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January 15, 2016
Chimpanzee Friendships Are All About Trust
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Although chimps were found to place a lot of trust in their friends, not all of them ultimately proved trustworthy. Nick Biemans/Shutterstock
Like humans, chimpanzees are highly social animals, relying on group cooperation in order to survive.
Tardigrade Revived After Being Frozen For More Than 30 Years
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Shown is a tardigrade that hatched from an egg grown in moss. Tsujimoto et al/Cryobiology
Scientists have reported that they were able to “revive” a tardigrade after it had remained frozen for more than 30 years. The research is described in the journal Cryobiology.
January 14, 2016
Mammoth Find Moves Humans in Arctic Back 10,000 Years
The word Siberia is almost a synonym for extreme cold. It’s hard enough to imagine living there today, but humans have been wandering the icy terrain for thousands of years. The accepted estimate for the arrival of the first humans north of the Arctic Circle was upped in 2004 from about 12,000 years ago to 35,000 years ago. And now that number’s been revised again. Because in 2012 a young boy some 1250 miles south of the North Pole in Siberia stumbled across the leg bones of a wooly mammoth protruding out of the ground.
“What really made this a super-important find were two things.”
Ann Gibbons, contributing correspondent for the journal Science, which published an analysis of the frozen mammoth, talking about the finding on the Science podcast.
"One, it had a lot of injuries that showed it had been battered and shot with projectile points by humans…and then the second part that was really exciting was that when they used radiocarbon dating…it dated to about 45,000 years of age. So this was at least 10,000 years older than the earliest presence of humans in the Arctic Circle before." [Vladimir V. Pitulko et al, Early human presence in the Arctic: Evidence from 45,000-year-old mammoth remains]
People may have gone so far north because of the mammoths.
"This was a huge, vast steppe region full of mammoths and large wooly rhinoceroses and reindeer and elk…so if humans could figure out how to live in the cold up north they were lucky and would have a great source, a great packet of meat to get when they needed it.”
You can hear the entire episode of the Science podcast with Ann Gibbons talking about the mammoth find at www.science.com.
—Steve Mirsky
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
“Spermbots” Could Help Treat Male Infertility
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This tiny helix can be propelled using a rotating magnetic field in order to deliver immotile sperm to the egg. YouTube/American Chemical Society
A team of scientists from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Dresden has developed what it is calling a "spermbot," which it claims could provide a more effective treatment for male infertility than other available options.
Human Activity Has Postponed The Next Ice Age
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The next ice age might not be for another 100,000 years. Bildagentur Zoonar GmbH/Shutterstock
It appears that through the burning of fossil fuels and filling the atmosphere with carbon, mankind has caused the world to “skip” an ice age, potentially postponing the next one by between 50,000 to 100,000 years. The new research came to this conclusion after modeling the conditions needed to tip the planet into a glacial period. They found that while Earth is at the right point in its orbit around the Sun, the level of carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere is far too high.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Search Finds A Nineteenth-Century Shipwreck
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Australian Transport Safety Bureau
It’s been almost two years since the mysterious disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. While luck continues to elude the multinational search parties, the Australian wing of the search has managed to stumble across a lost 19th-century shipwreck.
Good Bridges Make Good Neighbors
Southern Chivalry – Argument versus Club's. John L. Magee illustration (from 1856) of Preston Brooks' attack on Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
In his final State of the Union Address, President Obama closed with a forceful restatement of the central theme of his 2008 campaign, a call for hope and change that can reach across and heal our divided politics. This passage stuck out in particular:
Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise; or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get attention. Most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest.
Too many Americans feel that way right now. It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.
First, it’s absolutely true that “democracy grinds to a halt…when even basic facts are contested.” We certainly see that around climate policy in general, which is probably one of the realms the President had in mind. It’s also true with evolution, where school board and state board of education races become battles over science and religion, leaving aside critical issues like the changing needs of science teachers as science advances and as the STEM workforce changes. Denial’s harmful effect on democracy is part of the reason NCSE’s work is so important!
Second, it’s absolutely false—5 Pinocchios!—that someone like “Lincoln or Roosevelt” could have bridged today’s partisan divide.
First, some key history: Lincoln was elected after over a decade of increasingly violent political battles, including the massacres of Bleeding Kansas, not to mention one member of Congress viciously beating another due to their differences over slavery. South Carolina’s legislature declared the mere fact of Lincoln’s election “a hostile act” and moved to secede from the Union even before he was sworn into office. Congress was not poised to grant Lincoln any mandate upon his election, though matters became substantially easier upon the exit of the elected representatives of states engaged in treasonous warfare upon their nation, and the commencement of hostilities by those traitors. Still, I hesitate to call Lincoln—or anyone accountable for Sherman’s march to the sea—an exemplar of effective bridgebuilding.
Roosevelt had an easier task. Hoover and his Republican Congress failed utterly to take any steps to stem the Great Depression, and matters were escalating. Grangers in some farm states affected by the Dust Bowl and the financial crisis assaulted bank agents and sheriffs executing foreclosures. An army of unpaid veterans marched on and occupied Washington, demanding early payment of a bonus promised for service in World War I. The election of 1932 swept Franklin Roosevelt into office with overwhelming support, and also delivered an overwhelming pro-Roosevelt electoral wave in Congress. He didn’t need to build bridges because voters had already put paid to his opponents. When conservative holdovers on the Supreme Court struck down New Deal policies, Roosevelt responded by threatening to pack the Court with sympathetic justices. Congress balked, but the Court got the message and a new judicial approach emerged. While Roosevelt got his way in the end, the moment is hardly an exemplar of political bridge-building.
Estimates of the partisan makeup of Congresses since 1879, based on vote records. Estimates and graph by Howard Rosenthal and Keith Poole.Second, President Obama faced a deeper partisan divide than has existed in American politics since, arguably, the Civil War. Since the ‘90s, Democratic officials and Democratic voters have gotten more liberal, and Republican officials and voters have gotten way more conservative. (This is referred to as “asymmetrical polarization,” since Democrats have not polarized to the same degree that Republicans did.)
Most significantly for President Obama’s point, the Pew Research Center notes that “the most politically polarized [citizens] are more actively involved in politics, amplifying the voices that are the least willing to see the parties meet each other halfway.”
This also goes a long way toward explaining political inaction on climate change, and the persistence of creationism as a dominant force in American politics. Most Americans are not vigorously pro-evolution, and are not absolutely opposed to evolution either. As I’ve observed before, only a small fraction of Americans are dedicated to the proposition that the universe, the Earth, and life on Earth were created by divine fiat less than 10,000 years ago. Numerous surveys by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication find that relatively few Americans take a firm denialist stance on climate change, and a comparably small number fall into the group that is most concerned about climate change. On both subjects, the political debate is dominated by those extremes. Asymmetrical polarization means that over time those most extreme views are increasingly correlated with a suite of other political views, making it harder to form novel political coalitions that might be able to advance some particular agenda despite the partisan divide.
Furthermore, the last few decades have seen America experience The Big Sort, a geographical realignment that parallels the asymmetrical polarization. People’s views aren’t just shifting to match those of their fellow partisans. Americans are increasingly moving to communities where people are more like themselves. This segregation means fewer opportunities for dialog across the (growing) partisan divide, and it makes it more likely that elected officials will represent a constituency that holds extreme views on key topics. Thus, even in a state with substantial support for teaching evolution, we could find individual school districts in which overwhelming creationist majorities elect creationist school boards which hire and tolerate creationist teachers.
The solution is not to await a President better at bridging partisan divides than Obama, Roosevelt, or Lincoln. We may as well wait for Godot. Instead, the challenge is to recognize this polarization, acknowledge it as a political reality, and incorporate it into our political tactics. And if we want to narrow that divide, people who fall away from the extremes need to raise their voices, and those of us with firm and polarized views need to find ways to elevate the voices of people whose views are (depending on your perspective) more nuanced or less clear.
For the latter, I can envision an example from the realm of evolution. Instead of setting the matter up as a debate between evolution and creationism, we need more panel discussions. And while such a panel might include an evolution-denying creationist for the sake of completeness, it would be far more interesting to have the proverbial priest, rabbi, and imam—an example that’s on my mind having just taped an interview with The Three Wise Guys radio show. The panel would ideally include scientists whose theological views represent the diversity within the scientific community. Such settings would give room for consensus, even agreement, to emerge, and nudge people watching and listening to think about the continuum of belief, to find a comfortable place in the middle that they can advocate for coherently.
Astronomers spy brightest-ever supernova
Astronomers have spotted what seems to be the brightest supernova ever discovered: an exploding star that shines brighter than 500 billion Suns. Don’t go looking for it with binoculars though: its light has taken 2.8 billion years to travel to Earth and, at such a distance, the supernova is only visible through a telescope.
The ASASSN-15lh supernova was first picked up on 14 June by two telescopes operated by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. In reports posted on the Astronomer’s Telegram — an online bulletin service — on 8 July, astronomers led by Subo Dong at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing report that they caught it about nine days after its brightness peaked. The team have also posted a report at the arXiv preprint server (http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03010)1.
Using larger telescopes to follow up the sighting, Dong and his colleagues from the United States and Chile estimate that the stellar explosion is the most extreme instance yet of a superluminous supernova. A few dozen of these enormous blasts, one hundred times brighter than ordinary supernovae, have been spotted in the past decade — and ASASSN-15lh is about twice as bright as any of them.
Continue reading the entire article by clicking the name of the source below.
Orion’s Parachutes Are Now Almost Safe For Astronauts To Use
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A drop test took place on Wednesday, January 13, 2016. NASA
NASA has performed the last “development test” of the parachutes for its upcoming Orion spacecraft, which will be used for future manned missions to an asteroid and Mars. Now, the crucial testing to make sure the spacecraft is safe to carry humans can begin.
Humans Lived In The Arctic 10,000 Years Earlier Than Thought
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The new evidence suggests that humans lived in the Arctic 10,000 years earlier than thought. AuntSpray/Shutterstock
It might seem like an inhospitable and desolate landscape to us, but the Arctic can offer a way of life if you know where to look and how to exploit the resources. It was previously thought that humans didn’t manage this until roughly 35,000 years ago, when the first conclusive evidence of mankind’s habitation within the Arctic Circle has been dated to.
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