First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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What is it about geneticists like Henn et al. that makes them completely unable to use common language and at least define their terms? PNAS is not a specialist journal and both micronewton and microtesla are well defined SI units that have nothing whatsoever to do with time or population size.
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John et al. don’t just state the facts as is appropriate for a scientific journal but add their own advice to it. In a way they are right. In a world where nothing is private privacy is viewed with suspicion. Did you know that elections in Germany’s Soviet Zone were free and secret? Everybody had the right to use the cabin and come out with a folded ballot – but less than 3 % of voters did. In the West not even small children were allowed in the booth from the age when attendants considered them able to read. The right to privacy is not enough, it is either mandatory or nonexistent.
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I have been banging on about the consequences of antibiotic poisoning and abuse for quite some time now. Now Korpela et al. deliver the proof, that the expected effects on the microbiome really exist. Undoubtedly obesity and related syndromes are a result of lifestyle first and foremost but other causes may influence that lifestyle as well as the outcome directly.
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Considering its presence among Chimpanzees, territorial warfare in humans is not surprising. It has not yet been demonstrated for mobile populations, but as Mirazón Lahr et al. show it began at least with sedentism not only with food production. This makes sense too. As long as I can carry all my possessions, I can avoid conflict by departing. Once part of my hard gained assets are immobile, it becomes worth the effort to defend them.
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Admittedly it is only a „Bauchgefühl“ generated from a very simplified model of the geometric properties of special relativity, but I have always believed the expansion of the universe to occur with a constant speed neither accelerating nor decelerating, although I could never offer an explanation of how this could be made to conform to the known laws of physics. So it is with considerable personal joy that I view a solution for just that conundrum in Phillips.