58159025
submission
ananyo writes:
Economists—most famously the Freakonomics duo, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner—have long worried that having the “wrong” name could set you back in the labour market. A number of studies show that having an “ethnic-sounding” name tends to disadvantage job applicants (though others suggest that names matter little).
Waves of migrants to America did not need economists to tell them that their name could be a disadvantage. Many changed their names to fit in. Almost a third of naturalising immigrants abandoned their first names by 1930 and acquired popular American names such as William, John or Charles. What was the impact? The authors draw on a sample of 3,400 male migrants who naturalised in New York in 1930.
The authors found that changing from a purely foreign name to a very common American name was associated with a 14% hike in earnings.
58157051
submission
ananyo writes:
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled homeopathic remedies made by a company called Terra-Medica because they may contain actual medicine — possibly penicillin or derivatives of the antibiotic.
58058563
submission
ananyo writes:
In an age of big data—when our cellphones track our location and American spooks know what we ate for breakfast—it seems bizarre that a huge airliner with 239 people on board could vanish with barely a trace.The incident reveals numerous security lapses that are relatively easy to fix—and must be, to maintain public confidence in air travel.
The first is the continual tracking of commercial airliners. Prior to MH370’s disappearance, most people would have presumed that aeroplanes are in constant communication with ground stations for security reasons if not navigational ones. But there is no requirement that they maintain continuous contact. The aviation industry plans to upgrade its radar to a GPS-based system that would accomplish this, but the process has faced delays. It should be implemented immediately.
Second, MH370 “went dark” about 40 minutes after takeoff because two communications systems were mysteriously deactivated: the secondary radar (which identifies the aircraft, among other data, to radar screens) and ACARS, a system for sending status updates and messages.
There are good reasons why pilots should be able to disable equipment on board, the threat of fires being one of them. But in such cases, the aeroplane should automatically send out an alert that the system is being shut off, so that authorities are immediately aware of this, and know to track the aircraft with conventional radar (where it appears as a blip on a screen without the identifying information).
57835153
submission
ananyo writes:
John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist who published an infamous paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false', has co-founded an institute dedicated to combating sloppy medical studies. The new institute is to focus on irreproducibility, waste in science and publication bias. The institute, called the Meta-Research Innovation Centre or METRICS, will, the Economist reports, 'create a “journal watch” to monitor scientific publishers’ work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre’s nerdishly valiant mission statement: “Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality.”'
56609745
submission
ananyo writes:
P values, the 'gold standard' of statistical validity, are not as reliable as many scientists assume. Critically, they cannot tell you the odds that a hypothesis is correct. A feature in Nature looks at why, if a result looks too good to be true, it probably is, despite an impressive-seeming P value.
56411655
submission
ananyo writes:
Physicists have produced nanoribbons of graphene — the single-atom-thick carbon — that conduct electrons better than theory predicted even for the most idealized form of the material. The finding could help graphene realize its promise in high-end electronics, where researchers have long hoped it could outperform traditional materials such as silicon.
In graphene, electrons can move faster than in any other material at room temperature. But techniques that cut sheets of graphene into the narrow ribbons needed to form wires of a nano-scale circuit leave ragged edges, which disrupt the electron flow. Now a team led by physicist Walt de Heer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta has made ribbons that conduct electric charges for more than 10 micrometres without meeting resistance — 1,000 times farther than in typical graphene nanoribbons. The ribbons made by de Heer's team in fact conduct electrons ten times better than standard theories of electron transport they should, say the authors.
56335567
submission
ananyo writes:
India has pledged to build the world’s most powerful solar plant. With a nominal capacity of 4,000 megawatts, comparable to that of four full-size nuclear reactors, the ‘ultra mega' project will be more than ten times larger than any other solar project built so far, and it will spread over 77 square kilometres of land — greater than the island of Manhattan.
Six state-owned companies have formed a joint venture to execute the project, which they say can be completed in seven years at a projected cost of US$4.4 billion. The proposed location is near Sambhar Salt Lake in the northern state of Rajasthan.
56335507
submission
ananyo writes:
A 35-year trend of researchers reading ever more scholarly papers seems to have halted. In 2012, US scientists and social scientists estimated that they read, on average, 22 scholarly articles per month (or 264 per year), fewer than the 27 that they reported in an identical survey last conducted in 2005. It is the first time since the reading-habit questionnaire began in 1977 that manuscript consumption has dropped.
56304995
submission
ananyo writes:
Publishing giant Elsevier says that it has now made it easy for scientists to extract facts and data computationally from its more than 11 million online research papers. Other publishers are likely to follow suit this year, lowering barriers to the computer-based research technique. But some scientists object that even as publishers roll out improved technical infrastructure and allow greater access, they are exerting tight legal controls over the way text-mining is done.
Under the arrangements, announced on 26 January at the American Library Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, researchers at academic institutions can use Elsevier’s online interface (API) to batch-download documents in computer-readable XML format. Elsevier has chosen to provisionally limit researchers to 10,000 articles per week. These can be freely mined — so long as the researchers, or their institutions, sign a legal agreement. The deal includes conditions: for instance, that researchers may publish the products of their text-mining work only under a licence that restricts use to non-commercial purposes, can include only snippets (of up to 200 characters) of the original text, and must include links to original content.
56136939
submission
ananyo writes:
In 2006, Japanese researchers reported a technique for creating cells that have the embryonic ability to turn into almost any cell type in the mammalian body — the now-famous induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. In papers published this week in Nature, another Japanese team says that it has come up with a surprisingly simple method — exposure to stress, including a low pH — that can make cells that are even more malleable than iPS cells, and do it faster and more efficiently.
The work so far has focused on mouse white blood cells but the group are now trying to make the method work with cells adult humans. If they're succesful, that would dramatically speed up the process of creating stem cells for potential clinical applications.
55920887
submission
ananyo writes:
Stephen Hawking has proposed a new solution to the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years, after its discovery by theoretical physicists Joe Polchinski at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, and colleagues. The paradox troubles physicists because if the firewall scenario is correct, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is flouted. But the classical theory black hole cannot be reconciled to the quantum mechanical prediction that energy and information can escape from a black hole.
Now Hawking has proposed a tantalizingly simple solution to the paradox which allows both quantum mechanics and general relativity to remain intact--black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause spacetime to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist. As Hawking writes in his paper, "The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity."
55481635
submission
ananyo writes:
Organisms, including humans, are often assumed to be hard-wired by evolution to try to make optimal decisions, to the best of their knowledge. Ranking choices consistently — for example, in selecting food sources — would seem to be one aspect of such rationality. If A is preferred over B, and B over C, then surely A should be selected when the options are just A and C? This seemingly logical ordering of preferences is called transitivity.
Furthermore, if A is preferred when both B and C are available, then A should ‘rationally’ remain the first choice when only A and B are at hand — a principle called the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA).
But sometimes animals do not display such logic. For example, honeybees (Apis mellifera) and gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) have been seen to violate IIA, and so have hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus).
Researchers have now used a theoretical model to show that, in fact, violations of transitivity can sometimes be the best choice for the given situation, and therefore rational. The key is that the various choices might appear or disappear in the future. Then the decision becomes more complicated than a simple, fixed ranking of preferences. So while these choices look irrational, they aren’t necessarily.
55481311
submission
ananyo writes:
Leaping up out of a jar in an arc before falling to the floor, the fountain-like motion of a chain of beads has puzzled millions around the world with its apparently gravity-defying behaviour. Now physicists think they have an explanation.
British science presenter Steve Mould, who made the experiment famous, explained the phenomenon as simply one of inertia: the falling chain has downward momentum, causing an upward momentum in beads leaving the pot. This, in turn, makes them leap before gravity can slowly reverse their momentum.
Mould’s explanation was clever, but wrong, says physicist John Biggins of the University of Cambridge, UK. The only way to account for the rise is for the chain to receive a 'kick' from the pot from which it is being pulled. This challenges not only the explanation given by Mould, but the conventional mathematics of chains, Biggins says.
55440383
submission
ananyo writes:
Physicists have tracked electrons crossing a semiconductor chip one at a time — an experiment that should at last enable a rational definition of the ampere, the unit of electrical current.
At present, an ampere is defined as the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one metre apart, such that the wires attract each other with a force of 2×107 newtons per metre of length. That definition, adopted in 1948 and based on a thought experiment that can at best be approximated in the laboratory, is clumsy — almost as much of an embarrassment as the definition of the kilogram, which relies on the fluctuating mass of a 125-year-old platinum-and-iridium cylinder stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris.
The new approach, described in a paper posted onto the arXiv server on 19 December, would redefine the amp on the basis of e, a physical constant representing the charge of an electron.
55204135
submission
ananyo writes:
The waters of the African lake seem calm and peaceful. A few migrant swallows flit near the surface. Suddenly, leaping from the water, a fish grabs one of the famously speedy birds straight out of the air.
“The whole action of jumping and catching the swallow in flight happens so incredibly quickly that after we first saw it, it took all of us a while to really fully comprehend what we had just seen,” says Nico Smit, director of the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa.
After the images did sink in, he adds, “the first reaction was one of pure joy, because we realized that we were spectators to something really incredible and unique”.
Rumours of such behaviour by the African tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus), which has been reported as reaching one metre in length, have circulated since the 1940s. But this is the first confirmed record of a freshwater fish preying on birds in flight, the team reports in the Journal of Fish Biology (PDF).
