From ScienceDaily: Researchers have for the first time shown that ribose, a sugar that is one of the building blocks of genetic material in living organisms, may have formed in cometary ices. Origin of life is a somewhat unusual field for a science in that “may have” is equivalent to a discovery. Maybe that’s why James Tour has no time for it. As a first step, an artificial comet was produced at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale. By placing a representative mixture of water (H2O), methanol (CH3OH) and ammonia (NH3) in a high vacuum chamber at — 200 ̊C, the astrophysicists simulated the formation of dust grains coated with ice, the raw material of comets. … Several sugars were detected, including Read More ›

Asks Jon Tennant at Paleo Community: Further to the dinosaur document dump (a fair bit of news and views recently, about the late and the great): Why are there so many bird species around today, when we have relatively so few dinosaurs in the fossil record? This disparity is even more extreme when you consider that while non-avian dinosaurs were around for about 170 million years, there were only ever about 800 or so species of dinosaur, based on current records. The actual number fluctuates through time, as new species are discovered, and others are shown to be invalid through research broadly known as ‘taxonomy’. One problem is with the difference between what existed and what gets preserved and another Read More ›

The largest dinosaurs who ever lived became increasingly front-heavy over time: The team found that these linked trends in size, body shape and weight distribution did not end with the evolution of fully quadrupedal sauropods. In the Cretaceous period — the last of the three ages of the dinosaurs — many earlier sauropod groups dwindled. In their place, a new and extremely large type of sauropod known as titanosaurs evolved, including the truly massive Argentinosaurus and Dreadnoughtus, among the largest known animals ever to have lived. The team’s computer models suggest that in addition to their size, the titanosaurs evolved the most extreme ‘front heavy’ body shape of all sauropods, as a result of their extremely long necks. … Dr Read More ›

From Nature News: Much of what scientists know about the relative contributions of dark matter and dark energy comes from the relic radiation left behind from the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background. The most exhaustive study of it — essentially a portrait of the young Universe at about 400,000 years of age — was done in recent years by the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory. Based on Planck’s measurements, cosmologists can predict how that young Universe will evolve, including how fast it expands at any point in its history. For years, those predictions have disagreed with direct measurements of the current rate of cosmic expansion — also known as the Hubble constant. But until now the error margins Read More ›

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds (Instapundit) at USA Today: This [government goes to Muscle Beach] all takes place in the context of an unprecedented meeting by 20 state attorneys general aimed, environmental news site EcoWatch reports, at targeting entities that have “stymied attempts to combat global warming.” You don’t have to be paranoid to see a conspiracy here. Not everyone believes that the planet is warming; not everyone who thinks that it is warming agrees on how much; not everyone who thinks that it is warming even believes that laws or regulation can make a difference. Yet the goal of these state attorneys general seems to be to treat disagreement as something more or less criminal. That’s wrong. As the Supreme Read More ›

Following on James Tour on the hypocrisy of origin of life conjectures –  updated: From James Tour, T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, as well as Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University, with over 590 research publications and over 100 patents: (beginning at 3:05) in his March 3, 2016 lecture titled “The Origin of Life: An Inside Story,” here: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled into Read More ›

Last news cycle, skim milk was virtuous; now it’s just a fad. Meanwhile, from the Ian Leslie at the Guardian: If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error. What happened to John Yudkin belies that interpretation. It suggests instead that this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us. We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way Read More ›

Recently, we noted a claim that nature prefers hexagons, but a reader has written in to say that nature prefers squares. He adduces in evidence: Science published an interesting paper last year about the fact that the square shape of the seahorse tail creates a robust, rigid, yet flexible tail, more so than the typical circular/cylindrical shape you see in animal tails. Explanation: Most animals and plants approximate a cylinder in shape, and where junctions occur (as with branches of trees or limbs on animals), those corners are “faired,” meaning smoothly curved so that one surface grades into the next (1). When living organisms deviate from the norm, there’s usually a good biomechanical reason: a clue to some specific problem Read More ›

More on James Tour here: A prominent chemist who was recognized this year as one of the 50 most influential scientists in the world says most scientists do not understand how evolution could explain the existence of life. Dr. James Tour is a well-known professor at Rice University, specializing in chemistry, nanoengineering, and computer science. Over the last 30 years, Tour has authored over 500 research publications, and he was recognized as one of “The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by TheBestSchools.org. Tour has also received awards and recognitions from the American Chemical Society, Thomson Reuters, Honda, NASA, and others. See also: A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution (also Read More ›

Oops. One last religion news item just landed: A friend writes to say that these guys didn’t get the memo from theistic evolutionists that an explanation by natural selection doesn’t refute intelligent design: From Thiago Hutter, Carine Gimbert, Frédéric Bouchard and François-Joseph Lapointe, “Being human is a gut feeling,” Microbiome, (2015) 3:9: Before Darwin, intelligent design arguments (such as the ones found in Paley) explaining the organization found in biological individuals via divine creation were the norm. Since Darwin, the origin of organization of biological individuals is to be explained thanks to designer-free adaptive processes. Individuals were functional wholes whose parts-integration was the result of evolution by natural selection. (public access) More. Some people believe natural selection somehow naturally produces Read More ›

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Closing our religion coverage for the week: In a 2014 article in Christian Research Journal, “The New Theistic Evolutionists: BioLogos and the Rush to Embrace the ‘Consensus’ (not online), Luskin writes: Of course, when BioLogos claims “it is all intelligently designed,” they mean that strictly as a faith-based theological doctrine for which they can provide no supporting scientific evidence. Indeed, it’s ironic that BioLogos accuses ID of “removing God from the process of creation” when Collins writes that “science’s domain is to explore nature. God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science.” Under Collins’s view, God’s “domain” is seemingly fenced off from “nature,” which belongs to “science.” Since Read More ›

Hey, peace—for all its faults, it’s still a free country. And after Karl Giberson and Peter Enns, one’s entitled to at least wonder about stuff like that… Anyway, Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter writes at Shadow of Oz blog: Unfortunately, Dr. Paul Wallace (an astronomer and ordained Baptist minister) has proven Daniel Dennett’s point, “Darwin’s idea — bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Of course, Wallace’s new book was supposed to be transformational in its ability to meld science and faith as one common body. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Read More ›

From Jonathan McClatchie: Here is the recording of my recent debate at Monash University in South Africa with agnostic philosopher Charles Villet, on “Does God Exist?” It includes quite a bit of ID material. More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

New Scientist advises us that “evolution” can help us understand the migration crisis in Europe. But of course. Provided we believes what they believe, “evolution” can by definition enable us to understand anything. Just find a peg on which to hang whatever is happening. Migration is, we are told, “a characteristic of our species,” “evolution made us xenophobes,” and “we’re a stay-at-home species.” Or that “rich countries need immigrants.” And “Only a new international body can cut through the bluster on the emotive but much misunderstood migration ‘crisis.’” Contradiction’s no problem; we haven’t evolved so as to understand how to deal with it properly. If you can stand all the enlightenment, sign up and pay. Note: It would be nice Read More ›