This week, Science for The People is exploring the science of sound and hearing. They talk to Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford, about his book “Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound.” And they speak to Andrew Wise, Senior Research Fellow at Bionics Institute, about a gene therapy technique to enhance the function of cochlear implants.
Unlike the widespread reporting of the credulous media, the human skull is not specifically evolved to take a punch from other humans. Brian Switek explains the many problems with this hypothesis at National Geographic’s Phenomena. I admit that I thought, throughout my rugby career, that my head, and only my head, had evolved to be punched. It turns out that the way I played rugby had evolved to make people want to punch me in the head1. I was a particularly annoying person to play rugby against2.
Fortunately, human skulls are pretty robust in some key ways. It is just very unlikely that they got that way due to the evolutionary pressure of hominids punching each other in the noodle. One of the key problems with the punching hypothesis is that it is pure conjecture (and unreasonable conjecture, at that) without supporting experimental evidence. What would it take to really test the punching hypothesis?
WARNING: This post may contain a Game of Thrones spoiler “below the fold”.
In the wake of the sensational story about a larger shark potentially killing and eating a smaller shark, shark conservation advocate and researcher David Shiffman has posted a series of overwrought shark headlines paired with versions that have been adjusted for accuracy.
My favorite is “Shark seen swimming in ocean. You know, where sharks live”.
David has invited readers to submit their own suggestions.
*Hat tip to Andrew David Thaler of Southern Fried Science.
All that in six minutes and 40 seconds. Last week I gave my first Pecha Kucha talk at Openly Disruptive’s Disruptive Diner series. The topic was science foreshadowed by science fiction. Have a look. The script of my talk is below the fold. If you want the post-talk Q&A session you can find it on Openly Disruptive’s YouTube channel, where you’ll also find science fiction author Mark Tiedemann’s talk on robots in our society and imaginations.
This is too good not to share, from a preprint by Andrew Gelman and Eric Loken, “The garden of forking paths: Why multiple comparisons can be a problem, even when there is no ‘fishing expedition’ or ‘p-hacking’ and the research hypothesis was posited ahead of time”
Without modern statistics, we find it unlikely that people would take seriously a claim about the general population of women, based on two survey questions asked to 100 volunteers on the internet and 24 college students. But with the p-value, a result can be declared significant and deemed worth publishing in a leading journal in psychology.
The paper is here (PDF).
The Finch and Pea 