Category: Science

The Sound Of Settled Science

More than just X and Y: New genetic basis for sex determination

The team found that miRNAs are essential for sex determination even after an animal has grown to adulthood. “They send signals that allow germ cells, i.e., eggs and sperm, to develop, ensuring fertility,” Fagegaltier explains. “Removing one miRNA from mature, adult flies causes infertility.” More than that, these flies begin to produce both male and female sex-determinants. “In a sense, once they have lost this miRNA, the flies become male and female at the same time,” according to Fagegaltier. “It is amazing that the very smallest genes can have such a big effect on sexual identity.”
Some miRNAs examined in the study, such as let-7, have been preserved by evolution because of their utility; humans and many other animals carry versions of them. “This is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” says Fagegaltier. “There are likely many more miRNAs regulating sexual identity at the cellular and tissue level, but we still have a lot to learn about these differences in humans, and how they could contribute to developmental defects and disease.”

DON’T EAT THE CANNED FOOD!!!!!!

CFact;

Thirteen members of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) were trapped and in danger of freezing to death when their base, Halley VI, lost power. Power went down on July 30th and is now partially restored. The BAS waited to report the incident until power came back up, however now reports that the incident was so serious that all science activities have been suspended and emergency contingency plans to abandon some of Halley’s eight modules and attempt to shelter in a remaining few have been prepared. […]
One Survey member, Anthony Lister, managed to send a out a “tweet” when power came back up, reporting that the outage occurred while the station was experiencing record cold temperatures of -55.4° C (-67.72° F).

…”record cold”? Must be a typo.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Via WUWT;

A paper published in the Journal of Climate finds from 800,000 observations a significant decrease in longwave infrared radiation from increasing greenhouse gases over the 14 year period 1996-2010 in the US Great Plains. CO2 levels increased ~7% over this period and according to AGW theory, downwelling IR should have instead increased over this period.

So long as we’re still to blame. From the comments;

Maybe, just maybe there is a fundamental problem with using sheets of glass or plastic enclosing a space as an analogy for a free flowing gas of a planetary atmosphere …

The Sound Of Settled Science

The most unkindest cut of all:

Men with vasectomies may be at an increased risk for the most lethal form of prostate cancer, researchers have found. […]
The lead author, Lorelei A. Mucci, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, emphasized that a vasectomy does not increase the risk for prostate cancer over all. “We’re really seeing the association only for advanced state and lethal cancers,” she said.

So that’s reassuring.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The “Science Publishing Complex”;

Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100 publishing scientists (distinct author identifiers) in the period 1996-2011. However, only 150,608 (<1%) of them have published something in each and every year in this 16-year period (uninterrupted, continuous presence [UCP] in the literature). This small core of scientists with UCP are far more cited than others, and they account for 41.7% of all papers in the same period and 87.1% of all papers with >1000 citations in the same period.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The evolving story of a word;

The patient, dedicated men and women, the living realities of the word scientist, working in laboratories and communicating in an esoteric language only with their peers, do not satisfy the general craving for definitive answers to social, economic, and political problems, which, so the great half-educated has been led to expect, ‘science ‘ has it in its power to deliver. An abstraction named ‘the scientist’ has been given form in people’s minds as a new figure of authority, corresponding to the priest or witch-doctor of a more primitive culture, whose ‘scientific’ statements can be accepted with child-like reliance. The notion is dangerous not merely because it is untrue but because it is irrational. The quest for absolute scientific validity is as hopeless as the quest for the philosopher’s stone. There may be incidental good in a political or religious philosophy that claims ‘Scientific’ authority and that stands ready to identify itself with the ready-made image in the popular mind of the infallibility of science; but the willingness to assume and exploit that role betrays the unprincipled shrewdness of the publicist.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The consensus biz takes another hit;

El Fin del Mundo is one of the oldest and southernmost Clovis sites ever discovered, according to University of Arizona archaeologist Vance Holliday, a co-author of the study announcing the find, released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Far from the famous Bering land bridge, the location has researchers questioning the origin of our early ancestors.
“I think sites like El Fin del Mundo really force us to rethink the process of the colonization of the Americas,” says archaeologist Thomas Jennings of the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, who was not part of the discovery team.
For a long time, Clovis culture was believed to have originated in the North American Southwest, south of the glaciers and Bering land bridge area. But the discovery of older Clovis sites in Texas and at El Fin del Mundo, which yielded nearly identical radiocarbon dates (13,400 years old), has cast doubts on that theory.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Although the underlying technical material in the IPCC’s fifth major report was widely agreed upon and published intact, “heated negotiations among scientific authors and diplomats led to substantial deletion of figures and text from the influential ‘Summary for Policy-makers,'” writes Brad Wible, an editor at the journal Science […]
A chart removed from the IPCC summary but published in Science shows that much of the growth in recent greenhouse gas emissions comes from Asia, with smaller contributions from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Emissions in developed countries have continued to rise, but at a much slower rate.

In other words, business as usual.
h/t Maz2

Navigation