If only we could get back to those numbers.
When they say ‘breeding individuals’ does that infer there were thousands more who were doing it just for fun?
Posted in the wrong place.
However, Manzi and his colleagues believe that the existential pressures of the bottleneck could have triggered the emergence of a new species, Homo borisjohnsongensis that returned numbers to what we see today through rampant humping and indiscriminate reproduction
Left to him, or to themselves if they inherited any of his characteristics, they’d have starved to death before reaching breeding age (I was going to say ‘adulthood’, or maybe ‘sexual maturity’ but neither seemed appropriate …).
Fascinating stuff
Not at all what I expected, enjoyed that 
About bloody time
Fuck me, did you hear the R4 interview this morning about this. All the EU’s fault apparently.
Fucking Tory cunts.
It’s great that we’re getting back in. Our contribution should deliver a good deal more bang for the buck if the work’s done collaboratively with others. However a couple of things concern me.
I was involved with several of the EU’s Framework programmes when I was still at work. One way in which UK science really benefited was by bringing in some of Europe’s very best young researchers to work on our projects. It isn’t clear that it will be as easy to attract them now that their travel and residence here is less easy.
Framework and Horizon both have (had) predetermined strategies. They only fund certain types of science in certain subject areas. Determining the choice of areas to be funded was the sort of opaque, highly-political, wheeling-dealing process that brought the EU’s decision-making into such disrepute. Transparent it really wasn’t. It really mattered though. I imagine that as non-EU ‘associated’ members of Horizon the UK’s influence on the fundamental programme shape and direction will be very much reduced.
One of the research professors funded by the organisation I work for said a couple of years ago that we used to attract the brightest and the best phD researchers to our projects, now we don’t.
He also said that the we would often chair (and influence) major collaborative projects, now we don’t.
I’m out of touch with the (all important) details - where the devil lives - now. I know that when we were out of the programme altogether it really limited our access both to good people and to money.
To be fair the extent to which we could exert influence on the real decision making, even when we were in the EU, was a bit limited. If the French and the Germans had taken a common view then the chances of swaying that were essentially zero. But at least you could use your agreement to it as a bargaining counter to get your way over somethng else.
“we’ve had enough of experts”
It’s bonkers how quickly they’re making progress with the “goldilocks” planet searching
Slightly disappointed to see these type of planets have a ‘K2’ designation
presumably they will be upgraded to ‘M’ class planets once we know for sure that they can support life (as we know it).
Worth a read…
Also:
It’s all perfectly safe. Nothing can go wrong.
Nasa manages not to crash. Well done!
Though the Grauniad still has spelling difficulties
Proffesor Neil Bowles of the University of Oxford