The discovery that the birds’ movements could be used to track the currents and tides came about when Cooper and his colleagues realized this valuable information was hiding in plain sight. When Cooper and his colleagues reviewed the RSPB’s data, they realized that the tracker-outfitted birds were indirectly measuring the tide and the surface currents. After filtering out tracking data of birds in flight, Cooper’s team compared the birds’ movements on the water to other tidal flow measurements, confirming that the two coincided closely.

Image: NASA
Earth’s magnetic field, which protects life from intense solar radiation, almost collapsed 565 million years ago, according to a study published Monday in Nature Geoscience. Now, a half-billion years later, Earth’s magnetic field is ten times stronger than it was in was during this early era. The inner core is slowly growing by “freezing” molten iron and nickel to its mass, a process that pumps heat into the outer core and bolsters Earth’s magnetic field.

The main actors of these scientific revolutions often fostered this way of thinking about science as an enquiry leading to the inevitable triumph of truth over past errors. For decades (without taking Wittgenstein as a direct target nor as an interlocutor in this specific debate on science), anti-realist trends in philosophy of science have called into question both the possibility of atomic facts and their ability to make scientific claims true or false. This decades-long, multi-pronged, disenchantment-with-truth trend in philosophy of science starts by rejecting the idea that there are facts about nature that make our scientific claims true or false.

Steinhardt’s new book, The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Simon Schuster) chronicles his 30-year obsession with a structure called the quasi-crystal, from proving that it could theoretically exist to traveling to remote parts of Russia to discover whether it might be found in nature. Those are quasi-crystals, and their existence means there’s a whole new world of forms of matter. In 1998, I started working with a geologist at Princeton to find quasi-crystals in some obscure places using crystal databases.

That’s why a team of scientists decided to drill a hole more than a mile into the ice to figure it out.Here are some things we know about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet: The sheet is held up by a collection of ice shelves, which are melting pretty quickly. “I have waited for this moment for a long time and am delighted that we’ve finally achieved our goal,” said lead scientist Andy Smith in a press release.With this giant hole finally drilled, the scientists can send instruments down to the bottom to study the sediment underneath the ice sheet, gaining a clear picture for the first time of what the underside of all that ice looks like. With that information, scientists can finally pin down just what’s going to happen to the ice sheet in the future, and (they hope) get rid of all that confusion.Source: British Antarctic Survey via Gizmodo

If DF2 contained as much dark matter as astronomers would normally expect for such a galaxy, the dark matter would boost the orbital speeds of those star clusters. Examining seven star clusters orbiting DF4, Danieli and her co-workers found they are moving languidly, suggesting there is very little or no dark matter in the galaxy. One thing is clear: If confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, the galaxies’ lack of dark matter would conclusively show the stuff is separable from stars, gas, dust and other regular matter, and would further bolster the case for dark matter’s existence.

That’s according to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research group that published its annual temperature analysis on Thursday. The United Kingdom’s Met Office and Berkeley Earth also planned to release their own findings that day. The ongoing federal shutdown has indefinitely delayed the NASA and NOAA reports, so Berkeley Earth decided to go ahead with its report.

A 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report, which synthesized all the available research on marijuana, concluded in part: “There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and the development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users.” An important piece of Berenson’s argument is that rates of marijuana use have risen at around the same time as an increase in diagnoses of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. Nonetheless, Gladwell offers up Berenson’s same misleading statistics on violence without interrogating their accuracy, mentions two studies suggesting a gateway effect while ignoring plenty of contradictory research, and highlights some data generated by a New York University professor and friend of Berenson’s, which, while they may be valid, have not been peer reviewed or otherwise assessed by experts.

Nicole Long
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Head of the Long Term Memory Lab at the University of Virginia
Exactly why some experiences stand the test of time and others fade from memory is an on-going topic of research across a number of psychology, cognitive, and neuroscience labs as experiences can be forgotten for a number of reasons. Jason Ozubko
Assistant Professor, Psychology, SUNY Geneseo, whose work examines the cognitive and neuropsychological properties of human memory
The main reason we forget is due to a phenomenon called interference, which is when new information interferes with previous things you’ve learned. This is efficient for the brain, because when you encode new experiences in the context of older things, you can sort of piggyback your new experiences on top of your older memories.

The work of the antidiet crowd asks anyone touched by diet culture to entertain the possibility that body weight doesn’t, in itself, cause health issues. At the same time—rather than sadistically goad people in bigger bodies into some mythical food regimen that turns them thin for good—it “poses serious risks to their psychological and physical health,” according to a 2010 paper in the American Journal of Public Health. According to studies in the American Journal of Physiology–­Endocrinology and Metabolism (2014) and Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (2016), food restriction of almost any form—famine, elimination diets, wellness diets—routinely upsets hormonal regulation, potentially setting off serious mental and physical health problems and, paradoxically, weight gain.