Report finds that a disturbing number of scientists may not be incompetent

Scientists who put faith in technology less likely to take climate action

‘Techno-optimism’ may lead to reliance on unproven solutions at expense of societal changes needed

Scientists who believe technology will largely solve the problems caused by the climate crisis are less likely to engage in civic action on the issue, according to a study.

The report from the London School of Economics found they are 23% less likely to sign petitions or take part in protests than peers who doubt that technology is the answer. They are also 18% less likely to make high-impact lifestyle changes, from reducing flights to changing to a vegan or vegetarian diet...

The study surveyed more than 9,000 scientists across 115 countries. Overall 27% said they agreed with the statement “technology will largely solve the problems caused by climate change” and 44% disagreed (29% neither agreed nor disagreed).


“Listen, Stavrogin. To level the mountains is a fine idea, not an absurd one. I am for Shigalov. Down with culture. We’ve had enough science! Without science we have material enough to go on for a thousand years, but one must have discipline. The one thing wanting in the world is discipline. The thirst for culture is an aristocratic thirst. The moment you have family ties or love you get the desire for property. We will destroy that desire; we’ll make use of drunkenness, slander, spying; we’ll make use of incredible corruption; we’ll stifle every genius in its infancy. We’ll reduce all to a common denominator! Complete equality!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Demons (1871-72)

Science By Headline

The Earth is splitting apart - and scientists are seeing something happen for the first time

Scientists are always discovering something new on Earth - and this time it is the birth of new oceanic crust.

The team say they have historic evidence of this process where the seafloor spreads apart, leading to a release of magma from inside Earth that rises to the surface, it is after this and when it gets in contact with cool seawater that it then solidifies and turns into new ocean crust.

This research, published in Nature, was carried out by French scientists at an autonomous observatory near Amsterdam Island, in the southern Indian Ocean on the edge of the Australian and Antarctic plates and the the Southeast Indian Ridge is nearby too.

Alternatively we have the heading and part of the abstract from the Nature paper on which this story is based.

Anatomy of a seafloor spreading event captured by in situ seismogeodesy

Over geological time, the growth of the ocean floor involves magmatic and tectonic extension1 at mid-ocean ridges (MORs). Because seismogeodetic monitoring of these submarine plate boundaries remains challenging2,3,4,5,6,7, little is known about how these systems operate on yearly timescales. Here we report the first, to our knowledge, in situ observation of a rifting event at a MOR segment that combines hydroacoustic, direct-path ranging and bottom-pressure measurements, with repeated seafloor mapping.

The Atomic Trampoline

 

Scientist says...

 

Because it cannot lie

"If one destroyed in museums and libraries, if one hurled down on the flagstones before the churches all the works and all the monuments of art that religions have inspired, what would remain of the great dreams of humanity? To give to men that portion of hope and illusion without which they cannot live, such is the reason for the existence of gods, heroes, and poets. During fifty years science appeared to undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts hungering after the ideal, because it does not dare to be lavish enough of promises, because it cannot lie."

Gustave Le Bon quoting Daniel Lesueur (Jeanne Lapauze) in -

The Crowd; study of the popular mind (1895)


In which case, science must be made to lie in the interests of ruling elites. Ruling elites have no use for science as a secure knowledge culture which cannot lie, especially as the cold blue light of reason could be turned on their lies. 

Science wasn’t lavish enough of promises and has become less lavish in recent decades, but its great fault is the same as it was in Le Bon's day - as a knowledge culture it cannot lie. The favoured approach to fixing this fault has long been familiar to us.

When Movies Get Science Wrong

 

Skeptical of medical science reports?

A piece by Carlton Gyles from a link passed on by dearieme in the comments to this recent post about AI being used to churn out dodgy scientific research. Published in 2015, quite short and well worth reading.


Skeptical of medical science reports?

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” (1).

More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness” (2).

Swipe

Europe launches drive for scientists in swipe at Trump’s funding freeze

The European Union launched a drive on Monday to attract scientists and researchers to Europe with offers of grants and new policy plans, after the Trump administration froze U.S. government funding linked to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“A few years ago, no one would have imagined that one of the biggest democracies in the world would cancel research programs under the pretext that the word diversity was in this program," French President Emmanuel Macron said at the “Choose Europe for Science” event in Paris...

Taking the same stage at the Sorbonne University, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU’s executive branch would set up a “super grant” program aimed at offering “a longer-term perspective to the very best” in the field.


Oh dear, the reverse brain drain seems to be accelerating. 

Interesting though, because it feels like political anti-Trump sentiment rather than a coolly calculated attempt to attract competent scientists from the US. 

European elites promote themselves as professionals, but as usual this does not feel professional, it feels too tediously familiar for that, the familiar tedium of grandstanding politics.

Weird

World’s first computer powered by human brain cells goes on sale

Melbourne-based Cortical Labs launched the CL1 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, describing it as a “body in a box” that holds the potential to revolutionise AI and robotics.

The computer uses lab-grown neurons that grow across a silicon chip, which allows them to send and receive electrical impulses.

An internal life support system of pumps, gas, and temperature controls keep the neurons alive for up to six months...

Cortical Labs said the first CL1 computers will be ready to ship to customers in June, with each unit costing around $35,000 (£27,000).


Interesting, but on the face of it, a computer costing $35,000, which needs life support and only lasts for up to 6 months doesn't sound like an unmissable deal, but scientists involve themselves is some weird projects.

Meanwhile Donald Trump's weird political opponents seem to be running around like headless chickens, as if life support for their neurons has wandered past its sell-by date too.

Maybe it's a weirdness pandemic. 

Tiny minds blown

Massive ocean discovered beneath the Earth's crust containing more water than on the surface

It feels like there have been staggering science stories emerging every other day recently, all of which have blown our tiny little minds...

Now, people are only just realising that there’s a massive ocean hidden under the Earth’s crust.

It turns out there’s a huge supply of water 400 miles underground stored in rock known as 'ringwoodite'.

It's not a new idea, it's not an ocean, it is the Independent. 

It is interesting, the initial hype adds nothing, it is the Independent.

The antithesis of the dispassionate observer

A quarter of US science funding is now ‘diversity, gender, race’ based, class warfare research

It’s a form of cultural warfare. These funds are not just diluting science, but actively sabotaging it. They enable experts who “decolonize geoscience” and offer a million dollars to the kind of people who say “white supremacy permeates … STEM education”. It is the antithesis of the dispassionate observer, instead the observer is all that matters. If you can’t see your oppression, it’s because they didn’t give you enough money…

Nice work if you can get it as they say, which clearly many "scientists" can. 

But as dispassionate observers we knew that. Modestly dispassionate observers anyhow.

Signs in the cliffs

We’ve just arrive back from our summer holiday after a tedious journey up the M5, but now we're relaxing with coffee and dark chocolate. One day we went on a local geology tour organised by Sidmouth museum. It’s a subject Mrs H and I know nothing about so we knew it was likely to be an interesting couple of hours, which it was.

By the end of the tour, one impression stood out, apart from interesting details of the local geology and that was how little we’d noticed about obvious features of local cliffs.

 

Arrowed in the photo is an example of something we hadn’t noticed before even though we've walked past it many times. It’s a large oval shape in the rock with what looks like an attached tube shape going upwards to the right. It is thought that it may be the fossilised burrow of some long extinct animal.

 You may also notice the initials of morons carved into the rock.

Something's getting a bit fishy

Out of interest I coped the Future Directions paragraphs from the previous Curiouser and Curiouser post into the BlaBlaMeter. Here's the output.

 Your text: 965 characters, 129 words

Bullshit Index :0.46

Something's getting a bit fishy. You probably want to sell something, or you're trying to impress somebody. It still may be an acceptable result for a scientific text.

Here's the text I used -


Future directions

Given the highly beneficial role of curiosity in childhood growth and development across both information-gathering and emotional spectrums, future research should focus on elucidating novel metrics for measuring the characteristic, thereby allowing for comparisons between studies and, in turn, the discovery and optimization of methodologies to foster/promote its persistence across childhood.

The present review suggests three primary means by which to achieve this goal. Firstly, metacognition frameworks should be further developed to operationalize internal curiosity in isolation or combined with external curiosity/interest. Secondly, research questions should be refined to more adequately explore curiosity across different physical and social contexts. Finally, curiosity should be assessed in non-US populations and particularly in minority communities to broaden our understanding of the cultural determinants and variability in the characteristics.

Hyperintelligent pandimensional beings

These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.

Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Lab mice are getting their own back by deliberately messing up experiments

Dr Kishore Kuchibhotla, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times: ‘It can be quite frustrating. You’ll be doing an experiment and the [mice] just don’t seem to be getting it. You’ve done everything correctly but they still seem to be making lots of errors.’...

They created an experiment where thirsty mice could hear one of two sounds. When one sound was played, they were supposed to turn a wheel to the left using their front legs, and for the other sound, they had to turn the wheel to the right.

When the mice did this correctly, they were rewarded with a drink of water, and when they spun the wheel the wrong way, they were given nothing at all.

The researchers tracked mouse choice, response speed and accuracy, and noticed that over time the mice got better at the task, but at points, the mice would stop following the rules, and do things like spin the wheel in one direction, no matter what sound they heard.

The researchers then stopped rewarding the mice for their correct answers, and soon the rodents began responding to the sounds more accurately.

The researchers believed the mice knew what they were doing the whole time, and were purposefully giving up the reward to explore their environment by doing experiments of their own.

Broken Science

About a year ago William Briggs gave this excellent and comparatively non-technical talk on the problems of modern science. Just over an hour long, but Briggs is a fluent and entertaining speaker who certainly manages to explain why modern science and scientists can be so abjectly unreliable.

 

Missing secrets of the universe

Giant 'supercollider' could find missing secrets of universe, say CERN scientists

The current machine has been unable to unlock more information about dark energy in the universe - but it is hoped its giant successor will be given the green light for construction to begin in the 2040s.

Scientists at CERN - home to the world's largest particle accelerator - have put forward proposals for a new "supercollider" which it is hoped will help uncover the secrets of 95% of the universe.

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is seen as the giant successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which sits in a 17-mile tunnel beneath the ground near Geneva, Switzerland - but the new machine is also facing criticism for its £17bn price tag.

This kind of development used to be fascinating, especially for those with scientific interests. Not so much now we know more about the pernicious influence of funding and the equally pernicious influence of mediocrities angling for professional status. 

It's something we never thought would happen, but the shadow is already there.

That bright light at the end of the tunnel

Michael Cook has an interesting and slightly spooky BioEdge piece on near-death experiences.

What is that bright light at the end of the tunnel?

Reports of near-death experiences — with tales of white light, visits from departed loved ones, hearing voices, seeing Heaven — capture our imagination.

The fact that these reports share so many common elements begs the question of whether there is something fundamentally real underpinning them — and that those who have managed to survive death are providing glimpses of a consciousness that does not completely disappear, even after the heart stops beating.

There is a certain fascination in the pursuit of the elusive, probing the boundaries of what is knowable. Take it a little further - imagine a person opts for euthanasia. On the brink of the Eternal, a detectable flicker of consciousness indicates they have changed their mind just at the point when it is far, far too late.

Researchers at the University of Michigan studied four patients who died after a cardiac arrest in the hospital while under EEG monitoring. All four were comatose and unresponsive and were ultimately removed from life support.

Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness.

Furthermore, the activity was detected in the so-called hot zone of neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the junction between the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes in the back of the brain. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies.

Dangerous Asteroids

 

A useful summary of the search for asteroids, particularly dangerous asteroids such as 2022 AP7 which has been obscured by sunlight until quite recently. 

As mentioned in the video description, the NASA Earth Impact Monitoring website is also worth a visit whenever we see a scary asteroid story in the media.

Why did our brains shrink?

 

Interesting video I thought. A facetious suggestion I know, but if domestication has selected for smaller human brains then globalisation could select for even smaller brains. Somehow I don't find that difficult to envisage. 

This combustible mixture of ignorance and power