Lab notes: staggeringly profitable scientific publishing, a skull cult and Asteroid Day

It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. Is the staggeringly profitable business ofscientific publishing actually bad for science? While thinking about scalping: fragments of three ancient skulls found in Turkey have all the hallmarks of being carved with flint after being defleshed first. Archaeologists believe this is more evidence that aneolithic “skull cult” embraced rituals around the heads of the dead. To think, if the cult were to exist in the future rather than 11,000 years ago, there might not be any skulls lying around for them to worship because we could all be alive! This is because scientists have argued there isno compelling evidence that we are approaching an upper limit on our mortality, in response to work published in Nature that concluded “maximum longevity has hit a ceiling of 114.9 years”. Here’s wishing a long and happy career for the robotic yellow submarineBoaty McBoatface, whose successful maiden voyage saw it gather “unprecedented data” from one of the deepest and coldest ocean regions on Earth, Orkney Passage in Antarctica.Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - June 30, 2017 Category: Science Authors: Jake Brown Tags: Science Source Type: news