Scientists may be awesome, but they're still human beings - and they fall prey to the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Now, a group of researchers say they've discovered that the bias known as anthropocentrism is holding back genetic research and severely limiting our discoveries.
Anthropocentrism is the idea that humanity is the most important form of life in the universe.

It becomes a cognitive bias when we project human motivations or values onto other life forms - or even onto the universe itself. We fall prey to the anthropocentric bias quite a bit when describing animals, because it's tempting to go all Richard Attenborough and treat their lives as scarier, cuter, or more rascally versions of our own.

But this bias can also show up in more subtle ways, such as shaping which life forms we think are worthy of study.

A group of genetic researchers at the University of British Columbia undertook a massive study to investigate what life forms scientists have chosen for DNA sequencing.

Published in Cell last month, their work reveals that the vast majority are animals similar to humans. More broadly, scientists tend to favor studying eukaryotes, or life forms that have nuclei in their cells.

This includes animals and plants, but not bacteria - despite the fact that bacteria have been proven time and again to be crucial in medicine and genetic discovery.

High-powered law firms have for decades won massive settlements from accused online pirates based on legal claims that are now in doubt. Initiating so many battles has created a lot of enemies, though, as one firm recently found out.

Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver was one of the legal agencies that teamed up with Hollywood film studios and the United States Copyright Group (USCG) to file suit against tens of thousands of suspected BitTorrent users who acquired music, movies, or other media content illegally.

Since online piracy became common in the early 2000s, lawsuits trying to stop downloaders have traditionally identified the alleged pirate by their IP address, a computer's individual specification number that could be likened to its fingerprint. Hundreds of suits were successful in reaping millions of dollars for the plaintiffs, until a recent string of rulings in which state and federal judges announced that an IP address alone was insufficient evidence of a defendant's guilt.

Defense attorneys representing accused pirates have claimed that, because of the legal grey area, prosecutors sometimes take any measure they can to convince the defendant to settle, rather than leaving the decision up to a judge.

Astronomers say they have discovered a star cluster that has been thrown in the direction of Earth at a speed of more than two million miles per hour.

The cluster, named HVGC-1, originated in the M87 galaxy and is expected to endlessly drift through space, rocketing through the voids between other galaxies.

"Astronomers have found runaway stars before, but this is the first time we've found a runaway star cluster," said Nelson Caldwell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is the lead author on a study which is set to be published in the The Astrophysical Journal.

HVGC stands for hypervelocity globular cluster. These clusters are groupings of thousands of stars contained inside a ball a few dozen light-years across.

Kate Ravilious makes this nutty claim at The Guardian:

But in fact the catastrophe may have been set in motion by a warm, wet year over Greenland in 1908, resulting in greater snow accumulation. Writing in the journal Weather, Grant Bigg and David Wilton of Sheffield University explain how the snow soaked through cracks in the ice sheet, encouraging excess iceberg calving over the following few years. Soberingly, global warming has increased iceberg hazard greatly in recent decades, making years like 1912 more the norm than the exception.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/apr/27/weatherwatch-icebergs-greenland-titanic

Yeah, but have a look at what this research actually says and you'll understand why The Guardian is nothing more than agitprop.

A woman's body is found in London. DNA turns up a hit, yet the suspect apparently died weeks before the alleged victim. Here, forensic scientist Dr Mike Silverman tells the story of one of the strangest cases of his career.
It was a real-life mystery that could have come straight from the pages of a modern-day detective novel.

A woman had been brutally murdered in London and biological material had been found under her fingernails, possibly indicating that she might have scratched her attacker just before she died.

A sample of the material was analysed and results compared with the National DNA database and quickly came back with a positive match.

The problem was, the "hit" identified a woman who had herself been murdered - a full three weeks before the death of her alleged "victim".

The killings had taken place in different areas of the capital and were being investigated by separate teams of detectives.

A woman's diet at the time of conception might cause lasting changes in the DNA of her children, potentially influencing their development, researchers say.

In a new study, researchers analyzed the diets of women in rural parts of The Gambia, in western Africa, who experience major changes in their diets over the course of each year as the area goes through rainy seasons and dry seasons.

"The rainy season is often referred to as 'the hungry season,' and the dry season 'the harvest season,'" said study author Robert Waterland, a nutritional epigeneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

"During the rainy season, villagers have a lot more farming labor to do, and they gradually run out of food collected from the previous harvest."

Yearlong staples of the women's diet include rice, a grain called millet, peanuts and cassava. But during the rainy season, they eat more leafy green vegetables similar to spinach, which are very high in folate, a nutrient that is especially important during pregnancy.

The scientists investigated the concentration of nutrients in the blood of 84 pregnant women who conceived at the peak of the rainy season and 83 women who conceived at the peak of the dry season. In addition, they analyzed the DNA of six specific genes in the women's infants when they were 2 to 8 months old.

The researchers found that in all six genes, the infants who were conceived during the rainy season had consistently higher rates of "methylation" in their DNA. A methylation is a change made to DNA - it's the addition of methyl groups to the DNA strand, a so-called epigenetic modification to DNA - and is a process that can silence the expression of a gene.

For centuries, scientists have sought a biological method for tracing a person's geographic origin. Now, a group of researchers has developed such a genetic ancestry test that can pinpoint the location where a person's ancestors originated more than 1,000 years ago.

The genetic algorithm accurately predicts the country of ancestral origin for about 80 percent of people, and for isolated island populations, it can predict people's island or even village of origin in some cases, researchers report today (April 29) in a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

A person's DNA contains more than simple instructions - it also tells the story of their evolution, migrations, interbreeding and mixing, said study leader Eran Elhaik, a population geneticist at the University of Sheffield in England.

"Only genetic tools can access this vast archive and extract the exact information about our geographic origin," Elhaik told Live Science.

Researchers have been attempting to use genetic data to trace human origins for decades. The best efforts have been able to accurately trace ancestral place of origin within about 435 miles (700 kilometers) in Europe, but not very accurately in other countries.

Dark matter could sling lethal meteors at Earth, potentially causing mass extinctions like the cataclysm that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, Harvard scientists say.

Physicists think the mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter makes up five-sixths of all matter in the universe. It was first detected by the strength of its gravitational pull, which apparently helps keep the Milky Way and other galaxies from spinning apart, given the speeds at which they whirl.

Scientists have recently suggested that a thin, dense disk of dark matter about 35 light-years thick lies along the central plane of the Milky Way, cutting through the galaxy's disk of stars. The sun travels in an up-and-down, wavy motion through this plane while orbiting the center of the galaxy.

Researchers suggest this disk of clouds and clumps made of dark matter might disturb the orbits of comets in the outer solar system, hurling them inward. This could lead to catastrophic asteroid impacts on Earth, of the kind that likely ended the Age of Dinosaurs, said theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece at Harvard University.

Light might make you a lightweight - in a good way. It's been known that bright light in the morning can reduce appetite and body weight. But that fact did not prove that light has a direct effect on weight. Early morning exposure to light could just be a marker for a regular sleep cycle, which is also associated with a healthy body weight.

The question was thus whether light exposure was associated with weight regardless of sleep patterns.

To find out, researchers had 54 adults record their diet and sleep for a week. The subjects also wore sensors that monitored the timing and intensity of their light exposure.

This month, NASA revealed new details of the plan to send humans to Mars by 2030. It's an elaborate and expensive mission, involving a giant deep-space rocket, and roping an asteroid into the moon's orbit to use as a stepping stone to Mars.

But there are still some serious questions about a manned expedition to Mars. Namely, is it safe? That's where astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly come in. The Kelly brothers are identical twins, and the only siblings ever to both fly in space.

Starting next March, Scott Kelly will spend a year at the International Space Station. While he's up there, he will be a part of some novel scientific experiments comparing his health to his brother's down on Earth.