Science

Humans are hive enthusiasts. We love social insects like ants and bees, and we pay extra attention to Star Trek episodes when the you-will-be-assimilated Borg are featured. But what exactly is so interesting about hives? They’re interesting to us because, en masse, they amount to a superorganism, with analogs to organisms at the genetic level, reproductive level, and the behaviour level. Also, just as larger, more complex, organisms tend to have a greater number of specialized cell types, larger ant colonies tend to have a greater number of “ant types” (see figure).

And in new research this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Chen Hou from Arizona State University… Read More

Scientists are prone to going on and on about how strikingly early in life we are able to comprehend speech. Our children’s aptitude for reading, however, doesn’t cause much excitement. At first glance this seems sensible: children comprehend speech fairly well by two, whereas they typically can’t read until about five. This is because, the standard story goes, we evolved to comprehend speech but did not evolve to read. And while one might debate whether we have evolved to comprehend speech, no one believes we evolved to read. Writing is only several thousand years old, far too short a time to have crafted reading mechanisms in our brain. And for many of us, our ancestors only started reading one or… Read More

Excellent Freedom of Information work from Prof David Colquhoun of University College London, who has obtained the course materials of the now-defunct BSc in homeopathy that was for a short while offered by the University of Central Lancashire, and is reviewing them on his blog.

After years of wrangling, 13kg of paper fell through Prof Colquhoun’s letterbox on Christmas Eve. The lecture notes and their relationship with the Society of Homeopath’s code of conduct are, in places, staggering. Even considering that this is a course built entirely on quackery it’s surprising to see so much internal contradiction and spurious claims of evidence and health benefits.

Read the blog post for the details (it is, I’m very glad to… Read More

Colour is in the eye of the beholder

At the end of Avatar, Jake Sully, the main character, wakes up as an alien. The movie ends before he has the chance to say anything to his (blue) alien wife, but here’s my guess as to what he might say to her:

“But I thought you were blue!”

But, since she is blue, why might he say that?

For those who haven’t seen the film, what you need to know is that Sully is a human who, from the safety of his brain-interface chamber back at the lab, can remotely control a “soul”-less alien body. And, at… Read More

Charles Darwin: even greater than we realise

Darwin’s 200th anniversary has come and gone, and thousands of news stories have reflected upon it. One of the largest issues we grapple with is why so many people still don’t believe in evolution – by which I mean, they don’t believe that natural selection suffices to explain all the wonderful life we find here on Earth. And that issue was, accordingly, one of the most commonly themes in last year’s Darwin pieces.

There is, however, a potentially more troubling problem lurking about, also related to understanding Darwin, and this problem emanates from within scientific circles, from among… Read More

There's more to 3D than that 'popping-out' effect

You know what I love about going to see plays or musicals at the theatre? Sure, the dialogue can be hilarious or touching, the songs a hoot, the action thrilling. But I go for another reason: the 3D stereo experience. Long before movies like Avatar were shot and viewed in 3D, people were putting on real live performances, which don’t simply approximate the 3D experience – they are the genuine article.

“But,” you might say, “One goes to the theatre for the dance, the dialogue, the humans – for the art. No one goes to live… Read More

As the biologists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute celebrate their achievements mapping the genomes of cancers, the country’s physicists are not having such a good day. Cuts announced by the Science and Technology Facilities Council [STFC], which administers funding for post-graduate and research grant bodies in the UK, mean the end for many projects in particle physics, nuclear physics, space and astronomy.

The Science Programme Prioritisation 2010-2015 document has a lot to say about the £2.4bn to be spent over the next five years, but phrases such as ‘managed withdrawal,’ ‘tough choices,’ and ‘current tougher financial environment’ are dotted through it. There are welcome announcements for several important projects, but right at the… Read More

Some of the comments on the leaked code from the University of East Anglia have expressed shock and outrage at a particular line of code in a routine used to produce a graph. An array of values and its name – fudgefactor – set sceptic hackles on end and has been held up as proof of data tampering. Here’s why it isn’t.

There is a line in a file called briffa_sep98_d.pro that sets outs some seemingly arbitrary values and calls them ‘fudgefactor’. It refers to them as a ‘VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline!!’ (emphasis coder’s own):

; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0., 0., 0., 0., 0., -0.1, -0.25, -0.3, 0., -0.1… Read More

With a buying public that balks at anything that isn’t free, it takes some audacity to release a program that costs £29.99, but Wolfram Alpha, the online service that looks like a search engine but is in fact a front end for a huge number of statistical information and computational services, has done just that.

Once you’ve held your breath and clicked ‘buy’ you’re presented with the same problem that has confronted many users of wolframalpha.com: what do I want to know that this will be able to tell me? The cursor in the search box, perched on top of an expanded keyboard that features mathematical symbols above the… Read More

The Nobel Foundation knows how significant its place in culture is.

Galileo's richly-decorated telescope

Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Istituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza in Florence (soon to be renamed Museo Galileo Galilei, to the relief of leaflet printers across the city), is introducing an exhibition of Galileo’s telescope and astronomical work at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. As he speaks a slowly rotating roster of the names and faces of Nobel prize-winners pass over his head on a track, announcing the importance of it all. There’s Charles Richet, honoured for his work on anaphylaxi… Read More