Saturday, December 13, 2014

Top 10 science of 2014

The Scientific American's Top 10 Science Stories of 2014 included:
Symbolic Thought Shown to Exist in Other Human Species
They mean a human ancestor scratched a clam shell, and I was skeptical about it. Now I am even more skeptical, as this was a shell that had been sitting around a museum for a century, and it was not found near any human ancestor skeletons. Other stories are disasters (Ebola, California drought, rocket crashes) and failures (BICEP2 retraction, credit card hacks, China refusing CO2 limits until 2030, lab germ mishandling). The only actual accomplishments were landing on a comet and synthesizing a yeast chromosome.

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