Science News, the 'Golden Corral' Buffet

A Bunch of interesting science blog posts at this link -- The finalists for the Three Quarks Daily science contest. Lots of fun, and the winner will be selected by Sean Carroll (who, though he has blocked me from posting on his facebook wall, still lets me comment on his posts, and who in fact, is a heck of a nice guy.)

A few posts I ,at least, noticed the title of, include---

Eruptions: The Mysterious Missing Eruption of 1258 A.D.

Double X Science: Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?

[ I didn't read the above post--- I was miffed my essay"God will smite the climate change deniers" didn't even make the first round, of candidates]

Cosmology Science Blog: Observation of two early yet mature galaxies: Rare objects or is Big Bang model inaccurate?

Galileo's Pendulum: Is Cosmology in Shambles?

[nice]

The Beast, the Bard, and the Bot: Are Humans Still Evolving?

[don't get too excited here; the evolution of human intelligence seems not to have occurred to the writer.]

So how did the climate change in the Miocene Era?

Scientists are puzzled today by the discovery that millions of years ago levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were lower [than they are today] - and yet,[the water] temperatures [then] were higher than today's [are].

So begins a writeup about a paper in Nature just published. If you don't have access to the magazine the writeup I reference still contains information about how they determined what the temperature in the miocene era WAS, and how surprised they were to find that apparently the levers of climatic change were different in the miocene than the mechanisms of global change today.

Mind body connection progress perhaps

Quoting a blurb about an article in Nature, an article which may represent a step toward understanding the mind body connection---

Though i don't have a subscription to Nature, nor could I understand the article probably, my guess is its a very tiny step, because the headlines for any part, typically, of a scientific solution, will grandify the results, which is only apparent when you look at the actual article. That is just how the mind operates. Guess they won't be identifying the part of the brain, where a guess, a step towards progress, ie, any verbal formulation, is taken by the brain to be more significant than it actually is, ---- too soon. What brought my comment up, is the observation that even the title of the article here, is modest. "Involved" rather than "discovered", "explained," .... the usual hyper conclusions typically found in headlines, book titles, etc. This is not a scientific jargon matter, this is the way words work in general. (kind of) -- that is, unavoidably overstating their own, significance. My favorite example, which I am not quoting exactly, is books titles, Like "The Evolution of Consciousness" which you find quickly, is held out by the author or authors, as nothing so definitive. The interesting thing is this blurb is atypically modest---

Rhythmic Firing of Nerves Involved in Body’s Movements

A new model for understanding how nerve cells in the brain control movement may help unlock the secrets of the motor cortex, a critical region that has long resisted scientists’ efforts to understand it, researchers report June 3 in Nature. (Embargo expired on 03-Jun-2012 at 14:00 ET)
Nature, June 3
—Washington University in St. Louis

My source for the above quotation is --Newswise SciWire for 04-Jun-2012