Science does weird things sometimes, especially when you're not really sure what it does. Like, does science figure things out, or does it make things more confusing? Does it prove things right, or does it prove things wrong? Does it discover, or does it forget? Man I'm already confused.
Analysis claims statistical proof of the COVID-19 seafood market hypothesis is false
Jan 2024, phys.org
Hard to believe, years later: "Research on this question is still in its infancy," explains Stoyan.
Real science, good science, takes time. And it takes time because it needs people to correct each other, over and over, until we all agree that we're all right.
As for this one, I am not statistician, but even I can see why this was a dumb study:
Stoyan and Chiu used the same geostatistical data as Worobey and colleagues. These are the residential addresses of the first 155 coronavirus cases. These addresses were entered as points on a map. In the Science article, this dot pattern is compared with dot patterns generated by simulation, finding significant differences. However, since these artificial dot patterns are incorrectly chosen, the test used must always reject the hypothesis that a location other than the market is the epicenter.In other words, Worobey and colleagues have excluded locations other than the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from the outset. However, other locations in the vicinity of the market could also be possible candidates: A large railway station and a huge shopping complex with hotels and restaurants.
via the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology: Dietrich Stoyan et al, Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139
Why the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology?
The Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (abbreviation: TU Bergakademie Freiberg, TUBAF) is a public university of technology with 3,471 students in the city of Freiberg, Saxony, Germany. Its focuses are exploration, mining & extraction, processing, and recycling of natural resources & scrap, as well as developing new materials and researching renewable energies. It is highly specialized and proficient in these fields. Today, it's the oldest university of mining and metallurgy in the world.
(No idea why)
Image credit: AI Art - 1930s Poster of a Surgeon Performing a Brain Transplant - 2024
Filed under wtf:
Study examines aerodynamic performance of nylon shuttlecocks
Jan 2024, phys.org
Shuttlecocks, also known as birdies or birds, are traditionally made from duck feathers, but nylon shuttlecocks have become more widely used because of their superior durability. Their flight behavior, however, is far different from that of traditional feather birdies.In Physics of Fluids, a trio of scientists in India explored the aerodynamic performance of nylon shuttlecocks at various flight speeds. Through computational analyses based on two-way fluid-structure interactions, the team coupled equations governing air flow with equations determining skirt deformation of a shuttlecock in flight.The study's computational results confirm experimental measurements, explaining the phenomenology of why a duck feather shuttlecock does not deform as much as a nylon shuttlecock - and why the flight of each at high speed is quite different.
via Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur: Computational analysis of the fluid-structure interactions of a synthetic badminton shuttlecock, Physics of Fluids (2024). DOI: 10.1063/5.0182411
Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck
Mar 2024, phys.org
Facts vs Fandom:
After a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over the Western Pacific in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. In 2023, materials at the bottom of the ocean near where the meteor fragments were thought to have fallen were identified as of "extraterrestrial technological" (alien) origin.Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road.
Says planetary seismologist.
Johns Hopkins University: Benjamin Fernando et al, Seismic and acoustic signals from the 2014 'Interstellar Meteor', arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.03966 ,
doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.03966
Materials follow the 'Rule of Four,' but scientists don't know why yet
Apr 2024, phys.org
"Rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result"; it happens.
The two collections of materials science databases include over 80,000 electronic structures of experimental as well as predicted materials; scientists noticed that around 60 percent of structures in both databases have primitive unit cells made out of a multiple of 4 atoms. The scientists named this recurrence the "Rule of Four" and started looking for an explanation."The first question we asked was whether the software used to 'primitivize' the unit cell had done it correctly, and the answer was yes.""We could expect to find that all the materials following this Rule of Four included silicon (which has a coordination number of 4)," says Gazzarini. "But again, they did not.""The materials that are most abundant in nature should be the most energetically favored, which means the most stable ones, those with negative formation energy. But what we saw with classic computational methods was that there was no correlation between the Rule of Four and negative formation energies."A machine-learning expert at the University of Wisconsin developed an algorithm to group structures according to their atomic properties and look at formation energies within classes of materials sharing some chemical similarities. But again, this method did not provide a way to distinguish the Rule-of-Four compliant materials from the non-compliant ones.Similarly, the abundance of multiple of fours does not even correlate with highly symmetric structures but rather with low symmetries and loosely packed arrangements.In the end, the resulting article in npj Computational Materials is the rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result: the researchers could only describe the phenomenon and rule out several possible causes, without finding one.
via EPFL Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne and National Centre of Competence in Research: Elena Gazzarrini et al, The rule of four: anomalous distributions in the stoichiometries of inorganic compounds, npj Computational Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-024-01248-z
New research confirms plastic production is directly linked to plastic pollution
Apr 2024, phys.org
Every 1% increase in plastic production is associated with a 1% increase in plastic pollution in the environment.
Sometimes you wonder why we even need science. But then you remember that global megacorporations spend lots of money and lots of effort to hide, confuse and redirect attention and scientific investigation away from this stuff:
56 global companies are responsible for more than half of all branded plastic pollution.The Coca-Cola Company was responsible for 11% of branded waste, followed by PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%), and Altria/Philip Morris International (2%). The top companies identified produce food, beverage, or tobacco products.The five-year analysis used #BreakFreeFromPlastic brand audit data from 1,576 audit events across 84 countries. Brand audits are citizen science initiatives in which volunteers conduct waste clean-ups and document the brands found on the pollution collected. Over five years, more than 200,000 volunteers submitted data through Break Free From Plastic or 5 Gyres' TrashBlitz app.
via Institute of Environmental & Marine Sciences and College of Engineering & Design at Silliman University, and CSIRO: Win Cowger et al, Global Producer Responsibility for Plastic Pollution, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj8275.
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