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"...our data suggested that the Japanese population could be best modeled by admixtures of three ancestral components (hereafter K1 to K3). K1 to K3 were the highest in Okinawa, Northeast, and West, respectively (Fig. 1D and table S4). K1 (Okinawa) component maintains a relatively stable fraction of around 12% in Hondo subgroups, except for South (which is a region adjacent to Okinawa), with a higher proportion of 22%. K2 (Northeast) and K3 (West) components showed a cline from West to East."

Xiaoxi Liu et al., Decoding triancestral origins, archaic introgression, and natural selection in the Japanese population by whole-genome sequencing. Sci. Adv. 10, eadi8419 (2024). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adi8419

@science

Science Doesn't Understand How Ice Forms

"What starts off as a simple desire to get a macro shot of a droplet of water freezing quickly leads George to the very edge of scientific knowledge and a shocking fact about most of the water on Earth."

length: 10 minutes 31 seconds

youtu.be/24TB1vPuzIU

@chemistry @science

The art of the bee

"As I set out to write a book on honey bee biology, I kept Humboldt as an aspirational model. Rather than write the typical biology text that reflected an excavation of levels of biological organization like taxonomy, biogeography, physiology, anatomy, etc., I built chapters around themes relating to honey bee impacts, behavior, and ecology."

blog.oup.com/2024/05/the-art-o

@bookstodon @science @biology

"Infant mortality rates have plummeted over the last 50 years.

Globally, they’ve fallen by over two-thirds, from around 10% in 1974 to less than 3% today.

The study’s researchers estimate that 40% of this decline is due to vaccines."

Hannah Ritchie (2024) - “Vaccines have saved 150 million children over the last 50 years” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'ourworldindata.org/vaccines-ch' [Online Resource]

@science

Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos

"Synthetic embryos are clones, too—of the starting cells you grow them from. But they’re made without the need for eggs and can be created in far larger numbers—in theory, by the tens of thousands."

technologyreview.com/2024/05/0

@science

Video of sun’s surface shows solar rain, eruptions and coronal moss

"Scientists say the observations of the sun’s complex surface dynamics could help resolve the question of why the sun’s atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface – a longstanding paradox in solar physics."

theguardian.com/science/articl

@science @astronomy

Space Day Reading List 2024

"Space has fascinated authors, scientists, storytellers, and children alike. From a brief history of the moon to a collection of diverse stories connected to the stars, our Space Day reading list will deepen your love and appreciation of the cosmos."

yalebooks.yale.edu/2024/05/03/

@bookstodon @science

What happens when the permafrost thaws? | The Royal Society

"Around 11% of the Earth's land mass is covered by permafrost. But its delicate balance is being threatened by climate change."

length: 8 minutes 14 seconds

youtu.be/SUxsAZKx-94

@science @climatechange

"Even though it was hoped that machines might overcome human bias, this assumption often fails due to a problematic or theoretically implausible selection of variables that are fed into the model and because of small size, low representativeness, and presence of bias in the training data [5.]."

Suchotzki, K. and Gamer, M. (2024) 'Detecting deception with artificial intelligence: promises and perils,' Trends in Cognitive Sciences [Preprint]. doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.04.

@science @psychology

attribution: Madhav-Malhotra-003, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"While ChatGPT-4 correlates closely with established risk stratification tools regarding mean scores, its inconsistency when presented with identical patient data on separate occasions raises concerns about its reliability."

Heston TF, Lewis LM (2024) ChatGPT provides inconsistent risk-stratification of patients with atraumatic chest pain. PLOS ONE 19(4): e0301854. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0

@science

"They discuss the mathematics of gravity, including the work of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, gravitational waves, black holes, and recent developments in the field."

zencastr.com/z/rRvdO2Xn

@science

How Cambridge bred eugenics

"The term “eugenics” (from the Greek for ‘well born’) was birthed here in Cambridge by Trinity’s own Francis Galton in 1883. Galton was inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin and adapted the idea of natural selection to presuppose that the survival of the fittest had been distorted by social welfare policies."

varsity.co.uk/science/27401

@histodon @histodons

"In most work in the history of science, the approach is to show how a particular event or outcome was the result of various social and intellectual influences. Bayesian history of science, on the other hand, focuses on the lines of evidence relevant to the historical development to see if the direction taken by an individual or group of scientists was consistent or inconsistent with the evidence at hand."

Henry Small; Bayesian history of science: The case of Watson and Crick and the structure of DNA. Quantitative Science Studies 2023; 4 (1): 209–228. doi: doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00233

@science

Early warning sign of extinction?

"Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that’s among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that environmental events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological community is composed, acting as an early warning signal."

news.harvard.edu/gazette/story

@science

"We present a set of large pedigrees, reconstructed using ancient DNA, spanning nine generations and comprising around 300 individuals. We uncover a strict patrilineal kinship system, in which patrilocality and female exogamy were the norm and multiple reproductive partnering and levirate unions were common. The absence of consanguinity indicates that this society maintained a detailed memory of ancestry over generations."

Gnecchi-Ruscone, G.A., Rácz, Z., Samu, L. et al. Network of large pedigrees reveals social practices of Avar communities. Nature (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-073

@science @histodon @histodons

On the trail of deepfakes, Drexel researchers identify ‘fingerprints’ of AI-generated video

"The lab’s tools use a sophisticated machine learning program called a constrained neural network. This algorithm can learn, in ways similar to the human brain, what is “normal” and what is “unusual” at the sub-pixel level of images and videos, rather than searching for specific predetermined identifiers of manipulation from the outset."

scienmag.com/on-the-trail-of-d

@science @engineering

attribution: Madhav-Malhotra-003, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Not a one hopes to :

Forced to eat bat feces, chimps could spread deadly viruses to humans

"Tobacco farming is driving apes to seek unusual food source, brimming with pathogens"

doi.org/10.1126/science.zzx18k

@science

"All tested LLMs performed poorly on medical code querying, often generating codes conveying imprecise or fabricated information. LLMs are not appropriate for use on medical coding tasks without additional research."

Soroush, A. et al. (2024) 'Large language models are poor medical coders — benchmarking of medical code querying,' NEJM AI [Preprint]. doi.org/10.1056/aidbp2300040. @science

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