Новости за 13.05.2017

Ethan Siegel, SWaB!
All scientific ideas, no matter how accepted or widespread they are, are susceptible to being overturned. For all the successes any idea may have, it only takes one experiment or observation to falsify it, invalidate it, or necessitate that it be revised. Beyond that, every scientific idea or model has a limitation to its range of validity: Newtonian mechanics breaks down close to the speed of light; General Relativity breaks down at singularities; evolution breaks down when you reach the origin of life. Читать дальше...

John Timmer, AT

Scientists are announcing a rare look into the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet more than 400 light years away. The planet is roughly Neptune-sized and orbits close to its host star. And now we know its atmosphere contains significant amounts of water.Significant amounts, but not quite as much as we might expect, based on what we've seen in our own Solar System. And that suggests that most of the planet's atmosphere is the original hydrogen-helium mixture that it formed with.

John Collins, Science 2.0

The National Commission on Forensic Science was dissolved by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a decisive action that brought an end to a highly decorated body of professionals, but one that was frequently stymied by legal gamesmanship and discord. The commission, a precipitant of the Obama administration's criminal justice reform efforts, was curiously loaded with trial attorneys, law professors, and other academicians but relatively few forensic scientists.

Corey Powell, Discover

Readers of this blog know that I'm a big fan of Quora, because it lets non-experts raise the kinds of speculative questions that don't normally come up in formal scientific discussions. One frequent theme that comes up is the issue of what we would do if we found intelligent life on a planet around another star. A recent posting in particular caught my eye: What would we do if we found an Earthlike planet with intelligent life that is 500 years behind us in technology and advancements?Well... Читать дальше...

Alex Berezow, ACSH
When a company fires several board members, things are not going well. That's what Whole Foods just did.According to the Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods stores are struggling. In the 2nd quarter of 2017, sales fell by nearly 3%. This isn't a one-off result. Revenue growth has been trending downward since 2012. Then, in the 4th quarter of 2015, revenue growth hit negative territory, meaning that sales actually began to shrink. Since 2013, Whole Foods's stock price has fallen by almost 50%.

David Cyranoski, Nature

Those who submit faked clinical trial data might now go to jail and in extreme circumstances, be executed under a new interpretation of China's criminal code, announced last month.The policy shift is one of a handful of measures that China is implementing both to speed up its notoriously slow drug-approval process and to keep dangerous and ineffective drugs off the market. This move is the strongest signal yet, to all the drug developers, clinical-trial managers and principal investigators and physicians... Читать дальше...

Joanna Klein, NYT

By shoving her nose against a fire hydrant, your terrier may be able to decipher which pit bull in the neighborhood marked it before her. But that doesn't necessarily mean she's a superior sniffer.Still, it's conventional wisdom that humans' sense of smell is worse than that of other animals dogs, mice, moles and even sharks.This belief isn't based on empirical evidence, but on a 19th-century hypothesis about free will that has more in common with phrenology than with our modern understanding of how brains work.