Slashdot Mirror

Why do zebras have stripes? From a report: Evolutionary biologists have proposed many possible theories, such as camouflage or vision aids for recognizing individual zebras. But in recent years, pest control has emerged as the leading explanation for zebra stripes. Researchers led by Tim Caro, an evolutionary ecologist at UC Davis, set out to test this idea in the field. The results, published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, reveal that stripes are a powerful deterrent to horse flies, a common nuisance that suck blood and bite flesh. The experiment managed to find the most delightful way to help explain these uniquely patterned coats -- by getting horses to cosplay as zebras.

A series of auctions revealed that Facebook users value the company's service so highly that it would take on average more than $1,000 to convince them to deactivate their accounts for a year, according to a recent paper published in PLOS One. From a report: This doesn't mean much for the company's stock market valuation, but it's a good indicator that people find value in Facebook regardless of the many concerns raised recently. The paper started out as two separate studies. Jay Corrigan, an economist at Kenyon College, and his collaborator, Matt Rousu of Susquehanna University, were interested in a session on this topic at an upcoming conference. They discovered that Sean Cash (Tufts University) and Saleem Alhabash (Michigan State University) were doing something very similar.

Since the design of both studies was so complementary, they decided to combine their data and results into a single paper. Cash and Saleem had a larger sample for their part of the study and looked at a longer time period of one year, while Corrigan and Rosein focused on shorter time frames, asking subjects to quit Facebook for one day, three days, or seven days. The studies nonetheless had similar results.

brindafella writes: Veterinary scientists from Viena have shown that Goffin's cockatoos can do an excellent job of remaking cardboard into tools to get rewards. This follows on from earlier experiments with the New Caledonian crow that can select tools for its purposes. So, birds are definitely not "bird-brained." "[The study] tells us that the cockatoos' mind is highly flexible and that they can modify their solution to a problem in order to save effort," said Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and lead author of the paper.

The Australian Broadcast Company explains how the study was conducted: "[S]ix trained birds were given a piece of cardboard and placed in front of a cage that had food accessible through a small hole, but placed at different distances away. The birds used their beak to cut strips of cardboard they then used to reach the food. Importantly, when the food was close, the birds made a shorter strip. When it was far away, they made a longer strip. But when the researchers made the hole in the cage smaller, only one of the birds was able to fashion their cardboard tool to be narrow enough to fit through the hole. The successful bird was the only female in the group, and the researchers think she was able to do this because her beak was small enough to make a narrow tool."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Pando aspen grove, located in central Utah, is the largest organism on the planet by weight. From the surface, it may look like a forest that spans more than 100 U.S. football fields, but each tree shares the exact same DNA and is connected to its clonal brethren through an elaborate underground root system. Although not quite as large in terms of area as the massive Armillaria gallica fungus in Michigan, Pando is much heavier, weighing in at more than 6 million kilograms. Now, researchers say, the grove is in danger, being slowly eaten away by mule deer and other herbivores -- and putting the fate of its ecosystem in jeopardy. "This is a really unusual habitat type," says Luke Painter, an ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis who was not involved with the research. "A lot of animals depend on it."

[...] Scientists first noticed the Pando shrinking in the late '90s. They suspected elk, cattle, and most prominently deer were eating the new shoots, so in the new study Rogers and colleagues divided the forest into three experimental groups. One section was completely unfenced, allowing animals to forage freely on the baby aspen. A second section was fenced and left alone. And a third section was fenced and then treated in some places with strategies to spur aspen growth, such as shrub removal and controlled burning; in other places it was left untreated. The results were surprising: Simply keeping the deer out was enough to allow the grove to successfully recover, the team reports today in PLOS ONE. Even in the fenced-off plots where there was no burning or shrub removal, young trees were thriving.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

An anonymous reader shares a report from NPR about ecologist Chelsea Rochman, who has dedicated her career to studying how microplastics are getting into the food chain and affecting everything from beer to fish: Since modern plastic was first mass-produced, 8 billion tons have been manufactured. And when it's thrown away, it doesn't just disappear. Much of it crumbles into small pieces. Scientists call the tiny pieces "microplastics" and define them as objects smaller than 5 millimeters -- about the size of one of the letters on a computer keyboard. Researchers started to pay serious attention to microplastics in the environment about 15 years ago. They're in oceans, rivers and lakes. They're also in soil. Recent research in Germany found that fertilizer made from composted household waste contains microplastics. And, even more concerning, microplastics are in drinking water. In beer. In sea salt. In fish and shellfish. How microplastics get into animals is something of a mystery, and Chelsea Rochman is trying to solve it.

Since she started studying microplastics, Rochman has found them in the outflow from sewage treatment plants. And they've shown up in insects, worms, clams, fish and birds. To study how that happens, [researcher Kennedy Bucci] makes her own microplastics from the morning's collection. She takes a postage stamp-size piece of black plastic from the jar, and grinds it into particles using a coffee grinder. "So this is the plastic that I feed to the fish," she says. The plastic particles go into beakers of water containing fish larvae from fathead minnows, the test-animals of choice in marine toxicology. Tanks full of them line the walls of the lab. Bucci uses a pipette to draw out a bunch of larvae that have already been exposed to these ground-up plastic particles. The larva's gut is translucent. We can see right into it. "You can see kind of a line of black, weirdly shaped black things," she points out. "Those are the microplastics." The larva has ingested them. Rochman says microplastic particles can sicken or even kill larvae and fish in their experiments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: [A] recent experiment by German researchers demonstrates that people will refuse to turn a robot off if it begs for its life. In the study, published in the open access journal PLOS One, 89 volunteers were recruited to complete a pair of tasks with the help of Nao, a small humanoid robot. The participants were told that the tasks (which involved answering a series of either / or questions, like "Do you prefer pasta or pizza?"; and organizing a weekly schedule) were to improve Nao's learning algorithms. But this was just a cover story, and the real test came after these tasks were completed, and scientists asked participants to turn off the robot. In roughly half of experiments, the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging: "No! Please do not switch me off!" When this happened, the human volunteers were likely to refuse to turn the bot off. Of the 43 volunteers who heard Nao's pleas, 13 refused. And the remaining 30 took, on average, twice as long to comply compared to those who did not not hear the desperate cries at all.

A major U.S. government report warns that advances in synthetic biology now allow scientists to have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The Guardian reports: In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, "enhances and expands" opportunities to create bioweapons. "As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinize where harms could come from," said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The report calls on the U.S. government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defenses, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. The Guardian references a case 20 years ago where geneticist Eckard Wimmer recreated the poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horse pox virus. "The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century," reports The Guardian. "Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized."

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: U.S. suicide rates spiked in the months after Robin Williams killed himself in 2014, according to researchers. In the five months after the actor's death there were 10% more suicides than might be expected, or 1,841 extra cases, PLOS One journal reports. The potential risk of copycat incidents after celebrity cases is known to public health bodies. It cannot be known for certain if his death led to the spike but it appeared to be connected, the new study said. Experts say "irresponsible" media coverage of suicides can play a big part in copycat cases. At the time of his death, the Samaritans warned about a large number of news articles giving too much detail about the nature of his suicide, against media guidelines. Guidance from the World Health Organization, the Independent Press Standards Organization's editors' code of practice, the Ofcom broadcasting code and the BBC's editorial guidelines all advise against going into explicit detail about the methods used. However, researchers said there was "substantial evidence" that many media outlets had tended to deviate from these guidelines.

For the latest study, they looked at the monthly suicide rates from the U.S. government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between January 1999 and December 2015 to see if there had been a spike. They found there were 18,690 suicides between August and December 2014 compared with the 16,849 cases they would have expected. In the weeks after Williams's death, there was a "drastic" increase in references to suicide and death in news media reports, as well as more posts on an internet suicide forum researchers monitored, the study found. David Fink, one of the study's authors, from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, said research had previously shown that suicide rates increased following a high-profile celebrity suicide, but this was a first time such a study had been done within the era of the 24-hour news cycle. Lorna Fraser, from the Samaritans' media advisory service, said: "This study builds on a strong body of research evidence that shows that irresponsible or overly detailed depictions of suicide can have a devastating impact. In the case of celebrities, the potential for someone at risk to make an emotional connection and over-identify with them is greater, in some cases even to interpret their death as affirmation that they could take their own life."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: About 50 years ago, the sugar industry stopped funding research that began to show something they wanted to hide: that eating lots of sugar is linked to heart disease. A new study exposes the sugar industry's decades-old effort to stifle that critical research. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, recently analyzed historical documents regarding a rat study called Project 259 that was launched in 1968. The study was funded by a sugar industry trade group called the International Sugar Research Foundation, or ISRF, and conducted by W. F. R. Pover at the University of Birmingham. When the preliminary findings from that study began to show that eating lots of sugar might be associated with heart disease, and even bladder cancer, the ISRF pulled the plug on the research. Without additional funding, the study was terminated and the results were never published, according to a study published today in PLOS Biology. The study in question investigated the relationship between sugars and certain blood fats called triglycerides, which increase the risk of heart disease. The preliminary results from the research, called Project 259, suggested that rats on a high-sugar diet, instead of a starch diet, had higher levels of triglycerides. The rats that ate lots of sugar also had higher levels of an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase in their urine, which at the time was thought to be potentially linked to bladder cancer, says study co-author Cristin Kearns, an assistant professor at the UCSF School of Dentistry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: About 50 years ago, the sugar industry stopped funding research that began to show something they wanted to hide: that eating lots of sugar is linked to heart disease. A new study exposes the sugar industry's decades-old effort to stifle that critical research. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, recently analyzed historical documents regarding a rat study called Project 259 that was launched in 1968. The study was funded by a sugar industry trade group called the International Sugar Research Foundation, or ISRF, and conducted by W. F. R. Pover at the University of Birmingham. When the preliminary findings from that study began to show that eating lots of sugar might be associated with heart disease, and even bladder cancer, the ISRF pulled the plug on the research. Without additional funding, the study was terminated and the results were never published, according to a study published today in PLOS Biology. The study in question investigated the relationship between sugars and certain blood fats called triglycerides, which increase the risk of heart disease. The preliminary results from the research, called Project 259, suggested that rats on a high-sugar diet, instead of a starch diet, had higher levels of triglycerides. The rats that ate lots of sugar also had higher levels of an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase in their urine, which at the time was thought to be potentially linked to bladder cancer, says study co-author Cristin Kearns, an assistant professor at the UCSF School of Dentistry.

limbicsystem writes: A new publication in the journal PLOS ONE shows that your rank in League of Legends (LoL) correlates with your intelligence quotient (IQ). Games like LoL and DOTA II apparently depend on the same cognitive resources that underlie tests of fluid intelligence. That means that proficiency in those games peaks at the same age as raw IQ -- about 25 -- while scores in more reaction-time based games like Destiny or Battlefield seem to decline from the teens onwards. The researchers suggest that the massive datasets from these online games could be used to assess population-level cognitive health in real-time across the globe. The authors have a nice FAQ (and open datasets) here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is "on course for ecological Armageddon," with profound impacts on human society. The new data was gathered in nature reserves across Germany but has implications for all landscapes dominated by agriculture, the researchers said. The cause of the huge decline is as yet unclear, although the destruction of wild areas and widespread use of pesticides are the most likely factors and climate change may play a role. The scientists were able to rule out weather and changes to landscape in the reserves as causes, but data on pesticide levels has not been collected. The research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardized ways of collecting insects in 1989.

A new study by scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand suggests that at about 58,000 years ago, Stone Age humans began to settle down, staying in one area for longer periods. The research also provides a potential answer to a long-held mystery: why older, Howiesons Poort complex technological tradition in South Africa, suddenly disappear at that time. Phys.Org reports: The Howiesons Poort at Sibudu contains many finely-worked, crescent-shaped stone tools fashioned from long, thin blades made on dolerite, hornfels and, to a lesser extent, quartz. These "segments," as they are called, were hafted to shafts or handles at a variety of angles using compound adhesives that sometimes included red ochre (an iron oxide). A diverse bone tool kit in the Howiesons Poort includes what may be the world's oldest bone arrowhead. Certainly a variety of hunting techniques was used perhaps including the first use of snares for the capture of small creatures. The animal remains brought to Sibudu reflect this diversity for there are bones from large plains game like zebra, tiny blue duiker, and even pigeons and small carnivores. Soft, clayey ochre pieces were collected in the Howiesons Poort perhaps at a considerable distance From Sibudu. Clayey ochre is useful for applying as paint. The beautiful Howiesons Poort industry with its long, thin blades is replaced at 58,000 years ago by a simple technology that could be rapidly produced. Coarse rocks like quartzite and sandstone became popular. These could be collected close to Sibudu. Post-Howiesons Poort tools were part of an unstandardized toolkit with triangular or irregularly-shaped flakes. Tiny scaled pieces were also produced using a bipolar technique (in the simplest terms this involves smashing a small piece of rock with a hammerstone). The study has been published in the journal PlosOne.

An anonymous reader quotes Popular Science: Raising cattle contributes to global warming in a big way. The animals expel large amounts of methane when they burp and fart, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. U.S. beef production, in fact, roughly equals the annual emissions of 24 million cars, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That's a lot of methane... Researchers think there may be a better way. Rather than ask people to give up beef, they are trying to design more climate-friendly cattle.

The goal is to breed animals with digestive systems that can create less methane. One approach is to tinker with the microbes that live in the rumen, the main organ in the animals' digestive tract... Scientists in the United Kingdom last year found that a cow's genes influence the makeup of these microbial communities, which include bacteria and also Archaea, the primary producers of methane. This discovery means cattle farmers potentially could selectively breed animals that end up with a lower ratio of Archaea-to-bacteria, thus leading to less methane... "The selection to reduce methane emissions would be permanent, cumulative and sustainable over generations as with any other trait, such as growth rate, milk yield, etc. used in animal breeding." This, over time, "would have a substantial impact on methane emissions from livestock," Roehe said.
Breeding low-emission cattle would also make it cheaper to raise cattle -- and improve the quality of meat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Need inspiration? Happy background music can help get the creative juices flowing. Simone Ritter, at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Sam Ferguson, at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, have been studying the effect of silence and different types of music on how we think. They put 155 volunteers into five groups. Four of these were each given a type of music to listen to while undergoing a series of tests, while the fifth group did the tests in silence. The tests were designed to gage two types of thinking: divergent thinking, which describes the process of generating new ideas, and convergent thinking, which is how we find the best solutions for a problem. Ritter and Ferguson found that people were more creative when listening to music they thought was positive, coming up with more unique ideas than the people who worked in silence. However, happy music -- in this instance, Antonio Vivaldi's Spring -- only boosted divergent thinking. No type of music helped convergent thinking, suggesting that it's better to solve problems in silence. The study was published in the journal PLoS One.

schwit1 shares a report from Seeker: An ice-free corridor between the Americas and Asia opened up about 12,500 years ago, allowing humans to cross over the Bering land bridge to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south. History books have conveyed that information for years to explain how the Americas were supposedly first settled by people, such as those from the Clovis culture. At least one part of the Americas was already occupied by humans before that time, however, says new research on the skeleton of a male youth found in Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Mexico. Dubbed the Young Man of Chan Hol, the remains date to 13,000 years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4,000 miles away from the Bering land crossing. For the new study, Gonzalez, Stinnesbeck, and their colleagues dated the Young Man of Chan Hol's remains by analyzing the bones' uranium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes, which were also found in stalagmite that had grown through the pelvic bone. The scientists believe that the resulting age of 13,000 years could apply to at least two other skeletons found in caves around Tulum: a teenage female named Naia and a 25-30-year-old female named Eve of Naharon. Gonzalez said that the shape of the skulls suggests that Eve and the others "have more of an affinity with people from Southeast Asia." He and his team further speculated that the individuals could have originated in Indonesia.

Ars Technica reports on a study suggesting that "Striking at a myth with facts may only shore it up." Applehu Akbar writes: Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied public attitudes toward vaccination in a group whose opinions on the subject were polled before and after being shown three different kinds of explanatory material that used settled scientific facts about vaccines to explain the pro-vaccination side of the debate. Not only was the anti-vax cohort not convinced by any of the three campaigns, but their attitudes hardened when another poll was taken a week later.

What seems to have happened was that the pro-vax campaign was taken by anti-vaxers as just another attempt to lie to them, and as reinforcement for their already made-up minds on the subject. A previous study at Dartmouth College in 2014 used similar methodology and except for the 'hardening' effect elicited similar results. What's really scary about this is that while the Dartmouth subjects were taken from a large general population, the Edinburgh subjects were college students.
"The researchers speculate that the mere repetition of a myth during the process of debunking may be enough to entrench the myth in a believer's mind," writes Ars Technica, with one of the study's authors attributing this to the "illusory truth" effect.

"People tend to mistake repetition for truth."

New submitter Zorro shares a report from Patch.com: When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found. That's the equivalent of driving 13.6 million cars for a year. The problem lies with the meat-filled diets of kitties and pooches, according to the study by UCLA geography professor Gregory Okin. Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin. Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts. The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Scientists from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom have managed to develop an algorithm that outperforms medical doctors when it comes to predicting heart attacks. As it stands, around 20 million people fall victim to cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attacks, strokes, and blocked arteries. Today, doctors depend on guidelines similar to those of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) in order to predict individuals' risks. These guidelines include factors like age, cholesterol level, and blood pressure. In employing computer science, Stephen Weng, an epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham, took the ACC/AHA guidelines and compared them to four machine-learning algorithms: random forest, logistic regression, gradient boosting, and neural networks. The artificially intelligent algorithms began to train themselves using existing data to look for patterns and create their own "rules." Then, they began testing these guidelines against other records. And as it turns out, all four of these methods "performed significantly better than the ACC/AHA guidelines," Science reports. The most successful algorithm, the neural network, actually was correct 7.6 percent more often than the ACC/AHA method, and resulted in 1.6 percent fewer false positives. That means that in a sample size of around 83,000 patient records, 355 additional lives could have been saved.

First, "A new study finds that nearly 9 in 10 people who go for a second opinion after seeing a doctor are likely to leave with a refined or new diagnosis from what they were first told," according to an article shared by Slashdot reader schwit1: Researchers at the Mayo Clinic examined 286 patient records of individuals who had decided to consult a second opinion, hoping to determine whether being referred to a second specialist impacted one's likelihood of receiving an accurate diagnosis. The study, conducted using records of patients referred to the Mayo Clinic's General Internal Medicine Division over a two-year period, ultimately found that when consulting a second opinion, the physician only confirmed the original diagnosis 12 percent of the time. Among those with updated diagnoses, 66% received a refined or redefined diagnosis, while 21% were diagnosed with something completely different than what their first physician concluded.
But in a related story, Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes that four machine-learning algorithms all performed better than currently-used algorithm of the American College of Cardiology, according to newly-published research, which concludes that "machine-learning significantly improves accuracy of cardiovascular risk prediction, increasing the number of patients identified who could benefit from preventive treatment, while avoiding unnecessary treatment of others."

"I can't stress enough how important it is," one Stanford vascular surgeon told Science magazine, "and how much I really hope that doctors start to embrace the use of artificial intelligence to assist us in care of patients."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Human noses have been shaped by climate, according to research probing variation in the human snout. Researchers say their findings back up the theory that wider nostrils developed in populations living in warm, humid conditions, while populations living in high latitudes, such as northern Europe, developed narrower nostrils as an adaptation to the chilly, dry conditions. Writing in the journal Plos Genetics, researchers from the U.S., Ireland and Belgium describe how they began to unpick variations in nose shape by using 3D facial imaging to take a host of measurements from 476 volunteers of south Asian, east Asian, west African and northern European ancestry. The results revealed that only two out of seven nose-related traits were found to differ more between the populations than would be expected from the impact of random, chance changes in genetic makeup over time. The authors say that suggests variations in those traits have been influenced by natural selection. With further analysis, based on data from participants of west African and European ancestry, confirming that nose shape is highly heritable, the team looked to see if there was a link between nose shape and climate. The results showed that nostril width is linked to temperature and absolute humidity, with participants whose ancestors lived in warm-humid climates on average having wider nostrils than those whose ancestors lived in cool-dry climates. That, says Arslan Zaidi, co-author of the study from Pennsylvania State University, could be because narrower nasal passages help to increase the moisture content of air and warm it -- a bonus for those in higher latitudes.

sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: Scientists have trained a quantum computer to recognize trees. That may not seem like a big deal, but the result means that researchers are a step closer to using such computers for complicated machine learning problems like pattern recognition and computer vision. The team fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into a D-Wave 2X processor, and asked the computer to consider dozens of features -- hue, saturation, even light reflectance -- to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, buildings, or rivers. They then told the computer whether its classifications were right or wrong so that the computer could learn from its mistakes, tweaking the formula it uses to determine whether something is a tree. After it was trained, the D-Wave was 90% accurate in recognizing trees in aerial photographs of Mill Valley, California. The results demonstrate how scientists can program quantum computers to 'look' at and analyze images, and opens up the possibility of using them to solve other complex problems that require heavy data crunching.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply "bots," that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks. In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each other's edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action. The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedia's existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots' changes. While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger. One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbot's changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.

mspohr writes: The Economist has an interesting story about two neuroscientists/engineers -- Eric Jonas of the University of California, Berkeley, and Konrad Kording of Northwestern University, in Chicago -- who decided to test the methods of neuroscience using a 6502 processor. Their results are published in the PLOS Computational Biology journal. Neuroscientists explore how the brain works by looking at damaged brains and monitoring inputs and outputs to try to infer intermediate processing. They did the same with the 6502 processor which was used in early Atari, Apple and Commodore computers. What they discovered was that these methods were sorely lacking in that they often pointed in the wrong direction and missed important processing steps.

skids quotes a report from Phys.Org: Wearable sensors that monitor heart rate, activity, skin temperature and other variables can reveal a lot about what is going on inside a person, including the onset of infection, inflammation and even insulin resistance, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Altogether, the team collected nearly 2 billion measurements from 60 people, including continuous data from each participant's wearable biosensor devices and periodic data from laboratory tests of their blood chemistry, gene expression and other measures. Participants wore between one and eight commercially available activity monitors and other monitors that collected more than 250,000 measurements a day. The team collected data on weight; heart rate; oxygen in the blood; skin temperature; activity, including sleep, steps, walking, biking and running; calories expended; acceleration; and even exposure to gamma rays and X-rays. "We want to study people at an individual level," said Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics. "We have more sensors on our cars than we have on human beings," said Snyder. In the future, he said, he expects the situation will be reversed and people will have more sensors than cars do.

Slashdot reader skids adds: "IT security being in the state it is, will we face the same decision about our actual lives that we already face about our social lives/identities: either risk very real hazards of misuse of your personal data, or get left behind?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living near a busy road have an increased risk of dementia, according to research that adds to concerns about the impact of air pollution on human health. Roughly one in 10 cases of Alzheimer's in urban areas could be associated with living amid heavy traffic, the study estimated -- although the research stopped short of showing that exposure to exhaust fumes causes neurodegeneration. Previously, scientists have linked air pollution and traffic noise to reduced density of white matter (the brain's connective tissue) and lower cognition. A recent study suggested that magnetic nano-particles from air pollution can make their way into brain tissue. The latest study, published in The Lancet, found that those who live closest to major traffic arteries were up to 12% more likely to be diagnosed with dementia -- a small but significant increase in risk. The study, which tracked roughly 6.6 million people for more than a decade, could not determine whether pollution is directly harmful to the brain. The increased dementia risk could also be a knock-on effect of respiratory and cardiac problems caused by traffic fumes or due to other unhealthy life-style factors associated with living in built-up urban environments. The study tracked all adults aged between 20 and 85 living in Ontario, Canada from 2001 to 2012, using postcodes to determine a person's proximity to major roads. The cohort's medical records were examined to see who went on to develop dementia, Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis. Over the study period, more than 243,000 people developed dementia, 31,500 people developed Parkinson's disease and 9,250 people developed multiple sclerosis. The scientists found no link between living near a road and Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, but dementia was slightly more common in people living close to busy roads and the risk dropped off gradually in less built-up areas. Those living within 50 meters of a busy road had a 7% higher risk in developing dementia, the risk was 4% higher risk at 50-100 meters, 2% higher risk at 101-200 meters and there was no increase in risk in those living more than 200 meters away. Those who lived in a major city, within 50 meters of a major road and who did not move house for the duration of the study had the highest risk at 12%.

schwit1 quotes a report from The New York Times: Social isolation is a growing epidemic (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- one that's increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they're lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent. About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health -- especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression -- are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters. A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent. Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age. Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.

A new study from the University of California is the latest to show that increased smartphone screen-time can lower one's quality of sleep, which can lead to various negative health conditions such as obesity, diabetes and depression. Medical Xpress reports: Christensen and colleagues sought to test the hypothesis that increased screen-time may be associated with poor sleep by analyzing data from 653 adult individuals across the United States participating in the Health eHeart Study. Participants installed a smartphone application which recorded their screen-time, defined as the number of minutes in each hour that the screen was turned on, over a 30-day period. They also recorded their sleeping hours and sleep quality. The researchers found that each participant totaled an average of 38.4 hours over this period, with smartphones being activated on average for 3.7 minutes in each hour. Longer average screen-time was associated with poor sleep quality and less sleep overall, particularly when smartphones were used near participants' bedtime. The authors state that their study is the first to measure smartphone exposure prospectively, but caution that the study also had some important limitations, including the self-selection of study participants and self-reporting of data. The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: Study after study has demonstrated a link between strong social connections and reduced mortality risk. But does that hold true as our social interactions increasingly take place in online spheres? A new study out of Yale and the University of California suggests that it does. The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people who use Facebook live longer than those who do not, and that certain types of Facebook activities -- like posting pictures and accepting friend requests -- are associated with a lower risk of mortality. "There's a big debate about online social media. There are people that worry that worry it substitutes for healthy social interaction," co-author James Fowler, a social scientist from University of California, San Diego, told CBC News. The researchers started with 12 million Facebook profiles, then narrowed it down to four million people whose identities could be verified through California's voter registration list. Then they used data from the California Department of Public Health to compare those people to voters who don't use the social networking platform. They found the risk of dying in a given year was 12 per cent lower for Facebook users than non-Facebook users. That doesn't mean Facebook is necessarily good for you, Fowler cautions. Correlation does not prove causation, so it's impossible to say whether being on Facebook makes you healthier, or whether healthy people are more likely to be on Facebook. Still, Fowler said the study does help debunk some of the negative associations people have with social media. "The fact that we found such a strong positive relationship between health and social networks speaks against the hypothesis that they're making us unhealthy in some way," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: A new study from Microsoft Research found that the most interested Pokemon Go players took 26% more steps than before using the app. The largest behavior changes were seen among sedentary users. No matter their gender, age, weight or lifestyle, Pokemon Go users began to move more -- taking an extra 194 steps a day once they started using the app. (That's the equivalent of walking roughly one tenth of a mile.) The researchers estimate that Pokemon Go has added 144 billion steps to U.S. physical activity. That's 143 roundtrips to the moon. The study was published online this month in the Cornell Library University. Since activity reduces mortality risks, the researchers estimated that Pokemon Go could add 2.83 million years to the life expectancy of an assumed 25 million U.S. users. Based off research that showed walking reduces mortality, the researchers calculated that Pokemon Go users who continued to walk an extra 1,000 steps a day would enjoy 41.4 days of additional life expectancy. The Microsoft scientists examined data shared by 31,793 users of Microsoft Band, a wearable device, and Bing, the company's search engine. They compared the movement data from the wearables with users' web search queries. Pokemon Go players were identified by web searches that indicated they were playing the game. The Microsoft team also looked at four of the most popular health apps on Apple and Android devices. They found these apps had little impact on a person's behavior. The activity levels of Pokemon Go users changed far more.

HughPickens.com writes: Sophie Kleeman, writes at Gizmodo that according to a study at the University of Michigan people who are more sensitive to written typos and grammatical errors are indeed the kinds of 'Type A assholes' everyone already suspects them to be. Researchers gathered 83 people and had them read emails that either contained typos ("mkae" or "abuot"), grammar errors (to/too, it's/its or your/you're), or no spelling mistakes at all. Participants were asked at the end of the experiment whether or not they'd spotted any grammatical errors or typos in the emails, and, if so, how much it had bothered them. The researchers then asked the participants to complete a Big Five personality assessment -- which rates where they are on a scale of openness, agreeableness, extraversion/introversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness -- as well as answer questions about their age, background, and attitude towards language. People who tested as being more conscientious but less open were more sensitive to typos, while those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors. "Less agreeable participants showed more sensitivity to 'grammos' than participants high in agreeability," the researchers said, "perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention."

Lucas123 writes: An MIT [Senseable City Lab] study based on mathematical modeling demonstrated a likely scenario in which high-tech vehicles, using sensors to remain at a safe distance from each other as they move through a four-way intersection, can eliminate the need for traffic lights in the future. By removing the waits caused by traffic lights, these so-called Slot-based Intersections speed-up traffic flow.The study claims this kind of traffic-light-free transportation design, if it ever arrives, could allow twice as much traffic to use existing roads.

An anonymous reader writes: Who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory? Well, I don't — they're usually annoying daydreams from annoying people. Fortunately, an Oxford mathematician seems to feel the same way. Dr. David Grimes just published research in PLOS One establishing a formula for determining the likelihood of a failed conspiracy — in other words, how likely some of its participants are to spill the beans. There are three main factors: number of conspirators, the amount of time passed since it started, and how often we can expect conspiracies to intrinsically fail (a value he derived by studying actual conspiracies that were exposed). From the article: "He then applied his equation to four famous conspiracy theories: The belief that the Moon landing was faked, the belief that climate change is a fraud, the belief that vaccines cause autism, and the belief that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer. Dr. Grimes's analysis suggests that if these four conspiracies were real, most are very likely to have been revealed as such by now. Specifically, the Moon landing 'hoax' would have been revealed in 3.7 years, the climate change 'fraud' in 3.7 to 26.8 years, the vaccine-autism 'conspiracy' in 3.2 to 34.8 years, and the cancer 'conspiracy' in 3.2 years."

schwit1 sends word that a new study published in PLOS Medicine has examined how lifestyle risk factors can affect mortality rates, both alone and in combination with each other. Having a single major risk factor increased mortality rates slightly, but the study found that those who report multiple risk factors are significantly more likely to die early. While this includes obvious behavior like smoking and alcohol consumption, the findings also suggest prolonged sitting and unhealthy sleep patterns can strongly increase mortality rates when combined with each other, or with the obvious behaviors. "Some combinations were more deadly than others, the researchers found. Those who blended insufficient exercise with prolonged sitting were 2.42 times more likely to die during the study, and those who were also guilty of sleeping for too many hours were 4.23 times more likely die by the time the study ended. 'These findings suggest there is a "synergistic effect" among risk factors,' the study authors wrote."

An anonymous reader writes: In the 1950s, Panama Disease wiped out the dominant type of banana that was imported worldwide. Banana-growers had to switch to a different strain, the Cavendish banana, at great expense. Now, a new study finds that a more virulent strain of the disease is directly threatening the Cavendish banana. Banana plants are dying from it throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. It hasn't reached Latin America yet, which is good — that's where the vast majority of the world's bananas are produced. But the researchers say it's just a matter of time. "The latest strain is likely to put the risks of monoculture on display once more. And while scientists might find or breed a better one in the mean time, the reality is that this time around we don't have a formidable replacement that's resistant to the new strain of Panama Disease. Once it reaches Latin America, as it is expected to, it could be only a matter of decades before the most popular banana on the planet once again disappears."

A few weeks ago you had a chance to ask author, entrepreneur, and software developer Jeff Atwood about founding Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network, as well as his new endeavor, the Discourse open-source discussion platform. Below you will find his answers to your questions. Magic wand
by Anonymous Coward

If you had a magic wand to make one change in technology right now, what would it be?

Atwood: Users would not have to generate, remember, enter, or ever think about passwords again. Computers would automatically know who the user is through a combination of ambient biometrics plus physical possession of some kind of device. Like, say, a smartphone.

Passwords are the enemy. And the users, because we are the idiots put in charge of making up the passwords. But mostly, it's the *goddamn passwords*.



Why did you choose Microsoft Platform for SE?
by Sadsfae

I don't see many large, high profile sites running an entire Microsoft Windows stack nowadays (IIS/SQL Server, etc) but Stack Exchange is one of them.

What were the reasons behind choosing a full Microsoft stack versus any of the Open Source alternatives which seem much more prevalent, especially in start-ups and smaller businesses for web presence?

Atwood: Mostly, C# is what I knew and what I was skilled in -- and I'm a great fan of its primary architect Anders Hejsberg who also created Turbo Pascal and Delphi. Performance was a goal, too, and since C# is a compiled language it's *extremely* fast. I think you can see for yourself that Stack Overflow is absurdly fast. Having switched to Ruby with the Discourse project, I can also testify that Ruby .. is, uh ... not ... absurdly fast.

The only downside of the .NET environment is, honestly, the SQL Server licensing costs which can be quite extreme at scale. There is movement to make .NET more open source. Plus the long running mono effort.

The main weakness of .NET is that it's not great for open source projects, though that has changed a bit over the last few years. It never really made sense to open source Stack Overflow -- ask yourself, how many Stack Overflow clones have flourished? Why is that? As a closed source project, the performance, great language design, and scaling of C# worked for us.

I made different choices for Discourse which *was* designed to be an open source project, a tool that is widely applicable to many communities, from day zero.



History of StackExchange
by unencode200x

A question on the history of Stack Exchange. What was the original idea that drove you to make StackExchange and how has it evolved or added since?

Atwood: Do you remember a site called Experts-Exchange? No? That means we succeeded at our original goal.

The basic concept was to do a 100% community driven Q&A that had elements of:

- Wikipedia (all the articles are always up to date and not dead tombstones from six years ago).
- Reddit (voting up the good information and voting down the bad information).
- Blogs (ownership, curation, and responsibility for content that has your name on it).
- Videogames (the Xbox 360 Achievements system, points, and ways of encouraging and incentivizing positive community behavior that are fun).

Where everything we build together is creative commons, and belongs to all of us, since you guys and gals are the ones doing all the work in the system!



Reputation mechanisms & scientific quality
by Anonymous Coward

Jeff, have you thought about how to use reputation mechanisms to improve the quality of published scientific results? I'm asking in the context of John P. A. Ioannidis' famous paper.

It seems to me one fix for this (horrible) problem might be an online reputation mechanism where scientists could rate the reproducibility of published results. Thoughts? (thanks for inventing Stack Exchange - you've done the world a big favor).

Atwood: It certainly seems applicable. The Stack engine works best for systems of data, fact, and science -- or at least a "tome of knowledge" -- where you can actually verify an answer (or five answers) as plausibly correct. You can see which topics do best on the Stack engine in the Stack Exchange directory, with a massive, Jupiter sized Stack Overflow right at the top.

There's always more than one way to do it, of course, but when you start getting dozens or hundreds of "answers" you don't have Q&A, you have a discussion with no clear answers, just opinions.



User Reputation, Moderating, and Discourse
by T.E.D.

I think its probably inarguable that the biggest innovation StackOverflow brought to the web was the centrality of reputation and user moderation to its design. Sure, our own /. had done something similar years before, and it was hardly the first either, but no website I know of had before taken it to its logical conclusion in quite the way SO does. This effectively "crowdsourced" a lot of traditional website administrative activities, which turned out to be an incredibly powerful idea. Practically all the functionality of SO is built around the concept.

So when I saw you were tackling online message boards, I expected the same kind of thing. But browsing around a typical Discourse thread, I'm not seeing that at all. Sure, users can "heart" posts, but all that does is bump a small counter next to the heart. There is no way to tell at a glance which posts users found the best and/or worst. Higher rated posts don't sort to the top, or get bigger or anything. As a result, I don't even see that feature used much. Certainly its nothing like SO, where post voting is the central activity. It also seems like moderation on Discourse is designed to be done by administrators, not users. I don't see any facility for users getting moderation privs as they gain reputation. Compared to SO, Discourse seems kind of, well, like a big step backwards in interactivity.

I'm sure I'm missing something here. What is it? Or did you really decide SO's centering of its design around users and their opinion on posts was a mistake, or perhaps just not a good fit for a more generalized discussion board?

Atwood: Sorting a conversation by votes is a pretty effective way to destroy conversation. How can you follow the logical flow of back and forth, chronological dialog when the ground is constantly shifting underneath you as posts get voted up or down? You can't.

Stack is a system of technical Q&A, where opinions are fascinating, and all, but they are completely trumped by facts, data, and science. Stack only tolerates the minimum amount of discussion necessary to get the best questions and the best answers. The goal isn't for people to talk to each other, the goal is for people to *answer the damn question*. Ideally with the aforementioned facts, data, and science, so our peers can objectively decide if the answer is correct and works.

Discourse, on the other hand, is explicitly a system of discussion and opinion. There is no right and wrong. You can't tell me my opinion that Wolverine is the coolest X-Man is wrong. Long after people have forgotten what exactly was said, they will remember how you made them feel. That's what the like (heart) action is about, and why it is featured so prominently: empathy. Discourse is a system of empathy.

We do have user trust levels in Discourse, it's just less obvious, because we're playing a different kind of game. Compare that with Stack, where your reputation number and badge counts appear prominently next to your name every time you post. Trust me, people *do* notice when you like their post. And if they see your post got 20 likes whereas their post only got two, or none, they absolutely notice that too. Discourse is more of a collaborative game, where Stack is an explicitly competitive game, and that's why the score is so prominent. The best way to motivate a programmer is to tell them someone else did it better. Don't try to race sheep, don't try to herd race horses.

There may not be re-ordering by votes in Discourse, as there is in Stack Overflow, but there is a summary mode for topics when they reach 50 or more replies. If you'd like to see this in action, visit a longer topic and press the "Summarize Topic" button at the top near the estimated read time, or as I like to call it, the TL;DR button. Then you'll see only the "best" 10 percent of that long topic. That factors in a lot of data from each post such as likes, incoming and outgoing links to the post, the number of times it has been read, total read time (we track actual on-screen read time for all posts in Discourse), number of times it has been bookmarked, number of replies, and so on. You can also expand context above (in reply to) and below (replies) for each post as needed. Or you can expand the collapsed gaps as needed. Try it, you just need a long topic with over 50 replies to see it in action.



Cargo cult programming and Stack Overflow
by Anonymous Coward

I don't mean to minimize StackOverflow's contribution to the online knowledge base, because it's a great tool when used properly. I'm a systems guy and Server Fault is often more useful than vendor support for looking up strange error messages and possible troubleshooting routes. But, there are a lot of low skill programmers and sysadmins out there who lean on these tools way too much. How do you feel about these properties contributing to the crappy cargo cult programming and sysadmin work we see in our field?

Atwood: Stack is a system of peer education at its core. The key insight is realizing that crappy programmers hurt all of us, and it's our job to learn from each other so that we have less terrible code and terrible coders to deal with in the future. Even if that terrible coder is us!

The best way to learn a topic is to teach it to someone else. That is the skill at the heart of the Stack engine. It works at three levels:

1. Selfish. I need the answer to this question or I may get fired. Give me the answer. This is ideally handled through a good search result. They get what they need.

2. Self Improvement. I want to get reputation and prove to my peers that I know what I am doing. The more I learn, the better I am at my job, the more skilled I am, and the more job satisfaction / money / prestige I can gain.

3. Advancement of our craft. Programming, physics, and math will be here long after we are all dead. It's an honor to help move science forward together as much as we can together in our lifetime, so that future programmers, physicists, and mathematicians can stand on our shoulders and do amazing, incredible things for the future of humanity.

It's fine for people to play the game at level one, because they are also helping others learn and work their way up the skill ladder. If someone is learning, and someone is teaching, we all win.



Rampant closure of questions
by WaffleMonster

From time to time I search stackoverflow for easy answers and I would say about 20% of the time the question has been closed even though it is the reason I went to stackoverflow in the first place. In most of these instances a useful answer was also provided before closure. So my question to you is simply what gives.

The most common reason for closure I run into is that the people closing it don't have any domain clue what is being asked and appear to assume if they don't understand nobody else does either.

Another common reason for closure is the "duplicate" question meme in which nuance is overlooked and questions are marked as duplicates because the people doing the marking failed to understand or appreciate the difference. This is very annoying.

Less common but equally annoying issues are closure due to chatter about domain specific algorithms not being "programming questions" or even more amusing someone posting a question that is more specifically addressed by one of a hundred different stack exchanges even though it is still on topic.

Atwood: Remember that Stack is for questions that can be explicitly answered, *not* discussion. It's not a place for "what's the best way to.." opinion sinkholes. Humans love this kind of stuff because they are social animals, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to have a discussion -- you just need to have that discussion elsewhere, because you can't have it on Stack Overflow.

We're strict about this because we've seen what happens when systems are not explicit about their goals. This way lies madness. This way lies Yahoo Answers. In Stack's case the goal is *learning*. And I do not mean accidental, random, meandering, oh-hey-check-out-this-crazy-thing-I-saw-on-Reddit learning, but highly efficient, directed learning where you are a classroom, not a social club.

Duplicates are a hard problem, for sure. That's the one place I felt we didn't make a ton of progress in my four years there, unfortunately. Human beings have the incredibly annoying habit of asking the same questions using completely and utterly different words. They're really good at it. And it is true that over time there are more and more questions and answers on Stack Overflow, so the minefield of "is this a duplicate of...?" is only getting bigger over time. It is a super hard problem. If you have specific ideas of how to handle duplicates better, don't hesitate to ask or search some of the existing topics there.

Remember, Stack Overflow is governed by programmers just like you, you are a citizen of its community just like me, and you get a say in what happens there. You could even be elected a moderator by participating in the yearly elections. So if you don't like the way things work, it's like any other democracy -- make your voice heard, vote, campaign, or run for office.



Relevance of old answers
by Scottingham

As SO ages, some of the offered solutions are no longer valid. Are there currently plans to automate some way of validating old answers automatically? This problem seems to be a larger problem with forums in general. Do you have any musings regarding aging forums?

Atwood: Anyone, even anonymous users, can suggest an edit to any question or answer on any Stack Exchange site. It is like Wikipedia in that regard. Once two other users with sufficient reputation approve the edit it goes through. Alternately, if you earn enough reputation, you can make direct edits yourself.

If you see information that's out of date, edit it to make it more up to date! Be the change you want to see, and all that.



Signal To Noise: Trolls
by Anonymous Coward

In reading your work for years and seeing your various contributions, it seems like you are fascinated with filtering out the most useful information. In many of your blog posts the insight is not yours but rather a conglomeration of chosen useful quotes and sources. I very much appreciate this. My question for you is how do you handle critical feedback vs trolls when dealing with communities. For example, the down button is often a disagree button rather than a negative point. How do you deal with mixed opinions?

To use a real life personal example, TEF noted how he felt you were suggesting that people shouldn't play around to learn. Yet, the way he said it was clearly inflammatory. How do you separate the legitimate concern and critical feedback from the troll who doesn't want to listen to your response?

Atwood: There is a reason we don't have a "dislike" or "downvote" in Discourse. How can an opinion be wrong? It can be rude, offensive, misinformed, misguided, or just plumb crazy -- but it can't be objectively *wrong*. Often the way you judge posts in Discourse is by their *lack* of likes. If nobody feels strongly enough about your reply to push the heart button on it, and 'co-sign' it with their name in public, that says something.

As for separating legitimate criticism from trolling, I don't know that actual trolls, by the strict definition of the word troll, are that common. I think bad faith makes itself quite clear in the tone and delivery of the criticism. Are you saying this in the hope that we can both learn something from the interaction, or are you saying it because you want to hurt or shame or denigrate or discredit me? Truth alone, as it turns out, isn't the whole truth. How you say something matters.

Bad faith is especially visible to the audience, who has no stake in the argument, and can be surprisingly objective in judging authenticity. One of the most striking things about the early days of Stack Overflow was seeing how people would not upvote cruelty. They wouldn't necessarily downvote it, mind you, but overt cruelty and meanness in an answer was never an effective way to get upvotes and reputation even if the technical information was sound. The best way to win an argument isn't to convince the other person, necessarily -- good luck with that -- but to convince everyone who is watching. And you will never convince an audience watching you be cruel to another person.

In life, being cruel to others may achieve some short term goals, but it is *never* a winning long term strategy. And I think that is exactly how it should be.



How do you have a good debate online?
by AmiMoJo

It seems like the internet is mostly a terrible place to have debates. Many forums quickly become echo chambers for people who want to be as offensive as possible just to prove that they can exercise their free speech rights. Other times debates are derailed by cheap tactics like being deliberately offensive to derail the arguments and bog everyone down in accusations that they are "SJWs". Ad-hominems and obvious logical fallacies seem to be the norm.

How do you plan to avoid this happening? So far no-one seems to have found a way.

Atwood: We have a few tricks up our sleeve at Discourse. We try to teach communities not just how the software works, but how human beings should work, with stuff like our Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse which is prominently featured in every install of Discourse and of course Creative Commons licensed.

I believe in the “Just in Time" theory of human behavior where we try to reach you at the exact moment you start typing your first post with the TL;DR version of those rules. And the most important rule of all for empathy is a simple one: hey, there's another person on the other side of that screen. Not just an abstract name, an avatar, a collection of pixels, but a real live human being, just like you.

I don't know if we can weaponize empathy but I'd sure like to try. Not every space has to be open to everyone, unless you work for Facebook or Twitter. Sometimes the point of having your own community is being able to close the door on people who demonstrate that they can't behave themselves in your house. Live with wolves, and you learn to howl.



Stackoverflow in hindsight
by jez9999

In hindsight, would you have reduced the scope of on-topic questions for Stackoverflow to where it's at today when you started the site knowing what you do now, and do you think it would've made the site less popular?

Atwood: Much of the strictness of Stack Overflow evolved as a side effect of the reputation system. Once you have a reputation score, you want to protect that score, and nothing devalues your own reputation more than seeing some other programmer get 300 reputation points from a humorous answer containing nothing but an XKCD comic. Anyone can post an XKCD comic; that takes no particular competence or knowledge. So the evolution in strictness -- peer reputation should come from expression of *skill*, not funny anecdotes -- was largely driven by the community, not by anyone employed at Stack Overflow.

Even knowing what I already knew, which is that putting a number next to someone's name will cause them to do whatever it takes to make that number go up -- I didn't anticipate how strong this effect would be. But ultimately I agree with it, and I think systems should trend to slightly increasing strictness over time as they grow bigger. Big cities have different problems than small cities, and they need more structure.

Bruce66423 writes: A survey of more than 450,000 people in the UK has shown there is a significant correlation between a higher score on the Autism Quotient and being a scientist or engineer. AQ scores are also higher for men than for women. "On average, the male AQ score was 21.6, compared to a female score of 19.0. People work in a STEM-related job had an average AQ score of 21.9 compared to a score of 18.9 for individuals working in non-STEM jobs. This suggests autistic traits are linked to both sex and to having a ‘systems-thinking’ mind." A professor involved with the work said, "These may shed light on why we find males in the population on average have slightly more autistic traits than females do, and why fathers and grandfathers of children with autism are over-represented in STEM fields."

schwit1 sends news that researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed robots that emulate natural selection. The "mother" robot designs and builds its "child" bots, and then tests them against particular criteria. The child bots that are the most successful have their traits carried on to the next generation. "For each robot child, there is a unique ‘genome’ made up of a combination of between one and five different genes, which contains all of the information about the child’s shape, construction and motor commands. As in nature, evolution in robots takes place through ‘mutation’, where components of one gene are modified or single genes are added or deleted, and ‘crossover’, where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals." By the final generation, the fastest robots were able to perform their task twice as fast as the average robot in the first generation.

sciencehabit writes: New research suggests that vaccines that don't make their hosts totally immune to a disease and incapable of spreading it to others might have a serious downside. According to a controversial study by Professor Andrew Read these so-called "imperfect" or "leaky" vaccines could sometimes teach pathogens to become more dangerous. Sciencemag reports: "The study is controversial. It was done in chickens, and some scientists say it has little relevance for human vaccination; they worry it will reinforce doubts about the merits or safety of vaccines. It shouldn't, says lead author Andrew Read, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park: The study provides no support whatsoever for the antivaccine movement. But it does suggest that some vaccines may have to be monitored more closely, he argues, or supported with extra measures to prevent unintended consequences."

New submitter Michael Tiemann writes: An article published in PLOS One finds increased hospital admissions significantly correlate with living in the same zip code as active fracking sites. The data comes from three counties in Pennsylvania, whose zip codes mostly had no fracking sites in 2007 and transitioned to a majority of zip codes with at least one fracking site. While the statistical and medical data are compelling, and speak to a significant correlation, the graphical and informational figures flunk every Tufte test, which is unfortunate. Nevertheless, with open data and Creative Commons licensing, the paper could be rewritten to provide a more compelling explanation about the dangers of fracking to people who live within its vicinity, and perhaps motivate more stringent regulations to protect them from both immediate and long-term harm.

ferrisoxide.com writes: A paper co-authored by researcher fellow Dr. Fiona Ingleby and evolutionary biologist Dr. Megan Head — on how gender differences affect the experiences that PhD students have when moving into post-doctoral work — was rejected by peer-reviewed PLoS Onebecause they didn't ask a man for help.

A (male) peer reviewer for the journal suggested that the scientists find male co-authors, to prevent "ideologically biased assumptions." The same reviewer also provided his own ironically biased advice, when explaining that women may have fewer articles published because men's papers "are indeed of a better quality, on average," "just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile race a bit faster." PLoS One has apologized, saying, "We have formally removed the review from the record, and have sent the manuscript out to a new editor for re-review. We have also asked the Academic Editor who handled the manuscript to step down from the Editorial Board and we have removed the referee from our reviewer database."

First time accepted submitter MakeItGlow writes A new study by researchers from the University of Manchester found that mice use the color of light to set their body clock. The researchers investigated whether color signals from the eyes wound up in the suprachiasmatic nucleus—the part of the brain in vertebrates that keeps time using electrical and chemical signals. From the article: "Scientists have long known about the role light plays in governing circadian rhythms, which synchronize life’s ebb and flow with the 24-hour day. But they weren’t sure how different properties of light, such as color and brightness, contributed to winding up that clock. 'As a sort of common sense notion people have assumed that the clock somehow measures the amount of light in the outside world,' says Tim Brown, a neuroscientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and an author of the new study. 'Our idea was that it might be doing something more sophisticated than that.'”

sciencehabit writes: The sugar industry convinced the U.S. National Institutes of Health that studies that might persuade people to cut back on sugary foods should not be part of a national plan to fight childhood tooth decay, a new study of historical documents argues. The authors say the industry's activities, which occurred more than 40 years ago, are reminiscent of the tobacco companies' efforts to minimize the risks of smoking.

HughPickens.com writes Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced the pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. Now the NYT reports on recent research on why some groups, like some people, are reliably smarter than others. In one study, researchers grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning. Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn't score much higher on collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group's success. Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics (PDF). First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. It appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.

Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated the these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as "Theory of Mind," to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."