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Great new fossil, but the missing link it aint Big news? The Telegraph: Missing link between man and apes found. The Sunday Times: Fossil from cave is a ‘missing link’ The cliche is misleading. The new fossil is a very complete and therefore very interesting specimen from a poorly understood period. If it proves to have features of both Australopithecus […]

  For those who think truth is the most beautiful thing of all, enjoy this gorgeous short film by Cristobal Vila about the mathematics of biological shapes.    

How fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916 From Maggie Koerth Baker at boingboing.net, a fascinating glimpse of  how fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916. Pity she spoils it by an attempt at finding the cloud in the silver lining at the end. Centralized electricity changed energy production from a […]

Exaggerations run rife while the reality is strangely absent from recent reporting on melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Breathless reporting last week of a new estimate of Greenland’s melting ice. It’s higher than it was before: “The changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass […]

Politicising, propagandising and polarising the climate issue A fine analysis by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the way that climate science has been distorted by environmentalism. They write: “The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in […]

Chiffchaffs are the first summer visitors to arrive, around here at least, and their distinctive song is hard to miss, and one day near the vernal equinox suddenly there they are. I have written down the date in my diary most years since 1990. Last night I went back through the diaries and collated the data. It’s […]

Genetic diversity within the Neanderthals is a more likely explanation Woke to find the newspapers all claiming a new “species” of human being discovered in central Asia. Here’s the Guardian: “The finding suggests an undocumented human species lived alongside Neanderthals and early modern humans in parts of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago.” Leave aside the fact that […]

A new study reiterates a long-standing evolutionary conundrum So Man flu is not a myth, because testosterone inhibits the immune response. This has been known to biologists for ages. In The Red Queen, I challenged readers to explain why bodies should be designed that way: why set up an immune system in such a way that it […]

Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. Looking past the title (“Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income”), an interesting NBER paper from Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin shows that in spite of an 80% increase in population between 1970 and 2006, poverty rates have fallen by the […]

Very nice piece of rational optimism