First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Marsh et al. are a particularly strong example for the meaninglessness of statistical significance. While their figure 2b clearly shows a significant difference at the group level, the two groups become completely identical by just taking away two individuals from each, and the predictive value of their measure is zero.
Although Udikovic-Kolic et al. demonstrate another path by which resistant bacteria may be transmitted to humans, their result is in fact much weaker than they try to make it. Manuring raises the number of both resistant and non-resistant bacteria compared to inorganic fertilizer, so the ratio between the two is much less affected than the raw number of resistants, which is all they show here.
Eiluned Pearce models the movement of small human groups through space as an ideal gas. This is obviously wrong, movement is not arbitrary but strongly shaped by attractors like sheltered valleys. So her result has to be quantitatively wrong, but her speculation is qualitatively intriguing nonetheless, especially when applied to the much less dense Neanderthal populations. See also Hussain part II.
How and where did tin alloys of copper originate? There still is no answer, but Molofsky & al. and Park & Shinde add new data towards it.