Top Science Stories of 2004

borkbot writes "New Scientist has several round-ups of 2004. They include one for technology , space and biology . There's also an interesting peice about the most popular stories of the year."

Comments

Mars rovers?

[rufey]

I found it surprising that the Mars rovers and the discoveries they have made didn't make it onto the list.

I wonder how they came up with the "most popular" stories.

Handsome men evolved thanks to picky females?

[joepa]

From 2004: The year in biology and medecine

Another study suggested that men may have swapped fighting for wooing and evolved into handsome hunks because of women's pickiness.

The article itself states "As our ancestors evolved, the ability to attract a female mate through good looks became [sic] may have become more important in the mating stakes than the ability to fight off male rivals..." and it goes on to say that the "changes were probably driven by choosy females who began to demand handsomeness, not brute force."

Unless I'm missing something here, the reasoning in the target article seems to be backwards. It could be that the author of the article in question is something along the lines of a Platonist about beauty (having a belief that there is an objective "form" of beauty that ancestral females had in mind when they were picking their mates). But, aside from that perspective, which is currently unpopular both philosophically and scientifically, I think that the reasoning usually goes more like this: we judge certain faces to be attractive (beautiful or handsome or whatever) because the people who have those features inherited them from ancestors who had greater reproductive success.

Although the details of this sort of reasoning may be somewhat debatable (e.g., why aren't the majority of people then considered to be beautiful or handsome instead of just your average Joe or Jane -- because of some technicalities having to do with the normal distribution of any given trait in the population and the fact that the people who happen to have all or most attractive features would be the statistically lucky ones at one tail of the distribution), it does make sense prima facie, as is evidenced by the use of a similar line of reasoning in the article on female attractiveness and fertility that is referenced in the same paragraph of the year in review.

I don't have access to the journal article that is referenced (in Biology Letters), so if someone is familiar with the particular article or the general debate in question, or if I'm missing some subtlety that makes things different in the male case, could you point it out to me?

What about library science?

[tiltowait]

Seriously. LISNews.com is featuring a rundown of the top library stories of 2004. Much of Slashdot's news crosses over with library science, just as much of IT relates with what librarians do nowadays. So please take a look to see what we're been up to. Librarians need more tech-savvy people familiar with the challenges we're facing.

Re:Nature

[St. Arbirix]

You must have missed item 10 in there list. A virus that thwarts the onset of AIDS in HIV carriers. The number of people to die in the tsunami was chump change compared to AIDS deaths.