(Inside Science) -- According to Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, at the Southern District of New York, "Forensic science continues to be routinely admitted by the courts, both state and federal, even though considerable doubts have now been raised as to whether forensic science really is science at all, and whether it is reliable and valid.”
As part of the National Commission on Forensic Science, Rakoff contributed to a 2016 report noting some serious flaws in the way the justice s ...read more
In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.” So named by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, the Ik are a tribe of some 11,600 hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers living in an arid and harsh mountainous region of Uganda.
Turnbull studied the Ik in the 1960s and famously characterized them as “inhospitable and generally mean” in his book The Mountain People. He documented how young children were abandoned to starve and how people would sn ...read more
Few things in life are as unpredictable as natural disasters. Many times, they strike with little-to-no warning and even if there is advanced knowledge of an impending disaster, people are rarely fully prepared to deal with the event or potential consequences. As population rises and metropolitan areas grow, the risk associated with a massive natural disaster rise with them and that's something that has investors worried. Last week, Warren Buffett discusses his concerns about how the economi ...read more
A red-tailed guenon in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest region of Uganda nibbles on a jam-covered rope. It’s sweet treat with purpose — the rope will later be collected, the saliva left behind analyzed. This clever, non-invasive sampling technique was developed a few years ago by researchers at the University of California, Davis.
Data from these samples helps scientists track the emergence of zoononic diseases — pathogens in wildlife that could spread to humans. Before the jam ...read more
The Journal of Health Psychology has just published an extraordinary pair of papers that call for a new inquiry into a 30-year old case of probable scientific fraud.
According to Anthony J. Pelosi, author of the main paper, the case was "one of the worst scientific scandals of all time" and yet has never been formally investigated. The journal's editor, David F. Marks, agrees and, in an editorial, also calls for the retraction or correction of up to 61 papers.
The scandal in question is on ...read more
What a difference a year makes.
After a shocking dearth of snow last year, the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and Nevada truly have been getting plastered, helping to build up the snowpack that millions of people depend on for water.
Other parts of the western United States have also benefited from a bounty of precipitation that has eased drought conditions. But does this herald a change in long-term fortunes in the region? Read on to the end for insights a ...read more
(Inside Science) -- In 2012 and 2013, Bill Bateman, a zoologist based in Perth, Australia, began to notice something interesting about how animals were navigating the bush: When mining companies created small paths through the previously tangled environment to install seismic lines, animals started preferentially using those trails to move from one place to another.
And animal ingenuity wasn’t confined to walking on beaten paths.
“The more we looked, the more evidence there was t ...read more
Scientists keep prying into the sex lives of Neanderthals. In the past decade, they’ve revealed that Neanderthals got busy with both Homo sapiens and Denisovans, another lineage of now-extinct humans.
But there’s more: Mounting evidence suggests Neanderthals also had a habit of inbreeding, or conceiving with close relatives. Several studies have now reported this based on genetic patterns and bone abnormalities thought to result from intra-family flings.
First, let’s review t ...read more
People all around the world (or at least where Netflix is available) have been exhausting themselves of late trying to "spark joy" in their lives. The urge comes from cleaning guru Marie Kondo, whose philosophy rests on the principle that we should rid our homes and minds of things that don't inspire bursts of pleasure.
The message resonates, in part, because it ties positivity to the world of material things. Happiness is in our minds. So having a tangible mechani ...read more
Following on the heels of its announcement to return to the moon this year, NASA announced Thursday the first batch of science projects and technology demonstrations they want to send skyward in 2019, assuming their commercial partners can launch on time.
The selections highlight the science questions NASA wants answered as it ramps up robotic missions to the moon and shoots for placing humans back on the surface within the next decade, this time on a more permanent basis.
The science ...read more
