First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Frolich fails to ask the main question: Will triggering small and nearly imperceptible earthquakes suppress big and devastating ones or will they bring them about?
Statins very effectively control a symptom. Rahimi and Rosendaal provide another example of them not controlling the illness these symptoms strongly correlate with.
Woodgett is another commentary on the tremendous amount of noise in published science drowning out the signal. The problem as such is well known. When Western television was deprecated in Stalinist East Germany, the government set up jamming transmitters to disrupt it. The answer then was the erection of highly directional antennas to extract the signal from the noise. With scientific journals this solution doesn’t work. As long as editors and reviewers refuse to get their act together the only way forward might be meta-journal, for which avid and qualified readers pick out the wheat from the chaff and critically point out the latter, like, dare I say it, this blog tries to do. This could be a chance for sites like Science Daily, New Scientist, and AAAS science now, where I find most of my articles from journals I don’t peruse in full. but, alas, all they do is uncritically regurgitate whatever news releases feed them and rate blurb above content.
Did Neanderthals and Denisovans not mingle and mate with modern humans after all? Eriksson et al. seem to think so. If they’re right it would solve the conundrum of the times and places of that admixture inferred from genetics differing widely from the archaeologically plausible ones.
At first sight Mathias et al.’s result seems contradictory, as the very allele enabling humans to leave their African homeland is least expressed the further they get. Their explanation of a rich supply of high quality food making this costly synthesis redundant must come as a blow for all promoting the coexistence of intelligence and vegetarianism.
Palumbi is an older fundamental work on the willful and purposeful breeding of pests and resistancies. And they still hand them out just like candy.
The theme of Díaz-Andreu & García Benito has been very well dealt with for the British megalithic by the BBC in 2000. Unfortunately I can only make my copy available to personal friends due to copyright restrictions.
And lastly a nice short story by Tony Ballantyne. Wish it were true …