From Science: Scientists think that mitochondria were once independent single-celled organisms until, more than a billion years ago, they were swallowed by larger cells. Instead of being digested, they settled down and developed a mutually beneficial relationship developed with their hosts that eventually enabled the rise of more complex life, like today’s plants and animals. Most of their DNA is outsourced to the cell’s nucleus, but why not all of it? In humans, all but 37 are outsourced. In a large project involving more than 2000 mitochondrial genomes from a variety of life forms, researchers found All of the mitochondria’s remaining genes help produce energy in some way. But the team found that a gene was more likely to stick Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze was complaining to us recently, The real problem with infinity as I have come to realize is not the mathematics and logic of it. Rather it’s that just about everybody has a firm opinion on the topic. Yes they do. Average people who haven’t cracked a math text since they failed Algebra I, know exactly what infinity means, how it functions, and how it is the answer to many perplexing questions. They KNOW that actual infinities exist and no amount of reasoning can argue them out of their certainty. Yes, I’ve tried. They regard all explaining as mere trickery. Furthermore, they KNOW that our universe is infinite, time is infinite, energy is infinite, and that Read More ›

From Slate: early 20 years ago, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice, a married couple at Case Western Reserve University, devised a foundational experiment on self-control. “Chocolate chip cookies were baked in the room in a small oven,” they wrote in a paper that has been cited more than 3,000 times. “As a result, the laboratory was filled with the delicious aroma of fresh chocolate and baking.” … Baumeister and Tice timed the students in the puzzle task, to see how long it took them to give up. They found that the ones who’d eaten chocolate chip cookies kept working on the puzzle for 19 minutes, on average—about as long as people in a control condition who hadn’t snacked at Read More ›

From Real ClearScience: Recently, my colleagues and I published research in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that examined dietary data from almost 50 years of nutrition studies. What we found was astounding; these data were physiologically implausible and incompatible with survival. In other words, the diets from these studies could not support human life if consumed on a daily basis. The reason for this is simple; the memory-based data collection methods (M-BMs) used by nutrition researchers are unscientific because they rely on both the truthfulness of the study participant and the accuracy of his or her memory. Stated more simply, these methods collect nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotal estimates of food and beverage consumption. Importantly, vast amounts of taxpayer dollars are directed Read More ›

From Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at the Boston Globe: Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask … Ah, heritability. A term that is much maligned in disciplines like criminology and often serves as a wellspring of confusion. Well, in Carrie Buck’s case, it wasn’t exactly confusion, was it?: The vote was 8 to 1. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion dispensed with young Carrie Buck’s physical integrity in five paragraphs, the six cruelest words of which characterized Virginia’s interest in preventing Buck from burdening the state with her defective offspring: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” More from Boutwell and Barnes: Most of the evidence about the causes of crime overlooks genetic transmission. Yet, some Read More ›

Physicist David Snoke writes to say that the abstracts and bios for the papers at the annual meeting of the Christian Scientific Society (April 15-16) are now posted online. A less familiar voice might be Perimeter Institute affiliate Rob Mann: Robert Mann, Professor of Physics and Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo “Cosmic Particularity: a Universal Puzzle” It is now clear that our cosmos is riddled with considerable degree of particularity. In responding to this a number of scientists have in recent years advocated a “super Copernican” revolution, in which our universe is regarded as a small part of a much larger structure known as the multiverse. Scientifically, this entails an unprecedented combination of broadened theoretical perspective with severe empirical limitations, Read More ›

In Burkina Faso, Africa: . . . and, in the Netherlands: Let me add, in Japan: See if you can spot the pattern WmAD highlights in the introduction to NFL and elsewhere: . . . (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials. (No Free Lunch, p. xi. HT: ENV.) Are we getting a feel for what design as process and as artifact looks like? Is it reasonable to argue that functionally specific, complex organisation and/or linked information (FSCO/I) is credibly produced by blind Read More ›

So thinks Dr. 24hours: The “Creator” paper, Post-pub Peer Review, and Racism Among Scientists. So by now you probably know that PLOSONE retracted a paper about the mechanics of the hand for including phrases about “the mystery of the creator’s design”. Which sounds like an intelligent design argument sneaking into a scientific publication. Except it wasn’t. It was a poor translation of a Chinese idiom, which the author states would have been better translated as “nature”. The paper explicitly and accurately referenced evolution and the real timescale on which evolution occurs. But that didn’t matter. First the outspoken atheist PZ Myers, without apparently doing any investigation, blogged about it credulously asserting it was creationism in a scientific journal. Then twitter Read More ›

From Science Daily: Researchers at Michigan State University, with the help of some stickleback fish, have shown that intense competition among males most definitely has a big say in creating new species. The results, featured in the January issue of Ecology Letters, also show that such competition can reverse the process, actually erasing boundaries between species. “Our paper is of special interest because this is the first time that researchers have shown that intense competition between males for the chance to mate with females can have this kind of influence on splitting populations in two or fusing them together,” said Janette Boughman, MSU integrative biologist and the paper’s senior author.More. Good heavens, not the threespine sticklebacks again? Two stories blew Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Psychology’s Replication Crisis Can’t Be Wished Away Yes, when that “hey, we’re saved” story whistled past the News desk here, casting doubt on serious problems in social science, we held off. There was something troubling about the way the findings were phrased: “Researchers overturn landmark study on the replicability of psychological science” C’mon. It’s widely recognized that there are problems in social science, chiefly due to the monochromatic bias of the researchers. That makes them an easy mark for any flimflam that flies within their mass comfort zone. It’s all the worse if they imagine that won’t happen because they are a “science.” Anyway, Ed Yong: Last August, I wrote about a large initiative called Read More ›

Voids and supervoids: Cosmic voids, and supervoids, are large volumes of space that are devoid of matter. This includes normal matter, in the form of galaxies, and dark matter. Initially, astronomers were not sure if the voids contained dark matter, even though there were no galaxies, but recent observations show that the halos of dark matter are not present. The filamentary structure of galactic superclusters surrounds the voids. While space is mostly empty, voids are large volumes, tens of megaparsecs across. The largest confirmed supervoids are about 100 Mpc (325 million light-years) or more across . The larger known voids include the Boötes Supervoid, and the Northern and Southern Local Supervoids. To explain the cold spot in the cosmic microwave Read More ›

The retraction of a PLoS ONE paper on the hand that made repeated reference to a Creator shows that biologists are “very hostile to those who invoke the supernatural in their science,” writes Professor Jerry Coyne. But it turns out that the paper’s authors weren’t referring to God, but Nature. One of the paper’s authors, Ming-Jin Liu, explains: We are sorry for drawing the debates about creationism. Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word “Creator” was not actually as a native English speaker expected. Now we realized that we had misunderstood the word “Creator.” What we would like to express is that the biomechanical characteristic of tendi[n]ous connective architecture Read More ›

From Lizzie Wade at Science: Archaeologists have long known that Neandertals… used fire, but they could have merely taken advantage of naturally occurring lightning strikes and forest fires to supply the flames. Out of interest, how practical would that be? The point of using fire is to have it handy. No cultural practice could have grown up from relying on occasional accidents and infrequent disasters. That would be like waiting for prey animals to drop dead of heart attacks instead of killing them. Excavations at the 50,000-year-old site Pech-de-l’Azé I in southwestern France have yielded blocks of manganese dioxide, which is abundant in the region’s limestone formations. It has been thought that the compound was used to make body paint, Read More ›

Just as chimpanzees are claimed to have sacred rituals, we now hear from New Scientist that Ravens’ fear of unseen snoopers hints they have theory of mind … The results [of the experiment] suggest ravens can generalise from their own perceptual experience to infer the possibility of being seen by others who are not visibly present. “This proves they have a basic understanding of seeing, which is a basic form of a theory of mind,” says Bugnyar. “This basically means that some non-human animals can indeed evolve this particular ability of attributing a mental state to another one, which has always been considered to be one of the unique human abilities.” More. If the experiment, which showed that ravens are aware Read More ›