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Zum Seitenende Ältere Texte bis 2013 Home & Impressum
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The Journal of Human Evolution comes out with a special issue about becoming human and food resources with many nods towards the Aquatic Ape hypothesis.
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Freeman’s argument about water not being fractionated through plant transpiration sounds quite convincing, but is contradicted by the results of Kahmen et al. 2011 (PNAS 108, 1981--1986). So to the extent it relies on this non-fractionation the model by Winnick et al. has to be seen as questionable.
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I’m not much impressed by the editorial quality of Elsevier’s journal Applied Energy, and with Elsevier it’s not the only one. There are several jarring occurrences of "MW/h" in Pearre et al. interspersed with the correct "MWh". (I grudgingly accept the American convention of two fraction bars in one term, as in "$/MW/h", but it has to be done consistently.) Is it not time to strike Elsevier off the list of reputable publishers?
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Liu et al. have found an extremely common gene variant with a slight influence on personality traits – big deal. According to the yellow press though, the “partnership gene” has been found.
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As far as I can find out, Robert G. Bednarik is no crackpot, but well published in peer reviewed journals. As such his ideas about Out of Africa II warrant some, albeit critical, consideration.
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What Kemp reports about America strongly smacks of the kind of ideological cleansing practised by Lyssenko and Mao. I may be misled by unfamiliar terms, but as far as I can tell the dismissed Armitage was neither a lecturer nor assistant professor but a technician, and a good one at that. Since when do university students need cloistering, indoctrination, and being protected from whacky ideas? When the university president ...
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If Shimelmitz et al. are right, then humans up until the dawn of Neanderthals and moderns had to make do without the nutritional advantage of cooking. This is the opposite of what Wrangham claims, but it would explain the last synchronous spurt of brain growth in two disjunct areas of the world.
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There are two rules that psychologists, sociologists and all the other humanities will probably never grasp: 1) Correlation is not causation, 2) Any regression between the most random data will always yield a definite result with a non-zero slope. Most results shown in d’Acunto et al. depend on one or two outliers alone, and those few ...
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Marsh et al. are a particularly strong example for the meaninglessness of statistical significance. While their figure 2b clearly shows a significant difference at the group level, the two groups become completely identical by just taking away two individuals from each, and the predictive value ...
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Successful teachers have always scattered witty or engaging anecdotes throughout their more serious stuff. Gruber et al. now show why this is so effective.
Currently the press is full about stretching before sport being not only not beneficial but downright harmful. ...
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The result by Franco et al. is unexpected and perhaps disturbing. Publication bias is not a result of journals rejecting null results but of them not being written up and offered in the first place. Understandably having come up with a seemingly plausible hypothesis one will always feel better having it confirmed than ...
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Dunbar and Wiessner tell us nothing strikingly new, but they artfully tie together several strands of old evidence towards a deeper understanding of the development at the beginning of becoming human.
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Looking at Boëda et al. I see several caveats. All the supposed tools were found near the tops of gravel layers of similar grain sizes. During excavation the fine grained layers are carefully scraped away, so it is the top of any gravel layer that emerges prominently and catches the eye. Lower down the need to remove stones leaves an irregular surface, where ...
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Sher et al. use LOWESS to draw regression lines through extremely noisy data. They then go on to interpret those in far more detail than the data warrant. Their single limited sample makes it impossible to distinguish between true age-related changes and random, individual idiosyncrasies. I accept all their first-order results (none of which are new or surprising), but ...
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Marshall has obvious implications for the continual attempts to sever even one- and two-year-olds from their mothers and offload them to state run institutions for most of the day.
The more we come to know about mother’s milk, as in Gura, the more valuable it gets and less easy to substitute.
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Perry et al. offer another proof, that the characteristic physiognomy of African pygmies is adaptive and highly selected for. One question I don’t know the answer to and haven’t seen discussed so far, is how much the climate and environment on the island of Flores is similar to Africa’s tropical rain forest and induces the same selection pressure.
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Although the reaction itself is exothermic, ammonia synthesis through the Haber-Bosch-process consumes huge amounts of energy worldwide and the generation of its hydrogen feedstock even more so. Licht et al. have found a way to combine the two and use the enthalpy of the synthesis to partially offset that of splitting water. Contrary to steam reformation the process itself does not generate carbon dioxide ...
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Loads of tabloid stuff this fortnight but little of substance. Yang et al. finally solve the riddle, why slim and fat women always go to the loo together. Shame the model breaks down for old men.
Being sensitised to current carbon-dioxide scams I was skeptical about Graciani et al.’s catalytic methanol production. ...
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Sovacool’s stance is not surprising once you realize that he touts his own commercial interest here. His solution of solving technical problems by massive, state sponsored, and mandatory reeducation has been tried for over forty years. Not only was it voted down by overwhelming public opposition, ...
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According to Ochiai et al. ignoring all health warnings and spurning all Government mandated precautions may not be conducive to perfect health in the aftermath of a nuclear accident. Bet you knew that already. The more relevant part seems to be the generally good state of health in observed fauna in spite of their less than perfect blood values.
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Teaching how to read used to be the job of primary and high schools and undergraduates were expected to pick up the subtleties of primary research reporting through learning on the job. Formal niceties used to be remarked on by the lecturer while discussing the content of papers. Looking at the current batch of first years, van Lacum et al. may well have a point. What they fail to say is that, given limited time and already full schedules, ...
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From Bohannon I finally learn what being a perpetual student is really worth. Bus fares and reduced entry are peanuts when my library shells out $ 2.00 for every article I read online, that’s $ 50.– for a typical blog entry every week. Does the taxpayer get any value back for his money? ...
Apologies for tardiness and skipping a week.
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For Gillespie et al.’s hypothesis to make sense, menopause would have to be an exceedingly young phenomenon, only appearing after the establishment of sedentism and agriculture. This means we’d have to expect at least some residual hunter-gatherer societies not to possess it. ...
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Although the Solutréen hypothesis is unanimously condemned by the archaeological mainstream, John J. Shea is not someone whose opinion can be easily dismissed out of hand. As Stanford & Bradley point out in their reply to O’Brien et al., what counts is not the average state of ice over thousands of years, but a stable shelf for less than a century suffices ...
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Richard Feynman has included Social Psychology in his list of Cargo Cult sciences and according to Bohannon and Klein et al. not much has changed since. The blame of persecution is of course utter nonsense. If the data were reported and evaluated honestly and correctly, all but one in twenty studies would be successfully replicated ...
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If the trace element concentration in grain is reduced, as Myers et al. find under elevated CO2 conditions, then just eat more of it. This may sound glib, but people having to cope with malnutrition at all, typically don’t just get too little zinc or something, they get too little to eat in total. Of course Myers et al. fail to give any numbers, but ...
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If, as Couzin-Frankel seems to imply, feminists want to insist on untried pharmaceuticals with unknown risks and yet to be found side effects being tested on women, preferable pregnant, so be it, just don’t blame me for the outcomes. But feminists really ought to decide which it is to be: Are women so different, that trans-sex inferences are even less secure than trans-species ones, or are they so indistinguishably identical, that each and every slight difference in career choices has to be culturally imposed by suppressive male chauvinists? ...
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Although Verd et al. do note the possibility of their result being purely cultural, they strongly play it down. To me it’s obvious that what they see here is a group more prone to letting themselves be browbeaten into publicly approved correct behaviour than ...
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Aagaard et al. still don’t answer the question how fetuses and newborns acquire their gut biomes, except that it’s not from the vagina during birth, but they do clear up, what bacteria are acquired. How they get from a woman’s mouth to her placenta ...
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The discussion about significance and the prevention of publishing nonsense is continuing in PNAS, and a very good thing too. How much this discussion of arcana by specialists is helping all those authors, who have yet to grasp the basics, is an open question, though.
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The recent announcement by the American Academy of Pediatrics is a typical and most blatant example of both Cargo cult Science and “Never trust the experts”. When my daughter was born, rather a short time before 1994, my wife and me kept being admonished in the strongest and least ambiguous terms possible, never ever to let her sleep on her back because ...
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PNAS has come out with a big special section on aspects of the Neolithisation process.
There is one huge internal contradiction in the otherwise convincing article by Villa & Roebroeks. If there really was no cognitive or social advantage for AMHs, ...
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While there certainly are isolated cases of the kind of problem Macilwain highlights, I fail to agree they are the norm. What he calls environmentalists advocat[ing] caution is all too often just the opposite, like the wholesale demolition of a secure energy supply in favour of unproven, unreliable and expensive alternatives, the kind of thing best represented by Lysenko, the great leap forward, and ...
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There is nothing I can see to fault the results by Campbell et al. as they are. But then the area and the families those children came from were cherry picked for best results and what they got is hardly representative of normal state-run childcare. If this is going to be taken as a pretext for more enforced social engineering ...
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If I read Gassmann et al. correctly, the susceptibility of the current regime of maize growing for breeding resistance was well known beforehand, but it was adopted regardless. Are humans innately too stupid to use things like antibiotics sensibly? ...
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I’m very surprised by the explanation for zebra stripes by Caro et al. (unfortunately the full article is only accessible at an extortionate price) being touted as a new result. In his “Rätsel der Menschwerdung” Josef Reichholf already ...
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Powell et al. 2012 sounds interesting and seems to confirm a well accepted hypothesis. Going into the details though, there is no significant correlation between the cause and effect values and what there is points in the wrong direction. The article doesn’t show a single meaningful diagram ...
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Riehl offers a very nice introductory summary of the neolithisation process but with one big omission. While citing an outsider hypothesis by Watkins, requiring a coincidence of timing, that reminds of Old Testament miracles and acts of G-d, ...
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Reading Livio & Silk strengthens my gut feeling – admittedly substantiated by nothing but the size of the gut – that neither dark energy nor dark matter exist, the Hubble constant is an artefact ...
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Seemingly Stanford & Bradley are increasingly being disproved by the growing number of new aDNA determinations. On the other hand we should keep in mind the problems of finding remains of Anglo-Saxon invaders in the archeological record – so far all individuals tested have turned out to be acculturated Britains. The whole area where Solutréen immigrants may have settled, all of eastern USA, is known for its extremely bad bone preservation. To my mind Stanford & Bradley’s arguments are convincing. ...
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Of course a single study, even if a sizeable one like Burkert et al., is not sufficient for general conclusions and even less for determining the direction of causality. It is however strikingly divergent, in fact the opposite, of what current mainstream consensus tends to claim. So one thing we can say is that things are not as simple and monocausal as vegetarian propagandists would have us believe. ...
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I wanted to rubbish Alcock et al. but again found Feynman’s rule on primary sources confirmed. From the Nature’s research highlights through the abstract to results the interpretation better fits the data moving from utter nonsense to quite a sensible analysis. That said their data are open to an alternative analysis. Both groups ...
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If someone tells me, his result “was achieved through Microsoft Excel 2003’s summation function”, which is more or less what Jennings & Waters do, I know, he has not understood simple addition. What they offer is junior high school stuff: Throwing a dice n times, what is the probability never to get a single six? Like not finding a rare tool in a small sample this too rapidly diminishes with sample size. ...
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Although Rhodes & Churchill’s data all point towards Neanderthals throwing things, they strangely conclude the opposite in their discussion. Admittedly there are some surprising elements ...
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Contrary to Braun et al.’s headline there are no magnetic monopoles, only dipoles of seriously distorted geometry. While the first were a sensation, the second is, to my mind, a case of "so what?" The rest of this week’s stuff speaks for itself.
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One thing climate models have agreed about from the beginning, is that if anything winters ought to warm more than summers. Wahl et al. claim to have found the opposite but only ...
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Cahill and Ingalhalikar finally offer proof that women’s and men’s brains really are different. This adds a question Hazari et al. did not even consider: Are male and female interests genuinely different so that inequal numbers in different subjects are not a problem in need of being solved?
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In Birney and Prüfer several high quality genomes of Denisovans and Neanderthals from the Middle Palaeolithic have produced signs of high rates of inbreeding. From all the Upper Palaeolithic we do not yet have a single genome of a quality to address this question (Raghavan). ...
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The pre-Clovis human coprolites from Paisley cave (list of 2012-08-02) turn out to be pure herbivore after all, according to Sistiaga et al.
