Mike Taylor is a computer programmer with Index Data and a dinosaur palaeobiologist with the University of Bristol, UK.  He blogs about palaeontology and open access at http://svpow.wordpress.com/ and tweets as @SauropodMike.

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Everyone involved in academic publishing knows that it’s in a horrible mess. Authors increasingly see publishers as enemies rather than co-workers. And while publishers’ press releases talk about partnership with authors, unguarded comments on blogs tell a different story, revealing that the hostility is mutual. The Cost Of Knowledge boycott is the most obvious illustration of the fractious situation—more than 6000 researchers have declared that they will not write, edit, or review for Elsevier journals. But how did we get into this unhealthy situation? And how can we get out?

The problems all stem from the arrival of the Internet. Or, rather, the Internet has removed problems that used to exist, and this has caused problems for organisations that existed to solve those problems. Which is a problem for them.

Back in the day, it was hard to distribute the results of research. Authors would submit typewritten manuscripts, and publishers took it from there. Editors would fix errors and hone language. Typesetting was an art, especially when it involved equations or graphs. Making multiple copies was costly and time-consuming. And distributing them around the world needed enormous resources. So the researchers of 20 years ago saw publishers as necessary to their work. It’s no wonder that publishers were generally liked and respected.

But just as long-distance telephone networks made telegrams obsolete, so computers mean that most of what publishers do isn’t needed any more. By submitting machine-readable manuscripts and figures, we eliminate nearly all typesetting work. (In maths and physics, authors submit “camera-ready” copy that requires no further typesetting at all.) Printing is no longer needed. Copying is quick, free, and perfect. And worldwide distribution is also free and instantaneous.

You might think that publishers’ response would be to emphasise and increase their editorial role. Instead, surprisingly, they have shed most editorial work. Copyediting is rare, and when it does exist has a reputation for adding more errors than it removes. Most journals have stringent formatting guidelines that authors must follow in submitted manuscripts. (A colleague of mine recently gave up attempts to submit his manuscript to a particular journal after it was three times rejected without review for trivial formatting and punctuation errors, such as using the wrong kind of dash. Seriously.)*

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Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You. She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage.

What’s the most exotic, strange-sounding language you’ve ever heard? I recently popped this question to a group of English speakers at a cocktail party. Norwegian and Finnish were strong contenders for the title, but everyone agreed that the prize had to go to African “click languages” like the Bantu language Xhosa (spoken by Nelson Mandela) or the Khoisan language Khoekhoe, spoken in the Kalahari Desert. Conversations in such languages are liberally sprinkled with clicking sounds that are made with a sucking action of the tongue, much like the sounds we might make when spurring on a horse or expressing disapproval. You may have been introduced to one of these click languages spoken by Kalahari Bushmen in the 1980 film The Gods Must be Crazy. Below is an example, and if you’d like to try your hand at making Xhosa click sounds, you can find a quick lesson here.

To English ears, Xhosa speech often comes across a bit like highly-skilled beatboxing, mixing recognizeable speech with what sounds like the clacking of objects striking each other. My cocktail party friends wanted to know “How do they click and talk at the same time?” To a native speaker of Xhosa, this is a really weird question, much like asking “How do they make the consonants t or p and talk at the same time?” The late African singer Miriam Makeba, in introducing this 1979 performance of her famous “Click Song,” put it like this: “Everywhere we go, people often ask me ‘How do you make that noise?’ It used to offend me, because it isn’t a noise, it’s my language.”

If clicks do sound like exotic noises to you, it might surprise you to know that there’s nothing especially difficult about making click sounds in speech—they’re easily mastered by toddlers who still struggle making truly difficult sounds like s and z. And it might really surprise you to learn, as found in a recent study by Melissa Wright at Birmingham City University, that as an English speaker, you likely riddle your own speech with click sounds, using them much more frequently and systematically than just the occasional “tsk” of disapproval. If that’s so, why on earth do the African clicks sound so strange to English speakers, to the point of being un-language-like?

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Christie Aschwanden is a 2011 National Magazine Award finalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Reader’s Digest, Men’s Journal, and New Scientist. She’s a contributing editor for Runner’s World and writes about medicine for Slate. Follow her on Twitter @cragcrest or find her online at christieaschwanden.com.

This post originally ran on the blog Last Word on Nothing.

Over the week or so, critics have found many reasons to fault Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The scrutiny began with the revelation that the group was halting its grants to Planned Parenthood. The decision seemed like a punitive act that would harm low-income women (the money had funded health services like clinical breast exams), and Komen’s public entry into the culture wars came as a shock to supporters who’d viewed the group as nonpartisan. Chatter on the Internet quickly blamed the move on Komen’s new vice president of Public Policy, Karen Handel, a GOP candidate who ran for governor in Georgia on a platform that included a call to defund Planned Parenthood. Komen’s founder, Ambassador Nancy Brinker, attempted to explain away the decision, and on Tuesdy, Handel resigned her position.

The Planned Parenthood debacle brought renewed attention to other controversies about Komen from recent years—like its “lawsuits for the cure” program that spent nearly $1 million suing groups like “cupcakes for the cure” and “kites for the cure” over their daring attempts to use the now-trademarked phrase “for the cure.” Critics also pointed to Komen’s relentless marketing of pink ribbon-themed products, including a Komen-branded perfume alleged to contain carcinogens, and pink buckets of fried chicken, a campaign that led one rival breast cancer advocacy group to ask, “what the cluck?”

But these problems are minuscule compared to Komen’s biggest failing—its near outright denial of tumor biology. The pink arrow ads they ran in magazines a few months back provide a prime example. “What’s key to surviving breast cancer? YOU. Get screened now,” the ad says. The takeaway? It’s your responsibility to prevent cancer in your body. The blurb below the big arrow explains why. “Early detection saves lives. The 5-year survival rate for breast cancer when caught early is 98%. When it’s not? 23%.”

If only it were that simple. As I’ve written previously here, the notion that breast cancer is a uniformly progressive disease that starts small and only grows and spreads if you don’t stop it in time is flat out wrong. I call it breast cancer’s false narrative, and it’s a fairy tale that Komen has relentlessly perpetuated.

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Andrea Kuszewski is a behavior therapist and consultant, science writer, and robopsychologist at Syntience in San Francisco. She is interested in creativity, intelligence, and learning, in both humans and machines. Find her on Twitter at @AndreaKuszewski. 

Before you read this post, please see “I, Robopsychologist, Part 1: Why Robots Need Psychologists.”

A current trend in AI research involves attempts to replicate a human learning system at the neuronal level—beginning with a single functioning synapse, then an entire neuron, the ultimate goal being a complete replication of the human brain. This is basically the traditional reductionist perspective: break the problem down into small pieces and analyze them, and then build a model of the whole as a combination of many small pieces. There are neuroscientists working on these AI problems—replicating and studying one neuron under one condition—and that is useful for some things. But to replicate a single neuron and its function at one snapshot in time is not helping us understand or replicate human learning on a broad scale for use in the natural environment.

We are quite some ways off from reaching the goal of building something structurally similar to the human brain, and even further from having one that actually thinks like one. Which leads me to the obvious question: What’s the purpose of pouring all that effort into replicating a human-like brain in a machine, if it doesn’t ultimately function like a real brain?

If we’re trying to create AI that mimics humans, both in behavior and learning, then we need to consider how humans actually learn—specifically, how they learn best—when teaching them. Therefore, it would make sense that you’d want people on your team who are experts in human behavior and learning. So in this way, the field of psychology is pretty important to the successful development of strong AI, or AGI (artificial general intelligence): intelligence systems that think and act the way humans do. (I will be using the term AI, but I am generally referring to strong AI.)

Basing an AI system on the function of a single neuron is like designing an entire highway system based on the function of a car engine, rather than the behavior of a population of cars and their drivers in the context of a city. Psychologists are experts at the context. They study how the brain works in practice—in multiple environments, over variable conditions, and how it develops and changes over a lifespan.

The brain is actually not like a computer; it doesn’t always follow the rules. Sometimes not following the rules is the best course of action, given a specific context. The brain can act in unpredictable, yet ultimately serendipitous ways. Sometimes the brain develops “mental shortcuts,” or automated patterns of behavior, or makes intuitive leaps of reason. Human brain processes often involve error, which also happens to be a very necessary element of creativity, innovation, and human learning in general. Take away the errors, remove serendipitous learning, discount intuition, and you remove any chance of any true creative cognition. In essence, when it gets too rule-driven and perfect, it ceases to function like a real human brain.

To get a computer that thinks like a person, we have to consider some of the key strengths of human thinking and use psychology to figure out how to foster similar thinking in computers.

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Andrea Kuszewski is a behavior therapist and consultant, science writer, and robopsychologist at Syntience in San Francisco. She is interested in creativity, intelligence, and learning, in both humans and machines. Find her on Twitter a @AndreaKuszewski.

“My brain is not like a computer.”

The day those words were spoken to me marked a significant milestone for both me and the 6-year-old who uttered them. The words themselves may not seem that profound (and some may actually disagree), but that simple sentence represented months of therapy, hours upon hours of teaching, all for the hope that someday, a phrase like that would be spoken at precisely the right time. When he said that to me, he was showing me that the light had been turned on, the fire ignited. And he was letting me know that he realized this fact himself. Why was this a big deal?

I began my career as a behavior therapist, treating children on the autism spectrum. My specialty was Asperger syndrome, or high-functioning autism. This 6-year-old boy, whom I’ll call David, was a client of mine that I’d been treating for about a year at that time. His mom had read a book that had recently come out, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and told me how much David resembled the main character in the book (who had autism), in regards to his thinking and processing style. The main character said, “My brain is like a computer.”

David heard his mom telling me this, and that quickly became one of his favorite memes. He would say things like “I need input” or “Answer not in the database” or simply “You have reached an error,” when he didn’t know the answer to a question. He truly did think like a computer at that point in time—he memorized questions, formulas, and the subsequent list of acceptable responses. He had developed some extensive social algorithms for human interactions, and when they failed, he went into a complete emotional meltdown.

My job was to change this. To make him less like a computer, to break him out of that rigid mindset. He operated purely on an input-output framework, and if a situation presented itself that wasn’t in the database of his brain, it was rejected, returning a 404 error.

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Charlie Jane Anders is the managing editor of io9.com. Read her novelette Six Months, Three Days here.

Last week saw the debut of Touch, Kiefer Sutherland’s show about a father whose non-neurotypical son turns out to be able to predict future events. This comes on the heels of Alphas, which also gave us Gary, another person who appears to be on the autism spectrum but who has the ability to see hidden energies. And the notion of autistic people as savants or special fixers has been around forever.

Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for The New York Times and magazines such as DISCOVER, which also hosts his blog, The Loom. He is the author of 12 books, the most recent of which is Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

It’s been nearly 87 years since F. Scott’s Fitzgerald published his brief masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner’s and Son issued the first hardback edition in April 1925, adorning its cover with a painting of a pair of eyes and lips floating on a blue field above a cityscape. Ten days after the book came out, Fitzgerald’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, sent him one of those heart-breaking notes a writer never wants to get: “SALES SITUATION DOUBTFUL EXCELLENT REVIEWS.”

The first printing of 20,870 copies sold sluggishly through the spring. Four months later, Scribner’s printed another 3,000 copies and then left it at that. After his earlier commercial successes, Fitzgerald was bitterly disappointed by The Great Gatsby. To Perkins and others, he offered various theories for the bad sales. He didn’t like how he had left the description of the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy. The title, he wrote to Perkins, was “only fair.”

Today I decided to go shopping for that 1925 edition on the antiquarian site Abebooks. If you want a copy of it, be ready to pay. Or perhaps get a mortgage. A shop in Woodstock, New York, called By Books Alone, has one copy for sale. The years have not been kind to it. The spine is faded, the front inner hinge is cracked, the iconic dust jacket is gone. And for this mediocre copy, you’ll pay a thousand dollars.

The price goes up from there. For a copy with a torn dustjacket, you’ll pay $17,150. Between the Covers in Gloucester, New Jersey, has the least expensive copy that’s in really good shape. And it’s yours for just $200,000.

By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, his reputation—and that of The Great Gatsby—had petered away. “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled,” The New York Times declared in their obituary. Only after his death did the novel begin to rise to the highest ranks of American literature. And its ascent was driven in large part by a new form of media: paperback books.

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Phil Plait, the creator of the Discover blog Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. He’s written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. 

On Wednesday, January 25th, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich spoke to a crowd of supporters in Florida. In a short speech guaranteed to create a buzz—online, as well as among space enthusiasts—he declared that if elected president, “… by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

That’s a pretty bold statement. Unfortunately, it’s also impossible.

I’ll note he followed that up with something that is far more likely:

We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism, and manufacturing, and are designed to create a robust industry precisely on the model of the development of the airlines in the 1930s, because it is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching.

That’s a lovely thought, but while that’s a more realistic goal, it’s likely to happen whether or not Gingrich makes it to the White House.

Private Parts

His second statement is the easiest to discuss, and to dismiss. I agree with the sentiment, but what he’s saying is already well on its way to being reality. We have several private companies vying to create commercial activities in orbit, including tourism and science. SpaceX has successfully launched rockets to orbit several times, and they are planning to do a rendezvous with the space station in the coming months as a demonstration that they can take supplies there. Virgin Galactic has shown it can do sub-orbital flights, and several other companies are on their way to space. Manufacturing is a far more difficult goal, but once a more reliable and cheaper method of getting to orbit is established, it’s an inevitable outcome.

With or without any possible future President Gingrich, private companies in space is already happening.

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Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, and the host of the weekly radio show and podcast, “Big Picture Science.”

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid—one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence—hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large, natural satellite.

OK, that’s a bit of modestly engaging astrophysics. But some scientists think there’s a biological angle here. Namely, that elaborate terrestrial life might never have appeared if that asteroid had arrived a few hours earlier, and sailed silently by. Put another way, if every night were moonless, you wouldn’t be around to notice the lack of a moon.

But is that true? Did our cratered companion really make our existence possible?

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Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You. She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage.

Due to a migratory childhood (born in Czechoslovakia, and eventually landing in Montreal via Austria and Italy), English was the fifth language I had to grapple with in my tender years. On my first day of kindergarten, I spoke only a few words of English. I could see that my teacher had some concerns as to how well I would integrate linguistically; my stumbling English was met with pursed lips.

The pursed-lips reaction of my teacher is shared by many who advocate English-only legislation for the U.S., seeking to ban the use of other languages in schools, government documents, and even radio stations and signs on private businesses. The common worry is that making it easier for immigrants to function in their native language is a form of enabling—it prevents them from learning English, hobbling their full entry into American society. Over the past few decades, the waves of Latin American immigrants have only increased such concerns. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 1980, less than 11% of the population spoke a language other than English at home. By 2007, that number had grown to almost 20%. If you looked no further, you might see this as evidence of a potential threat to the English-speaking identity of the U.S.

But these fears are misplaced. Just like I did, most young immigrants from any country eventually master English. It’s true that the rate of Spanish-only speakers in the U.S. has increased dramatically, and that these immigrants often cluster in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. But a more telling statistic is what happens to such families a few generations after they’ve arrived. As Robert Lane Greene reports in his book You Are What You Speak, it’s the same thing that’s happened to all immigrant groups in the U.S.: within the space of a few generations, they not only function perfectly in English, but in the process lose their heritage language. Even among Mexican immigrants, currently the slowest group in the U.S. to shed their ancestral language, fewer than 10% of fourth-generation immigrants speak Spanish very well. As Greene points out, who needs disincentives to speak the heritage language when the economic and cultural imperatives to speak English are already so great?

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Erika Check Hayden is a journalist at Nature and educator in San Francisco. Her work has taken her to wild and beautiful places, but focuses most of the time on the inner terrain of the human body. You can find her online at erikacheck.com and twitter.com/Erika_Check.

This piece was originally published at The Last Word on Nothing.

A few years ago, Eric Klavins found himself starting at the ceiling of his room in the Athenaeum, a private lodging on the grounds of the California Institute of Technology, in the middle of the night. Unable to sleep, Klavins was instead pondering a question that had been posed to him earlier that day at a meeting.

Klavins, a robotics researcher, was funded by grants from the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on robot self-organization: making many simple robots work together to assemble themselves into a shape or structure. While working on the grants, Klavins would routinely be called into meetings to discuss his work with various defense officials, and it was at one of these meetings that a Defense Department researcher had posed his question. “He said, ‘Do you think you could figure out how something that has been broken up into lots of little pieces could be reassembled so we could figure out what it was?’” he recalls.

Klavins spent hours thinking about how one could actually do it. Then, he realized, he had no idea why one would even want to—and hadn’t asked that question at all during all the years he worked with Defense Department funding. He suddenly felt uncomfortable about that. “It bothered me that someone would spend their time studying how things get blown up and working to make things get blown up better,” Klavins says. Not long after, he decided to steer away from defense funding and towards applications in biology and medical research that are part of the realm of synthetic biology, the field of science that tries to turn biology into more of an engineering discipline.

But if Klavins thought that the change would help him escape the moral dilemmas that used to keep him up in the middle of the night, he was wrong. The U.S. Department of Defense has emerged as one of the major funders of synthetic biology; last fall, for instance, DARPA accepted proposals for a highly coveted set of grants in a new program, Living Foundries, that aims to “enable the rapid development of previously unattainable technologies and products, leveraging biology to solve challenges associated with production of new materials, novel capabilities, fuel and medicines.”

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Earlier this week, food columnist Ari LeVaux set off a storm of media reaction with a piece with this premise: tiny plant RNAs, recently discovered to survive digestion and alter host gene expression, are a major reason why genetically modified foods should be considered dangerous. For anyone familiar with the paper he referred to, or with molecular biology in general, the article was full of conflation and sloppy logic, and even as it became the most-emailed story on TheAtlantic.com, where it was published, biology bloggers and science writers were pointing out its significant flaws. To his credit, LeVaux revised the article to fix many (though not all) of the errors concerning genetics; the new version appeared yesterday at AlterNet and today replaced his original piece at The Atlantic.

So what did LeVaux get so wrong, and, once all of the wheat was sorted from the chaff, was there anything to what he was trying to say?

At the heart of the fracas is LeVaux’s claim that a class of molecules called miRNA is a reason to fear GMOs specifically, more than any other food plant or animal. miRNA, which is short for microRNA, is a class of molecules that perform various tasks in plants and animals. They were first discovered about twenty years ago, in nematode worms, and they regulate gene expression by binding the messenger RNA involved in translating a gene into a protein. The messenger RNA carries the “message” of the DNA’s sequence to a group of enzymes that translate it into the amino acid sequence of a protein. But if a miRNA binds to a messenger RNA, the message is destroyed, and the protein is never made. Thus, miRNA can be a powerful tool for preventing the expression of genes. In fact, that is what’s made it such an important lab tool in recent years: it allows researchers to knock down the expression of genes without physically removing them from an organism’s genome.

In the paper that LeVaux pegged his article on, Nanjing University researchers found that miRNAs usually seen in rice were circulating in the blood of humans, and that mice fed rice had the miRNA in their blood as well. That particular miRNA, in its native context, regulates plant development. When the researchers added it to human cells, it appeared to bind to the messenger RNA of a gene involved in removing cholesterol from the blood. Previous papers had found that plants have plenty of miRNA floating around in them [pdf] (as does just about everything we eat, since plants and animals make them by the thousands), but having them show up whole and unmolested in blood, apparently after digestion, was a new and very intriguing discovery.

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Vincent Racaniello is Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University, where he oversees research on viruses that cause common colds and poliomyelitis. He teaches virology to undergraduate, graduate, medical, dental, and nursing students, and writes about viruses at virology.ws.

The detection of a new virus called XMRV in the blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in 2009 raised hope that a long-sought cause of the disease, whose central characteristic is extreme tiredness that lasts for at least six months, had been finally found. But that hypothesis has dramatically fallen apart in recent months. Its public demise brings to mind an instance when a virus *was* successfully determined to be behind a mysterious scourge: the case of HIV and AIDS. How are these two diseases different—how was it that stringent lab tests and epidemiology ruled one of these viruses out, and one of them in?

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David Ropeik is an international consultant in risk perception and risk communication, and an Instructor in the Environmental Management Program at the Harvard University Extension School. He is the author of How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts and principal co-author of RISK A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You. He writes the blog Risk; Reason and Reality at Big Think.com and also writes for Huffington Post,  Psychology Today,  and Scientific American.

He founded the program “Improving Media Coverage of Risk,” was an award-winning journalist in Boston for 22 years and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

This post originally appeared on Soapbox Science, a guest blog hosted by the nature.com Communities team.

If you were to be diagnosed with cancer, how do you think you would feel? It would depend on the type of cancer of course, but there’s a good chance that no matter the details, the word “cancer” would make the diagnosis much more frightening. Frightening enough, in fact, to do you as much harm, or more, than the disease itself.  There is no question that in many cases, we are cancer-phobic, more afraid of the disease than the medical evidence says we need to be, and that fear alone can be bad for our health. As much as we need to understand cancer itself, we need to recognize and understand this risk, the risk of cancer phobia, in order to avoid all of what this awful disease can do to us.

In a recent report to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), a panel of leading experts on prostate cancer, the second most common cancer in men (after skin), said;

“Although most prostate cancers are slow growing and unlikely to spread, most men receive immediate treatment with surgery or radiation. These therapeutic strategies are associated with short- and long-term complications including impotence and urinary incontinence.”

“Approximately 10 percent of men who are eligible for observational strategies (keep an eye on it but no immediate need for surgery or radiation) choose this approach.”

“Early results demonstrate disease-free and survival rates that compare favorably (between observation and) curative therapy.”

“Because of the very favorable prognosis of low-risk prostate cancer, strong consideration should be given to removing the anxiety-provoking term ‘cancer’ for this condition.”

Let me sum that up. Many prostate cancers grow so slowly they don’t need to be treated right away…the unnecessary treatment causes significant harm…and one of the reasons nine men out of ten men diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer accept, indeed choose these unnecessary harms, is because “cancer” sounds scary.

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Death is good. Death clears away old people to make way for new people and ideas. Death makes sure there aren’t too many of us on the planet at once. Mortality is our condition, and as meaning-makers, we cannot but live through the lens of knowing we must die. Death is just too important to kill.

So efforts to postpone death are misguided and unethical. People who try to fend off death are being selfish, are in denial, and are pouring money down the drain for cockamamy schemes to preserve their frozen heads for some fingers-crossed future, which will never arrive. At the same time, we shouldn’t let people die, particularly (and ironically) if they really want to. Choosing death is untenable. It’s against nature. No, death is good only when death decides it’s ready for you.

Or so go the arguments of many who oppose anti-aging technology.

But just because we accept death as good and necessary, that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to say the same about aging. Can we argue for anti-aging technology, for 2,000-year lifespans of perpetual youth, and admit death can be good at the same time? Not only can we; we must.

We can accept death yet also seek to live vastly longer, healthier, and happier. Death is good, but so too is a long, long, long life. We can attain long lives of quality by rejecting extreme “life-saving measures,” embracing euthanasia, and accepting that there are just some things we cannot cure. Death has got to be our closest kept enemy if we want to be ageless. Baffling as it may seem, wanting to live to be a thousand years old is inextricably connected to the ability to decide when it’s time to give up the ghost.

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Vaughan Bell is a clinical and research psychologist based at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London and currently working in Colombia. He’s also working on a book about hallucinations due to be out in 2013.

During surgery, a patient awakes but is unable to move. She sees people dressed in green who talk in strange slowed-down voices. There seem to be tombstones nearby and she assumes she is at her own funeral. Slipping back into oblivion, she awakes later in her hospital bed, troubled by her frightening experiences.

These are genuine memories from a patient who regained awareness during an operation. Her experiences are clearly a distorted version of reality but crucially, none of the medical team was able to tell she was conscious.

This is because medical tests for consciousness are based on your behavior. Essentially, someone talks to you or prods you, and if you don’t respond, you’re assumed to be out cold. Consciousness, however, is not defined as a behavioral response but as a mental experience. If I were completely paralyzed, I could still be conscious and I could still experience the world, even if I was unable to communicate this to anyone else.

This is obviously a pressing medical problem. Doctors don’t want people to regain awareness during surgery because the experiences may be frightening and even traumatic. But on a purely scientific level, these fine-grained alterations in our awareness may help us understand the neural basis of consciousness. If we could understand how these drugs alter the brain and could see when people flicker into consciousness, we could perhaps understand what circuits are important for consciousness itself. Unfortunately, surgical anesthesia is not an ideal way of testing this because several drugs are often used at once and some can affect memory, meaning that the patient could become conscious during surgery but not remember it afterwards, making it difficult to do reliable retrospective comparisons between brain function and awareness.

An attempt to solve this problem was behind an attention-grabbing new study, led by Valdas Noreika from the University of Turku in Finland, that investigated the extent to which common surgical anesthetics can leave us behaviorally unresponsive but subjectively conscious.

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Malcolm MacIver is a bioengineer at Northwestern University who studies the neural and biomechanical basis of animal intelligence. He also consults for sci-fi films (e.g., Tron Legacy), and was the science advisor for the TV show Caprica. 

A few years ago, the world was aflame with fears about the virulent H5N1 avian flu, which infected several hundred people around the world and killed about 300 of them. The virus never acquired the ability to move between people, so it never became the pandemic we feared it might be. But recently virologists have discovered a way to mutate the bird flu virus that makes it more easily transmitted. The results were about to be published in Science and Nature when the U.S. government requested that the scientists and the journal withhold details of the method to make the virus. The journals have agreed to this request. Because the information being withheld is useful to many other scientists, access to the redacted paragraphs will be provided to researchers who pass a vetting process currently being established.

As a scientist, the idea of having any scientific work withheld is one that does not sit well. But then, I work mostly on “basic science,” which is science-speak for “unlikely to matter to anyone in the foreseeable future.” But in one area of work, my lab is developing new propulsion techniques for high-agility underwater robots and sensors that use weak electric fields to “see” in complete darkness or muddy water. This work, like a lot of engineering research, has the potential to be used in machines that harm people. I reassure myself of the morality of my efforts by the length of the chain of causation from my lab to such a device, which doesn’t seem much shorter than the chain for colleagues making better steels or more powerful engines. But having ruminated about my possible involvement with an Empire of Dark Knowledge, here’s my two cents about how to balance the right of free speech and academic freedom with dangerous consequences.

Consider the following thought experiment: suppose there really is a Big Red Button to launch the nukes, one in the U.S., and one in Russia, each currently restricted to their respective heads of government. Launching the nukes will surely result in the devastation of humanity. I’m running for president, and as part of my techno-libertarian ideology, I believe that “technology wants to be free” and I decide to put my money where my slogan is by providing every household in the U.S. with their very own Big Red Button (any resemblance to a real presidential candidate is purely accidental).

If you think this is a good idea, the rest of this post is unlikely to be of interest. But, if you agree that this is an extraordinarily bad idea, then let’s continue.

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Amir D. Aczel has been closely associated with CERN and particle physics for a number of years and often consults on statistical issues relating to physics. He is also the author of 18 popular books on mathematics and science.

By now you’ve heard the news-non-news about the Higgs: there are hints of a Higgs—even “strong hints”—but no cigar (and no Nobel Prizes) yet. So what is the story about the missing particle that everyone is so anxiously waiting for?

Back in the summer, there was a particle physics conference in Mumbai, India, in which results of the search for the Higgs in the high-energy part of the spectrum, from 145 GeV (giga electron volts) to 466 GeV, were reported and nothing was found. At the low end of the energy spectrum, at around 120 GeV (a region of energy that attracted less attention because it had been well within the reach of Fermilab’s now-defunct Tevatron accelerator) there was a slight “bump” in the data, barely breaching the two-sigma (two standard deviations) bounds—which is something that happens by chance alone about once in twenty times (two-sigma bounds go with 95% probability, hence a one-in-twenty event is allowable as a fluke in the data). But since the summer, data has doubled: twice as many collision events had been recorded as had been by the time the Mumbai conference had taken place. And, lo and behold: the bump still remained!

This gave the CERN physicists the idea that perhaps that original bump was not a one-in-twenty fluke that happens by chance after all, but perhaps something far more significant. Two additional factors came into play as well: the new anomaly in the data at roughly 120 GeV was found by both competing groups at CERN: the CMS detector, and the ATLAS detector; and—equally important—when the range of energy is pre-specified, the statistical significance of the finding suddenly jumps from two-sigma to three-and-a-half-sigma!

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Sex, a biological function of reproduction, should be simple. We need to perpetuate the species, we have sex, babies are born, we raise them , they have sex, repeat. Simple, however, is one thing sex most certainly is not. And it’s only getting more complex by the day.

For those who are fans of human exceptionalism, it might be worth considering that the trait which differentiates us from all other animals is that we over-complicate everything. Sex, and its various accoutrements of sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, libido, and even how many partners one may have, contains a multitude.

Recently some psychologists have said that pedophilia is a sexual orientation, the erotic predilection that drives people like former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky to do what he allegedly did. This idea came to twitter and incited a minor firestorm over whether “sexual orientation” should really be applied to pedophilia. Nature editor Noah Gray used the term in a neutral sense, as in, “an attraction to a specific category of individuals”; io9′s Charlie Jane Anders and Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin pointed out the queer community’s long campaign to define sexual orientation only as an ethically acceptable preference for any category of consenting adults. Given that willful troglodytes like Rick Santorum regularly conflate homosexuality with pedophilia and zoophilia, you can see where the frustration around loose use of the term might arise.

Santorum aside, how should we classify pedophilia if not a “sexual orientation?” Why should that term include should one unchosen, inborn form of sexual attraction, but exclude another unchosen, inborn form of sexual attraction?

While we may have ready answers for these questions now, technological and social changes on the horizon will once again challenge our definitions and beliefs about sex. We can imagine a time when we have artificial intelligence (to at least some degree), or super-intelligent animals, or maybe we’ll even become a spacefaring species and encounter other alien intelligences. Without a doubt, people will start discovering that they are primarily attracted to something that isn’t the good ol’ Homo sapiens. Sex and sexuality will increase in complexity by powers of ten. If some person is attracted to a sexy cyborg, or a genetically enhanced dolphin, how will we know if it is ethical to act upon those desires?

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by Daniel Simons, as told to Discover’s Valerie Ross. Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he studies attention, perception, and memory—and how much worse people are with those skills than they think. He is the co-author, with fellow psychologist Chris Chabris, of The Invisible Gorilla.

Late one January night in 1995, Boston police officer Kenny Conley ran right past the site of a brutal beating without doing a thing about it. The case received extensive media coverage because the victim was an undercover police officer and the aggressors were other cops. Conley steadfastly refused to admit having seen anything, and he was tried and convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors, jurors, and judges took Conley’s denial to reflect an unwillingness to testify against other cops, a lie by omission. How could you run right past something as dramatic as a violent attack without seeing it? Chris Chabris and I used this example to open our book because it illustrates two fundamental aspects of how our minds work. First, we experience inattentional blindness, a failure to notice unexpected events that fall outside the focus of our attention. Second, we are largely oblivious to the limits of perception, attention, and awareness; we think that we are far more likely to notice unexpected events than we actually are.

Chabris and I have studied this phenomenon of inattentional blindness for many years. Our best-known study was based on earlier work by Ulric Neisser: We  asked subjects to count how many times three players wearing white shirts passed a basketball while ignoring players wearing black who passed their own ball. We found that about 50 percent of subjects failed to notice when a person in a gorilla suit unexpectedly walked through the scene.

The mismatch between what we see and what we think we see has profound implications for our court system. As our research has shown, we can fail to notice something obvious if we are focused on something else. Yet, most jurors likely hold the mistaken belief that we should see anything that happens right before our eyes. Kenny Conley was convicted on the strength of that intuitive belief. Many others likely languish in jail due to similarly mistaken beliefs about the accuracy of memory. By studying these limits of attention and memory and our beliefs about them, we identify cases in which our beliefs diverge from reality. Ideally, we can then reveal these “invisible gorillas” in the court system.

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by John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison who studies the genetic and environmental aspects of humanity’s 6-million-year evolution. This post ran in slightly different form on his own blog.

Philip Ball writes in The Guardian about another new initiative from NSF to fund “potentially transformative” research. He begins his essay with this:

The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein’s grant applications in 1905. “I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits,” one might say. “I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up,” goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity.

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don’t get funded—that the system is set up to exclude them.

The system is set up to exclude really innovative ideas. But Einstein is a really misleading example. For one thing, Einstein didn’t need much grant funding for his research. Yes, if somebody had given the poor guy a postdoc, he might have had an easier time being productive in physics. But his theoretical work didn’t need expensive lab equipment, RA and postdoc salaries, and institutional overhead to fund secretarial support, building maintenance, and research opportunities for undergraduates.

It is a better question whether we would have wanted Einstein to spend 1905 applying for grants instead of publishing. But even this is terribly misleading. Most scientists who are denied grants are not Einstein. Most ideas that appear to be transformative in the end turn out to be bunk. Someone who compares himself to Einstein is overwhelmingly likely to be a charlatan. There should probably be a “No Einsteins need apply” clause in every federal grant program.

Setting aside the misleading Einstein comparison, our current grant system still has some severe problems. Is it selecting against “transformative” research—the big breakthroughs? I would put the problem differently. “Transformative” is in the eye of the beholder. Our grant system does what it has been designed for: it picks winners and losers, with a minimum of accountability for the people who set funding priorities.

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by Richard Wrangham, as told to Discover’s Veronique Greenwood. Wrangham is the chair of biological anthropology at Harvard University, where he studies the cultural similarities between humans and chimpanzees—including our unique tendencies to form murderous alliances and engage in recreational sexual activity. He is the author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. 

When I was studying the feeding behavior of wild chimpanzees in the early 1970s, I tried surviving on chimpanzee foods for a day at a time. I learned that nothing that chimpanzees ate (at Gombe, in Tanzania, at least) was so poisonous that it would make you ill, but nothing was so palatable that one could easily fill one’s stomach. Having eaten nothing but chimpanzee foods all day, I fell upon regular cooked food in the evenings with relief and delight.

About 25 years later, it occurred to me that my experience in Gombe of being unable to thrive on wild foods likely reflected a general problem for humans that was somehow overcome at some point, possibly through the development of cooking. (Various of our ancestors would have eaten more roots and meat than chimpanzees do, but I had plenty of experience of seeing chimpanzees working very hard to chew their way through tough raw meat—and had even myself tried chewing monkeys killed and discarded by chimpanzees.) In 1999, I published a paper [pdf] with colleagues that argued that the advent of cooking would have marked a turning point in how much energy our ancestors were able to reap from food.

To my surprise, some of the peer commentaries were dismissive of the idea that cooked food provides more energy than raw. The amazing fact is that no experiments had been published directly testing the effects of cooking on net energy gained. It was remarkable, given the abiding interest in calories, that there was a pronounced lack of studies of the effects of cooking on energy gain, even though there were thousands of studies on the effects of cooking on vitamin concentration, and a fair number on its effects on the physical properties of food such as tenderness. But more than a decade later, thanks particularly to the work of Rachel Carmody, a grad student in my lab, we now have a series of experiments that provide a solid base of evidence showing that the skeptics were wrong.

Whether we are talking about plants or meat, eating cooked food provides more calories than eating the same food raw. And that means that the calorie counts we’ve grown so used to consulting are routinely wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Changizi is an evolutionary neurobiologist and director of human cognition at 2AI Labs. He is the author of The Brain from 25000 Feet, The Vision Revolution, and his newest book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.”

I’m king of the world! You are too. We humans—all of us—get props for being the smartest Earthlings. And we’re not merely the smartest. No, we’re the only species worth writing home about; we’re the only truly worth building artificial intelligence to mimic. We’re the smart ones. The rest of the diversity of life may be rich in clever design, like well-engineered tools and gadgets, but they’re not designed to be intelligent. That’s for humans. Rationality and intelligence is something natural selection granted us.

But…what if our Homo sapiens intelligence is radically overrated? What if we’re smarter, but only quantitatively so, not qualitatively? What if many of our Earthly cousins are respectably intelligent after all? More intriguingly, what if there are systematic barriers that lead us to overestimate our true level of intelligence relative to that of others? And, although I won’t get into this here, what are the implications for the rights of chimpanzees, if the chasm between us and them is, instead, a slender fault line? That question has led to a recent movement to ban invasive research on chimpanzees in the U.S., a measure that the EU has already adopted.

Here I’ll discuss just two barriers, a little one and a big one, that conceal how smart we really are—or are not.

Individuality: The Little Bubble

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Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, and the host of the weekly radio show and podcast, “Big Picture Science.”

Back in the early days of “Star Trek,” whenever the Enterprise would chance upon a novel planet, we’d hear a quick analysis from Science Officer Spock. Frequently he would opine, “It’s an M-class planet, Captain.” That was the tip-off that this world was not only suited for life, but undoubtedly housed some intelligent beings eager for a meet-and-greet with the Enterprise crew.

But what is an “M-class planet” (also referred to as “class M”)? Clearly, it referred to a world on which intelligent life could thrive, and made it easy for the crew (and viewers) to see where the episode was headed. A recent paper by Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues has suggested a somewhat similar way to categorize real-world orbs that might be home to cosmic confreres. Rather than giving planets a Spockian alphabetic designation, Schulze-Makuch prefers a less obscure, and more precise, numerical specification: a value between 0 and 1. A world that scores a 1 is identical to Earth in those attributes thought necessary for life. A score of 0 means that it’s a planet only an astronomer could love—likely to be as sterile as an autoclaved mule.

Schulze-Makuch computes this index—which he calls an Earth Similarity Index, or ESI—by considering both the composition of a planet (is it rocky and roughly the size of Earth?) and some crude measures of how salubrious the surface might be (does it have a thick atmosphere, and are temperatures above freezing and below boiling?) He combines parameters that define these characteristics in a series of multiplicative terms that are reminiscent of the well-known Drake equation, used to estimate the number of technologically adept civilizations in the Milky Way.

At present the number of worlds thought to have an ESI of 0.8 or greater—near-cousins of Earth—is only one: Gliese 581g (though that planet’s existence is disputed). But as additional data from NASA’s Kepler mission continue to stream in, we can expect that more such “habitable” planets will turn up. In particular, Kepler scientists reported this week on a newsworthy object called Kepler-22b. This planet is 2.4 times Earth’s diameter and in an orbit around a Sun-like star that places it securely in the habitable zone—where temperatures might be similar to a summer day in San Francisco.

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One of the strangest aspects of our understanding of evolutionary biology is the tendency to conflate a sprawling protean dynamic into a sliver of a phenomenon. Most prominently, evolution is often reduced to a process driven by natural selection, with an emphasis on the natural. When people think of populations evolving they imagine them being buffeted by inclement weather, meteors, or smooth geological shifts. These are all natural, physical phenomena, and they all apply potential selection pressures. But this is not the same as evolution; it’s just one part. A more subtle aspect of evolution is that much of the selection is due to competition between living organisms, not their relationship to exterior environmental conditions.

The question of what drives evolution is a longstanding one. Stephen Jay Gould famously emphasized of the role of randomness, while Richard Dawkins and others prioritize the shaping power of natural selection. More finely still, there is the distinction between those which emphasize competition across the species versus within species. And then there are the physical, non-biological forces.

Evolution as selection. Evolution as drift. Evolution as selection due to competition between individuals of the same species. Evolution as selection due to competition between individuals of different species. And so forth. There are numerous models, theories, and conjectures about what’s the prime engine of evolution. The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin famously observed that in the 20th century population geneticists constructed massively powerful analytic machines, but had very little data which they could throw into those machines. And so it is with theories of evolution. Until now.

Over the past 10 years in the domain of human genetics and evolution there has been a swell of information due to genomics. In many ways humans are now the “trial run” for our understanding of evolutionary process. Using theoretical models and vague inferences from difficult-to-interpret signals, our confidence in the assertions about the importance of any given dynamic have always been shaky at best. But now with genomics, researchers are testing the data against the models.

A recent paper is a case in point of the methodology. Using 500,000 markers, ~50 populations, and ~1,500 people, the authors tested a range of factors against their genomic data. The method is conceptually simple, though the technical details are rather abstruse. The ~1,500 individuals are from all around the globe, so the authors could construct a model where the markers varied as a function of space. As expected, most of the genetic variation across populations was predicted by the variation across space, which correlates with population demographic history; those populations adjacent to each other are likely to have common recent ancestors. But the authors also had some other variables in their system which varied as a function of space in a less gradual fashion: climate, diet, and pathogen loads. The key is to look for those genetic markers and populations where the expectation of differences being driven as a function of geography do not hold. Neighbors should be genetically like, but what if they’re not? Once you find a particular variant you can then see how it varies with the factors listed above.

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