February 2011
43 posts
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Watchscipsy:
Lady Gaga parody takes on genetics
Embarassing…
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children as young as 10 months use size to... →
“Psychologists agree that the longer an infant gazes at a scene, the more surprising the infant finds it. Thomsen thinks therefore that even prelingual children understand enough about how social dominance works to know that battles in which “David” beats “Goliath” violate expectations. ”Infants come into the world with certain basic concepts even before they...
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January 2011
71 posts
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teachers fail evolution education. →
“Shockingly, they found that only 28 percent of teachers taught evolution effectively, and 13 percent actually advocated for creationism. The roughly 60 percent in the mushy middle steered around conflicts between evolution and creationism or taught both and let students draw their own conclusions. (Always such a good idea….) ” posted by john rennie in scientific american
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new impacts for climate change on ancient... →
“Their study, published Jan. 13, 2011 in the online version of the journal Science, provides new evidence that agrarian wealth and overall economic growth may was impacted by climate change. The researchers reconstructed the history of central Europe’s summer precipitation and temperature for the past 2,500 years, extending the record more than 1,000 years further than previous...
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unearthing prehistoric tumors and debate. →
“Often thought of as a modern disease, cancer has always been with us. Where scientists disagree is on how much it has been amplified by the sweet and bitter fruits of civilization. Over the decades archaeologists have made about 200 possible cancer sightings dating to prehistoric times. But considering the difficulties of extracting statistics from old bones, is that a little or a...
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woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of... →
“Blogging and other Web activities have allowed members of many marginalized communities to open previously locked media doors. But women still rely more on back channels and ask for less help than men do in the digital realm. This tendency and other issues of concern for women bloggers were discussed Sunday at the ScienceOnline2011 conference in Durham, N.C., primarily in a session called...
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does twitter have it out for the english language? →
“Just as fashion trends come and go, the ways in which we communicate change throughout time. The transition from leg warmers and mullets to jeans and faux-hawks might spring to mind easier than the transition from “unbeknownst to me” to “I dunno” or “idk”, but both our fashion styles and our forms of language inevitably change. Just as you still have the ability to don a mullet, you can...
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Head in the clouds: A hypothetical discussion... →
P: Sadness and anger are universal human emotions.
L: Sadness and anger are English words, which don’t have equivalents in all other languages. Why should this English words—rather than some words from language X, for which English has no equivalents—capture correctly some emotional universals?
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mothering as everyday practice. →
“What makes a good mother? Bambi Chapin has co-edited (with Kathleen Barlow) a new special issue of the journal Ethos on “Mothering as Everyday Practice.” The articles explore not just what mothers say about parenting, but what they actually do, and how they understand what defines a good mother. These ideas are far from natural or universal. Instead, they are informed by a diversity of value...
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chemical analysis confirms discovery of oldest... →
“Analysis by a UCLA-led team of scientists has confirmed the discovery of the oldest complete wine production facility ever found, including grape seeds, withered grape vines, remains of pressed grapes, a rudimentary wine press, a clay vat apparently used for fermentation, wine-soaked potsherds, and even a cup and drinking bowl. The facility, which dates back to roughly 4100 B.C. —...
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remains of oldest fruit trees found in iberian... →
Researchers have found that the seed samples gathered over the years at mediaeval archaeological sites in the historic old quarter of Hondarribia are the remains of the oldest fruit trees in Southern Europe. posted in the daily news and analysis india
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glenn beck, archaeologist... um yeah. →
the glenn beck show presenting bad archaeology mixed with some history, politics and conspiracy. ”Slightly later in Beck’s presentation we find out that there was supposedly a man buried in the earthworks. He was interred with holy stones written in Hebrew. If we just ignore the fact that these finds are frauds, Beck believes he has proven the ancient connection between the Khufu pyramid...
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does the slut gene exist? →
“The last decade has witnessed an explosion in genetics studies, and with it, a proliferation of sensational study results that run the gamut from disingenuous pop-science to borderline science fiction. In the past 10 years, we’ve heard about the God gene that allegedly explains religiosity; the warrior gene that supposedly makes those who have it more aggressive when provoked; and the...
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playing with rna. →
“In the online game EteRNA, players are helping to create the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs. You don’t need to be a biology major to help reveal new principles for designing RNA-based switches and nanomachines — new systems for seeking, and eventually controlling, living cells and disease-causing viruses. By interacting with thousands of players and learning from...
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rudeness is a neurotoxin. →
“First it is helpful to consider, from a biological perspective, what “rudeness” is, so that we can consider what is lost when formal polite behaviors are cast away. People (and animals) living together in large numbers must develop strict formalized behaviors governing interactions between all individuals in the group, or there will be strife and chaos. In the natural world, as...
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identifying skeletal remains →
“THE Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team has brought scientific rigour to investigations of human-rights abuses in over 40 countries. We invited Mercedes Doretti, the organisation’s co-founder, to join us for tea and discuss the group’s work.” posted in the economist
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House of Mind: Cognition, Sex Differences, and... →
houseofmind:
The idea that there are cognitive differences between men and women, especially when it comes to math and science, has become widely accepted and mainstream, thanks largely in part to Simon Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis that there are “male brains” built to understand mechanical systems (which would…
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the catcher of songs, alan lomax proved that the... →
“The following year found Lomax— accompanied by his new bride, Elizabeth—in the mountains of Kentucky, where he wrote his boss at the Library of Congress about the dangers of ballad-hunting. “It seems I am very nearly ready to lay down my life for the Library, for one evening I was nearly stabbed by the most religious man in Clay County. This sixty-year oldster was mortally jealous...
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swiss whistleblower rudolf elmer plans to hand... →
“The offshore bank account details of 2,000 “high net worth individuals” and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland. British and American...
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world's oldest marijuana stash found in 2,700 year... →
premutation:
SCIENCE
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twitter users' slang based on geography. →
“The researchers plugged into the Twitter stream during one week in March 2010 and selected 380,000 tweets from 9,500 in users who geo-tagged their messages. ”A large number of slang terms are found to have strong regional biases, suggesting that slang may depend on geography more than standard English does,” the report said. For example, Northern and Southern California...
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