Science – Page 27 – artdiamondblog.com

Newly Found, Early Human Species, Respected Their Dead

(p. A1) [A] . . . new hominin species was announced on Thursday, [September 10, 2015] by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language.
In two papers published this week in the open-access journal eLife, the researchers said that the more than 1,550 fossil elements documenting the discovery constituted the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world.
. . .
The finding, like so many others in science, was the result of pure luck followed by considerable effort.
Two local cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, found the narrow entrance to the chamber, measuring no more than seven and a half inches wide. They were skinny enough to squeeze through, and in the light of their headlamps they saw the bones all around them. When they showed the fossil pictures to Pedro Boshoff, a caver who is also a geologist, he alerted Dr. Berger, who organized an investigation.
. . .
(p. A3) Besides introducing a new member of the prehuman family, the discovery suggests that some early hominins intentionally deposited bodies of their dead in a remote and largely inaccessible cave chamber, a behavior previously considered limited to modern humans. Some of the scientists referred to the practice as a ritualized treatment of their dead, but by “ritual” they said they meant a deliberate and repeated practice, not necessarily a kind of religious rite.
. . .
At the news conference in South Africa on Thursday, [September 10, 2015] announcing the findings, Dr. Berger said: “I do believe that the field of paleoanthropology had convinced itself, as much as 15 years ago, that we had found everything, that we were not going to make major discoveries and had this story of our origins figured out. I think many people quit exploring, thought it was safer to conduct science inside a lab or behind a computer.” What the new species Naledi says, Dr. Berger concluded, “is that there is no substitute for exploration.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. “Cave Yields Addition to Human Family Tree.”The New York Times (Fri., SEPT. 11, 2015): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word and date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 10, 2015, and has the title “Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave,”)

Those Who Use “Consensus” Argument on Global Warming, Should Endorse Genetically Modified Food

(p. B3) NAIROBI, Kenya — Mohammed Rahman doesn’t know it yet, but his small farm in central Bangladesh is globally significant. Mr. Rahman, a smallholder farmer in Krishnapur, about 60 miles northwest of the capital, Dhaka, grows eggplant on his meager acre of waterlogged land.
As we squatted in the muddy field, examining the lush green foliage and shiny purple fruits, he explained how, for the first time this season, he had been able to stop using pesticides. This was thanks to a new pest-resistant variety of eggplant supplied by the government-run Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.
Despite a recent hailstorm, the weather had been kind, and the new crop flourished. Productivity nearly doubled. Mr. Rahman had already harvested the small plot 10 times, he said, and sold the brinjal (eggplant’s name in the region) labeled “insecticide free” at a small premium in the local market. Now, with increased profits, he looked forward to being able to lift his family further out of poverty. I could see why this was so urgent: Half a dozen shirtless kids gathered around, clamoring for attention. They all looked stunted by malnutrition.
. . .
I, . . . , was once in [the] . . . activist camp. A lifelong environmentalist, I opposed genetically modified foods in the past. Fifteen years ago, I even participated in vandalizing field trials in Britain. Then I changed my mind.
After writing two books on the science of climate change, I decided I could no longer continue taking a pro-science position on global warming and an anti-science position on G.M.O.s.
There is an equivalent level of scientific consensus on both issues, I realized, that climate change is real and genetically modified foods are safe. I could not defend the expert consensus on one issue while opposing it on the other.

For the full commentary, see:
MARK LYNAS. “How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., APRIL 26, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 24, 2015.)

“Strong-Willed Scientists Overstated the Significance of Their Studies”

The New York Times seems open to the idea that strong-willed scientists might overstate their results in science food studies. I wonder if The New York Times would be open to the same possibility in science climate studies?

(p. A19) For two generations, Americans ate fewer eggs and other animal products because policy makers told them that fat and cholesterol were bad for their health. Now both dogmas have been debunked in quick succession.
. . .
Epidemiological data can be used to suggest hypotheses but not to prove them.
Instead of accepting that this evidence was inadequate to give sound advice, strong-willed scientists overstated the significance of their studies.
Much of the epidemiological data underpinning the government’s dietary advice comes from studies run by Harvard’s school of public health. In 2011, directors of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences analyzed many of Harvard’s most important findings and found that they could not be reproduced in clinical trials.
It’s no surprise that longstanding nutritional guidelines are now being challenged.
In 2013, government advice to reduce salt intake (which remains in the current report) was contradicted by an authoritative Institute of Medicine study. And several recent meta-analyses have cast serious doubt on whether saturated fats are linked to heart disease, as the dietary guidelines continue to assert.
Uncertain science should no longer guide our nutrition policy. Indeed, cutting fat and cholesterol, as Americans have conscientiously done, may have even worsened our health.

For the full commentary, see:
NINA TEICHOLZ. “The Government’s Bad Diet Advice.” The New York Times (Sat., FEB. 21, 2015): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date FEB. 20, 2015.)

Entrepreneurs Creating Healthy, Tasty Meat, Without Killing Animals

(p. B2) “The next couple of years will be exciting ones,” says Joseph D. Puglisi, a Stanford University professor of structural biology who is working on meat alternatives. “We can use a broad range of plant protein sources and create a palette of textures and tastes — for example, jerky, cured meats, sausage, pork.”
“The true challenge will be to recreate more complex pieces of meat that are the pinnacle of the meat industry,” he added. “I believe that plausible, good-tasting steaks and pork loins are only a matter of time.”
Puglisi is advising Beyond Meat, a start-up that is a leader in the field, with investments from Bill Gates and both Biz Stone and Ev Williams of Twitter fame, not to mention Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that backed Google and Amazon. Beyond Meat says its sales are doubling each year.
“We’re really focused on the mainstream,” said Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, over a lunch of fake chili, meatballs and hamburgers.
. . .
“We want to create the next great American meat company,” Brown says. “That’s the dream.”
. . .
The mainstream food industry isn’t saying much publicly. But recently released documents from the American Egg Board, a quasi-governmental body, show it regarded Hampton Creek’s egg-free “Just Mayo” spread as a “major threat.” In one internal email, an Egg Board executive jokingly suggests hiring a hit man to deal with Hampton Creek.
. . .
. . . if I can still enjoy a juicy burger now and then, while boosting my health, helping the environment and avoiding the brutalizing of farm animals, hey, I’m in!

For the full commentary, see:
Nicholas Kristof. “The (Fake) Meat Revolution.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., SEPT. 20, 2015): 11.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 19, 2015.)

New Evidence Says Scientists Must “Start from Scratch” on Computer Weather Models

“An image of Pluto’s atmosphere, backlit by the sun, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it zipped past the planet.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Confounding expectations, Pluto’s atmosphere has actually thickened over the last 26 years, and many planetary scientists changed their minds. Maybe the atmosphere would persist throughout Pluto’s 248-year orbit, they speculated.

Now the story appears to be changing again. New Horizons obtained a snapshot of the structure of the atmosphere by looking at distortions in radio signals sent from Earth passing through Pluto’s atmosphere.
What the new measurement “seems to have detected is a potential for the first stages of that collapse just as New Horizons arrived,” Dr. Stern said. “It would be an amazing coincidence, but there are some on our team who would say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Even if the atmosphere is collapsing, though, the view from the night side of Pluto is, at present, spectacularly hazy. A photograph showing a silhouette of Pluto surrounded by a ring of sunlight “almost brought tears” to the atmospheric scientists, Dr. Summers said, showing sunlight scattered by small particles of haze up to 100 miles above the surface.
“This is our first peek at weather in Pluto’s atmosphere,” he said.
Computer models had suggested that the haze would float within 20 miles of the surface, where temperatures are about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, the haze particles formed higher, 30 to 50 miles up, where temperatures are balmier, around minus 270.
“We’re having to start from scratch to understand what we thought we knew about the atmosphere,” Dr. Summers said.

For the full story, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Pluto’s Atmosphere Is Thinner Than Expected, but Still Looks Hazy.” The New York Times (Sat., JULY 25, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JULY 24, 2015.)

Experts Are Paid “to Sound Cocksure” Even When They Do Not Know

(p. B1) I think Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” co-written with the journalist Dan Gardner, is the most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” (I helped write and edit the Kahneman book but receive no royalties from it.) Prof. Kahneman agrees. “It’s a manual to systematic thinking in the real world,” he told me. “This book shows that under the right conditions regular people are capable of improving their judgment enough to beat the professionals at their own game.”
The book is so powerful because Prof. Tetlock, a psychologist and professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has a remarkable trove of data. He has just concluded the first stage of what he calls the Good Judgment Project, which pitted some 20,000 amateur forecasters against some of the most knowledgeable experts in the world.
The amateurs won–hands down.
. . .
(p. B7) The most careful, curious, open-minded, persistent and self-critical–as measured by a battery of psychological tests–did the best.
. . .
Most experts–like most people–“are too quick to make up their minds and too slow to change them,” he says. And experts are paid not just to be right, but to sound right: cocksure even when the evidence is sparse or ambiguous.

For the full review, see:
JASON ZWEIG. “The Trick to Making Better Forecasts.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 26, 2015): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 25, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Tetlock, Philip E., and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015.

“Stunned” Geophysicists Are Headed “Back to the Drawing Board”

(p. A3) Bringing the blur of a distant world into sharp focus, NASA unveiled its first intimate images of Pluto on Wednesday [July 15, 2015], revealing with startling clarity an eerie realm where frozen water rises in mountains up to 11,000 feet high.
. . .
At a briefing held Wednesday [July 15, 2015] at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., mission scientists said they were stunned by what the images reveal.
“It is going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board,” said Alan Stern, the New Horizons project’s principal investigator, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “Across 3 Billion Miles of Space, NASA Probe Sends Close-Ups of Pluto’s Icy Mountains.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JULY 16, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JULY 15, 2015, has the title “NASA Releases Close-Up Pictures of Pluto and Its Largest Moon, Charon,” and has some different wording than the print version. The quote above follows the online version.)

112 Years of Spectacular Progress Started With Wilbur Wright

“New close-up images of a region near Pluto’s equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) LAUREL, Md. — The first close-up image of Pluto has revealed mountains as tall as the Rockies, and an absence of craters — discoveries that, to their delight, baffled scientists working on NASA’s New Horizons mission and provided punctuation for a journey nine and a half years in the making.

Only 112 years after the Wright Brothers were barely able to get their airplane off the ground, a machine from Earth has crossed the solar system to a small, icy world three billion miles away. The flyby on Tuesday, when New Horizons buzzed within 7,800 miles of the former ninth planet, came 50 years to the day after NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft made a similar first pass by Mars.

For the full story, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Pluto’s Portrait From New Horizons: Ice Mountains and No Craters.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 16, 2015): A1 & A17.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JULY 15, 2015.)

Fire Cooked Carbohydrates Fed Bigger Brains

(p. D5) Scientists have long recognized that the diets of our ancestors went through a profound shift with the addition of meat. But in the September issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, researchers argue that another item added to the menu was just as important: carbohydrates, bane of today’s paleo diet enthusiasts. In fact, the scientists propose, by incorporating cooked starches into their diet, our ancestors were able to fuel the evolution of our oversize brains.
. . .
Cooked meat provided increased protein, fat and energy, helping hominins grow and thrive. But Mark G. Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, and his colleagues argue that there was another important food sizzling on the ancient hearth: tubers and other starchy plants.
Our bodies convert starch into glucose, the body’s fuel. The process begins as soon as we start chewing: Saliva contains an enzyme called amylase, which begins to break down starchy foods.
Amylase doesn’t work all that well on raw starches, however; it is much more effective on cooked foods. Cooking makes the average potato about 20 times as digestible, Dr. Thomas said: “It’s really profound.”
. . .
Dr. Thomas and his colleagues propose that the invention of fire, not farming, gave rise to the need for more amylase. Once early humans started cooking starchy foods, they needed more amylase to unlock the precious supply of glucose.
Mutations that gave people extra amylase helped them survive, and those mutations spread because of natural selection. That glucose, Dr. Thomas and his colleagues argue, provided the fuel for bigger brains.

For the full story, see:
Carl Zimmer. “MATTER; For Evolving Brains, a ‘Paleo’ Diet of Carbs.” The New York Times (Tues., AUG. 18, 2015): D5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 13, 2015.)

The academic article summarized in the passages above, is:
Hardy, Karen, Jennie Brand-Miller, Katherine D. Brown, Mark G. Thomas, and Les Copeland. “The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 90, no. 3 (Sept. 2015): 251-68.

Science Is a Process, Not a Set of Settled Conclusions

(p. A11) Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?
The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact.
. . .
. . . , the release of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009 showed climate scientists concerned with the lack of recent warming and how to “hide the decline.” The communications showed that whatever the emailers were engaged in, it was not the disinterested pursuit of science.
Another batch of 5,000 emails written by top climate scientists came out in 2011, discussing, among other public-relations matters, how to deal with skeptical editors and how to suppress unfavorable data. It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of the mainstream media that this wasn’t the scandal of the century. But then again I forget, “the science is settled.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming; Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers; That doesn’t sound like science to me.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date July 30, 2015.)

Marie Curie Opposed Patents Because Women Could Not Own Property in France

(p. C6) Ms. Wirtén, a professor at Linköping University in Sweden, pays special attention to the decision not to patent and how it was treated in the founding texts of the Curie legend: Curie’s 1923 biography of her husband, “Pierre Curie,” and their daughter Eve’s 1937 biography of her mother, “Madame Curie.” The books each recount a conversation in which husband and wife agree that patenting their radium method would be contrary to the spirit of science.
It is not quite that simple. As Ms. Wirtén points out, the Curies derived a significant portion of their income from Pierre’s patents on instruments. Various factors besides beneficence could have affected their decision not to extend this approach to their radium process. Intriguingly, the author suggests that the ineligibility of women to own property under French law might have shaped Curie’s perspective. “Because the law excluded her from the status of person upon which these intellectual property rights depend,” Ms. Wirtén writes, “the ‘property’ road was closed to Marie Curie. The persona road was not.”

For the full review, see:
EVAN HEPLER-SMITH. “Scientific Saint; After scandals in France, Curie was embraced by American women as an intellectual icon.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 21, 2015): C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 20, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.