**Drowning in junk science: Is there any hope at all?**
🔗 https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/17/drowning-in-junk-science-is-there-any-hope-at-all/.
🌍 **Scientists find evidence that overturns theories of the origin of water on Earth**
"_University of Oxford researchers have helped overturn the popular theory that water on Earth originated from asteroids bombarding its surface. Instead, the material which built our planet was far richer in hydrogen than previously thought._"
🔗 https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-04-16-scientists-find-evidence-overturns-theories-origin-water-earth.
🔴 🛰️ **Garbage on the Final Frontier**
“_We’ve trashed Earth, so let’s trash space… Oh, wait, we already have!_”
🔗 https://daily.jstor.org/garbage-on-the-final-frontier/.
#Science #Technology #Tech #Space #Pollution #Garbage #Rubbish @science
🔴 📖 **Skepticism about the science establishment, then and now**
“_In recent years, so many nonfiction books seem to be written to the airport-book template: 10 chapters, each starting with some personal anecdote, tons of repetition, almost nothing there. Even books with high-quality information provide very little of it, perhaps because the expectation is that no one will read these books from beginning to end anyway._”
🔗 https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/04/11/51458/.
#Read #Science #Literature #Nonfiction #Book #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon @science
🔴 **The Risky Business of Geoengineering**
Bloomberg Originals
“_Is geoengineering a dangerous notion whose time has come? Scientists and entrepreneurs are testing radical ideas like solar radiation management and ocean fertilization - and finding funding for it._”
#Video length: twenty-four minutes and one second.
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnXHJD0UI5U
#Risk #Geoengineering #Science #Technology #Tech #Climate #ClimateChange #Environment @climatechange @science
🔴 **Ultra-processed foods are making us old beyond our years**
“_It found a significant association between increased UPF consumption and accelerated biological ageing. For every 10% increase in UPF consumption, the gap between biological and chronological age widened by approximately 2.4 months._”
🔗 https://blog.oup.com/2025/04/ultra-processed-foods-are-making-us-old-beyond-our-years/.
🔴 **Scientists identify most bitter substance ever known**
“_Bitter bracket mushroom compounds found to be most bitter substances known to man_”
🔗 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/bitter-most-substance-ever-known-b2729280.html.
🔴 📖 ** Interview: Laurence D. Hurst On The Evolution Of Imperfection**
🔗 https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/laurence-d-hurst-on-the-evolution-of-imperfection.
#Nonfiction #Essay #Biology #Science #Book #Ebook #Bookstodon @bookstodon @science @biology
🔴 💻 **Why an overreliance on AI-driven modelling is bad for science**
“_Without clear protocols to catch errors, artificial intelligence’s growing role in science could do more harm than good._”
🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01067-2.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Tech #Technology #Science @science
🔴 🧬 **Genetic data is an another asset to be exploited – beware who has yours**
John Naughton
“_When 23andMe’s data assets come up for sale the queue of likely buyers is going to be long, with health insurance and pharmaceutical giants at the front, followed by hedge-funds, private equity vultures and advertisers, with marketers bringing up the rear._”
🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/05/genetic-data-breach-23andme-bankruptcy
🔴 **Long-term hunter-gatherer continuity in the Rhine-Meuse region was disrupted by local formation of expansive Bell Beaker groups**
“_We document an exception to this pattern in the wider Rhine-Meuse area in communities in the wetlands, riverine areas, and coastal areas of the western and central Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany, where we assembled genome-wide data for 109 people 8500-1700 BCE. Here, a distinctive population with high hunter-gatherer ancestry (∼50%) persisted up to three thousand years later than in continental European regions, reflecting limited incorporation of females of Early European Farmer ancestry into local communities._”
Olalde, I. et al. (2025) 'Long-term hunter-gatherer continuity in the Rhine-Meuse region was disrupted by local formation of expansive Bell Beaker groups,' bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) [Preprint]. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.24.644985.
#Preprint #Science #Biology #Genetics #Archaeology #Archaeodons #Anthropology #Europe @archaeodons
🔴 **The Persistence of Tychonism**
“_In conclusion I will suggest that the historical longevity of
Tychonism has been considerably underestimated and also that Tychonists were not generally restrained from public endorsement of heliocentrism by religious pressure. On the contrary, I suggest that the continued acceptance of Tychonism was conditioned by its congruence with scientists’ religious beliefs._”
Barker, P. (2025) ‘The Persistence of Tychonism’, in Philosophical Readings. Zenodo, pp. 11–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15035063.
#OpenAccess #OA #DOI #History #HistSci #EarlyModern #Science #Religion #Academia #Academic @science @religion
🔴 **Born On This Day**
Mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace was born in Beaumont-en-Auge, Normandy, France on this day in 1749.
“_He proved the stability of the solar system. In analysis Laplace introduced the potential function and Laplace coefficients. He also put the theory of mathematical probability on a sound footing.”
🔗 https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Laplace/.
#BornOnThisDay #BOTD #History #Maths #Mathematics #Math #Science #HistSci #Astronomy #Physics @science
🔴 🌍 **Global gridded population datasets systematically underrepresent rural population**
_“We find large discrepancies between the examined datasets, and, without exception, significant negative biases of −53%, −65%, −67%, −68%, and −84% for WorldPop, GWP, GRUMP, LandScan, and GHS-POP, respectively. This implies that rural population is, even in the most accurate dataset, underestimated by half compared to reported figures.”_
Láng-Ritter, J., Keskinen, M. & Tenkanen, H. Global gridded population datasets systematically underrepresent rural population. Nat Commun 16, 2170 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56906-7.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #Geography #Science #Data #Population #Environment #Academia #Academics @geography @science
🔴 **A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans**
_“Using cobraa, we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%.”_
Cousins, T., Scally, A. & Durbin, R. A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans. Nat Genet (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-025-02117-1.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #Science #Genetics #Genome #Academia #Academics @science
🔴 **Unearthed notebooks shed light on Victorian genius who inspired Einstein**
_“Michael Faraday’s illustrated notes that show how radical scientist began his theories at London’s Royal Institution to go online”_
#Science #News #Physics #Chemistry #Einstein #RoyalInstitution #Online @science @physics @chemistry
🔴 **We calculated pi with colliding blocks**
Stand-up Maths
#Video length: twenty-three minutes and thirty-six seconds.
🔴 **Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossible**
Adam Rutherford
_“You will never ever see a living woolly mammoth. While this is an obvious truth to most geneticists, zoologists and mammoth experts, the endless promises that you might get to meet an extant version of this very-much extinct elephantid apparently necessitate me typing it.”_
Not a bot, just a chap in his fifties who occasionally reads things.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, books, maps, charts and graphs related. Some toots containing videos may also find their way into the timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Finis