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My wife just stopped and said, ”You weren’t even listening were you?” I thought… “That’s a pretty weird way to start a conversation.”

https://phys.org/news/2022-01-earliest-human-eastern-africa-dated.html?fbclid=IwAR3qOIHmKKO6EsILQUbh6DCngk5MjeQl3pI-ugX_n6yrHc5k-WPp5GhYkEM

When I stopped believing in Christianity, I just stopped accepting that Jesus was a god. I never questioned whether he ever actually existed. But since then, I’m looked at the evidence for a real human that the gospels are based on, and it’s actually somewhere between very weak, and zero. Most people accept that there “must have been” a person that the gospel stories are based on, otherwise “why were they written?” But that’s looking at it from a 21st century point of view. Back in the first century, gospel writing was the youtube of the day. There were loads of gospels written, all wildly different. It was a far more religious/superstitious time, when there was little or no science, and there were mysteries everywhere you looked. Gods from different religions got copied and merged across borders all of the time. How could a religion about Jesus evolve, without a man called Jesus to start it? It’s actually quite a common thing. A sect starts off worshipping a heavenly, mythical figure, and the story gradually gets changed, and the god figure gets changed into a human. Often by a god breeding with a human woman, that’s actually a common religious story line. It's a recognised historical process called Euhemerism. It’s likely that Jesus started out as a “son-of-god” figure up in heaven, and the story morphed into a flesh and blood son-of-god figure on Earth. There were similar stories, going back hundreds, or even thousands of years BC. I’ve found that the best people to listen to on the subject are Richard Carrier, and David Fitzgerald, but there are many others. But the one who convinced me was actually St. Paul !! Even though he is responsible for Christianity as it is today, I think his writings are actually some of the best evidence for Jesus being a mythical figure. For someone who virtually created Christianity, he seems to have known virtually nothing about the man. That’s what did it for me. Paul was writing supposedly just a few decades after the cruxifiction. If he couldn’t give any info on a real-life Jesus, then he must have been a mythical figure. Of course, the gospels later gave loads of detail, but much of it was contradictory and obvious invention. They are religious stories, and can’t be taken as biographical material. And if you look elsewhere, for any non-gospel mention of a real Jesus, it’s either not there, or proven forgeries. ( which are actually very common ) Anyway, here are a few links : David Fitzgerald : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI72JNz0IC8&t=22s https://centerforinquiry.org/speakers/fitzgerald_david/ And Richard Carrier : https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=richard+carrier

Many, or most, of the mutations leading to a new structure are repurposing some other structures. E.g. a brain grew, some structure became bigger than necessary, or duplicated, and then a duplicate or a part of it gets repurposed. Unfortunately, so few details are known about cognitive functional, as opposed to anatomical, structures in the brain, that there is no way to guess what mutation it could be. Regarding the environmental requirement, I don't know if this specific solution or any specific solution is ever required. There are many ways to be fit. So yes, these aspects are difficult. I don't see any of this questions being answered soon. My impression of cognitive science is, a lot of factual knowledge and missing theoretical core. Akin biology before Darwin, genetics before Crick and Watson, electrodynamics before Maxwell, astronomy before Newton, geometry before Euclid, chemistry before atoms... what did I miss? I am in the middle of the Romanian orphans story. Horrible. In what way is it personal, if I may ask? And, thank you, and thank you @StringJunky.

One trick I’ve heard about is to put a clear container filled with water, then frozen, and a coin placed in top. If the ice melts and refreezes (e.g. while you are away and you have a power outage) the coin will drop to the bottom. But if it’s still on top or only part way down, you know the ice didn’t fully melt. Filling up space with ice in the freezer is a good strategy because it has a higher heat capacity than air, so things will stay colder, longer.

The metric is a local thing, there is no one universal metric of the universe. The cosmologically expanding metric is metric of a homogenous isotropic space. It works for places which are far away from inhomogenous gravitational sources and also for scales at which the universe 'becomes' homogenous and isotropic. I think this scale is of the order of 100 Mpc. In fact, we observe today galaxies at redshift of order 1 and more. They would be twice or more larger than the galaxies close to us. But they are not.

Beats me how they didn't see the gas dependence on Russia before now. In the short term, we can only assist Ukraine with tech, intelligence and arms, without actually joining in.

If, say, we had 100% knowledge of our lineage/lineages, how arbitrary would the point we define as Modern Humans be? Maybe a better way of stating it would be "what is our current definition?".

The LD50 was an old yardstick used by Therapeutic Goods Agencies as a broad guidelines to the safety of medications. At one stage, it was compulsory in Australia for Drug Companies to present an LD50 with any new pharmaceuiticals. It represented the dose rate that would kill 50% of a batch of mice or rats. It has been discontinued for animal welfare reasons. It had nothing to do with bacterial counts. As far as the dropping of a beverage cap on a floor is concerned, if it occurs in an average household, just pick it up, wipe any dirt off with your finger, a tissue or handkerchief and shove it back on the bottle. Average household floors possibly have more soil or bitumen or cement dust contamination than benches, but the chances of the floor alone containing pathogenic organisms in sufficient quantity to cause any probems are remote. Soil bacteria are mostly saprophytes. If you were compelled to disinfect it, you could place it in a cup or glass of bleach solution at the recommended strength for a few minutes. If you did not wish to have any of the residual bleach contact your mouth, you would have to use sterilized forceps to hold the cap for a rinse under cold, but previously-boiled water. And no matter where you put it after that, it will contact other micro-organisms. So any such procedure would be a waste of time. The floors in hospital-type buildings are a different matter, and there is an article on the importance of considering floor disinfection in this article -- https://infectioncontrol.tips/2021/06/09/floor-hygiene-and-the-under-studied-risk-of-pathogen-dissemination/ . This article also discusses the unlikelihood of picking up pathogenic micro-organisms from floors.

Humans are dumb sometimes often and frequently

I do remember the "thrown clear" argument...complete with factual anecdotal evidence. So maybe we just need time and maybe some of the right type of "air bags" to convince everyone. You can probably include most of human prehistory in that thought...but more information and science at least tends to win.

Going that way, are we? Or we could be in for a coaled war... Did not know that. More than 3 times Canada (or Australia) (+1 except I already +1ed the shirtless horse)

I suspect they might be referring to some misinterpretations that have been circulating in social media apparently (I have not seen the posts, but have been made aware of them). Basically a pre-print found that vaccinated folks who got infected produced fewer antibodies targeting the N-protein of the virus. In this context I think it is helpful if we get away from the notion of "strong" vs "weak" immune responses. The problem is that a "strong" response, can actually be harmful (cytokine storms are the most famous example). What we need is an "effective" response. I.e. a response that helps clearing the pathogen without or with minimal harm to the patient. Going back to the results, current vaccines target the S-protein of the virus. In other words, once an infection is detected, the vaccine-primed immune system will predominantly mount responses to this target. If effective, the response to the N-protein is going to be weaker than in folks who are not vaccinated, because, well, they don't need it. The virus is predominantly cleared using the S-protein as target. I.e. phrasing it as either a strong or weak response can create a bit of a misunderstanding of how things actually work and how effective the overall response is going to be to avoid serious illness.

Yep. Anything with a brain and some selective pressure towards articulated appendages is a candidate to become a techno-species, seems like. Haven't looked in for a while, surprised at some of the entrenchment here. Jeez, we only have a single data point on what a technological creature can be like.

! Moderator Note The energy released in a chemical vs nuclear reaction has nothing to do with logic, and the ONLY reason you weren’t immediately banned for yet another sockpuppet account was that you actually asked a science question instead of your usual nonsense, but here we are.