Doubtless a new experience for you. From International Business Times: Women affiliated with members of terror group Islamic State (Isis) have published a manifesto and guide to living as a militant Muslim female. Education for women is okay as long as they stay at home, but “It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by 16 or 17, while they are still young and active. Young men will not be more than 20 years old in those glorious generations.” The authors of the document also urged people to refrain from “exploring science”, aimed at “trying to uncover the secrets of nature”. The focus, rather, should be on Read More ›

Here at Science Friday: are excerpts from Brockman’s latest, This Idea Must Die : Seth Lloyd: Suppose that everything that could exist does exist. The multiverse is not a bug but a feature. We have to be careful: The set of everything that could exist belongs to the realm of metaphysics rather than physics. Tegmark and I have shown that with a minor restriction, however, we can pull back from the metaphysical edge. Suppose that the physical multiverse contains all things that are locally finite, in the sense that any finite piece of the thing can be described by a finite amount of information. The set of locally finite things is mathematically well defined: It consists of things whose behavior Read More ›

From The Netherlands: The professor of media studies, José van Dijck, has been appointed president of the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Academy. Van Dijck follows Hans Clevers on. Van Dyck is a representative of the humanities again headed the association of outstanding scientists. The appointment of the Academy Clevers had previously broken with the tradition that the presidency rotates between social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. Clevers well as its predecessor Robbert Dijkgraaf are scientists. (Google Translate) … It is the first time that a woman in charge is at the Academy.  O’Leary for News, an arts grad and double X, is going to sit this one out. But the rest of you, please, readers, your thoughts! Follow UD Read More ›

On July 30 of last year Meredith Prohaska had the misfortunate of having a sore throat. At what would have been a routine visit to the doctor the 12-year-old’s mother was told that Meredith should have an HPV vaccine. By dinnertime Meredith was dead.  Read more

Atheist philosopher John Gray has written an unflinchingly honest article in the Guardian, titled, What scares the new atheists. It’s an excellent piece, and I warmly recommend it to readers. A few revealing quotes convey the tenor of the article: In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. When organised as a movement and backed by the power of the state, atheist ideologies have been an integral part of despotic regimes that also claimed to be based in science, such as the former Soviet Union. Many rival moralities and political systems – most of them, to date, illiberal – have attempted to assert a basis in science. All Read More ›

It is cheerleading for a worldview, one that permits, even encourages, fiction to stand in for fact. In Scientists Create Methane-Based Life: Science Reporting Stoops to a New Low, Eric Anderson recounts a claim for life on Saturnian moon Titan: Researchers have finally developed a new “life form.” And a methane-based one at that. Now at this point, a few red flags should have been raised in the mind of anyone who is passingly familiar with origin of life research. Indeed, there should be a whole field of red flags waving and snapping smartly in the wind like the Hammer and Sickle on a frigid Moscow (or Titan) morning. Our pulse racing at the news, we scarcely get to the Read More ›

Readers may remember science writer Philip Ball, who described the many worlds multiverse as a fantasy, verging on nihilism. At Prospect Magazine, he narrates the string theory showdown: One of the key predictions specific to string theory is that the three dimensions of space (up-down, left-right and front-back, say) and the one dimension of space (past-future) are not all there is to the fabric of reality. String theory insisted that there are in fact not four but ten dimensions of spacetime—and Witten’s M-theory added one more. We don’t see these dimensions because they are “compactified:” in effect rolled up and hidden away, much as the three-dimensional form of a hosepipe looks like a one-dimensional strand from far enough away. Proposing Read More ›

A friend wrote to ask because he came across a 2001 paper, Entropy and Self-Organization in Multi-Agent Systems by H. Van Dyke Parunak and Sven Brueckner Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001), 124-130: Emergent self-organization in multi-agent systems appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics. This paradox has been explained in terms of a coupling between the macro level that hosts self-organization (and an apparent reduction in entropy), and the micro level (where random processes greatly increase entropy). Metaphorically, the micro level serves as an entropy “sink,” permitting overall system entropy to increase while sequestering this increase from the interactions where selforganization is desired. We make this metaphor precise by constructing a simple example of Read More ›

From The Guardian: How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals Forty thousand years ago in Europe our ancestors formed a crucial and lasting alliance that enabled us to finish off our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after we entered Europe, argues Shipman. We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat. … “Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey,” said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Read More ›

Attkisson is a genuine investigative journalist, harassed by authoritarian government in an age of cosseted government media hacks, poseurs, and vapid cheerleaders for “science.” Further to kairosfocus’ Sharyl Attkisson (in a TEDx) cautions on Astroturfing and pseudo-consensus: This also seemed worth calling out as astroturf: A close third is an array of blogs that use words such as “science” and “skeptic” in their titles or propaganda in an attempt to portray an image of neutrality and logic when they are often fighting established science and serving pro-pharmaceutical industry agendas. Or, we would add, attempting to strangle sciences that seek to move beyond the dead ends in which they themselves comfortably burrow. For an antidote to that last, see, for example, Read More ›

Really small: The snapshots may not look like much, but they’re revealing a lot about lifeforms at this extremely miniscule size. For one thing, their metabolisms are so minimal that they likely depend on resources from other bacteria to stay alive. While there’s still a lot that remains a mystery (it’s not certain what half of the genes do), this up-close imagery could eventually fill in a lot of blanks in biology — it’s clear that there’s a world of unusual organisms that have gone largely unnoticed. Engadget Note: If they depend on other bacteria for resources, they probably aren’t going to help much with origin of life studies. They might well be devolved from more metabolically endowed free-living organisms. Read More ›

MicroRNAs are short RNA molecules that regulate gene expression, for example, by binding to messenger RNA molecules which otherwise would code for a protein at a ribosome. MicroRNAs were first discovered in the 1990s but a full understanding of their numbers and distribution across different tissue types has been slow in coming. Increasingly MicroRNAs are understood to be lineage-specific and a new studyfurther confirms this. lineage-specific structures are the antithesis of evolution and its expected common descent pattern. Instead, structures appear in a few species, or even in just a single species, and are nowhere else to be found. Biology, as John Ray found three centuries ago, is full of unique solutions.  Read more

As in But what IS a gene? (At one time we knew. We were wrong. Honestly and stubbornly so). Philosopher (and photographer) Laszlo Bencze here: The notion of a gene seems to be becoming less and less useful with every discovery in genetics. Of course all (or practically all) of these discoveries are being made by strict evolutionists. They still palm off the increasing complexity of reproduction as the result of a long evolutionary process no matter how much their own work does not support that notion. The way I see it, the main purpose of the gene concept is to support a comprehensible evolutionary scenario. If one gene equals one protein and one protein equals one trait, it is Read More ›

Explained by chemist Addy Pross of Ben-Gurion University, author of What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology (Oxford, 2012): Despite the widespread view that Darwinian Evolution has been able to explain the emergence of biological complexity that is not the case….But Darwinian theory does not deal with the question how [life] was able to come into being. The troublesome question still in search of an answer is: how did a system capable of evolving come about in the first place. Darwinian theory is a biological theory and therefore deals with biological systems, whereas the Origin of Life problem is a chemical problem. (page 8) Significantly, Darwin himself explicitly avoided the origin of life question, recognizing that within the existing state Read More ›

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a news article with the exciting headline: “No water needed: Methane-based life possible on Saturn’s moon Titan, study says.” Quite remarkable! Amazing enough to immediately attract my friend’s attention and to get him to shoot an email to me with the link, as he knows I am interested in the field. Yet, if the headline weren’t exciting enough, the first sentence of the news article really amps up the message: Researchers from the Cornell University have developed a methane-based, oxygen-free life form that theoretically may exist in the cold and harsh environment of the planet Saturn’s giant moon Titan, defying the idea that water is necessary for life. This is truly an Read More ›