety threats undermine the freedom of science

An editorial in Science says: An accommodating and supportive environment is essential to conducting scientific research. Yet, in almost every country, researchers can experience harassment, threats, prosecution, or even violence for opinions they express or for their work in relation to high-profile issues. Although many international and regional reports on this issue are patchy in terms of comprehensiveness and representation, they reveal clear and worrying trends—namely, that researchers working in politically charged fields such as public health, climate, and sexual…

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The hidden story of how ancient India shaped the West

The hidden story of how ancient India shaped the West

William Dalrymple writes: In 628 AD, an Indian sage living on a mountain in Rajasthan made one of the world’s most important mathematical discoveries. The great mathematician Brahmagupta (598–670) explored Indian philosophical ideas about nothingness and the void, and came up with the treatise that more or less invented – and certainly defined – the concept of zero. Brahmagupta was born near the Rajasthan hill station of Mount Abu. When he was 30 years old, he wrote a 25-chapter treatise…

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The asteroid-in-spring hypothesis

The asteroid-in-spring hypothesis

Kerry Howley writes: It remains a matter of dispute when and where and with what antecedent Melanie During came up with the idea for determining the season the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. But the idea was this: Sturgeon bones grow like tree rings, and the bone cells grow thickest in summer, when food is most plentiful. A slice of bone, then, should reveal a succession of seasons. Months of plenty would be thicker, as the fish grew fat on plankton….

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Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Project 2025 poses far-reaching threats to science

Scientific American reports: Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service to such an extent that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, dubiously, tried to distance himself from the plan. But in 2022 Trump said the Heritage Foundation—the think tank that authored Project 2025—would “lay the…

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To save life on Earth, bring back taxonomy

To save life on Earth, bring back taxonomy

Robert Langellier writes: In 2009, the botanist Naomi Fraga was hunting a flower without a name near Carson City, Nev. Ms. Fraga saw that the plant was going extinct in real time as its desert valley habitat was bulldozed to make way for Walmarts and housing developments. But in order to seek legal protections for it, she had to give it a name. The diminutive yellow flower became the Carson Valley monkeyflower or, officially, Erythranthe carsonensis, allowing conservationists to petition…

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Why planetary problems need a new approach to politics

Why planetary problems need a new approach to politics

Jonathan S Blake and Nils Gilman write: ‘Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared to the World Health Assembly on 29 November 2021, quoting Albert Camus’s The Plague. ‘Outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics are a fact of nature,’ Tedros, the director-general of the World Health Organization since 2017, continued in his own words. ‘But that does not mean we are helpless to prevent them, prepare for them or mitigate their impact.’ Exuding…

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