A fallow deer relaxes in a European forest…120,000 years ago, two of his distant kin were quarry during a Neanderthal hunt. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Jiřà Nedorost) Our hominin family tree includes plenty of meat-eaters, going back a couple million years at least — this is not news. But it’s one thing to find evidence of animals that were butchered and consumed by our ancestors and closest kin. It&acir ...read more
Do scientists have a responsibility to make their work accessible to the public? “Public Engagement�, broadly speaking, means scientists communicating about science to non-scientists. Blogs are a form of public engagement, as are (non-academic) books. Holding public talks or giving interviews would also count as such. Recently, it has become fashionable to say that it is important for scientists to engage the public, and that this engagement should be enc ...read more
In research on people, scientists are typically interested in the group data – the mean, median, and variance of a sample of people. But according to a provocative new paper out in PNAS, the statistics of a group can obscure the variability within individuals, over time. The paper, from Aaron J. Fisher, John D. Medaglia, and Bertus F. Jeronimus, isn’t really making a new point. The pitfalls of generalizing from the group to the individual level have long b ...read more
The Leilani Estates eruption (bottom right) seen by Astronaut Ricky Arnold aboard the ISS on June 20, 2018. NASA. The eruption that started in Leilani Estates on the lower East Rift Zone of Kīlauea is rapidly approaching the end of its second month, and right now, there are no signs the eruption will be ending soon. For many of us, this eruption seems unprecedented: how often do volcanoes erupt lava like this for months at a time? It turns out that it isn’t that u ...read more
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Skull of Junzi imperialis, a newly described extinct gibbon from China. [Credit: Samuel Turvey/ZSL] In what may be the tomb of the grandmother of the first emperor of China, scientists unexpectedly discovered the bones of an extinct and hitherto unknown species of gibbon, a new study reveals. These findings suggest there was a higher level of ape diversity after the last ice age than previously thought, and that the number of primate extinctions due to humans has likely been underestimated. In ...read more
(Credit: SpeedKingz/Shutterstock) The brain is an enormously complex thing. Trying to suss out the genetic overlap of the disorders that strike it is perhaps even more complicated. Still, the Brainstorm Consortium, a collaboration of researchers from Harvard, Stanford and MIT, is aiming to do just that. A new study put out by the group shows there are distinctions in how psychiatric and neurological disorders relate to each other; some personality traits may even be at play. The study, led by ...read more
Wealthy nations send most of their recyclables to developing countries. (Shutterstock/Mohamed AbdulRaheem) The world is truly awful at recycling. Less than 10 percent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled — the rest goes to landfills and litter. And of that sliver of plastic that we do recycle, about half of it is shipped from wealthy nations to developing ones — especially China. Together with Hong Kong, China has imported nearly three-quarters o ...read more
Galaxy NGC 3344 (Credit: NASA/ESA) Albert Einstein’s name is synonymous with intelligence, but he’s more than earned his rep. The man revolutionized physics when he was in his 20s and 30s. He came up with a whole new way of understanding reality, not as a fixed grid against which events occur, but as fundamentally intertwined with time and perception. Trying to prove Einstein wrong, somehow, is a perennial goal of budding and experienced physicists al ...read more
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