This week’s biggest stories
It’s been quite an eclectic week in science, but all the richer for it, say I. For starters, the Developing Human Connectome Project released its first set of really rather stunning images. They’re trying to map the connections in the human brain from womb to birth (that’s right: this includes pics of the brains of unborn babies. Amazing.) in the hope that it will help them understand how conditions such as autism, cerebral palsy and attention deficit disorders arise. Meanwhile, at the other end of the age spectrum, it seems possible that a daily dose of cannabis extract could reverse brain’s decline in old age. The results were quite dramatic in mice, so here’s hoping that the human trial planned for later this year will be similarly impressive. Some interesting news from Lee Berger and his team: a new haul of Homo naledi bones has shed some surprising light on human evolution, with dating suggesting that the early human relative lived at same time as Homo sapiens and could even have made stone tools. Also interesting evolutionarily speaking, is a 36m-year-old fossil found in Peru. Mystacodon selenensis is the oldest known cousin of modern baleen whales and researchers say it could be the missing link in whale evolution. And finally we look up from the sea to the stars - specifically to the two enormous lava waves spotted on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. It seems that a hugely powerful active volcano has produced and 8,300 square mile dent in the surface, unleashing the waves.
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Disgusting creature of the week
Love sushi? Well, I’m just going to leave this story about parasites right here ...
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
Zombie ammonite discovery is ‘snapshot of an unusual moment in deep time’ | Lost Worlds Revisited
... looking down, you see something is floating along the seabed. It moves slowly on an unseen current, leaving a trail through the sand like a finger drawing a line on a beach. You realise it’s a shelled animal – an ammonite in fact. This extinct group of cephalopods was common in these warm Jurassic seas. But there is something wrong with this one. No lively little tentacle arms reach out from the opening in the end of the coiled shell. It is dead; it drifts on the ocean’s whim. This is the scenario for a remarkable fossil ammonite trace fossil and body fossil described this week by an international team of researchers, led by palaeontologist Dean Lomax from the University of Manchester. Both the animal itself - a species called Subplanites rueppellianus - and its last movements are preserved in the rock together.
From protoscience to proper science: The path ahead for reforming psychology | Head quarters
As time goes by, I find myself having dwindling respect for my senior colleagues in psychology. So much has been said now about the reproducibility crisis, both in psychology and science in general, that none can honestly profess ignorance. And yet so many remain silent. I see these people much as I see my former self: experts at winning, lawyering their way through their academic careers; otherwise intelligent people cranking the handle in a broken machine. They don’t care if the system is broken because it seems to work for them. They don’t see how psychology is failing its public mission because their careers succeeded.
How Chilean arsenic eaters vindicated a classic work of crime fiction | Notes & Theories
A little while ago I wrote about the poisoning possibilities and probabilities in Dorothy L Sayers’ 1930 novel Strong Poison. The premise of the murder mystery is that two people sit down to eat an arsenic-laced dinner but only one of the pair dies. I argued that, according to 1930s scientific understanding, Sayers was completely right. But modern scientific theories of arsenic poisoning would have meant that either both or neither died from their arsenic exposure in the tainted meal.
I was wrong ...
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Alex Bellos’s Monday puzzle
This week Alex has a highly-addictive and satisfying sudoku-style puzzle for you – time to take a punt on the ponies with the paddocks puzzle! Did you fall at the first fence or did you solve all three?
Visit Alex Bellos’s Adventures in Numberland blog for more marvellous maths
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Eye on science – this week’s top images
I love Ghostbusters, and I love dinosaurs, so literally nothing has made me happier this week than this new fossil find, which glories in the name Zuul crurivastator (or “Zuul, destroyer of shins” for those of us whose Latin lets us down occasionally). Have a look at these great pictures, which show some of the extraordinary detail preserved in this rare and exciting fossil.
