Even after a few years, I learned there is always in-fighting when a major discovery like this is made. Regardless of where these bones should be classified, it's an incredible find no matter what - which is sometimes lost in the ensuing fray of dissenting opinions.
Virtually everyone was sceptical of the guy claiming to have developed a form of propulsion powered more or less only by light, but then NASA tested the "EmDrive" and sure enough, it seems like the fundamental idea works. (http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futu...)
With rampant forging of data and results, you better be skeptical of peer-reviewed results too. Reproducibility is an important, oft-overlooked, and under-appreciated part of science.
For example, problems with methodology and sampling, overlooked prior research, bad analysis of results, straight-up non-sequiturs and conclusions drawn from insufficient data.
All of these mean peer review is valuable without reproducing results.
For an extreme example: if somebody publishes a "Cheese found on moon" paper, do you expect the reviewer to mount an expedition to the moon to check?
For the 'Cheese found on moon' paper, I would expect the reviewer to clearly state that the results could not be replicated before mentioning anything else. Let readers draw informed conclusions based on a complete picture of the result, including whether or not it was a one-off.
If you have not done few physics labs, it's easy to underestimate the measurement problems and the level of noise in experiments.
Most of the Physics community thinks that this is an experimental error. One symptom is that at lunch in a Physics department nobody talks about this. If this were real it would be a groundbreaking result because it breaks some of the most fundamental Physics laws.
We shall see I guess, but it has been replicated in 3 places now taht I'm aware of, two of which are serious science outfits.
In a "massless" thruster, the theoretical maximum Thrust/Power ratio is 1/c = 0.0033 mN/KW if you don't want to break the conservation of momentum, special relativity or quantum mechanics. You could get this value with an ideal perfectly efficient laser beam. The latest NASA version proclaims (50 uN / 50 W) = 1 mN/KW that is 300x the theoretical maximum, so if it's not an experimental error, it must be breaking some of the currently supposed physic laws.
http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11...
Rounding to the nearest whole number.
> The researchers recovered ancient DNA of Neanderthals by extracting the DNA from the femur bones of three 38,000-year-old female Neanderthal specimens from Vindija Cave, Croatia, and other bones found in Spain, Russia, and Germany.[8] Only about half a gram of the bone samples (or 21 samples each 50–100 mg[1]) was required for the sequencing, but the project faced many difficulties, including the contamination of the samples by the bacteria that had colonized the Neanderthal's body and humans who handled the bones at the excavation site and at the laboratory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genome_project
2^(38000/521)=10^22, so there must be other effects. That Nature article says
> The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information.
which I don't know how to square with the 521 year figure. I think maybe 521 years is at the high temp?
I think you're right that it's a temperature thing.
The concept of species exists purely as a human, scientific abstraction: evolution/biology doesn't give us absolute categories that you can unambiguously put any organism into.
That's a somewhat rare version of a general pattern where that abstraction is leaky. Much more common is a temporal version of that. A might beget A1 and B, with A1 begetting A2 and B begetting C, continuing all the way down. And though A can interbreed with A1 and B, and B with C, etc, Z can't interbreed with A25. That's speciation, which happens all the time. The only thing that makes it a clear species is defining the concept species while abandoning time invariance.
The biological species concept is probably one of the most popular and very similar to what you are suggesting. In this concept, a species is an interbreeding population that is reproductively isolated from other populations (either due to genetics or geography).
In all seriousness, species definition is a case of trying to define a black/white classification in a gradient. It might sort of work in higher animals, such as mammals. But it certainly breaks down in bacteria, which is clearly seen since it's possible to compare genomes on population level.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies
"A taxonomist decides whether to recognize a subspecies or not. A common way to decide is that organisms belonging to different subspecies of the same species are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring, but they do not interbreed in nature due to geographic isolation or other factors."
"The domestic dog lost its recognition as a separate species in 1993, and is now considered a subspecies of gray wolf."
For instance, in species with sexual differentiation, two males or two females cannot mate, but are considered the same species.
For a more precise definition, you would have to, say, look at the probability that a pair of organisms of the appropriate sex from two different populations would be able to mate, and produce viable offspring (that is, offspring that could themselves mate and produce more offspring).
Asking about a single organism that happens to be infertile, or a single pair that happens not to be able to mate or produce viable offspring, is not particularly interesting, but at a population level you could use a statistical test to get a probability distribution, rather than a yes or no answer.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#Difficulty_defining_or... for more information.
Note also that it can be the case that two different species can mate, and produce offspring, but the offspring itself is not viable (cannot mate and produce offspring). This happens in the case of mating two closely related species, such as when mating a horse and donkey to get a mule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule), or a lion and a tiger to get a liger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger).
Plants can clone itselves so to be infertile is not the same as to be extinct for them. Infertile also means normally something like "99,9999% unable to produce seeds" but with enough time and a high number of tries, planets will align in the polinisation of two "unfertile" stems of the same plant. At the end seeds will be produced and the new species will exit the 'trap' perfectly (or all DNA of the father will be discarded reverting to the original mother species). Is just a question of time.
Other than that you can perform rough estimates based on the soil it was found in, but those in many cases might be off by quite a bit.
Christoph Zollikofer, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, said that many of the bone characteristics used to claim the creature as a new species are seen in more primitive animals, and by definition cannot be used to define a new species.
“The few ‘unique’ features that potentially define the new species need further scrutiny, as they may represent individual variation, or variation at the population level,” he said.
Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, goes further. “From what is presented here, they belong to a primitive Homo erectus, a species named in the 1800s.”
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“Intentional disposal of rotting corpses by fellow pinheads makes a nice headline, but seems like a stretch to me,” said Jungers. Zollikofer agrees. “The ‘new species’ and ‘dump-the-dead’ claims are clearly for the media. None of them is substantiated by the data presented in the publications,” he said. Hawks is open to other explanations, but said that disposal made sense. “The evidence really tends to exclude the idea that they entered the chamber one at a time, alive, over some time, because we have infants, small children, and very old adults who would almost certainly not have managed to get into this chamber without being deposited there.”
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/10/new-species-o...