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Sometimes you run across a grimy, tattered dollar bill that seems like it’s been around since the beginning of time. Assuredly it hasn’t, but the history of human beings using cash currency does go back a long time – 40,000 years.
Scientists have tracked exchange and trade through the archaeological record, starting in Upper Paleolithic when groups of hunters traded for the best flint weapons and other tools. First, people bartered, making direct deals ...read more
By Amy Sterling
Four years ago a citizen science game called Eyewire hatched from Seung Lab, then at MIT and now at Princeton. Its goal was to pair up gamers with a challenge that has been bottlenecking neuroscience for decades: mapping the brain. Over the years the project grew. Hundreds of thousands of people helped, enabling new discoveries and stunning visualizations of neurons.
Eyewire Heroes with a zfish neuron Credit: Zoe Gillette
After years of work, Mystic, the fi ...read more
Media coverage of scientific retractions risks feeding a narrative that academic science is broken – a narrative which plays into the hands of those who want to cut science funding and ignore scientific advice.
So say Joseph Hilgard and Kathleen Hall Jamieson in a book chapter called Science as “Broken” Versus Science as “Self-Correcting”: How Retractions and Peer-Review Problems Are Exploited to Attack Science
Hilgard and Jamieson discuss two retraction scandals ...read more
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If you smoke cigarettes, you’re putting yourself at a heightened risk for heart disease. That correlation is well-known and unchallenged today, but that wasn’t always so. It took an ambitious, years-long project, the Framingham Heart Study to uncover the link, and it only happened because of the study’s commitment to comprehensive data collection.
The Framingham study is a near-canonical example of the power of longitudinal studies, those tha ...read more
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Physicists aren’t often reprimanded for using risqué humor in their academic writings, but in 1991 that is exactly what happened to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University. He had submitted a draft article entitled ‘Hard Art of the Universe Creation’ to the journal Nuclear Physics B. In it, he outlined the possibility of creating a universe in a laboratory: a whole new cosmos that might one day evolve its own stars, planets and intell ...read more
A new study fills gaps in the when and where of cat domestication, explaining how the animals went from lean hunters to, uh, this. (Credit G. Tarlach…yes, it’s my cat, but don’t kvetch about his obesity. I took the photo shortly after I adopted him. Thanks to careful management he is now several pounds lighter.)
The truth about cats and dogs is this: despite being the two species that humans are most likely to have as pets, Rex and Ruffles had very different paths from t ...read more
When Disney’s animators were creating Timon, the energetic meerkat sidekick in The Lion King, the part where he turns his anal pouch inside-out and marks his territory must have been left on the cutting room floor. Not once does Timon smear scented butt paste on a branch. But real meerkats use their anal scent glands to communicate with each other. And each animal’s distinctive scent seems to come from its personal community of bacteria.
Both male and f ...read more
How we're powering up our lives.
Batteries symbolize our love affair with convenience. They liberate us from wires by juicing up our smartphones, laptops and cars. With gadgets fully charged, we can go anywhere, do anything. One hundred percent power feels secure. But when the charge runs dry, we’re screwed. The good news? Engineers are trying to create the perfect battery. It is efficient and safe, and it packs a lot of oomph using little space. It’s made from abundant, cheap a ...read more
