Each discipline within the natural sciences aims to produce knowledge about different aspects of the natural world. In this sense, each discipline within the natural sciences will tweak its methodology somewhat to fit its particular purpose and scope. Nevertheless, all disciplines within the natural sciences will broadly have a shared underlying scope, methodology and purpose.
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Natural Sciences - TOK 2022: THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE WEBSITE FOR THE IBDP - 1 views
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You arguably trusted your teachers and believed that what they told you in science class was true. But under which circumstances should we accept second hand scientific knowledge? The motto of Britain's very first scientific society (The Royal Society) is "Nullius in Verba", which means "Take nobody's word for it". One of the key features of the natural sciences is the necessity of being able to prove what you claim. Good science does not only require proof. It also actively invites peer-review and even falsification. For example, if your teacher claims that starch will turn blue when mixed with iodine, you will want to test this yourself. Within the natural sciences, you should be able to repeat experiments to see if a hypothesis is correct. But what should you conclude when an experiment 'does not work'? If this happens in you science lesson, you may have made a mistake.
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New cancer treatment destroys tumours in terminally ill, finds trial | Cancer | The Gua... - 0 views
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In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust.
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Scientists found the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab medications led to a reduction in the size of tumours in terminally-ill head and neck patients. In some, their cancer vanished altogether, with doctors stunned to find no detectable sign of disease.
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the immunotherapy treatment also triggered far fewer side-effects compared with the often gruelling nature of “extreme” chemotherapy,
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The results from the phase 3 trial, involving almost 1,000 dying head and neck cancer patients, were early and not statistically significant but were still “clinically meaningful”, the ICR said, with some patients living months or years longer and suffering fewer side effects.
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When the research nurses called to tell me that, after two months, the tumour in my throat had completely disappeared, it was an amazing moment,” said Ambrose. “While there was still disease in my lungs at that point, the effect was staggering.”
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The price of your soul: How the brain decides whether to 'sell out' | Science Codex - 0 views
www.sciencecodex.com/...ides_whether_to_sell_out-84687
sacred values ethics morality culture brains religion research results incentives
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An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold. "Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
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The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."
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Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says.
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"As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can't separate the two," Berns says. "We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that's putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage." Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.
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How have changes to publishing affected scientists? | Julie McDougall-Waters | Science ... - 0 views
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That was the purpose of a recent oral history event at the Royal Society, involving four senior scientists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than simply reminiscing, they were asked to recall their publishing experiences in scientific periodicals over the last fifty years. How have things changed since they published their first paper?
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It became clear that the hierarchy of journals has changed over the last fifty years, and the pressure to publish in those considered to have the highest impact has increased considerably, partly a result of the increased volume of data being produced and the need for readers to filter relevant information from the copious amounts of less pertinent stuff available.
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What have also changed are the technologies available to write a paper. Frith related the process she went through in writing her first paper: “I wrote my papers by long hand and then typed them myself.” Writing a biological paper before computers is one thing, but Ashmore remembered the problems of producing mathematical formulae in a typed manuscript, explaining that “you wrote the paper and probably took it along to somebody to be typed… And then it came back with spaces where you had to write in the equations.”
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Another change that interested the panellists was the increased number of collaborative and multiple authored papers now submitted to journals, which led them to think about the ethics of acknowledgement. In Meurig Thomas’s view the author is, simply, “the person that primarily thinks about the experiment, plans it, and writes it. I can sleep more comfortably at night this way. If I claim to be a senior author, I have to write it and I have to concoct what the experiment was, and defend it.” Chaloner suggested that authorship has grown “because of the pressure for people to have publications in their names”, with an “agreement to let you come onto this paper and I’ll get on yours next time”. Frith referred to this as “gaming”.
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Despite all of the technological developments in the last fifty years, there has been no quick or easy response to questions over refereeing, and the event ended with the feeling that although there is no doubt technology has transformed the way science is communicated, its effect has not invariably simplified the process.
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'Moon shot' call on clean energy - BBC News - 0 views
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A group of scientists and economists is calling for the equivalent of the Apollo space programme to produce cheap, clean energy.
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Their report, launched at London’s Royal Society, says on current projections the world will exceed the 2C danger threshold of climate change by 2035.
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Some experts believe that energy technology has developed so fast that it simply needs further price support to keep volumes rising and costs falling.
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Living Another Day, Thanks to Grandparents Who Couldn't Sleep - The New York Times - 1 views
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A new study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the way sleep patterns change with age may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors survive the night by ensuring one person in a community was awake at all times. The researchers called this phenomenon the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis,” suggesting that an older member of a community who woke before dawn might have been crucial to spotting the threat of a hungry predator while younger people were still asleep. It may explain why people slept in mixed-age groups through much of human history.
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The Hadza sleeping environment may have similarities to that of earlier humans, researchers said. They sleep outdoors or in grass huts in groups of 20 to 30 people without artificially regulating temperature or light. These conditions provide a suitable window to study the evolutionary aspects of sleep.
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more than 220 total hours of sleep observation, researchers found only 18 minutes when all adults were sound asleep simultaneously. Typically, older participants in their 50s and 60s went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than those in their 20s and 30s. On average, more than a third of the group was alert, or lightly dozing, at any given time.
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“We have a propensity to overcategorize things as disorders in the West,” said David Samson, an author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “It might help elderly individuals to know changes they’re experiencing have an evolutionary reason.”
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“The variation may be partially explained by genetics,” she said, “but there are environmental conditions too.” As people age, their social needs and level of activity change, potentially affecting their sleep patterns.
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there is evidence of a genetic link, she added, pointing out that sleep quality declined among the older Hadza even while they remained active hunters and gatherers.
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Social Media Effects on Teens | Impact of Social Media on Self-Esteem - 0 views
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In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.
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A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness.
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For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.
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Learning how to make friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it’s also true for maintaining friendships. When there are problems that need to be faced—big ones or small ones—it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and then hear what the other person has to say
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But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most personal—and sometimes intimidating—aspects of communication
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The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone’s face,”
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“Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this.” She warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. “We forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people down so you feel better.”
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. Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited atmosphere online.
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Another big change that has come with new technology and especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids update their status, share what they’re watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their specific location on a map at all times.
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Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they’re interested in
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Modern Science Didn't Appear Until the 17th Century. What Took So Long? - The New York ... - 0 views
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While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.
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Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”
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transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.”
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So much scientific research takes place under conditions of “intellectual confinement” — painstaking, often tedious work that requires attention to minute details, accounting for fractions of an inch and slivers of a degree.
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This kind of obsessiveness has made modern science enormously productive, but Strevens says there is something fundamentally irrational and even “inhuman” about it.
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He points out that focusing so narrowly, for so long, on tedious work that may not come to anything is inherently unappealing for most people. Rich and learned cultures across the world pursued all kinds of erudition and scholarly traditions, but didn’t develop this “knowledge machine”
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The same goes for brilliant, intellectually curious individuals like Aristotle, who generated his own theory about physics but never proposed anything like the scientific method.
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but in order to communicate with one another, in scientific journals, they have to abide by this rule. The motto of England’s Royal Society, founded in 1660, is “Nullius in verba”: “Take nobody’s word for it.”
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purged of all nonscientific curiosity by a “program of moralizing and miseducation.” The great scientists were exceptions because they escaped the “deadening effects” of this inculcation; the rest are just “the standard product of this system”: “an empiricist all the way down.”
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A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mice compensate with sharp senses of sight, hearing and smell. But they may have another set of tools we’ve overlooked. A paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science details striking similarities between the internal structures of certain small mammal and marsupial hairs and those of man-made optical instruments.
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Over the years, he has developed an appreciation for “how comfortable animals are in complete darkness,” he said. That led him to wonder about the extent of their sensory powers.
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Observations of predator behavior further piqued his interest. While filming and playing back his videos, he noted how cats stack their bodies behind their faces when they’re hunting. He interprets this, he said, as cats “trying to hide their heat” with their cold noses. He has also observed barn owls twisting as they swoop down, perhaps to shield their warmer parts — legs and wingpits — with cooler ones.
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Eventually, these and other musings led Dr. Baker to place mouse hairs under a microscope. As it came into view, he felt a strong sense of familiarity. The guard hair in particular — the bristliest type of mouse hair — contained evenly-spaced bands of pigment that, to Dr. Baker, closely resembled structures that allow optical sensors to tune into specific wavelengths of light.
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Thermal cameras, for instance, focus specifically on 10-micron radiation: the slice of the spectrum that most closely corresponds with heat released by living things. By measuring the stripes, Dr. Baker found they were tuned to 10 microns as well — apparently homed in on life’s most common heat signature. “That was my Eureka moment,” he said.