I for one welcome our new ant overlords.

Here’s a fun little scientific controversy. According to a study, men with damaged sperm can improve their sperm quality by having more sex, increasing the chances of a successful conception. But at least one scientist disagrees on the merits:

“Looking at sperm DNA is just one part of the puzzle,” said Bill Ledger, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Sheffield, who was not connected to the research. “Maybe this will improve pregnancy rates, but we still need to do more studies.”

Ledger said instructing couples with infertility problems to have more sex could stress their relationship. “This may add even more anxiety and do more harm than good,” he said. He said couples shouldn’t feel pressured to adjust their sex lives just for the sake of having a baby.

Let the idiocy that last sentence sink in for a moment. That is quality idiocy, and from a specialist in the field.

Another sexist assumption of “man’s” past bites the dust.

His findings suggest women’s role in prehistoric culture may have been greater than previously thought.

More accurate to say “…greater than previously thought by the scientific gate keepers,” perhaps.

…which is to say, I didn’t see this coming exactly, but come on, in general these days it’s a safe scientific assumption to make that women’s role in prehistoric culture was greater than previously believed.

A gen-yoo-ine scientific controversy is a-brewing over who is our closest relative. The molecular evidence favors chimps, but we share many more physical traits with orangutangs. Is the molecular evidence flawed, as a new study maintains?

“There are actually very few [physical] features linking chimps and humans,” noted the Natural History Museum’s Andrews. “The case for that is based almost entirely on molecular evidence.”

And those molecular studies are flawed, Schwartz and Grehan say, because of the high likelihood that the data includes broadly shared DNA traits.

“When you’re doing a really rigorous analysis of relationships, you don’t just stop at the potential demonstration of similarity,” Schwartz said. “You have to distinguish between features that are widely shared [among many species] and those that are more uniquely shared.”

In addition, Schwartz notes, the most cited studies are largely based on the so-called coding region of the genome, which makes up just 2 to 3 percent of an animal’s DNA.

Scientists are referring to this tiny part of the genome when they say humans and chimps are so similar, he said.

If evolutionary timelines based on genetic/molecular evidence become seriously in doubt, you may expect a shitstorm of controversy as biologists eat each other alive. That is what’s going on here. Time to make popcorn!

Research indicates that water vapor in the upper atmosphere is the best explanation for the type of clouds seen worldwide after the Tunguska event (the 1908 explosion over Siberia). The presence of water vapor indicates that the impactor was more likely of the “icy comet” type as opposed to a “rocky asteroid”.

Of course there is considerable overlap between “icy comets” and “rocky asteroids,” with “icy asteroids” and “rocky comets” unhelpfully blurring the distinction. Just sayin.

And from this we got Jethro Tull.

I’ll be happy if they just autopsy his nose.

Local high weirdness.

Forwarded by princelumber, our Bigfoot scout.

Conventional estimates of dinosaur body weight may have been greatly inflated:

…a mathematical mistake involving logarithms meant that the dinosaur estimates were much too high, according to Dr Packard’s team.

We’ll be watching this story to see if this is a solid piece of science, or if dino mass estimates are being scaled down to avoid the embarrassment of having to rejigger the theory of gravity.

World’s 2nd biggest manmade hole at the delightful Atlas Obscura. The fine people over at Cracked have this bowel-loosening bit about terrifying islands. And Iraq is being overrun by snakes.

No one could have predicted this would get out of hand.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

They read Bill Clinton’s email!

The Green Revolution was a product of a biotechnological approach to feeding people, the thinking being that we could create ways of tricking nature in a lab: ridding ourselves of pests and weeds, increasing yields and efficiency. Unfortunately pests and weeds have become more virulent in these systems, as they evolve to withstand higher and higher doses of chemicals. These “monocultures” — field plantings of a single crop, usually corn, cotton or soy — have relied heavily on oil and resource inputs the third world can’t afford. Furthermore, these systems have yet to actually improve yields. Efficiency has been the greatest achievement of biotechnology; however, as Michael Pollan and others point out, redundancy, though counter-intuitive, is the only way to ensure food safety. But biotechnology companies like Monsanto have a huge lobbying presence in Washington, and corporate shills like Nina Federoff have the ear of Secretary Clinton. So its no surprise that in the name of philanthropy, the US has begun to adopt the “feeding the world” mantra of Big Ag.

But if you don’t embrace GMOs, you’re a luddite who wants African babies to starve.

“Rare Isotope Rap” straight outta Michigan State University

Why did nature settle on sexual reproduction when self-cloning appears to be a simpler solution? New Scientist teases the threads apart.

The main theory, that they  exist to improve one’s grip, has been disproved.

It’s about time:

Nearly 40 years after the first of its 210 nuclear tests, France is preparing to compensate people affected by the fallout. The move leaves the UK isolated in its policy of rejecting liability for illnesses suffered by test participants, reports Aidan Lewis.

“EMMI designs, builds and composes music for robotic instruments.”

New Scientist: Seven things that don’t make sense about gravity.

And remember, no matter how many things don’t make sense about a given dominant paradigm like this, the establishment would still rather keep it around than junk it for Tom Van Flandern’s not-dominant theory that does the job better. A lot to unpack here but suffice it to say, if we did it Tom Van Flandern’s/Le Sage’s way, all New Scientist’s ”things that don’t make sense about gravity” would disappear.

But that, apparently, is not a good enough reason to junk a dominant theory that doesn’t make sense. Because well, it’s dominant.

As William S. Burroughs would say, “Man is a bad animal.”

Chimps, those charming little face-eaters, have a hell of a memory for fruit trees:

Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found.  

….One idea, known as the ‘ecological hypothesis’ proposes that the need to remember and find food resources, such as fruit trees, could have driven the evolution of primate brains. In particular, it says that a preference for fruit eating, or frugivory, would select for intelligence compared to leaf-eating, or foliovory.

“That’s because the distribution of fruits is more scattered, less predictable and fruits can be more difficult to manipulate than leaves, the nut cracking by Ta chimpanzees being an extreme example,” says Normand.

Compared to monkeys, chimpanzees live in larger territories and are highly frugivorous, suggesting that developing an outstanding ability to navigate to fruit trees could have a key driver in the evolution of ape intelligence.

This post will grow over time as I collect all the links involved but here is the unfolding of a little cryptozoological conundrum we were involved in that wound up getting mentioned in the 2006 book Haunted Minnesota by Hugh E. Bishop.

It all started with the following post that I put on a local weblog on 2-14-05, using bad grammar posting as “The Professor”, and using the old Gonzo Science blog url:

“Unidentified Tracks Found by Duluth Campers”.  

That followed with a report of alleged Bigfoot prints in the Great North Woods posted on a local weblog by “Vicarious” on 3-5-05:

“Um, This Is Kind of Weird But…” 

He followed up by posting photos on 3-9-05:

“You Wanted Photos?” 

Gonzo Science consulted Loren Coleman, who couldn’t tell anything from the photos. We also got an email or two from woodsy folks who assured us the photos could be body prints of a baby bounding deer, which can morph rather easily (with infalling snow and a little melting) into “Bigfoot prints”. Eventually we called it for the baby deer explanation, on account of all other things being equal, the deer explanation was more conservative. (That was published in the Reader Weekly but they have no online archives. Might be able to find the old file around here somewhere…) 

Later the incident made a discussion board at www.virtuallystrange.net (sign in required or I’d give the url). This is apparently where writer Hugh E. Bishop picked it up, and it made pages 111-112 of his 2006 book Haunted Minnesota; he describes us as “Fortean researchers”.

Vicarious always maintained it was not a bounding baby deer that made the prints. We always gave him a lot of credence as a first-hand witness of these tracks, so similar to the previous report of tracks from the same region, a report which in fact had been made by good and trusted friends of ours, the previous month. And of course, we have repudiated the criteria of conservatism extensively in other media, and so there you go.

These days, since 12,000-year-old Hobbit fossils have been more-or-less accepted as the genuine article by the establishment, all bets are off.

And that is the legend of the Haunted Minnesota Bigfoot.

Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.

Oarfish video scavenged from Wikipedia’s sea serpent page.

It’s sea serpent day here at Gonzo Science.

Here are a handful of sea serpent classification systems.

Or something else? You decide.

I will cop to thinking it’s a deer but there are moments when the illusion is that it’s considerably longer. I used to live by Lake Champlain and I spent time looking for Champ and if I’d gotten video like this, and if youtube had existed back then, I would have been stoked.

Knock around a thousand years off of humanity’s first known use of pottery:

…the specimens were found to be 17,500 to 18,300 years old….The previous oldest-known example of pottery was found in Japan, dated to an age between 16,000 and 17,000 years ago…

Some controversy here however:

…the accuracy of radiocarbon dates in the limestone area has been under debate for many years.

Radiocarbon dates are fallible? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Plant cognition?

Somehow, the clipped plants appeared to be warning their genetically identical neighbours that an attack was imminent, and the neighbour should somehow try to protect itself. But clipped plants didn’t warn unrelated neighbours.

Karban says he was “pretty surprised” at the results. “It implies that plants are capable of more sophisticated behaviour than we imagined.”

Karban suspects the plants are communicating using volatile chemicals. When one plant is clipped, or comes under attack from herbivores, it emits these chemicals into the air, warning those around it to put up a defence, either by filling their leaves with noxious chemicals, or by physically moving their stems or leaves in some way to make themselves less palatable.

Because his team doesn’t yet know exactly how the plants are communicating, others remain sceptical of the research, Karban admits.

“It’s controversial,” he says. “But through this communication process, sagebrush appears able to distinguish self from non self. And that opens up a lot of other possibilities.”

Stone-age chimp tech has produced a multi-purpose tool:

…They found that the chimps built and used five different types of tools to help them find beehives and extract honey: thin, straight sticks to probe the ground for buried nests; thick, blunt-ended pounders to break open beehive entrances; thinner lever-like enlargers to break down walls within the hive; collectors with frayed ends to dip honey from the opened hive and bark spoons to scoop it out. Various tools were often found near the same hive, suggesting that the chimps employ them in sequence (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.04.001).

A few tools even appeared to have two uses, with enlargers at one end and collectors at the other. This is the first example of a non-human species constructing multipurpose tools.

Chimps use bark spoons? Little face-eaters.

At issue is the rest position of the long-necked dinosaurs, and as the article says, there’s “more than one way to assemble a dino-skeleton”:

….”But we can be confident that they held their heads upright.”

Many scientists, however, still maintain a more horizontal view.

And a recent paper, published by Australian scientist Roger Seymour in the journal Biology Letters, went even further.

It suggested that the creatures would not actually be able to lift their heads up to eat from high trees, because this would raise their brains so far above their hearts that their blood pressure would have to be elevated to a dangerous - possibly lethal - level.

But Dr Taylor is not swayed by this argument.

They can argue all they want, it’s all a moot point if gravity used to be weaker.

With photos. Some speculation these anaerobic ecosystems may exist in the other Great Lakes too.