Ardi: probably not an actual ancestor

Again, find an interesting fossil, and the media is full of hyperbole.

Ardi is probably not a human ancestor. Ardi is probably not a common ancestor of humans and chimps.

The hominin family tree is very bushy. There's lots of "cousins" in it.

It's much more likely that Ardi's species is a close relative of a human ancestor than a direct human ancestor - but Ardi is probably very like a direct human ancestor that lived at the same time (a bit like looking for Cro Magnon and finding Neanderthal - it's really a very good approximation). It's even less likely that Ardi is the most recent common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos. Again, Ardi is probably somewhat like that common ancestor, but to my understanding the branch point is a good deal older than Ardi - the figure I usually see is 6-7 mya, Ardipithecus ramidus is a bit over 4.

You don't need to call your great aunt "grandma" to feel close to her.

The fossil is a very exciting find. We don't need to make it something it's likely not, for it to be fascinating.

(been trying to post this since news first came, but haven't been able to get on blogger for some reason)

Creationism - a party of no Idas?

The media hype about Ida is wearing thin.

But by contrast Dana's post is a delightfully clear summary of the issues. Perhaps the most engaging one I have read.

Light-weight reporting?

This item is a story saying that the Milky Way is bigger across and more dense than previously "thought" (it's not particularly clear on who thought this; I assume that the writer means "widely accepted by astronomers" - but that's not always the case).

The story contains the following: "More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight."

Why not just say mass? Why confuse it with weight, which has a different meaning?
Or if you must explain what mass is, why not take a further sentence to explain it in a way that isn't, well, wrong?

Magnetic cows? Well, maybe not.

Science journalists love a kooky headline.

The latest is magnetic cows. It seems rather blown out of proportion.

Google earth photos indicate a tendency for cows (and some other grazers) to line up north-south. But supposedly you can't tell if they are facing north or facing south or any mixture of the two.

So, here's a conjecture*:
In the morning, cold cows stand side on to the sun (which is in the east), thus exposing a greater area to the sun.
In the late afternoon, cold cows stand side on to the sun (which is in the west).
In both cases, they will face either north or south (and probably won't prefer one much over the other).
In the middle of the day, warm cows in a paddock with little shade might even stand backside toward the sun (thus reducing sun exposure when they're hot)... and thus tending to face either north or south, depending on the hemisphere.
Consequently, there would be some tendency for cows to line up north-south, purely as a way of managing sun exposure in order to be more comfortable.

[*Yes, yes, I know it says in the BBC article Their study ruled out the possibility that the Sun position or wind direction were major influences on the orientation of the cattle. Dr Begall said: "In Africa and South America, the cattle (were) shifted slightly to a more north-eastern-south-western direction."
"But it is known that the Earth's magnetic field is much weaker there," she explained. How does that establish anything? If sun and wind hypotheses have been ruled out, why not explain how? The bit about Africa and South America really doesn't help that much, so if that's what they've got, it's damn weak.]

Edit: Well, reading the physorg link more closely, it looks like they used "shadows" to discount the effect of the sun. It's not clear what precisely they did -- there are a variety of possible conjectures that might involve the sun. I'll have to try to get the PNAS paper. I just went looking for it, but in spite of the fact that the library supposedly has electronic access, the article is not showing up, either in the most recently available issue there, nor in the articles that have immediate access.

Indeed, I can think of several other perfectly simple explanations that I'd want to eliminate before I start hypothesizing magnetic cows.

Does that mean that I assert cows don't have a magnetic sense like some birds?
Not at all. Such a thing would be particularly useful for some migrating animals, say, caribou or wildebeest, so it's certainly not completely out of the realm of possibility. But you have to at least show that it's not some rather obvious and simple thing like sun exposure before you take it at all seriously. And you need a lot more than "they looked at shadows" or "the cattle were at a slightly different angle in Africa" before concluding that you've eliminated alternative explanations.

That cows tend to align north-south is interesting. But magnetic cows is a bit overblown on that basis alone. At best its a plausible conjecture.

Well, I guess we wait and see. If anyone does see the paper, I'd be curious to know just how strong the arguments for the elimination of alternative explanations actually was.

Well duh.

Natural selection may not produce the best organisms

(Note that so far I've only read the "press-release" news item at this link so far, not the original paper yet.)

"While natural selection favors the most fit organisms around, evolutionary biologists have long wondered whether this leads to the best possible organisms in the long run.

A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by Drs. Matthew Cowperthwaite and Lauren Ancel Meyers, has developed a new theory, which suggests that life may not always be optimal."

So... a sequence of local optimizations doesn't necessarily lead to a global optimum?

To anyone who's ever done any optimization, this is completely obvious (it happens all the time!). That's not to say that it's not useful to confirm a pretty well-known fact about optimization in this particular situation - but the way the story is worded, it kind of sounds like they expected different.

I guess this is another of those "try to make every bit of science news sound like a revolutionary breakthrough", as though just plain interesting science is somehow insufficient. If I can get time to read the paper, I will return and write some more.

"Quantum computers will be better than..."

ordinary computers programmed by publicists or reporters.

The story I linked to yesterday on a quantum computing development says this:

If a traditional computer were given the task of looking up a person's phone number in a telephone book, it would look at each name in order until it found the right number.

That's just stupid. The phonebook is in order for a start. So at worst, you'd use a binary search (but there are better things to do than that). That's already "exponentially better" (using their own words).