Science shows that yetis and Bigfoots are just well-known animals

July 2, 2014 • 8:50 am

But we already knew that, didn’t we? Nevertheless, a new paper by Bryan Sykes et al. in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (reference and free download below) used sequencing of mitochondrial DNA to examine the origin of hairs purported to be from various cryptozoological critters like Bigfoot and the yeti. You should be able to recognize the species names in the fourth column, but the fifth will tell you.

Their table tells it all:

Picture 1

And the conclusion shows that every sample except for two (which were clearly bears, probably either a polar bear or a Himalayan bear, but couldn’t be definitively placed), are extant and well known REGULAR species:

With the exception of these two samples, none of the submitted and analysed hairs samples returned a sequence that could not be matched with an extant mammalian species, often a domesticate. While it is important to bear in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this survey cannot refute the existence of anomalous primates, neither has it found any evidence in support. Rather than persisting in the view that they have been ‘rejected by science’, advocates in the cryptozoology community have more work to do in order to produce convincing evidence for anomalous primates and now have the means to do so. The techniques described here put an end to decades of ambiguity about species identification of anomalous primate samples and seta rigorous standard against which to judge any future claims.

Bye, bye, Bigfoot!

h/t: John Jaenike

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Reference: Sykes BC, Mullis RA, Hagenmuller C, Melton TW, Sartori M. 2014. Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates. Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20140161.

 

A joke

July 2, 2014 • 6:49 am

While writing about the possibly apocryphal story of Napoleon and Laplace (“I have no need of that hypothesis”), a joke suddenly came to me. It is only the fourth joke I’ve invented in my life.*

Q:  Why was the Empress Josephine like Americans at Thanksgiving dinner?
A: Because they all took a bone apart.

I presume that many countries have the tradition of breaking the wishbone.

I’ll be here all week, folks.

______

*Here’s another, which has to be related verbally and pronounced properly:

Q: What do French horses eat?
A: Haute cuisine.

Today’s footie

July 2, 2014 • 5:42 am

None, and thank Ceiling Cat for that! Believe me, I need a break. Try polishing a huge book manuscript and watching two World Cup games at the same time!

But play resumes on Friday, with two cracking matches. I will somehow need to watch both:

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.14.44 AM

Make your predictions, if you wish. Mine (I don’t dare to predict scores) are Germany and Brazil. That’s not too hard, but of course the outcome of all games are unpredictable (though completely determined ages ago)

We all know by now that yesterday the U.S. lost to Belgium 1-2, but it was a splendid game, with the U.S. playing their hearts out in the overtime. I’m only glad it wasn’t settled by penalty kicks. Argentina also beat Switzerland 1-0 with a beautiful pass from Messi to di Maria.  All in all, it was a great day of football. And so it will be on Friday.

Here are the highlights of both games; click on the screenshots to go to them:

Argentina/Switzerland:

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.20.31 AM

Belgium/US (Dempsey almost tied it up at minute 114):

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.23.23 AM

There’s no Google Doodle, of course, but I want to call your attention to an essay showing, with statistics, that Messi is not only the world’s best player (it’s also my opinion and that of my friend Seamus Malin, who’s seen all the greats of our time), but is an impossibly good player. Reader Hardy called my attention to this piece by Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEightSports called “Lionel Messi is impossible.” It’s an eye-opener, and loaded with stats. Here are two I found interesting, with Morris’s commentary (indented):

To make all those unassisted shots possible, Messi has to take on a lot of defenders one on one. There’s a stat for that, and in my view it’s one of the most revealing, reflecting both Messi’s skill and style, and the relationship between the two. Of all forwards in our data set who’ve played 100-plus games, he “takes on” defenders the most, and he’s the most successful at it.

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.37.57 AM

Scoring by distance:

If we break this down using shot-location data, it’s clear that Messi is highly efficient across a wide range of distances.

The percentage of shots Messi makes from outside the penalty area is absolutely stunning. He scores almost as often per shot from outside the penalty area (12.1 percent) as most players do inside it (13.1 percent).

Of 8,335 players in our dataset who have taken at least one shot from outside the box, only 1,835 have scored from that distance at any point. There are 47 players with 50 or more attempts from outside the box without a single goal, and about 500 with at least 20 attempts and no goals. Messi leads the world with 21 goals from outside the penalty area, on just 173 shot attempts.

Screen shot 2014-07-02 at 6.42.24 AM

For many of the stats, of course, Ronaldo is up there with Messi, and both are way ahead of the rest of the pack. You may argue with Morris’s analysis, but his analysis, which I highly recommend, has a ton of statistics, and statistics don’t lie. Watch Messi closely from now on: you may be seeing the best player in history. And I hope Argentina makes it to the final match.

Finally, for LOLz, reader George called my attention to a piece on Mashable that has 15 pairs of gifs using cats to demonstrate the US/Belgium game (there’s also a video at the end). Here’s one pair:

usa-kitty-goal

vs.

thumb-green

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ evolution

July 2, 2014 • 4:54 am

I’m chuffed that the Jesus and Mo artist has a strip on evolution today.  I’d suggest my own book as inspiration, but this strip was first published in 2007:

2014-07-02

As Richard Feynman said in his report on the space shuttle Challenger disaster, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled.”

h/t: Linda Grilli (with two new black kittens, making a total of six black cats)

Coco’s new bed

July 1, 2014 • 3:40 pm

Reader Darrelle Ernst brightened my day with an email about his sybaritic cat Coco, which looks to be a Burmese:

My wife and I have a prized bowl, hand carved from a single piece of marble by an Italian artisan, that we bought years ago. When our children were born we stored the bowl to keep it safe. This past weekend, one morning at breakfast, I suddenly decided the children were old enough and so I dug our prized bowl out of storage, filled it with red rose petals and proudly placed it as the centerpiece on our dining room table. The attached photo shows what happened less than 90 seconds later. What are you gonna do?

CAM00444

How thoughtful of them to buy their cat a marble bed, and then fill it with rose petals! But, of course, it’s only what Coco deserves.

Darrelle also enclosed a poem about the cat that his ten-year-old daughter wrote for him on Father’s Day:

CoCo

Coco, my cat, is brown.
When she is wet she looks like a clown.
Sometimes she sits like sphinx,
With big green eyes that are round,
And inside her is a treasure just waiting to be found.
She looks pretty but doesn’t make a sound,
And her beauty and attitude will surely astound.
But when nobody’s looking, down the hall she will bound,
And once in privacy, chase her tail round and round!

Finally, for extra LOLz see the video that reader Sara calls “the euphonium cat mute.”

The shrinking Arctic ice cap

July 1, 2014 • 1:00 pm

If you’re not worried about global warming yet, read this new report by National Geographic Daily News on the melting of the Arctic icecaps.  It’s a special problem for the magazine, which is famous for its maps. How do you draw an icecap that keeps changing in the definitive atlas, National Geographic’s Atlas of the World?

Here’s their solution, as implemented in the alarming drawings below:

The multiyear ice—or older ice—is shown on the map as a large white mass; the maximum extent of sea ice—the pack ice that melts and refreezes with the seasons—is depicted as a line on the map, according to Rosemary Wardley, National Geographic’s senior GIS cartographer. In the 10th edition, which will be released September 30, the multiyear ice is much smaller in area than on previous maps. The 5th edition of the atlas, published in 1989, was the first to comprehensively map the Arctic.

Wardley and Valdés relied on two government resources that track Arctic ice data: NASA and the NSIDC. To map the multiyear ice, they took data from a 30-year study by NASA, published in 2012. “We wanted to have that comprehensive coverage,” Wardley said.

Well, look and weep: here’s the change in the last 18 years.

1994:

Screen shot 2014-06-24 at 6.32.13 AM

2012:

Screen shot 2014-06-24 at 6.32.42 AM

And, of course, the why:

As the ocean heats up due to global warming, Arctic sea ice has been locked in a downward spiral.Since the late 1970s, the ice has retreated by 12 percent per decade, worsening after 2007, according to NASA. May 2014 represented the third lowest extent of sea ice during that month in the satellite record,according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

Ice loss is accelerated in the Arctic because of a phenomenon known as the feedback loop: Thin ice is less reflective than thick ice, allowing more sunlight to be absorbed by the ocean, which in turn weakens the ice and warms the ocean even more, NASA says.

Because thinner ice is flatter, it allows melt ponds to accumulate on the surface, reducing the reflectiveness of the ice and absorbing more heat. (See pictures of our melting world in National Geographicmagazine.)

“You hear reports all the time in the media about this,” Valdés said. “Until you have a hard-copy map in your hand, the message doesn’t really hit home.”

Some scientists argue that the map is a bit misleading (but not that it doesn’t reflect global warming); but you’ll have to go to the original article to read about that.

h/t: Amy