This week’s biggest stories
I really hate running, but for various, doubtless misguided reasons, I’m currently training to run a 10K charity race. Needless to say it’s awful: I’m slow and overweight; during training I look like a tomato on the verge of explosion and would do almost anything to make it all stop. However, one thing I do enjoy is a good swear. So imagine my joy at finding that introducing a bit of swearing into my training could actually help boost my performance. Researchers at Keele have confirmed that in cycling and hand-grip tests, people who repeated a swear word performed more strongly than those repeating a neutral word. Now to find a child-free park to run/swear in. Sadly the “exercise pill” that scientists believe could deliver the benefits of fitness in tablet form isn’t going to be ready in time for my race, so running and swearing it is for now. Some of you have been swearing for very different reasons: “Dark Knight employees” are on the rise, a new study claims. These workplace vigilantes are keen to report colleagues for minor misdemeanours – and while a minor irritant for some, they can be a costly issue for organisations. And finally, climate sceptics are more than a minor irritant, what with the fate of the planet being at stake, but at least one argument has now been laid to rest. An apparent ‘hiatus’ in global warming from 1998 to 2012 has repeatedly been cited by climate sceptics as a sign that the climate is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought – or even that global warming has stopped. A new study rejects this view, and suggests that there was ultimately no meaningful deviation between what climate models predicted and what was observed. The real take-home is that the science needs to be better communicated – and that it’s time to stop debating and start acting.
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Exciting creature of the week
One of our bloggers, palaeontologist Elsa Panciroli, was an author on a paper out this week announcing the discovery of Wareolestes rex – a new fossil mammal whose teeth provide the earliest evidence for milk-producing mammals in Scotland. As ever, Elsa’s account of her work is fascinating and packed full of further reading for the palaeo-fiends among you.
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
In the field with Iraq’s archaeologists of the future | The Past and the Curious
One of the two field projects set up in Iraq is Qalatga Darband, which roughly translates from Kurdish as ‘castle of the mountain pass’. The site guards a strategic gap in a chain of low mountains where they’re cut by the channel of the Lower Zab river. This is where Halkawt and I are sitting, contemplating a massive dry-stone Parthian city wall dating to the second or third century BC. It’s an impressive structure, now mostly buried under earth and grass. It stretches from halfway up the mountainside to the north, across the modern road and the cultivation, down to where Lake Dokan (created by the Dokan Dam in the 1950s) has washed away its southern end, along with a good chunk of the ancient site. Every twenty metres or so the wall is interrupted by a square projecting tower and it’s one of these I’m currently excavating. The tower has grown a new crop of grass on top since I uncovered it last autumn and is now uncomfortably full of spring snakes.
Finding zombies, ghosts and Elvis in the fossil record | Lost Worlds Revisited
There’s more to palaeontology than the literal description of fossil material – and that’s where the really interesting narratives around changing environment, evolution and relationships between populations, species and ecosystems paint an ever-changing picture of the history of life. Occasionally, a fossil or living organism will throw a spanner in these narratives, ranging from fossils which appear where all evidence up until that point says that they shouldn’t, through to living organisms from lineages thought to have long gone extinct. This is where the dead rising to live again come in in ghost, zombie and Elvis taxa.
The colour of numbers: visions of our mathematical universe | Alex Bellos’s Adventures in Numberland
One of the great perks of my job - writing about maths – is that I am always learning new maths. And I learned more in my latest book than probably in any other project I have been involved in. This statement might sound odd, since Visions of Numberland is a colouring book. Yet the aim that my co-author Edmund Harriss and I shared was more than just to serve up pretty pictures. It was to curate a gallery of beautiful images that would introduce readers to deep mathematical ideas. It meant that we delved through dozens of fields to find images that were both stunning to look at, and interesting to think about. The concepts that inspired the images come from number theory, topology, projective geometry, four-dimensional geometry, statistical physics, combinatorics, fractals, computer science, calculus, group theory, modular forms, complex arithmetic, Lie groups, tessellations, dynamical systems and many more mathematical fields.
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Science Weekly podcast
This week’s podcast is a little different: following our documentary film Erica: Man Made, we gave viewers a chance to pose their own questions to Erica, the world’s “most beautiful and intelligent” android. In this episode, we hear her (or her creator’s) thoughts on happiness, humanity, and the future of android-human relationships.
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Eye on science – this week’s top video
This week, the man who claimed to be the world’s oldest human died in Indonesia aged 146. But is it really possible to live that long? Scientists doubt that extreme natural longevity is feasible. But if lifespan is ruled by a genetic ‘clock’, that view could change ...
