Charles Hawley, editor of Spiegel Online International, joins us from Berlin to explain. Charles Hawley, how much of a problem are these wild boars?

Mr. CHARLES HAWLEY (Editor, Spiegel Online International): Well, the wild boar problem has certainly been growing in recent years. The population has been skyrocketing. The number of wild boars is estimated to be around 2.5 million in Germany, and the numbers of those shot by hunters has more than doubled in the last two years.

So there are certainly a lot of wild boars, and as they multiply, they come into contact with humans more often.

BLOCK: What kind of contact?

Mr. HAWLEY: Well, there are stories of them bursting into supermarkets. Occasionally, they’ll break up a church meeting. Quite often they’ll be causing car accidents, that kind of thing.

BLOCK: And they’re radioactive to boot.

Mr. HAWLEY: Quite a few of them are indeed radioactive, mostly in southern Germany. That was sort of the major fallout zone of the Chernobyl disaster, and so as a result, there’s quite a bit of radioactivity still in the ground.

I can’t wait for the movie.

“This is the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans,” said Rasmus Nielsen, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology, who led the statistical analysis. “For such a very strong change, a lot of people would have had to die simply due to the fact that they had the wrong version of a gene.”

The widespread mutation in Tibetans is near a gene called EPAS1, a so-called “super athlete gene” identified several years ago and named because some variants of the gene are associated with improved athletic performance, Nielsen said. The gene codes for a protein involved in sensing oxygen levels and perhaps balancing aerobic and anaerobic metabolism.

This new study seems to validate the role of cell phone radiation as a contributing factor in declining bee populations.

Andrew Goldsworthy, a biologist from the UK’s Imperial College, London, has studied the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. He thinks it’s possible bees could be affected by cell phone radiation.

The reason, Goldsworthy says, could hinge on a pigment in bees called cryptochrome.

“Animals, including insects, use cryptochrome for navigation,” Goldsworthy told CNN.

“They use it to sense the direction of the earth’s magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from [cell] phones and their base stations. So basically bees do not find their way back to the hive.”

The cell was created by stitching together the genome of a goat pathogen called Mycoplasma mycoides from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab, and inserting the genome into the empty cytoplasm of a related bacterium. The transplanted genome booted up in its host cell, and then divided over and over to make billions of M. mycoides cells.

Venter and his team have previously accomplished both feats – creating a synthetic genome and transplanting a genome from one bacterium into another – but this time they have combined the two.

Exciting as long as it’s contained. ETC Group gives the counterpoint.

Mysterious floating blobs of light known as ball lightning might simply be hallucinations caused by overstimulated brains, a new study suggests.

For hundreds of years eyewitnesses have reported brief encounters with the golf ball- to tennis ball-size orbs of electricity. But scientists have been unable to agree on how and why ball lightning forms, since the phenomenon is rare and very short-lived. (See “Ball Lightning: A Shocking Scientific Mystery.”)

Ball lightning is often reported during thunderstorms, and it’s known that multiple consecutive lightning strikes can create strong magnetic fields. So Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria wondered whether ball lightning is really a hallucination induced by magnetic stimulation of the brain’s visual cortex or the eye’s retina.

Hallucinations caused by lightning-induced magnetic fields? This whole phenomenon just got weirder.

The verdict is in and: humans and Neanderthals interbred.

The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool.

“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.

This has long been the Gonzo Science position.

Robert Whitaker on the causes of mental illness.

Levine: So mental illness disability rates have doubled since 1987 and increased six-fold since 1955. And at the same time, psychiatric drug use greatly increased in the 1950s and 1960s, then skyrocketed after 1988 when Prozac hit the market, so now antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs alone gross more than $25 billion annually in the U.S. But as you know, correlation isn’t causation. What makes you feel that the increase in psychiatric drug use is a big part of the reason for the increase in mental illness?

Whitaker: The rise in the disability rate due to mental illness is simply the starting point for the book. The disability numbers don’t prove anything, but, given that this astonishing increase has occurred in lockstep with our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications, the numbers do raise an obvious question. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling the increase in disability rates? And in order to investigate that question, you need to look at two things. First, do psychiatric medications alter the long-term course of mental disorders for the better, or for the worse? Do they increase the likelihood that a person will be able to function well over the long-term, or do they increase the likelihood that a person will end up on disability? Second, is it possible that a person with a mild disorder may have a bad reaction to an initial drug, and that puts the person onto a path that can lead to long-term disability. For instance, a person with a mild bout of depression may have a manic reaction to an antidepressant, and then is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a cocktail of medications. Does that happen with any frequency? Could that be an iatrogenic [physician-caused illness] pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability rates?

So that’s the starting point for the book. What I then did was look at what the scientific literature — a literature that now extends over 50 years — has to say about those questions. And the literature is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Although psychiatric medications may be effective over the short term, they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. I was startled to see this picture emerge over and over again as I traced the long-term outcomes literature for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar illness. In addition, the scientific literature shows that many patients treated for a milder problem will worsen in response to a drug– say have a manic episode after taking an antidepressant — and that can lead to a new and more severe diagnosis like bipolar disorder. That is a well-documented iatrogenic pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability numbers.

Now there may be various cultural factors contributing to the increase in the number of disabled mentally ill in our society. But the outcomes literature — and this really is a tragic story — clearly shows that our drug-based paradigm of care is a primary cause.

[The findings] highlight a specific ecological role for whales in the oceans “other than their charisma”, he says.

Story here.

Sounds a lot like Fred Hoyle here:

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Nice work if you can get it. Hoyle could never get any recognition for similar ideas, but coming from Hawking of course they are oh so respectable.

This quote from media analyst blog Atrios’ Eschaton is a good one:

…we live in the accountability-free era, where nobody could have predicted except those who did and were right for the wrong reasons. Those who didn’t were wrong for the right reasons and are therefore still Very Serious People in good standing.

It is intended as a sarcastic comment about how the cheerleaders of the Iraq War and the financial crisis still have jobs in many cases, and in many other cases they have actually failed upward - while those who predicted the crisis somehow still remain outsiders.

That’s how politics in science works too. For instance, Fred Hoyle’s ideas are being appropriated under different guises, while his name is still mud. He was right for the wrong reasons, but once his stuff is rebranded, it can safely be used by establishment figures who were wrong for the right reasons. And so it goes.

…a study by University of Michigan paleontologist Tomasz Baumiller and colleagues finds that sea urchins have been preying on marine animals known as crinoids for more than 200 million years and suggests that such interactions drove one type of crinoid — the sea lily — to develop the ability to escape.

“After 200 million years of being eaten by these sonsofbitches, yeah, we adapted. You’re goddamn right we did.”

Around these parts, we are used to disagreeing with that mechanist reductionist dog Richard Dawkins. Liked him a little better as bulldog-athiest-with-a-camera-crew, but it’s still easy to dislike him on style. But whereas I’m sure the Pope won’t be arrested, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say right on dude.

Crittercam: Sea Lion 1, Octopus 0.

The article is technically correct, but kind of misleading and reductionist in its message, which is what I have become all too used to in mainstream reporting.

“We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon-dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not,” said team member Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, of the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

So they basically proved that NDE’s are linked to the brain thinking it is….near death. Bravo, guys. According to the authors of the article, they studied patients undergoing cardiac arrest. A good place to look for low CO2 levels. But as there is this hiccup in the work:

Still, not all scientists are convinced: “The one difficulty in arguing that CO2 is the cause is that in cardiac arrests, everybody has high CO2 but only 10 percent have NDEs,” said neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

What’s more, in heart attack patients, Fenwick said, “there is no coherent cerebral activity which could support consciousness, let alone an experience with the clarity of an NDE.”

So it has been shown that some people have these experiences, and doesn’t even broach the subject of the mechanism in the brain that causes such lucid and powerful experiences.How about a follow up article on Peter Fenwick or Rick Strassman’s research? Maybe a bit too gonzo for National Geographic…..

Suggested starting point for keep-you-up-all-night reading on NDE’s. More.

Pretty self explanatory article. Up until now, the only oxygen-free lifeforms were single-celled bacterium. That ante has now been upped to multi-cellular life. Sweet.

“We did not think we could find any animal living there. We are talking about extreme conditions - full of salt, with no oxygen.”

Considering the implications of creatures which can exist without oxygen, she said that greater study of animal-microbe interactions in the extreme environment of Earth’s oceans could help answer questions about the possibility of life existing on other planets with different atmospheres.

Identified via two-million-year-old fossils, a new human ancestor dubbed Australopithecus sediba may be the “key transitional species” between the apelike australopithecines—and the first Homo, or human, species, according to a new study.

Dude has this to say-

…that [Australopithecus sediba] may very well be the Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

New discoveries just keep barreling in. Is this earth-shattering or ho-hum? I’m not sure any more.

It has long been a semi-fantasy of mine to willingly replace my eyes with something artificial. Something along the line of Geordi La Forge’s upgrades seen in First Contact (I think), but with the added capabilities full spectrum vision settings, and hopefully a zoom function, macro and micro (think stargazing).

So with that out in the open, these guys claim to be getting close to curing blindness, which means 25-35 years from now…well, who the hell can really predict that long from now?

A group of experts from the Tel Aviv University (TAU), led by Professor Yael Hanein from the university’s School of Electrical Engineering, announced major progress in developing bionic eyes. The group has been investigating ways of merging man and machine for many years, and they say that the foundational research needed to make this a reality has been completed.

This could mean that the long-heralded future of bionics may finally be upon us. 

Sweet.

Timeline of habitation on the island of Flores just got pushed back 120,000 years, leading to contention:

Many scientists believe the creature evolved from a much larger-bodied species, Homo erectus, that became isolated and shrunk over time. Others point to features in the hobbit’s body - such as the length its feet to the shape of its shoulder girdle - that are very primitive and not what one would expect in dwarfed H. erectus.

These researchers have put forward the idea that H. floresiensis may have evolved from more archaic creatures that left Africa to colonise Asia even before erectus.

“Our discovery at Wolo Sege will certainly open the door to this contentious theory,” said Dr Brumm.

Time to put on the popcorn.

Let me add that all this was total, total heresy just a couple of years ago, and now the archaeology of human origins has basically exploded in a new direction.

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

 

That’s why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

… it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic
below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?

I love any story involving surprised scientists.

Apparently most of Canada was holding it during the gold medal hockey game. Water consumption spiked wildly between the game’s periods, as much of the city ran to the bathroom…

Thrill to the graph which accompanies this story.

Photos have turned up of a rare Sperm whale surface feeding session. According to the text in the captions, because the prey fish is not swimming well when the whale eats it, there’s some speculation that the whale might have stunned the fish with the long-rumored sperm whale sonic stun attack. I remember reading somewhere that they make the loudest calls in the animal kingdom, and that  they can communicate over the distance of the Pacific Ocean.  There may be some focusing of sound like a laser cannon through the spermaceti in their giant heads, but I’m too lazy to look it up right now. Anyway, click through and see these amazing photos of this terrifying predator.

This is the first report of flounder mimicry by an Atlantic octopus, and only the fourth convincing case of mimicry for cephalopods.

Crafty buggers.

Komodo Dragon attack:

… a nearly 7-foot-long (more than 2-meter-long) dragon grabbed hold of his right foot …

The dragon had Subanghadir’s foot clamped in its shark-like, serrated teeth until fellow rangers heard his screams and drove it off with wooden clubs …
suffered deep lacerations

It’s a dirty bite too.

How does one species evolve into two? A new study on lizards shows how different types or “morphs” within one species can start to evolve away from each other:

“It’s like an evolutionary clock ticking between rock, paper, scissors then back to rock,” he said. “Ammon’s research indicates that the game has been cycling for millions of years at some sites, and yet at other sites it collapses on one or two strategies and begins to create new species. It is simply mind-boggling to think about deep time and these evolutionary cycles.”

… ”For most species, the speciation process is thought to begin only after populations are geographically separated. Our study shows that the distinctive morphs that build up within populations are important for understanding speciation. Thus, the first stages of new species may occur within and not between populations.”

I do feel like a different species sometimes.

Concerning a new specimen of the “giant Jurassic fish Leedsichthys” - some Gonzo Science themes in this find, which they are calling a “missing piece in the evolutionary story of fish, mammals and ocean ecosystems”:

Scientific anomaly:

Dr Jeff Liston, from Glasgow University, ran the excavation in Peterborough and found the new specimen to be an anomaly.

Excavate the Museums:

“We then started to go back to museum collections, and we began finding suspension-feeding fish fossils from all round the world, often unstudied or misidentified.” … One of the best preserved Kansas specimens had previously been interpreted as similar to a fanged predatory swordfish. When members of the team began to clean the specimen, they found a toothless gaping mouth, with an extensive network of thin elongate bony plates to extract huge quantities of microscopic plankton.

Revised Timelines:

“These specimens indicated that there were giant filter-feeding fishes for much longer than we thought. … The fact that creatures of this kind were missing from the fossil record for over 100 million years seemed peculiar.

“What we have demonstrated here is that a long dynasty of giant bony fish filled this space in time for more than 100 million years.”

Hmm, pursuing scientific anomalies yields fruitful results? Nobody tell the astronomers…

The first vertebrates to walk the Earth emerged from the sea almost 20 million years earlier than previously thought, say scientists who have discovered footprints from an eight-foot-long prehistoric creature.

Is 20 million years a lot?

Abuse of the Journal/Peer Review system?? What??!?

Bayblab has more.
Good thing this is only confined to stem cell journals and not, say, cosmology or astronomy journals grumble grumble

The question is, since the system of doing science is broken, what are scientists going to do to fix it?

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Bonobo group eats dead infant, causes media kerfuffle:

Though uncommon, the behaviour may not be aberrant, says the scientist who witnessed it.

But it does further challenge a widely perceived notion that bonobos are an especially “peaceful” ape species.

Poppycock. We’re with this guy:

However, says Dr Fowler: “I am not sure there are wider implications from a scientific point of view.”

“I don’t see that occasionally consuming dead infants, however distasteful it might seem to us, is a sign of pathology or aberration per se.”

“I don’t think it necessarily says anything about ‘empathy’ or ‘morality’,” he adds.

“It had been suggested in the past that bonobos might feel more sympathy for victims, which is why they didn’t hunt monkeys, for example.

Metaphor

“But we now know they do hunt monkeys. So I think eating an already dead baby says little about bonobos in that respect.

“Bonobos are often used in a symbolic way, held up as the sexy, peaceful ‘Hippy Chimps’.

“The fact that they eat monkeys and consume their own dead offspring may not accord with this view, but I personally don’t see this as a problem.”

“The idea of the ‘Hippy Chimp’ is more a metaphor than a scientific argument,” he continues.

“I think the major implication is that we don’t need to see it as an aberration among other apes.

…i.e., no one should be getting the vapors about this.

As a result of the study, coauthor Tim Spector said, the study “shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.” It didn’t take long, however, for this news to reach the French, who aren’t about to start taking sex advice from across the channel. A group of  gynecologists there convened their own conference in Paris to denounce this assault on female pleasure.

The rest.