Category Archives: Science

Stories of black mega-swans in New Zealand have long existed in legends from Moriori people.
Up until now, no direct evidence of these mysterious creatures has ever been found.
Some researchers suggested the legends may refer to the Australian black swan, which can fly over the Tasman Sea.
Now, a new study says it has proven, for the first time, that the elusive black mega-swan of New Zealand existed, and was its own, unique species.
Researchers say the semi-flightless black swan died out in New Zealand after humans first arrived from Polynesia in the 13th Century.

Century or two after the Maori turn up. Given that they ate at least some Moriori populations into extinction why not the birds?

It’s also a nice reminder of that Edenic, Rousseauesque, view of hunter gatherer society. They weren’t living in harmony with nature, they were eating it. They, in fact, ate their way through the megafauna pretty much everywhere they turned up.

So, they’ve managed to launch, land and relaunch.

Pretty impressive really.

So, how much does this actually save? The rocket itself is really just an aluminium tube. Not notably expensive.

The engines however, hmm.

But how much is it that they manage to save off a launch cost by being able to reuse?

For I simply have no clue at all. I haven’t a scoobie about the breakdown of costs. Is it 99% for the fuel and the rocket doesn’t matter? Or 70% on he engines so this is a big deal?

Prompted by that gracile and robust thing in apes in the comments this arvo.

We have two really rather things out there, race in human beings and sub-species in animals. In animals it is right on to insist that we must preserve the sub-species. In humans it is right on to deny that there is even something called race. Yet unless I’ve really missed some important part of science they strike me as being very much the same thing.

So, with animals, tigers and lions can breed but the result, the liger or tigon is rarely – but not never – fertile. So, OK, different species.

The domestic house cat is cross fertile with the European lynx – at least with the Iberian version. This must be so because they ask people with tabbies to not have them near the rare lynx areas. And the Scottish wildcat is closer again. And then we get to what are quite obviously the same species but also different sub-species. Fully and totally cross-fertile but of different colourings perhaps, size, location. And we very definitely find that we’re supposed to be preserving each and every one of these sub-species. It would be an outrage if the Florida panther disappeared despite it being only a swamp dwelling version of the standard panther found all over the Americas.

But when we consider race we get a flat out denial that the concept even exists in humans. And yet a Pygmy and an Eskimo differ by more (while still being cross fertile–not sure anyone has ever tested that pairing but there’s nothing we know which says they aren’t) than many of what we’re told are different sub-species of animal.

Now, it’s not uncommon that different people hold different views on something or other. Nor even different people holding different views on different subjects. But this rough equivalence between race in humans and sub-species in animals looks pretty robust to me. And yet it’s largely the same people who insist that we must preserve the one and then deny that the concept of the other even exists at all.

So, given that you all know more than I do, is there some great gaping hole in my scientific understanding here? Or is it just that people themselves are inconsistent in their beliefs?

So, teach evolution earlier and in more detail. Why not?

But it would be about more than learning why our bodies are the way they are. We would become better, more caring, citizens of Earth if we were reminded each day of our animal heritage. A daily reminder that we must play by the same laws of the universe as any other creature; that we can’t take, take, take from nature and expect infinite reward, because nothing comes from nothing.

For that’s the most significant manner in which we differ from the other products of that shared evolution. We manage that nature, that environment, greatly increasing the productive capacity in a manner that really no other animal does.

Think it though for a moment, we’ve escaped the Malthusian trap. We are all, entirely voluntarily, limiting our reproduction and holding species size well below the available food supply. This is, remarkably, more true the greater the food supply too – a larger food supply is synonymous with higher GDP and fertility is most definitely negatively linked to that.

The whole point about humans is that in this very sense, the abstraction from nature, we don’t play by the same rules as other animals. He’s entirely missed the point.

It’s life, but not as we know it. The oldest fossil ever discovered on Earth shows that organisms were thriving 4.2 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought.

The microscopic bacteria, which were smaller than the width of a human hair, were found in rock formations in Quebec, Canada, but would have lived in hot vents in the 140F (60C) oceans which covered the early planet.

The evidence we’re getting is that life turns up just about as soon as it possibly can turn up.

My guess is therefore that the fl in the Drake equation approaches 100%. fi is lower of course as Wolverhampton proves.

Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘We’re coming close to the point where we can create people who are superior to others’

The human brain is predisposed to learn negative stereotypes, according to research that offers clues as to how prejudice emerges and spreads through society.

Finding out that that stripey movement in the grass is actually yummy coloured zebra is interesting, but not a one time finding like finding out that it’s a tiger.

The world’s a sufficiently dangerous place for a shaved ape that a default reaction to anything of “fuck it, I’m outta here” is very sensible indeed in fact.

That it might not work so well in our more complicated and rather safer world is true but evolution is indeed evolution. We ave to start from where we are, not where some might like to pretend we are.

Proof that IVF babies can inherit father’s infertility: Tests on men born using common fertility technique find they also suffer from low sperm counts

Scientists are attempting to discover if Cornish cod moving north with climate change will be able to understand the accents of their Scouse counterparts.

Experts believe the fish, which make sounds with their swim bladders to attract mates, may have regional accents – and if males cannot “chat up” females who speak a different dialect it could threaten their ability to breed.

There are also concerns that noise pollution from boats and other marine activities could be drowning out the “gossip” cod need to establish territories, raise the alarm and for mating.

Prof Steve Simpson, from the University of Exeter, who is leading the research, said cod had a series of vocalisations, with the ability to change the patterns of their sounds, producing thumps, growls and different frequencies.

They have traditional spawning grounds, making populations quite isolated in reproduction – a process in which males produce a sound to stimulate the females to release their eggs.

He said: “Recordings of American cod are very different to those from their European cousins, so there is a precedent.

“This species is highly vocal with traditional breeding grounds established over hundreds or thousands of years, so the potential for regionalism is there.”

Seriously? Cod not only “talk” to each other, they have regional accents? I knew this was true of whales but cod?

Sounds most unlike ourselves of course. The male has to chat up the female in order to get sex, that bit’s the same, but then he’s expected to bugger off?

Scientists have stuck their necks out and decided that the giraffe is not one species, but four.

Until now, only a single species of giraffe made up of several sub-species had been recognised.

But new DNA evidence shows that four distinct species of the animals exist – and they are genetically at least as different as brown and polar bears.

Do they mean brown or grizzlies? For grizzlies and polar bears can (and do) mate and produce fertile offspring. This, by the more archaic standards to which I adhere, means they are one species.

Pygmies and Vikings are distinctly different and yet they’re the one species.

They’re vicious little bastards at best. However, I do regard this as good news:

Tasmanian devils are developing an evolutionary response to a deadly transmissible cancer that has wiped out 80% of the species in the past 20 years, a new study has found.

Devil facial tumour disease, one of only three known transmissible cancers, has swept across nearly the entire species’ range of Tasmanian devils. However, populations predicted to be extinct by now continue to persist, albeit in low numbers.

A new genetic study, published in the journal Nature Communications, has now revealed that the mammals are rapidly evolving to defend themselves against it.

Cue the observation from Matt Ridley’s Red Queen. Rather the point of sex is to speed up the mixing of genes so that there’s at least a possibility of out evolving the parasites and diseases. Not that it developed because of that point, but that extant species are descended from those who managed to out evolve those parasites and diseases.

As, say, the Gros Michel banana, a clone, did not……

China on Tuesday launched the world’s first quantum satellite, which will help it establish “hack-proof” communications between space and the ground, state media said, the latest advance in an ambitious space programme.
…
“In its two-year mission, QUESS is designed to establish ‘hack-proof’ quantum communications by transmitting uncrackable keys from space to the ground,” it said.

“Quantum communication boasts ultra-high security as a quantum photon can neither be separated nor duplicated,” it added. “It is hence impossible to wiretap, intercept or crack the information transmitted through it.”

As it happens one of our readers around here is a professor of quantum. More than a 0.2 professor of it as well. So as to the actual claim we’ll leave it to him to comment.

But my own suspicion is that the opposite will apply. That quantum will be easier to crack. Not, of course, because I know anything about the subject at all but because that’s the way I think the universe works. Yes, this is ludicrous physics but a spy plot would add in quantum entanglement. And Bond sneaks into the Chinese factory where they make quantums to put into satellites (and, obviously, qubits into chips and so on) and makes their supply of quantums ones entangled with ones at home in Bletchely Park. At which point we can read all their communications and calculations. And, as I think this works, they our so we only use this system to mislead them while communicating ourselves by tattooing the shaved heads of chavs. No one would notice anyway, would they?

Either that or we really do develop truly 100% secure comms and find ourselves interrupted by a bloke sitting on a cloud and shouting through his big beard “Get off the line!”.

Amazingly, no, it’s not.

Science doesn’t say it’s so you can send the girlfriend off to work with a smile on her face.

But a vibrating glove developed by British scientists promises to leave cinemagoers both shaken and stirred.
In tests, researchers found that sending subtle tremors through the hand at the optimum moment of a movie heightens a viewer’s emotions, accentuating the suspense, exuberance or terror that’s being played out on the big screen.

Intensifying, err, suspense, yes, right…..

Graduates are more likely to be diagnosed with brain tumours, a study has shown.

Didn’t we know this already?

On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, created Sci-Hub, a website that bypasses journal paywalls, illegally providing access to nearly every scientific paper ever published immediately to anyone who wants it. The website works in two stages, firstly by attempting to download a copy from the LibGen database of pirated content, which opened its doors to academic papers in 2012 and now contains over 48 million scientific papers. The ingenious part of the system is that if LibGen does not already have a copy of the paper, Sci-hub bypasses the journal paywall in real time by using access keys donated by academics lucky enough to study at institutions with an adequate range of subscriptions. This allows Sci-Hub to route the user straight to the paper through publishers such as JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier. After delivering the paper to the user within seconds, Sci-Hub donates a copy of the paper to LibGen for good measure, where it will be stored forever, accessible by everyone and anyone.

All illegal and being sued etc. however, three is something hinky about academic publishing. Knowledge is a public good, such research papers are meant to be read to spread it and almost all of the research was tax funded to boot. It does seem odd there’s a there’s a few gatekeepers waxing fat of the journals.

Hmm, tricky:

Do whales have nipples? Why discussing evolution in schools can occasionally be tricky

Actually not so tricky, given that they suckle their calves.

Or at least every time we do the horizontal tango in an attempt to have a child, rather than just for fun, we are germline editing. Which makes all of this simply pabulum:

Future generations, however, are not able to consent to germline editing that will manipulate their welfare in ways that we cannot yet predict or alter if things go wrong. Looking back, our descendants might or might not accept our decision as legitimate, but they will have no way of changing it. It might look obvious that they would welcome a future free of genetic disability, but even if there were no unintended or unforeseen adverse consequences – which is extremely unlikely – they might not. There have been cases in which deaf parents using IVF techniques selected an embryo with congenital deafness; they did not regard deafness as a disability and felt that a deaf child would integrate more readily in their community.

Proponents of modifying the human germline often say that we make decisions for our children all the time – about their education, for example – but there is a major flaw in this argument. As a consequence of our actions, the descendants we’re talking about will still be having decisions made for them even when they are adults: education doesn’t permanently alter a child’s genome, nor affect the genes it will pass on to its own children. Moreover, gene editing is not the only way to eliminate adverse or fatal genetic conditions in embryos: we can already use conventional embryo screening and detection procedures, such as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.

One sorta assumes that Professor Dickenson at least considered the genetics of fucking whoever it was to create Anders and Pip Lustgarten, no? After all, other than the accidents of the backseat fumble most women do think a bit about whose children they are going to have. Darwin was quite emphatic on the point.

Some people really do win the genetic lottery.
For the first time, scientists have shown that intelligence is linked to good health, so those blessed with brains are also less likely to become sick, develop disease or die early.
The reason is down to genes. An international team, led by the University of Edinburgh, have discovered that the same gene variants which make people smart, also protect them against illness.

We know very well that at the other end, with what we might call abnormally low intelligence, there’s often a number of confounding problems.

And it also provides something of an answer to the point that richer people live longer. To the extent that greater intelligence does make you richer (some) this is about what we would expect, no?

At which point Michael Marmot can (partly) bugger off, no?