Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 15, 2018

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“The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag”

“This is all part of his and many other evopsych researchers’ project to prove that humans haven’t changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 13, 2018

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“Grace Hopper and the psychological drain on the gender minority”

“of the perhaps 100 people in line that I could see, I couldn’t see another man. My normally logical brain switched off and gave way to a much more neurotic amygdala, flooding me with questions of self-doubt and a…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 19, 2018

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“3,700-year-old Babylonian tablet rewrites the history of maths — and shows the Greeks did not develop trigonometry”

““Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 18, 2018

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“Is Fat Killing You, or Is Sugar?”

“When, in my forties, my cholesterol level rose to 242–200 is considered the upper limit of what’s healthy — I embarked on a regimen that restricted fatty foods (and also cut down on carbohydrates). Six months later, having shed ten pounds, I rechecked my level. It was…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 22, 2018

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“An Ancient Cure for Alzheimer’s?”

“Dr. Trumble was trained as an anthropologist, and his field — evolutionary medicine — taught him to see our surroundings as a blip in the timeline of human history. He thinks it’s a problem that medical research focuses almost exclusively on “people who live in cities…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 19, 2018

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“Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights?”

“The paper looked into some foraging and non-foraging peoples who live in hot climates near the equator, and found that only the nomadic foragers regularly sleep without bed coverings. Everyone else uses some form of…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 18, 2018

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“Like We’ve Been Saying — Radiation Is Not A Big Deal”

“To recap LNT, the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis is a supposition that all radiation is deadly and there is no dose below which harmful effects will not occur. Double the dose, double the cancers. First put forward after WWII by…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 10, 2018

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“Let’s Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance”

“It can really happen because it is at heart a linguistic rule. Even if rigorously enforced, it just means that editors would force people in papers to say “statistically suggestive for a p of a little less…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 24, 2018

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“Most Scientific Research Data From the 1990s Is Lost Forever”

“According to a study by Timothy H. Vines, et al. titled “The Availability of Research Data Declines Rapidly with Article Age,” published last week in Current Biology, most raw data from scientific papers published twenty…

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Jess Brooks in Science and Innovation

Sep 8, 2018

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“Impossibly hungry judges”

“Some people dislike statistics. They are only interested in effects that are so large, you can see them by just plotting the data. This study might seem to be a convincing illustration of such an effect. My goal in this blog is to argue against this idea. You need statistics…

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These were the top 10 stories published by Science and Innovation in September of 2018. You can also dive into daily archives for September of 2018 by using the calendar at the top of this page.