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Category: Science/mathematics

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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The new math of how large-scale order emerges

The new math of how large-scale order emerges

Philip Ball writes: A few centuries ago, the swirling polychromatic chaos of Jupiter’s atmosphere spawned the immense vortex that we call the Great Red Spot. From the frantic firing of billions of neurons in your brain comes your unique and coherent experience of reading these words. As pedestrians each try to weave their path on a crowded sidewalk, they begin to follow one another, forming streams that no one ordained or consciously chose. The world is full of such emergent…

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An object lesson from Covid on how to destroy public trust

An object lesson from Covid on how to destroy public trust

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come. Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science….

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Can mathematicians help to solve social-justice problems?

Can mathematicians help to solve social-justice problems?

Rachel Crowell writes: When Carrie Diaz Eaton trained as a mathematician, they didn’t expect their career to involve social-justice research. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, Diaz Eaton first saw social justice in action when their father, who’s from Peru, helped other Spanish-speaking immigrants to settle in the United States. But it would be decades before Diaz Eaton would forge a professional path to use their mathematical expertise to study social-justice issues. Eventually, after years of moving around for education…

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What science forgets

What science forgets

Amanda Gefter writes: Science has been missing something. Something central to its very existence, and yet somehow just out of view. It is written out of papers, shooed away, shoved into laboratory closets. And yet, it’s always there, behind the scenes, making science possible. “Lived experience is both the point of departure and the point of return for science,” astrophysicist Adam Frank, physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson write in their new book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot…

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A wave of retractions is shaking physics

A wave of retractions is shaking physics

MIT Technology Review reports: Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results. Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal editors, and emissaries from the National Science Foundation gathered at the University of Pittsburgh to discuss the best way forward.“To be…

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Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear

Trump will dismantle key U.S. weather and science agency, climate experts fear

The Guardian reports: Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests. Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen. The plan to “break up Noaa…

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Why do some leading geologists reject the term, the Anthropocene?

Why do some leading geologists reject the term, the Anthropocene?

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: A few months into the third millennium, a group called the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (I.G.B.P.) held a meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Among the researchers in attendance was Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist best known for his research on ozone-depleting chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons. For this work, Crutzen, a Dutchman living in Germany, had received a Nobel Prize, in 1995. In his Nobel lecture, he noted that, given humanity’s heedlessness, it had got off lightly. Millions of pounds…

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If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

If we can learn to speak the language of whales, what should we say?

Ross Andersen writes: One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the…

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Climatologist Michael Mann wins defamation case. What this means for scientists

Climatologist Michael Mann wins defamation case. What this means for scientists

Nature reports: US climate scientist Michael Mann has prevailed in a lawsuit that accused two conservative commentators of defamation for challenging his research and comparing him to a convicted child molester. A jury awarded Mann, who is based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, more than US$1 million in a landmark case that legal observers see as a warning to those who attack scientists working in controversial fields, including climate science and public health. “It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize…

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Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Synchronization is one of the fundamental phenomena of nature

Any oscillator — a pendulum, a spring, a firefly, a human heart cell — wants to match up with its neighbors. Mathematicians recently showed that synchronization is inevitable in expander graphs, a type of network found in many areas of science. https://t.co/SM4cUWupJf pic.twitter.com/rINEz3lTuf — Quanta Magazine (@QuantaMagazine) February 3, 2024 Leila Sloman writes: Six years ago, Afonso Bandeira and Shuyang Ling were attempting to come up with a better way to discern clusters in enormous data sets when they stumbled…

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Trump allies plan to gut climate research if he is reelected

Trump allies plan to gut climate research if he is reelected

Climatewire reports: Former President Donald Trump’s second term could begin with a clear direction on climate policy: Trash it. Dozens of conservative organizations have banded together to provide Trump a road map — known as Project 2025 — if he prevails in November. It outlines a series of steps that the former president could take to reverse the climate actions taken by the Biden administration. Trump has already said that boosting fossil fuels would be one of his top priorities….

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‘Smoking gun proof’: Fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show

‘Smoking gun proof’: Fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show

The Guardian reports: The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels. A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western…

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Firms churning out fake scientific papers have taken to bribing journal editors

Firms churning out fake scientific papers have taken to bribing journal editors

Frederik Joelving, from Retraction Watch, writes: One evening in June 2023, Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Cambridge who moonlights as a scientific fraud buster, was digging around on shady Facebook groups when he came across something he had never seen before. Wise was all too familiar with offers to sell or buy author slots and reviews on scientific papers—the signs of a busy paper mill. Exploiting the growing pressure on scientists worldwide to amass publications…

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Team Trump hopes to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels

Team Trump hopes to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, staffed his environmental agencies with fossil fuel lobbyists and claimed — against all scientific evidence — that the Earth’s rising temperatures will “start getting cooler.” Expect a second Trump presidency to show less restraint. Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on…

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