I’m still at the intro, but the peer reviewers did not like Lee Berger’s latest papers claiming Homo naledi created art and practiced burial:
1 Like
I actually just finished watching that. Spoiler: a lot of it comes down to things being possible, but either not supported by enough positive evidence, or not being rigorous enough with negative evidence.
Very interesting conflict around it, but the media whirlwind they apparently created on purpose really makes the whole burial thing a bit more questionable. Which is a shame… feels like someone’s ego got too wrapped up in the conclusion.
2 Likes
6 Likes
(I recommend caution if you google that, avoiding things like Urban Dictionary…)
6 Likes
You have to make sure you add that to your search terms. Otherwise you get hits for the real Kentucky Meat Shower.
ETA: I don’t recommend it.
3 Likes
Imma gonna call 'em pewpewpews forevah!
2 Likes
My fave was percies purps!
2 Likes
I’m not at all surprised.
2 Likes
Personally, I’m all for “perky-ids”.
2 Likes
superconductors nuclear fusion need chatgpt moment
(From the URL)
Uh… nuclear fusion had a “chatgpt moment”. Remember the furor over “cold fusion”? Remember how many movies suddenly appeared with “cold fusion” as a plot? Remember what an absolute letdown and utter flop that whole period ended up being?
Since the findings were not peer-reviewed, the announcement was first met with skepticism. A paper submitted by researchers at the Peking University in Beijing on Sunday suggests the initial excitement may be overblown. Efforts remain underway to replicate the room-temperature superconductor’s creation. Still, few people understand the significance of discovering it.
It’s still not even clear it’s been discovered!!!
Also… how the heck is this article simultaneously saying “the initial excitement may be overblown” while also saying few people understand the significance? Way to contradict yourself in the space of a few sentences!
Actually discovering a room-temp superconductor or sustainable fusion would be a game-changer. But as things stand, those things don’t exist, and any attempt to market the benefits of these things to the general public at this stage is nothing but engaging in dreams and vaporware.
6 Likes
You may wonder how this was done—quite reasonably, since we can’t very well compare the genes of participants to those of non-participants. The analysis done by Kong and his student relies on the key idea that a genetic sequence that occurs more frequently in participants than in nonparticipants will also occur more frequently in the genetic regions that are shared by two related participants.
Put differently, a bit of DNA that is common in the population will show up frequently in the study. But it will still only have a 50/50 chance of showing up in the child of someone who carried a copy. If a bit of DNA makes people more likely to enroll in genetic studies, it will be more common both in the overall data and among closely related family members.
This analysis used genetic data from about 500,000 people collected between 2006 and 2010. It examined roughly 500,000 genetic regions from around 20,000 pairs of first-degree relatives. They didn’t find (or look for) “a gene” that correlates with participation in a study. Rather, they compared all of the shared and not-shared genetic sequences among the pairs of first-degree relatives enrolled in the study and analyzed their relative frequencies according to the above three principles.
3 Likes
4 Likes
The British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey described H. habilis as having “clever brains but blank minds.”
On what basis? It’s quite a claim, and I’d like to know if he had some evidence, or some expertise with other great apes, or anything. Because right now this is an appeal to an unspecified authority.
Some other claims seem to rest on “now we have clear unambiguous evidence of x, so clearly this is the beginning of x.”
3 Likes
That concern was supported by the new study, which found that the dog owners who espoused “canine vaccine hesitancy,” or CVH, were more likely to embrace misinformation and falsehoods linked to human vaccines. And those anti-vaccine beliefs were potent. Responses from the CVH dog owners suggested that 56 percent opposed mandatory vaccination against rabies, a 100 percent fatal condition.
In a particularly striking finding, the study found that 37 percent of all dog owners believed vaccines could cause their pets to develop cognitive problems, such as “canine/feline autism.”
6 Likes
Here’s a sentence you don’t see every day:
“However, most people don’t realize just how complex and elegant [mucus is]…"
6 Likes
I smear it on my face a few times a week! From a respectable bottle that says 99.9% snail mucin
3 Likes