Category: Science, Nature, & Technology

Farmers have quadrupled how much milk a typical cow can make, but there are hidden downsides.

It started with a bull named Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, who had a whopping 16,000 daughters. And 500,000 granddaughters and more than 2 million great-granddaughters. Today, in fact, his genes account for 14 percent of all DNA in Holstein cows, the most popular breed in the dairy industry.

The mutation caused some unborn calves to die in the womb. According to a recent estimate, this single mutation ended up causing more than 500,000 spontaneous abortions and costing the dairy industry $420 million in losses.

That’s a crazy number, but here’s an even crazier one: Despite the lethal mutation, using Chief’s sperm instead of an average bull’s still led to $30 billion dollars in increased milk production over the past 35 years. That’s how much a single bull could affect the industry.

Chief embodies the power and the perils of selective breeding

Source: The Milk Industry Lost $420 Million From a Defective Cow Gene – The Atlantic

the replication crisis has redrawn the topography of science, especially in social psychology

Their substantive theory is so open-ended that it can explain just about any result, any interaction in any direction.

And that’s why the authors’ claim that fixing the errors “does not change the conclusion of the paper” is both ridiculous and all too true. It’s ridiculous because one of the key claims is entirely based on a statistically significant p-value that is no longer there. But the claim is true because the real “conclusion of the paper” doesn’t depend on any of its details—all that matters is that there’s something, somewhere, that has p less than .05, because that’s enough to make publishable, promotable claims about “the pervasiveness and persistence of the elderly stereotype” or whatever else they want to publish that day.

When the authors protest that none of the errors really matter, it makes you realize that, in these projects, the data hardly matter at all.

When it comes to pointing out errors in published work, social media have been necessary. There just has been no reasonable alternative. Yes, it’s sometimes possible to publish peer-reviewed letters in journals criticizing published work, but it can be a huge amount of effort. Journals and authors often apply massive resistance to bury criticisms.

when statistical design analysis shows that this research is impossible, or when replication failures show that published conclusions were mistaken, then damn right I expect you to move forward, not keep doing the same thing over and over, and insisting you were right all along.

We learn from our mistakes, but only if we recognize that they are mistakes. Debugging is a collaborative process. If you approve some code and I find a bug in it, I’m not an adversary, I’m a collaborator. If you try to paint me as an “adversary” in order to avoid having to correct the bug, that’s your problem.

Source: What has happened down here is the winds have changed – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Terms like ‘basal’, ‘early-diverging’, and ‘first-branching’ reflect persistent misconceptions about evolution and phylogenies

Moreover, the use of basal and similar terms perpetuates a large suite of misconceptions about how evolution works. So in order to communicate effectively and accurately about evolution, we must also communicate effectively and accurately about trees.

Source: For the love of trees: The ancestors are not among us

Some believe with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that mathematical truths are human inventions. But others believe with Plato that our visible world is a faint shadow of higher truths.

Nature’s libraries add another dimension to a centuries-old debate about the reality of the Platonic realm. Until now, this debate largely revolved around abstractions like the ones we find in mathematics. With the genotype networks, a new element enters: experimental science.

Source: Without a library of Platonic forms, evolution couldn’t work | Aeon Essays

Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures

Source: Can computers read through a book page by page without opening it? | Camera Culture