Official "Science News" Thread

[Dr Sardonicus]

Sorry, wrong number: Statistical benchmark comes under fire

The p-value cutoff for significance Is "a measure that has gained gatekeeper status ... not only for publication but for people to take your results seriously," says Northwestern University statistician Blake McShane.

It's no wonder that a statistician, at a recent talk to journalists about the issue just before Halloween, displayed a slide of a jack-o'-lantern carved with this sight, obviously terrifying to anyone in science or medicine: "P = .06."

McShane and others argue that the importance of the p-value threshold is undeserved. He co-authored a call to abolish the notion of statistical significance, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature this year. The proposal attracted more than 800 co-signers.

Even the American Statistical Association, which had never issued any formal statement on specific statistical practices, came down hard in 2016 on using any kind of p-value cutoff in this way. And this year it went further, declaring in a special issue with 43 papers on the subject, "It is time to stop using the term `statistically significant' entirely."

[rogue]

A new way to measure gravity: Using floating atoms

Found: Surprisingly Modern Paint on an Ancient Egyptian Gate

Stunning Fossil Discovery Uncovers the Second-Most Primitive Flying Bird

Long Space Missions Can Change Astronaut Brain Structure and Function

Literacy Might Shield the Brain from Dementia

The difference between an expert's brain and a novice's

The Brahmanization of the American Lexicon

How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by rogue

[<snip>
The Brahmanization of the American Lexicon
<snip>

The subhead (my emphasis):

From 'bungalow' to 'veranda, 'khakis' to 'dungarees,' our language has looted Hindu and Indian culture

Curiously, the Wikipedia List of English words of Hindi or Urdu origin has the following entry:

Loot
from Loot لوٹ लूट, meaning 'steal'. Robbery

[kladner]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...for-first-time
This is short-term slowing of the metabolism for surgical purposes. It is stated that it does not relate to things like interstellar hibernation, a favorite of SciFi stories.

Doctors have put humans into a state of suspended animation for the first time in a groundbreaking trial that aims to buy more time for surgeons to save seriously injured patients.

The process involves rapidly cooling the brain to less than 10C by replacing the patient’s blood with ice-cold saline solution. Typically the solution is pumped directly into the aorta, the main artery that carries blood away from the heart to the rest of the body.

Known formally as emergency preservation and resuscitation, or EPR, the procedure is being trialled on people who sustain such catastrophic injuries that they are in danger of bleeding to death and who suffer a heart attack shortly before they can be treated. The patients, who are often victims of stabbings or shootings, would normally have less than a 5% chance of survival.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...for-first-time
This is short-term slowing of the metabolism for surgical purposes. It is stated that it does not relate to things like interstellar hibernation, a favorite of SciFi stories.

This sounds quite similar to Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, which is IIRC something I saw on 60 Minutes some years ago. The specific application was to repair cerebral aneurysms. The cooling is sufficient that the patient "flatlines," and is by most traditional criteria clinically dead. I remember the interviewer asking, "How do you know whether the patient is still alive?" The answer was (as best I can recall), "If the patient revives afterward, he was alive. If he doesn't, he was dead."

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

This sounds quite similar to Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest,

"Nobody is dead until warm and dead" is generally applied to places like Norway, Chicago in winter, Siberia, Winterpeg, etc. But, it can also apply to some place like California were someone comes into the casualty in January at a temp of 25 C.

[ewmayer]

Between the recent sighting of the Majorana and now evidence of the Axion, been a big few years for exotic-quasiparticles-seen-in-exotic-condensed-materials physics:

Physicists Just Created Long-Sought Dark Matter Quasiparticle. Here's Why That's a Big Deal. | Live Science

The research team worked with a Weyl semimetal, a special and strange material in which electrons behave as if they have no mass, don't interact with each other and are split into two types: right-handed and left-handed. The property of being either right- or left-handed is called chirality; chirality in Weyl semimetals is conserved, meaning there are equal numbers of right- and left-handed electrons. Cooling the semimetal to 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 11 degrees Celsius) allowed the electrons to interact and to condense themselves into a crystal of their own.

Waves of vibrations traveling through crystals are called phonons. Since the strange laws of quantum mechanics dictate that particles can also behave as waves, there are certain phonons that have the same properties as common quantum particles, such as electrons and photons. Gooth and his colleagues observed phonons in the electron crystal that responded to electric and magnetic fields exactly like axions are predicted to. These quasiparticles also did not have equal numbers of right- and left-handed particles. (Physicists also predicted that axions would break conservation of chirality.)

"It's encouraging that these equations [describing the axion] are so natural and compelling that they are realized in nature in at least one circumstance," said MIT theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who originally named the axion in 1977. "If we know that there are some materials that host axions, well, maybe the material we call space also houses axions." Wilczek, who was not involved in the current study, also suggested that a material like Weyl semimetal could one day be used as a kind of "antenna" for detecting fundamental axions, or axions that exist in their own right as particles in the universe, rather than as collective vibrations.

And here a link to the original article in Nature.

[rogue]

What America Lost When It Lost the Bison

The brain finds a way to adapt, even when we remove half

Simulations suggest embryo selection based on traits like height or IQ is still far off

Hologram Within a Hologram Hints at Fate of Black Holes

How the Invention of Scotch Tape Led to a Revolution in How Companies Managed Employees

More and More Lighthouses Are Moving Away From the Shore

A runaway star ejected from the galactic heart of darkness

Has the AI-Generated Art Bubble Already Burst?

[Till]

This one looks pretty cool, has it been mentioned yet?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutr...math-20191113/

[Dr Sardonicus]

The discovery via neutrinos seems to be a new method of computing eigenvectors from eigenvalues:

Eigenvalues: the Rosetta Stone for Neutrino Oscillations in Matter (July 4, 2019)

EIGENVECTORS FROM EIGENVALUES (August 10, 2019)

[rogue]

How the 2010s Changed Physics Forever

https://99percentinvisible.org/artic...us-check-font/

The Science Of Smell And Memory

Our place in the universe will change dramatically in the next 50 years – here’s how

Scientists turn undersea fiber optic cables into seismographs

Researchers Have Found That Visiting Art Museums Can Offer Significant Relief for People Living With Dementia