From ScienceDaily: A Milk and Ochre Paint Mixture Used 49,000 Years Ago at Sibudu, South Africa An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa has discovered a milk-and ochre-based paint dating to 49,000 years ago that inhabitants may have used to adorn themselves with or to decorate stone or wooden slabs. Milk-based paints are still used today. While the use of ochre by early humans dates to at least 250,000 years ago in Europe and Africa, this is the first time a paint containing ochre and milk has ever been found in association with early humans in South Africa, said Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Research conducted in Okinawa, Japan, by graduate student Yu Miyazaki and associate professor James Davis Reimer from the University of the Ryukyus has found a very unusual new species of octocoral from a shallow coral reef in Okinawa, Japan. The new species can be considered a “living fossil,” and is related in many ways to the unusual blue coral. More. The blue coral apparently dates from the Cretaceous period. Note: Some of us think that the term “living fossil” should be replaced by durable species: We human beings aren’t “living fossils” just because someone can dig up the bones of our ancestors and find out that they looked and lived a lot like us! So what is the Read More ›

From physicist Jon Butterworth at The Guardian: Jan Conrad, an astroparticle physicist, claims that “The field has cried wolf too many times and lost credibility” and he worries that false discoveries are undermining public trust in science. He lists some dubious results which have caused a stir amongst physicists and the general public over the past couple of years, including the faster-than-light-neutrinos that weren’t, the primordial gravitational waves that are probably just dust, and several Dark Matter candidates which remain shrouded in uncertainty and contradiction. His argument has some merit; in some cases there is an apparent rush to release, and especially to over-interpret, provisional and sometimes incorrect data. This is sometimes done because because of rivalries and competition, the Read More ›

From Ars Technica: Sometimes, scientists announce things that are breathtakingly stupid. The Guardian, which generally has pretty good science coverage, has an article up reporting that some top scientists believe that the comet 67P may harbor lots and lots of life. The purported evidence for life is the presence of complex hydrocarbons on the comet’s crust. Of course, this article is just based on a press release, and the data won’t be available until it’s presented later today at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. But The Guardian could at least have done some background reading on the person behind the claim, Chandra Wickramasinghe. It would have found that he has a long history of making claims about extraterrestrial Read More ›

ID debates often bring up foundational worldview issues, and the following exchange in the current Answering P thread is also worth headlining: ___________________ P, 62: >>Knowledge is information that, when embedded in a storage medium, plays a causal role in it being retained. This includes books, genomes and yes, brains. Furthermore, knowledge is objective in that is is independent of anyone’s belief. So, while I would agree that merely having a belief doesn’t make it true, we have a reason to suppose that our brains can genuinely contain knowledge. What explanation do you have for the growth of knowledge? Let me guess: the reason why our beliefs may be true is because “that’s just what God must have wanted”?>> KF, Read More ›

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, Professor Jerry Coyne has authored a post in which he offers his thoughts on the ruling. In a telling passage which is remarkable for its myopia, he writes: To those who oppose gay marriage, I say this: Is it really hurting you? What does an opponent have to lose if two homosexuals get married? I suppose they could say it could lead to the dissolution of society, but that’s clearly not the case. Is it really hurting us? Yes, and for a very simple reason: from now on, those who oppose the Supreme Court’s decision will be branded as hateful bigots who are morally on a par with Read More ›

Scientists now know a lot more about the genetic changes that helped give rise to mammoths, thanks to a recent study led by Vincent Lynch, PhD, assistant professor of human genetics at Penn State University, and published in Cell Reports on July 2. The study raises a fascinating question for Intelligent Design proponents who are interested in pinning down the “edge of evolution”: were woolly mammoths designed? University of Chicago science reporter Kevin Jiang summarizes the methods used by Lynch and his team, in a Science Life article titled, The genes that make a woolly mammoth a woolly mammoth (July 2, 2015): To thoroughly characterize mammoth-specific genes and their functions, Lynch and his colleagues deep sequenced the genomes of two Read More ›

Further to how cats get the rodents they will eat to lose their fear of them, we are now beginning to understand how parrots become excellent voice imitators. From Duke University, An international team of scientists led by Duke University researchers has uncovered key structural differences in the brains of parrots that may explain the birds’ unparalleled ability to imitate sounds and human speech. Parrots are one of the few animals considered ‘vocal learners,’ meaning they can imitate sounds. Researchers have been trying to figure out why some bird species are better imitators than others. Besides differences in the sizes of particular brain regions, however, no other potential explanations have surfaced. By examining gene expression patterns, the new study found Read More ›

This coffee time is dedicated to: animal mind  Urine: Surely not an incentive one would expect, if one must clean litter boxes. But this just in from From BBC News: Cats ‘control mice’ with chemicals in their urine Researchers found that when very young mice were exposed to a chemical in cat urine, they were less likely to avoid the scent of cats later in life. … This new study revealed that baby mice exposed to the compound during a “critical period” in their development would, as adults, react quite differently to their arch enemy’s smell. The team exposed one-month-old mice to the chemical over two weeks. When they were tested later for their reaction, they were much less likely Read More ›

Especially call Simon Conway Morris (right). Collect, Cambridge. From ScienceDaily: Extra-terrestrials that resemble humans should have evolved on other, Earth-like planets, making it increasingly paradoxical that we still appear to be alone in the universe, the author of a new study on convergent evolution has claimed. The argument is one of several that emerge from The Runes Of Evolution, a new book in which the leading evolutionary biologist, Professor Simon Conway Morris, makes the case for a ubiquitous “map of life” that governs the way in which all living things develop. It builds on the established principle of convergent evolution, a widely-supported theory — although one still disputed by some biologists — that different species will independently evolve similar features. Read More ›

Jerry Coyne, having supplied the world with yet another tome proving that evolution is true—and by true Coyne and the evolutionists mean as true as the existence of gravity or the computer screen sitting in front of you, in other words there is not much nuance there—has now moved on to the next target: religion. In his new book Faith Versus Fact, Coyne rides the mythical Warfare Thesis (which holds that religion, except for in its anti realism form where it merely is the keeper of some vague set of values we might want to think about, opposes science and the two are incompatible) to take the battle to the believers. You can read a polite review in The Atlantic Read More ›

(This begins and ends the formal religion news coverage for the day. Maybe the new atheists went to relationship counselling?) Closing off our religion coverage for the day, from Maureen Malarkey at The Federalist: A Short List of What’s Wrong with ‘Laudato Si’ … There is nothing to admire in its assault on market economies, technological progress, and—worse—on rationality itself. Bergolio, whom we know now as Pope Francis, is a limited man. His grasp of economics is straitjacketed by the Peronist culture in which he was raised. “Laudato Si” descends to garish, left-wing boilerplate. The pope is neither a public intellectual, theologian, nor a man of science. Yet he impersonates all three. At least he wasn’t lauding Darwinism, mindless evolution, Read More ›

A friend can’t make sense of this, from philosopher Keith Frankish in Aeon: Consciousness is a life-transforming illusion So, again, what is consciousness for? In his 2011 book Soul Dust, Humphrey proposes a novel idea. He argues that consciousness enriches life. It doesn’t add information; it adds interests and goals. Qualia are wonderful, magical things, and conscious creatures enjoy having them. They relish their sensations, and this relish gives them a deeper interest in their own existence. They also project qualia onto their surroundings and take a deeper interest in them too; and they come to think of themselves as having a self, which is of great importance to them. These developments, Humphrey argues, have great survival value and explain Read More ›

From NPR: Don’t Believe In Evolution? Try Thinking Harder … The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science, yet also among the most controversial for subsets of the American public. It’s appalling that this pysch prof can get away with misinforming the public about the fact that evolution by natural selection (= Darwinism) is increasingly regarded as a millstone around the necks of evolutionary biologists, so few are its demonstrated effects. By contrast with the many common, little-publicized modes of evolution, such as horizontal gene transfer and genome doubling, to say nothing of genetic drift. For decades we’ve known that beliefs about evolution are well-predicted by demographic factors, such as religious upbringing and political Read More ›

Because we just haven’t found the dark matter that the theory seems to require. Further to Human languages must be irreducibly complex (Can someone help us understand what this translation from German means?)—maybe it was something about how cosmology needs to change, which Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute in Canada said plainly earlier this year. Something like: Hi, Nonsense, meet Budget: From PBS: Do We Need to Rewrite General Relativity? Astronomical observations show that there isn’t enough ordinary matter to account for the behavior of galaxies and other objects. The fix is dark matter, particles invisible to light but endowed with gravity. However, none of our detectors or experiments have ever seen a dark matter particle directly, leading some Read More ›