Secular Café: An Excellent Takedown of Climate Science Denial

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

An Excellent Takedown of Climate Science Denial May 12th 2012, 12:41 And not a nasty put-down in sight. Kazim at the Atheist Experience fielded a long email from someone skeptical of the science, and took pains to set him straight - and got thanked for it!. Very good stuff.

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Secular Café: Planet of the Apes....it's real!

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

Planet of the Apes....it's real! May 11th 2012, 09:54 Quote: Chimpanzee Uses Innovative Foresighted Methods to Fool Humans ScienceDaily (May 10, 2012) — Chimpanzee Santino achieved international fame in 2009 for his habit of gathering stones and manufacturing concrete projectiles to throw at zoo visitors. A new study shows that Santino's innovativeness when he plans his stone-throwing is greater than researchers have previously observed. He not only gathers stones and manufactures projectiles in advance; he also finds innovative ways of fooling the visitors. The study, which was carried out at Lund University, has been published in PLoS ONE. The new study looked at the chimpanzee's ability to carry out complex planning. The case study shows how humans' closest relatives in the animal kingdom appear to be able to plan to deceive others, and that they can also plan their deception inventively. The behaviour of the chimpanzee Santino is of particular interest because it is done while the humans to be deceived are out of sight. That means that the chimpanzee can plan without having immediate perceptual feedback of his goal -- the visitors to the zoo -- to aid in his planning. The subject of the study is Santino the chimpanzee, who achieved international fame in 2009 for his habit of gathering stones and manufacturing concrete projectiles to throw at visitors from the safety of his enclosure at Furuvik Zoo north of Stockholm. His behaviour was reported as an example of spontaneous planning for a future event, in which his psychological state was visibly quite different from that of his subsequent aggressive displays. Previously, such cognitive abilities had been widely believed to be restricted to humans. .... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0510100225.htm

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Secular Café: You can all relax, the world will NOT end in December

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

You can all relax, the world will NOT end in December May 11th 2012, 09:40 Quote: Mural Found On Walls a First for a Maya Dwelling; Painted Numbers Reflect Calendar Reaching Well Beyond 2012 ScienceDaily (May 10, 2012) — A vast city built by the ancient Maya and discovered nearly a century ago is finally starting to yield its secrets. Excavating for the first time in the sprawling complex of Xultún in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologists have uncovered a structure that contains what appears to be a work space for the town's scribe, its walls adorned with unique paintings -- one depicting a lineup of men in black uniforms -- and hundreds of scrawled numbers. Many are calculations relating to the Maya calendar. One wall of the structure, thought to be a house, is covered with tiny, millimeter-thick, red and black glyphs unlike any seen before at other Maya sites. Some appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya -- the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars, reports archaeologist William Saturno of Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation. "For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community," Saturno said. "It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard." The discovery is reported in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science. The project scientists say that despite popular belief, there is no sign that the Maya calendar -- or the world -- was to end in the year 2012, just one of its calendar cycles. "It's like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to 130,000," said Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, a coauthor of the Science paper. "The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over; the Maya just start over." .... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0510141953.htm

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Secular Café: How much are people motivated by huge salaries?

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

How much are people motivated by huge salaries? May 10th 2012, 15:02 And what is the effect on their performance? It turns out to be fairly complex, and perhaps we should expect that. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012...ut-the-money/1 Quote: "People have three psychological needs – to feel autonomous, to feel competent and to feel related to others," he says. Payment, according to Deci's research, does not fulfill these needs. Over-emphasis on financial reward undermines autonomy and therefore intrinsic motivation, he says. "This [negative effect of money on motivation] matters hugely. You need high quality performance from bankers. You need thinkers, problem solvers, people who can be creative and using money to motivate them will not get you that." Perhaps more surprisingly some economists also question how good money is as a motivator. Dan Ariely, of Duke University, North Carolina, in the US, provides a compelling example. "If I ask you to help me change a tire on my car you might be willing to help, but if I offer you a dollar for this you don't say to yourself 'gee I get to help Dan and I get a dollar'. In contrast you say: 'It's a dollar, I don't work for a dollar' and you're less interested in doing this." In other words the introduction of financial incentives into a relationship by one party can undermine another's motivation to perform a task. But maybe the small sums involved in Ariely's example and Deci's experiments undermine their application to real-world international business and finance. To address this, Ariely and colleagues, recruited villagers in India to play games testing memory, creativity and motor skills, offering three different groups four, 40 or 400 rupees per game for scoring highly. The maximum reward was equivalent to the amount spent by the average person living in rural India in five months. They found that those offered the highest incentives performed worst, earning an average of 20% of the maximum possible, compared to around 36% for those in the low and medium reward groups. "Our results challenge the assumption that an increase in motivation would necessarily lead to improvements in performance," says Ariely... ...This concept of failure to perform under pressure, or "choking", is well known in sport. A famous example saw French golfer Jean Van de Velde needing to sink the ball in six shots on the last hole of the final round of the 1999 British Open to win. Having done so in just three shots in the two previous rounds, he crumbled under pressure and took seven shots, before losing the resulting play off. A key problem that has faced those in this field in the past has been the difficulty of measuring motivation using psychological tests and questionnaires. But the increasing use of brain imaging technologies in neuroscience has provided a new and more direct method to study thoughts and feelings. These techniques are now being adopted to tease apart the different aspects of motivation.

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Secular Café: Harry Potter Inspires New Blood Type Test

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Harry Potter Inspires New Blood Type Test May 10th 2012, 12:28 http://www.care2.com/causes/harry-po...type-test.html Wonderful: science imitating art.... Quote: Wei Shen, a chemical engineer at Monash University in Australia, was watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in his Melbourne home when he had an epiphany. In the film, Harry writes questions in ink in Tom Riddle's diary, and magically receives a written answer. Shen realized, watching the scene, that this sort of easy answer to a question didn't have to stay a fantasy: we have the technology right now to create medical tests which give immediate, easy-to-understand written answers. Inspired by the Harry Potter scene, Shen and his colleagues have developed a paper blood test the size of a Post-it note. The surface of the paper is water-repellant, but contains four spots with the antibodies for each blood type, and when a small amount of blood is smeared on the paper, letters will appear on the paper showing the blood type (A, B, AB, or O) and whether the sample is Rhesus positive or negative. This new sensor will be going into production within the next 5 years, and already the makers have high hopes for its application in poor countries, war zones, and disaster areas. Existing blood tests are incredibly accurate, but require a scientific background in order to correctly interpret. This new test has the potential to allow people other than medical professionals to test for blood type, which could have profound implications for medical care in emergency situations. And this isn't the only potential application of this technology. It's likely it will be applied to other diagnostic tests in the future, allowing for a quick, easy-to-read answer that takes away the potential for human error. Shen's blood type sensor isn't the only modern technology inspired by or eerily reminiscent of the magic in Harry Potter. Discovery News has an entire slideshow comparing technological advances to magical devices in the popular book series.

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Secular Café: Did arthropods and vertebrates inherit their segmentation?

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Did arthropods and vertebrates inherit their segmentation? May 8th 2012, 05:23 Nice to see PZ blogging about something in his professional specialty, evolutionary developmental biology: How was the vertebrate/arthropod LCA segmented? | Pharyngula Arthropods are well-known for being segmented. For vertebrates, one must look inside, but one can easily find segmented parts. Annelids are also segmented, though PZ did not mention them. Segmentation (biology). So did their segmentation originate in some common ancestor? Or did it originate separately? As PZ himself notes, we still don't know for sure. Vertebrates and arthropods share some genes that are involved in the process, but some of the genes are widely used in other processes. Even worse are differences between vertebrate and arthropod segmentation. Vertebrates grow segments at the rear end with a clock-and-wavefront mechanism, while flies grow them all at once. They start out with some broad layout, then narrow it down to produce the individual segments, all specified individually. They even have an alternation between certain molecules in odd-numbered segments and certain ones in even-numbered ones. Flies? The favorite lab fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. However, flies are rather atypical of arthropods for using all-at-once development. It's likely a result of selection for fast growth. So we must look at other arthropods. - PZ blogged on some results of studying the development of segments of the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, another common model system. Papers: Choe CP, Miller SC, Brown SJ (2006) A pair-rule gene circuit defines segments sequentially in the short-germ insect Tribolium castaneum. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 103(17):6560-6564. Sarrazin AF, Peel AD, Averof M (2012) A segmentation clock with two-segment periodicity in insects. Science 336:338-341. It makes new segments on its rear end, as vertebrates do, with a similar sort of mechanism. But some of its mechanisms are more like fruit-fly ones than like vertebrate ones, like its segment alternations. So the puzzle is still not solved. - PZ concluded that we need to look at more species. Flies and beetles are both four-stage insects (Endopterygota), which do most of their growing in a wormlike larval state. Here's where one might look next: Grasshoppers. PZ himself has worked on some of those in the past, though on nervous-system development. They are three-stage insects, with the immature ones looking much like the full-grown ones. Crustaceans, like the brine shrimp Artemia salina: Sea-Monkeys. Crustaceans in general are the closest relatives to the insects. Other arthropods, like arachnids and myriapods. Annelids: polychaete marine worms like Platynereis dumerilii, earthworms, leeches. There's actually been a sizable amount of study of the development of leeches and Platynereis. Much like vertebrates, most arthropods and annelids make segments by rearward growth, as far as can be determined. - There's a big puzzle about the evolution segmentation. Either it evolved more than once or it was lost several times. Protostomia Ecdysozoa Panarthropoda - includes arthropods Cycloneuralia Lophotrochozoa Annelida Mollusca Etc. Deuterostomia Chordata - includes vertebrates Ambulacraria Hemichordata Echinodermata

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Secular Café: Can't be Global warming, dinosaurs are dead

Secular Café Serious discussion of science, skepticism, evolution, pseudoscience, and the paranormal

Can't be Global warming, dinosaurs are dead May 7th 2012, 19:07 but maybe they gassed themselves to death. :evil: Quote: Dinosaur Farts May Have Warmed Ancient Earth The greenhouse gas methane produced by all sauropods across the globe would have been about 520 million tons per year. Mon May 7, 2012 02:41 PM ET Content provided by Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer THE GIST Between the heft of dinosaurs and their fiber-rich diets, it's likely they produced a lot of gas. Gassy dinos could have been a major factor in Earth's warming. Diplodocus, discovered in 1877, is one of the longest known dinosaurs. It was probably also very gassy. Click to enlarge this image. Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Corbis We might want to rename the Brachiosaurus with the moniker Gassiosaurus, new research indicates. The gassy emissions from these giant dinosaurs may have been enough to warm the Earth, the researchers say. Sauropods are large plant-eating dinosaurs typified by such titans as Apatosaurus (once known as Brontosaurus) and Brachiosaurus. When they lived, during the Mesozoic era — from about 250 million years ago until the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago — the climate was warm and wet. Nothing on Earth today compares with these giants. The researchers found that the greenhouse gas methane produced by all sauropods across the globe would have been about 520 million tons per year, a number on par with the total amount of methane currently produced by both natural and man-made sources. [Album: World's Biggest Beasts] .... http://news.discovery.com/animals/di...ts-120507.html

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