Official "Science News" Thread

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Oh, knock it off! If it's one thing I can't stand, it's people groveling ... Every time we try to have a scientific discussion in front of someone it's "sorry this" and "forgive me that" and "I'm not worthy"... It's just like those miserable psalms, they're so depressing.

There may have been a bit of mockery involved, sans flipping tongue. I still think that the word "respectively" implies correspondence between the pairs of numbers as presented.

[Dr Sardonicus]

The Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text of November 1981, which deals with addiction, says that

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.

Repeating the same mistakes and not caring about getting the same bad results is, well, bananas: Banana industry on alert after disease arrives in Colombia

Still, history has shown the risks of relying on a single banana variety. Not that long ago, the world market was ruled by another banana, the Gros Michel, aka the Big Mike. Experts say it was even easier to ship than the Cavendish, and sweeter (though others contend it tasted similar). Either way, the Gros Michel was ravaged by the 1950s by an earlier strain of the disease now stalking the Cavendish.

[rogue]

ABSURD CREATURE OF THE WEEK: THE PARASITIC WORM THAT TURNS SNAILS INTO DISCO ZOMBIES

Stolen fingerprints could spell the end of biometric security – here's how to save it

The First Native American U.S. Poet Laureate on How Poetry Can Counter Hate

Scientists Just Discovered a New Structure in Gold That Only Exists at Extreme States

A Supernova Was Hiding in Antarctica’s Snow (I'm waiting for Trump and other climate change deniers to blame the scientists for triggering most of the snow melt in Antarctica.)

How the brain 'approximates' without actually counting

Inside a Brain Bank, Where Humans’ Most Precious Organ Is Dissected and Studied

Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser

[ewmayer]

Big news on the "peopling of the Americas" front - An allegedly pre-Clovis site which has passed even the most stringent archeological tests and been carbon-dated to ~16,000 ybp, with error bars of around +-500 years:

First people in the Americas came by sea, ancient tools unearthed by Idaho river suggest | Science

About 16,000 years ago, on the banks of a river in western Idaho, people kindled fires, shaped stone blades and spearpoints, and butchered large mammals. All were routine activities in prehistory, but their legacy today is anything but. The charcoal and bone left at that ancient site, now called Cooper’s Ferry, are some 16,000 years old—the oldest radiocarbon-dated record of human presence in North America, according to work reported this week in Science.

The findings do more than add a few centuries to the timeline of people in the Americas. They also shore up a new picture of how humans first arrived, by showing that people lived at Cooper’s Ferry more than 1 millennium before melting glaciers opened an ice-free corridor through Canada about 14,800 years ago. That implies the first people in the Americas must have come by sea, moving rapidly down the Pacific coast and up rivers. The dates from Cooper’s Ferry “fit really nicely with the [coastal] model that we’re increasingly getting a consensus on from genetics and archaeology,” says Jennifer Raff, a geneticist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who studies the peopling of the Americas.

The Clovis people, big game hunters who made characteristic stone tools dated to about 13,000 years ago, were once thought to have been the first to reach the Americas, presumably through the ice-free corridor. But a handful of earlier sites have persuaded many researchers that the coastal route is more likely. Archaeologists have questioned the signs of occupation at some putative pre-Clovis sites, but the stone tools and dating at Cooper’s Ferry pass the test with flying colors, says David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. “It’s pre-Clovis. I’m convinced.”

Over 10 years of excavations, the Cooper’s Ferry team uncovered dozens of stone spear points, blades, and multipurpose tools called bifaces, as well as hundreds of pieces of debris from their manufacture. Although the site is near the Salmon River, most of the ancient bones belonged to mammals, including extinct horses. The team also found a hearth and pits dug by the site’s ancient residents, containing stone artifacts and animal bones.

Radiocarbon dates on the charcoal and bone are as old as 15,500 years. In North America, few tree ring records can precisely calibrate such early radiocarbon dates, but a state-of-the-art probabilistic model placed the start of the occupation at between 16,560 and 15,280 years. “I may not think it goes back to 16,000 years ago, but I surely can believe it goes back 15,000 years,” says Michael Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The only rival to Cooper’s Ferry as the oldest site in North America is the Gault site in Texas. Researchers dated that site to about 16,000 years ago by optical luminescence, a method with larger error bars than radiocarbon dating.

It’s easy to see how seafaring people might have reached Cooper’s Ferry, says Loren Davis, an archaeologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who led the excavations. Although the site is more than 500 kilometers from the coast, the Salmon, Snake, and Columbia rivers link it to the sea. “As people come down the coast, the first left-hand turn to get south of the ice comes up the Columbia River Basin,” Davis says. “It’s the first off-ramp.”

The area is now federal land but was long occupied by the Nez Perce Tribe, or the Niimíipuu. They know Cooper’s Ferry as Nipéhe, an ancient village founded by a young couple after a flood destroyed their previous home, says Nakia Williamson, the tribe’s director of cultural resources. “Our stories already tell us how long we’ve been here. … This [study] only reaffirms that,” Williamson says. He hopes the excavations—in which Nez Perce archaeologists and interns participated—will help others recognize the deep ties the Nez Perce have to their ancestral lands. “This is not just something that happened 16,000 years ago. It’s something that is still important to us today,” he says.

Perhaps most importantly, proving that one group of people came via the Pacific-coastal route means that others may have done so, as well - and since said route did not require the end of the most recent Pleistocene glaciation to become open, it means that earlier migrations were possible, if not likely.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Big news on the "peopling of the Americas" front - An allegedly pre-Clovis site which has passed even the most stringent archeological tests and been carbon-dated to ~16,000 ybp, with error bars of around +-500 years:

First people in the Americas came by sea, ancient tools unearthed by Idaho river suggest | Science

Perhaps most importantly, proving that one group of people came via the Pacific-coastal route means that others may have done so, as well - and since said route did not require the end of the most recent Pleistocene glaciation to become open, it means that earlier migrations were possible, if not likely.

This is an amazing roll-back for North American human habitation. I wonder where a hypothetical earlier site might be lurking.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

This is an amazing roll-back for North American human habitation. I wonder where a hypothetical earlier site might be lurking.

This Wikipedia entry on the Clovis culture has a list:

After the discovery of several Clovis sites in eastern North America in the 1930s, the Clovis people came to be regarded as the first human inhabitants who created a widespread culture in the New World. However, this theory has been challenged, in the opinion of many archaeologists, by several archaeological discoveries, including sites such as Cactus Hill in Virginia, Paisley Caves in the Summer Lake Basin of Oregon, the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, the Friedkin site in Texas, Cueva Fell in Chile, and especially, Monte Verde, also in Chile. The oldest claimed human archaeological site in the Americas is the Pedra Furada hearths, a site in Brazil that precedes the Clovis culture and the other sites already mentioned by 19,000 to 30,000 years. This claim has become an issue of contention between North American archaeologists and their South American and European counterparts, who disagree on whether it is conclusively proven to be an older human site.

That list does not contain Cooper's Ferry, perhaps due to the recency of its recognition as a probable pre-Clovis site.

Note "precedes ... by 19,000 to 30,000 years" would push the earliest date back to 32,000-43,000 years, were it to prove genuine.

[Dr Sardonicus]

I've been seeing stuff about pre-Clovis sites in the Americas for some time, and about how the very idea was attacked by academics who, perhaps had not heard about what Clyde Tombaugh said when images from Mariner disproved the existence of the "canals" on Mars he had (thought he had) seen as a young man: "Data is data."

Speaking of which, I did a bit of searching for better source material on Pedra Furada.

There's a chapter entitled The Late-Pleistocene Industries of Piauí, Brazil: New Data in a largish (9MB) book called Paleoamerican Odyssey (hit the "Download full-text PDF" button). The above-mentioned chapter begins on p. 445. If you do a text search on the author name Boëda (note the umlaut) you'll get there in a jiffy. As to the dating, in the section on The Site of Vale da Pedra Furada (pp448-452)

The chronological framework we have established thus dates with a high degree of confidence the upper unit to the Middle Holocene, and the lower unit to the Last Pleniglacial 26,000–15,000 years ago. Horizon C7a, the richest in terms of lithic artifacts, has been consistently dated by combined OSL samples and different charcoal samples to ca. 23,000 years ago.

There's another site, which at close to 23,000 years old, is obviously pre-Clovis. If you go to Peopling South America's centre: the late Pleistocene site of Santa Elina and hit the Adobe Acrobat (red loopy triangle) button, you get the complete paper.

Happy reading!

[rogue]

Scientists share new details about mysterious 'ghost particle'

Rapper Residente partners with scientists to create music with brain patterns

How googly eyes solved one of today’s trickiest UX problems

Diverse linguistic environment boosts brain sensitivity to new learning, UCI study finds

A Mathematical Model Unlocks the Secrets of Vision

Ask the Know-It-Alls: How Do Machines Learn?

Respect the Hammock, One of Humanity’s Greatest Creations

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by rogue

How googly eyes solved one of today’s trickiest UX problems

Fast Company - "the magazine for TechBros" ... I scrubbed all the tracking crud from the link before loading the article (above-quoted version of URL is the scrubbed one), this part made me curious about how a robot would manifest "high arousal", besides simply "chirping happily":

...Axelsson also created a matrix of behaviors to make the robot seem more dynamic, like spinning around and beeping, based on what happened to it. If it successfully led a person to the section they were searching for, its “emotions” would become more positive with high arousal, leading to the robot chirping happily.

Frank Zappa wrote a song about the intricacies of robot-human interactions. Plook me now, you savage rascal!

(The "Warren just bought some" bit in the Zappa song is an in-joke about Warren Cucurullo, one of the members of Zappa's backing band, the Mothers of Invention. Warren also gets a mention in Catholic Girls.)

[rogue]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Fast Company - "the magazine for TechBros" ... I scrubbed all the tracking crud from the link before loading the article (above-quoted version of URL is the scrubbed one), this part made me curious about how a robot would manifest "high arousal", besides simply "chirping happily":

Frank Zappa wrote a song about the intricacies of robot-human interactions. Plook me now, you savage rascal!

(The "Warren just bought some" bit in the Zappa song is an in-joke about Warren Cucurullo, one of the members of Zappa's backing band, the Mothers of Invention. Warren also gets a mention in Catholic Girls.)

Thanks for cleaning the link.

Speaking of Frank Zappa, I saw 200 Motels a few weeks ago. That was weird, to put it simply.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by rogue

Thanks for cleaning the link.

Speaking of Frank Zappa, I saw 200 Motels a few weeks ago. That was weird, to put it simply.

Weird indeed, but lots of funny stuff, and some really early analog video-based visual effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/200_Motels

200 Motels is a 1971 American-British musical surrealist film cowritten by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer and starring The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel and Ringo Starr.

A segment with Ringo as Larry the Dwarf, dressed up like Frank Zappa sticks with me. The Bikel character is asking him, "What's the deal?"

Bikel: What is such a large dwarf as yourself doing dressed as Frank Zappa?
Ringo: He made me do it. He's such a creep! He wants me to f*ck the girl with the harp.
Bikel: He wants you to f*ck the girl....with the harp?
Ringo: No. No. With the magic lamp. He wants me to stuff it up her and rub it!