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🔴 Leveraging ancient DNA to uncover signals of natural selection in Europe lost due to admixture or drift

"Our findings suggest that selective events in European prehistory, including from the onset of animal domestication, have been obscured by neutral processes like genetic drift and demographic shifts such as admixture."

Pandey, D., Harris, M., Garud, N.R. et al. Leveraging ancient DNA to uncover signals of natural selection in Europe lost due to admixture or drift. Nat Commun 15, 9772 (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-538.

@science @biology

🔴 Magnetic North Pole moves closer to Russia in way never seen before by scientists

Jabed Ahmed

"The magnetic pole moved along the northern Canadian shore for centuries, Dr Brown said. It drifted into the Arctic Ocean in the 1990s, and after that, it accelerated and headed towards Siberia."

🔗 independent.co.uk/news/science

@geology @science

🔴 🎥 Bredt’s Rule was broken

"What's more fun than proving a 100 year old chemistry principle wrong?"

length: fifty nine seconds.

🔗 youtube.com/watch?v=7xFGERo_2j

@chemistry @science

🔴 🌡️ 🎥 How heatwaves impact our lives

"The thermal load is particularly high in cities. The record summer of 2003 in Paris, for example, led to apocalyptic conditions. According to climate experts, temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius cannot be ruled out for the French capital in the future."

length: forty two minutes and twenty nine seconds.

🔗 youtu.be/JKEJ9p9YVY8

@science @climatechange

🔴 🌍 Earth is becoming ‘increasingly uninhabitable,’ scientists warn

"This could be Earth’s hottest year and increasingly warm and humid weather is making more of the planet unlivable, with 600 million people living outside habitable climatic conditions. With each degree of warming in the future, an estimated 10 percent of Earth’s population will join them. Those in the Global South are more exposed than others."

🔗 independent.co.uk/climate-chan

@science @climatechange

🔴 The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus

"For two millennia, mobile pastoralism dominated lifeways on the great expanses of steppe extending northwards from the Caucasus mountains. Fuelled by technological innovations such as wheeled transport and dairy pastoralism, as well as emerging horse husbandry, steppe populations from the Caucasus–Steppe interface exerted a large influence on the Eurasian landmass, leaving far-flung genetic and cultural footprints that remain even today. Understanding the dynamic and complex population interactions that shaped the region’s most influential BA groups, such as the Maykop, Yamnaya and Kura–Araxes, is key to reconstructing the population history of both Europe and Asia."

Ghalichi, A., Reinhold, S., Rohrlach, A.B. et al. The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus. Nature (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-081.

@archaeodons @science

🔴 Is It AI? Peer Reviewers Struggle to Distinguish LLMs From Human Writing

"The study suggests that as LLMs advance, peer reviewers will have a diminishing capability to detect content written by AI. It also revealed the negative bias held by reviewers toward machine-generated content."

🔗 medicine.yale.edu/news-article

@ai @science

🔴 Mortality burden attributed to anthropogenic warming during Europe’s 2022 record-breaking summer

"Our findings highlight that human-induced climate change poses a risk beyond vulnerable populations, extreme temperatures, heatwaves, or Southern regions characterized by high summer temperatures. However, we also find that population groups more susceptible to heat, i.e. women and the elderly, are more adversely affected by anthropogenic warming than the general population."

Beck, T.M., Schumacher, D.L., Achebak, H. et al. Mortality burden attributed to anthropogenic warming during Europe’s 2022 record-breaking summer. npj Clim Atmos Sci 7, 245 (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41612-024-007

@science @climatechange

🔴 🇳🇴 Corroborating written history with ancient DNA: The case of the Well-man described in an Old Norse saga

"Here we apply palaeogenomic analysis to human remains excavated from a medieval well at the ruins of Sverresborg Castle in central Norway. In Sverris Saga, the Old Norse saga of King Sverre Sigurdsson, one passage details a 1197-CE raid on the castle and mentions a dead man thrown into the well. Radiocarbon dating supports that these are that individual’s remains."

Ellegaard, M.R. et al. (2024) 'Corroborating written history with ancient DNA: The case of the Well-man described in an Old Norse saga,' iScience, p. 111076. doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.11.

@science @anthropology @archaeodons

🔴 Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia

"The thesis of this paper is that such paraphrases of Newton’s First Law are all incorrect, because the law, as Newton stated it, is not just a description of the motion of force-free bodies. It is in fact a stronger, more general principle, constraining the motion of all bodies."

Hoek, D. (2023) ‘Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia’, Philosophy of Science, 90(1), pp. 60–76. doi: doi.org/10.1017/psa.2021.38.

@philosophy @science

🔴 Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss

"In one conversation, HDF’s organiser was recorded discussing “remigration” – a euphemism for the mass removal of ethnic minorities – saying: “You’ve just got to pay people to go home.” The term has become a buzzword on the hard right, with Donald Trump using it in September to describe his own policies in a post on X that has been viewed 56m times."

🔗 theguardian.com/world/2024/oct

@science @biology

🔴 Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input

"Our results indicate that the left temporal cortex performs a rough sketch of syntactic structure starting as early as 125 ms after stimulus onset. This is faster than most estimates of even single-word visual perception (14), suggesting that the speed arises specifically from the parallel availability of the full sentence, with each word supporting the recognition of the other ones. This allows for rapid matching of the stimulus to top-down knowledge of sentence structure. Just like you can recognize a cup very quickly if you lay your full hand on it, feeling many parts simultaneously (15), you are able to understand a sentence very quickly if you lay your eyes on the full sentence all at once."

Jacqueline Fallon, Liina Pylkkänen, Language at a glance: How our brains grasp linguistic structure from parallel visual input. Sci. Adv. 10, eadr9951 (2024). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr9951

@science @psychology

🔴 🧠 The hidden role of air pollution in cognitive decline

"PM2.5 are fine airborne particles small enough to enter the lungs and even the bloodstream, posing significant health risks. Long-term exposure has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, resulting in air pollution being listed as one of the modifiable risk factors in the recent report of the Lancet commision on dementia prevention, intervention and care. However, the mechanisms through which PM2.5 affects cognitive function remain poorly understood."

🔗 uni.lu/lcsb-en/news/hidden-rol

@science

🔴 How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero

"To use zero in calculations, mathematicians had to establish all sorts of rules. You can’t divide any other number by zero, but you can divide zero by any other number. A nonzero number to the power of zero gives you one; zero to a power of a nonzero number gives you zero, but zero to a power of zero gives you a calculator error — and a headache."

🔗 quantamagazine.org/how-the-hum

@science @biology

🔴 🇮🇪 Three letters, one number, a knife and a stone bridge: how a graffitied equation changed mathematical history

"Yet Hamilton’s revelation changed the way mathematicians represent information. And this, in turn, made myriad technical applications simpler – from calculating forces when designing a bridge, an MRI machine or a wind turbine, to programming search engines and orienting a rover on Mars."

🔗 theconversation.com/three-lett

@science

🔴 X-ray evidence of Black maths scholar portrait reveals snubbed genius

"It has long been mistaken for a satirical painting that mocks its Black subject for having the temerity to pretend to be a Georgian gentleman and scholar. But it is now thought to have been commissioned in 1760 by Williams himself to immortalise his brilliance as a trailblazing astronomer who, the clues in the painting suggest, successfully managed to compute and witness the trajectory of Halley’s comet over Jamaica in 1759."

🔗 theguardian.com/artanddesign/2

@histodon @histodons @science

🔴 🎥 Every Other Video About Color is Wrong

"This video is going to explore deeper than all those other videos. It’s going to explain that color is the result of light interacting with electrons … most of the time."

length: twenty one minutes and thirty three seconds.

🔗 youtu.be/6xgBSQwqAuE

@science @chemistry

🔴 🇯🇵 Genetic analysis of a Yayoi individual from the Doigahama site provides insights into the origins of immigrants to the Japanese Archipelago

"One of the important findings of this study is that, in all analyses, among modern populations, the Korean population exhibited more genetic similarity to the Doigahama Yayoi individual than any other East Asian populations, except for the Japanese. This suggests that immigrants to the Japanese Archipelago during the Yayoi period primarily originated from the Korean Peninsula."

Kim, J., Mizuno, F., Matsushita, T. et al. Genetic analysis of a Yayoi individual from the Doigahama site provides insights into the origins of immigrants to the Japanese Archipelago. J Hum Genet (2024). nature.com/articles/s10038-024.

@science @biology @anthropology

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