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In the enjoyable and science-backed book Me, But Better, Olga Khazan embarks on a year-long experiment to see if she can really become a more agreeable person

Last month's discovery of the most energetic neutrino yet detected is incredibly exciting for us particle physicists – but it also raises many questions, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Feedback, a Lego fan, delves into a new science-related set, and learns that the model of a DNA double helix is the wrong way around. Time for some jokes about mirror organisms...

Improving our understanding of sudden climate shifts is welcome. But framing this as creating an "early-warning system" is wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin, says Bill McGuire

Adam Kucharski's new book Proof is a life raft in a sea of fake news and misinformation

After weeks of criticism, Microsoft promised to show new data about its Majorana 1 quantum computer at the biggest meeting of the world's physicists. Researchers in the room tell New Scientist they were not impressed with what they saw.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has achieved groundbreaking discoveries in the field of exoplanet studies. In particular, it has made strides in the analysis of their atmospheres by studying light from the parent star as it travels through the gas surrounding the planets. JWST has recently bucked the trend and observed a some gas giant planets in the system HR 8799 and detected the presence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, suggesting there are similarities between the formation of this system and our own.

With luck and clear skies, you can spot Venus crossing between the Earth and the Sun this weekend. Up for a challenge? If skies are clear, you may be able to complete a rare feat of visual athletics this coming weekend, and follow Venus on its trek from the evening and into the morning sky.

Recordings of brain activity in budgerigars reveal sets of brain cells that represent different sounds like keys on a keyboard – a structure never seen before in any bird brain

A record-setting test of quantum communication used a microsatellite to connect ground stations in China and South Africa, bringing a global quantum internet closer to reality

String theory may be our best attempt at a theory of everything, except that it can't describe an expanding universe like ours. Now a radical new twist on the idea could finally fix that – but it requires us to completely reimagine reality

I’ve posted quite a bit on the futility of attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth via genetic engineering. In my view, it’s close to a scam that deludes the public about what the geneticists really intend to produce, which, as Dr Tori Herridge at the University of Sheffield calls it, is simply “an elephant in a fur coat”. For my posts on this debacle, inspired by conversations with Matthew Cobb, go here. But there are two other useful references that Matthew provided, with links:

An extract from his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

and

A Vox article dealing with this mishigas. The geneticists also want to resurrect the dodo and the thylacine, equally futile endeavors. But despite all the problems that scientists have noted, for some reason many science journalists are still selling the “mammoth resurrection” tale as told by Colossal Biosciences, a company with $10.2 billion dollars in funds.

As I watched NBC News last night, I was upset to see that NBC had also bought the story, selling it as the program’s final “There’s good news tonight” upbeat story. You can watch it below, but do it today as they replace the news each day. Click on the screenshot below and start the segment at 18:29 (turn up the sound using the icon at the left bottom of the screen):

First, Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm says that the company aims, besides producing mammoths, to  “return balance to ailing ecosystems.” That is ridiculous. Is the tundra ailing because of the absence of mammoths, and, if so, will a couple of elephants in fur coats, not adapted to that ecosystem, cure it? Which ecosystem will the dodos “cure”?

He adds, misleadingly, “We actually took the genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, mapped them to mice, and then in only one month we produced living, healthy mice.”  He doesn’t mention the huge mortality in this experiment, nor that they didn’t REALLY use mammoth genes, but mice genes that had a few DNA bases changed to the mammoth version (As I recall, they changed I think only three bases in seven mouse genes.) There was no attempt to insert full mammoth genes into mice, and they really couldn’t because they’d have to insert the control regions, too.

Lamm’s statement is flat wrong, and misleads the listener into thinking that they put mammoth hair genes into mice, making the mice “woolly.” In fact, as I pointed out before, the wooliest of all the mice had no mammoth-informed DNA in it. There is not the slightest indication that the lipid-related gene they put in the mice will increase their ability to withstand cold.

Lamm also neglects to mention the difficulty of getting entire mammoth chromosomes into the egg of an Asiatic elephant, nor the impossibility of constructing the Volkswagen-sized artificial elephant uteruses that would be needed to grow up the “mammothy” embryos to birth.

Finally, in view of the futility of this project, another Colossal officer says that their endeavors have inspired children to love science, and perhaps to save the environment. That’s the Hail Mary call of a dying project.  Note that they project the production of the first mammoth (again, just an “elephant in a fur coat”  for 2028. Only three more years! Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put a giant fur coat onto an Asiatic elephant and then usher several of these garbed pachyderms to the tundra?

There are many changes–probably millions–necessary to convert an Asiatic elephant to a woolly mammoth, including those affecting behavior and metabolism. They will not accomplish such a conversion. Nor will they accomplish it with the dodo nor the thylacine. But Colossal talks a good game, as you see, and they’ve pulled the wool (pardon the pun) over the eyes of the public and of many credulous journalists. Shame on NBC News for not doing due diligence.

The first randomised controlled trial of microdosing LSD as a treatment for ADHD found the psychedelic drug wasn’t any more effective than a placebo in alleviating symptoms

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “King”, came with the note, “They’re still doing it.” What are they doing? Look:

It’s especially prevalent in the U.S.  And Luana told me this information, which is new to me:

The reason for this cartoon is the recent uproar about “Christ is King”. The expression was originally benign (and is everywhere in Brazil and South America – literally 90% of trucks have a sticker with it – “Jesus Cristo é o senhor”) but was appropriated as a symbol of far-right bigots.  Some people are very upset about it and are trying to reclaim the sentence back to its original sense.

Lee Jussim wrote about it here.

Interview with Michael Marshall and Cecil Cicirello; News Items: NASA Delays Artemis, Punishing AI, Hybrid Bionic Hand, Pettawatt Electron Beam; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Rewriting Physics; Science or Fiction

We have to face the fact that social media is now the primary way that many people get their information. More than half of people in the US get their “news” from social media at least some of the time. But I don’t think asking people where they get “news” captures the full phenomenon. People who watch TikTok videos might not consider […]

The post On TikTok, Everything Is a Poison or Superfood first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The European Space Agency has released the first batch of large-scale images from the Euclid space telescope, which astronomers have already used to find hundreds of strong gravitational lenses

An AI-powered robot that can prepare cups of coffee in a busy kitchen could usher in the next generation of intelligent machines, a study suggests.

An AI-powered robot that can prepare cups of coffee in a busy kitchen could usher in the next generation of intelligent machines, a study suggests.

A World Meteorological Organization report details a long list of grim records for everything from CO2 levels and temperature to sea ice loss and sea level rise