This week’s biggest stories
It’s a sensational claim, but a group of researchers believe that they may have found evidence that will rewrite the history of human arrival in North America. The scientists believe that smashed mastodon bones found under a freeway construction site in California indicate that humans arrived over 100,000 years earlier than previously thought. To say that other experts are sceptical, however, would be to understate the situation somewhat. “They are going to face a shitstorm,” said one scientist who preferred not to be named. For my (admittedly limited) money, however, the two biggest stories this week were advances in cancer screening and care for premature babies. The first is a ‘liquid biopsy’, a DNA-based test that in a major lung cancer trial was able to spot cancer recurrence up to a year before conventional scans. But to me, the most impressive breakthrough this week is the artificial womb intended to help premature babies. It has been shown to keep that premature lambs alive and growing for four weeks. Doctors are hoping that this could act as a bridge between the womb and the outside world for the the most fragile newborns – those born between 23 and 28 weeks’ gestation.
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Slightly gross thing of the week
It has huge pincers resembling can-openers, a hinged two-piece shell and more than 50 pairs of legs and may have crushed prey using its leg spines. Introducing Tokummia katalepsis, a 507m-year-old fossil that offers insights into the early body plan of mandibulates.
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
Why are we reluctant to trust robots? | Head quarters
There are good arguments for why some ethical decisions ought to be left to computers—unlike human beings, machines are not led astray by cognitive biases, do not experience fatigue, and do not feel hatred toward an enemy. An ethical AI could, in principle, be programmed to reflect the values and rules of an ideal moral agent. And free from human limitations, such machines could even be said to make better moral decisions than us. Yet the notion that a machine might be given free reign over moral decision-making seems distressing to many—so much so that, for some, their use poses a fundamental threat to human dignity. Why are we so reluctant to trust machines when it comes to making moral decisions? Psychology research provides a clue: we seem to have a fundamental mistrust of individuals who make moral decisions by calculating costs and benefits – like computers do.
Dinosaur click-bait: is getting your attention more important than getting it right? | Lost Worlds Revisited
‘The public is mostly made of people who just don’t care. The media know they don’t understand the science and they don’t want to learn about it either.’ An established scientist bitterly confesses to me his experiences with public outreach, via news media. He is red-faced and his voice is getting louder. ‘I know you have good intentions, but when you’ve been in the field for as long as me you’ll realise that we can’t win – the media will always take your words and turn them against you. All they care about is public entertainment. Accuracy? Forget it!’
Wild stories: why do we find feral children so fascinating? | The Past and the Curious
Across all cultures there are tales of semi-humans living beyond the reach of safety and society. The Yeren in central China, the Yeti, Bigfoot, ogres, giants, fairies, green men, sirens and man-monsters. Then there are the half-man half-animals – the centaur, the mermaid, people with wings, tails, hooves and horns who inhabit our world but don’t necessarily play to our rules. And there are the myriad but strikingly similar ways of explaining disorder, dysfunction and disability in children – either a healthy child has been cursed or possessed in some way, or the child itself has been swapped for a wicked and dangerous Changeling. From the Philippines to Ireland to Nigeria, changeling stories make sense of infant abnormality and death. Either way, the child’s difference is because they are not quite properly, fully, human any more.
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Alex Bellos’s Monday puzzle
Alex had three puzzles for you to wrestle with this week. Did you solve them, or did you end up in a pickle?
Visit Alex Bellos’s Adventures in Numberland blog for more marvellous maths
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Science Weekly podcast
How do we define human intelligence? How close are we to reaching it with machines? And what happens when these machines start taking our jobs? To discuss all this and more, in this week’s podcast Ian Sample is joined by Anil Seth, professor of cognitive science and computational neuroscience from the University of Sussex, Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial College London, Anders Sandberg, senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, and Alan Winfield, professor of robot ethics at UWE, Bristol.
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Eye on science – this week’s top video
Magical, gorgeous, wondrous: useless words in comparison to how utterly lovely this is.
