“Directed mutations” means that the cell alters its own genome for its own protection, rather than simply being the recipient of random interventions. Here: APOBEC enzymes are thought to defend human cells against viruses by mutating them so they don’t work any more. Pinto et al. wondered if there might be evidence of APOBEC enzymes acting on human and ape genomes as well. Think of it as a sort of “collateral damage” in the war against viruses. In their survey, they found eight thousand unique clusters of mutations that look like APOBEC mutations in the human genome, as well as the genomes of Neandertal and Denisovans. They found almost a half million that were unique to the entire genus Homo. Read More ›

Or something like that. From Priceonomics: The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, By Ants After years of watching ant colonies in the Arizona desert, Stanford biologist Debra Gordon made a discovery: harvester ants, the species she was studying, had a very particular foraging technique. … Theydidn;twaste a lot of ants in hard times. But when Gordon showed her data to Prabhakar to model computationally, he had a revelation. “The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol,” he said. … If we consider that the ant colony’s goal is to collect more food and expend fewer ants, and a server’s goal is to send Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have uncovered dozens of fossilized teeth in Kuwajima, Japan, and identified this as a new species of tritylodontid, an animal family that links the evolution of mammals from reptiles. The finding suggests that tritylodontids co-existed with some of the earliest mammal species for millions of years, overturning beliefs that mammals wiped out mammal-like reptiles soon after they emerged. … “Tritylodontids were herbivores with unique sets of teeth which intersect when they bite,” explains study author Hiroshige Matsuoka, based at Kyoto University. “They had pretty much the same features as mammals — for instance they were most likely warm-blooded — but taxonomically speaking they were reptiles, because in their jaws they still had a bone that in mammals Read More ›

In recent days, WJM put up a post on the end or reasonable discussion that soon turned into sharp exchanges on hot-button issues, especially the homosexualisation of marriage. (For months there has been a lot of baiting in and around UD to pull us into a debate on such.) An underlying factor in such is that we need to recognise not only the danger of a march of folly over a cliff: and the potential for a modern, electronic media version of Plato’s Cave manipulative shadow shows confused for reality: as well as the warning in Acts 27 that gives us a real-world case study on the dangers of manipulated democracy leading to shipwreck: but we should also take into Read More ›

From Chemistry World: Nobel prize-winning chemist and past president of the Royal Society of Chemistry Harry Kroto died on Saturday 30 April aged 76. Kroto was awarded the 1996 chemistry Nobel prize, along with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley, for the discovery of fullerenes, and was knighted the same year. More. He was also an atheist activist in science, seeming not to recognize any distinction, as the campaign against Royal Society theistic evolutionist Michael Reiss suggested. This item from the New York Times in 2006 gives the sense of it. He shared the Nobel that year with Richard Smalley (1943–2005) who came to the opposite conclusion. Curiously, no one was supposed to mind using science to spread atheism but using Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The University of Illinois and University of Puerto Rico have completely sequenced the mitochondrial genome for the Hispaniolan solenodon, filling in the last major branch of placental mammals on the tree of life. The study, published in Mitochondrial DNA, confirmed that the venomous mammal diverged from all other living mammals 78 million years ago, long before an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. “It’s just impressive it’s survived this long,” said co-first author Adam Brandt, a postdoctoral researcher at Illinois. “It survived the asteroid; it survived human colonization and the rats and mice humans brought with them that wiped out the solenodon’s closest relatives.” That is why it is endangered now, researchers say. While the solenodon is venomous and Read More ›

From Matthew R. Francis at Symmetry magazine: A GUT feeling about physics Linking the different forces into a single theory isn’t easy, since each behaves a different way. Electromagnetism is long-ranged, the weak force is short-ranged, and the strong force is weak in high-energy environments such as the early universe and strong where energy is low. To unify these three forces, scientists have to explain how they can be aspects of a single thing and yet manifest in radically different ways in the real world. Stop, wait. Are they prepared to accept the possibility that everything in the uiverse does not resolve into one single thing? Why not? Some things are only a “mess” if one assumes that a single Read More ›

From Salk Institute: LA JOLLA–When tweaking its architecture, the adult brain works like a sculptor–starting with more than it needs so it can carve away the excess to achieve the perfect design. That’s the conclusion of a new study that tracked developing cells in an adult mouse brain in real time. New brain cells began with a period of overgrowth, sending out a plethora of neuronal branches, before the brain pruned back the connections. The observation, described May 2, 2016 in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that new cells in the adult brain have more in common with those in the embryonic brain than scientists previously thought and could have implications for understanding diseases including autism, intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia. “We were Read More ›

Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel has attacked former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for questioning the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming and for promoting a documentary called Climate Hustle, whose aim is to expose the myths about global warming. Climatologist Judith Curry has written a review of the film, which she found to be “pretty entertaining and even interesting, especially the narratives developed around silly alarmist statements made by scientists and politicians.” Dr. Curry vouched that “there were no goofy or incredible statements about the science” in the movie, but she went on to add: “The perspective in Climate Hustle is arguably a minority perspective, at least in terms of world governments and a select group of scientists.” Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Earth could contain nearly 1 trillion species, with only one-thousandth of 1 percent now identified, according to a study from biologists. The estimate is based on the intersection of large datasets and universal scaling laws. Scaling laws, like those discovered by the IU scientists, are known to accurately predict species numbers for plant and animal communities. For example, the number of species scales with the area of a landscape. “Until now, we haven’t known whether aspects of biodiversity scale with something as simple as the abundance of organisms,” Locey said. “As it turns out, the relationships are not only simple but powerful, resulting in the estimate of upwards of 1 trillion species.” The study’s results also suggest that Read More ›

From One Zoom Tree of life software: OneZoom is a vivid and interactive guide to the relationships between all life on earth. You can marvel at a stunning variety of species and discover your favourites among them on our tree of life. More. Click on human for some fun. The problem with a “”tree of life” is that a normal tree does not change much from branch to branch, but the history of jellyfish, water bears, and weasels is just so different that the connection is possibly better seen as a river flowing through many landscapes than as a tree. In fact, the tree is beginning to look more like a river all the time. Great show here too. See Read More ›

UDEditors:  WJM’s devastating rebuttal to Aleta’s materialism deserves its own post.  Everything that follows is WJM’s: Aleta said: William, I know that your view is that unless morality is somehow grounded (purportedly) in some objective reality to which we have access, then it is merely subjective, and that then people have no reason not to to do anything they want: it’s not just a slippery slope, but rather a black-and-white precipice to nihilism.So actually discussing this with you, which we did at length one other time, is not worth my time. It’s odd that you say that it is not worth your time apparently because you already know my position. If the only thing that makes a discussion “worth your Read More ›

To avoid controversy. No guff. As Suzan Mazur, author of The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” tells it at Huffington Post: The Big Questions are these: What exactly is the extended evolutionary synthesis (“ES”) John Templeton Foundation has recently funded with $8M (and $3M more going to ES from institutional contributions)? What good is an extended synthesis without the largest part of the biosphere — viruses — factored in? Why fund now, when ES has been kicking around ever since it was born at “Altenberg!“ eight years ago? Paul Wason, Science and Religion chief at Templeton simply won’t say, declining my request for an interview and emailing that he “would prefer not to be involved Read More ›

From science writer Daniel Engber at Five Thirty-Eight: Who Will Debunk The Debunkers? Sutton, a criminology professor at Nottingham Trent University, started his career of doubting very young: He remembers being told when he was still a boy that all his favorite rock stars on BBC’s “Top of the Pops” were lip-synching and that some weren’t even playing their guitars. Soon he began to wonder at the depths of this deception. Could the members of Led Zeppelin be in on this conspiracy? Was Jimmy Page a lie? Since then, Sutton told me via email, “I have always been concerned with establishing the veracity of what is presented as true, and what is something else.” But he went too far. He Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the week (a bit late), we hear from Filthy Monkey Men (an evolutionary anthropology blog by a Liverpool Student with Attitude): Lots of religious people accept evolution, but they typically only do so because they’re following religious dogma, not because they understand the subject So some researchers decided to test this hypothesis by taking trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum. There they conducted a survey, identifying visitors’ knowledge of evolution, their acceptance of the theory and their religious denomination. The goal being to identify whether or not religious denomination was correlated with knowledge and acceptance of evolution; indicating that some groups were indeed fostering scientific understanding. And as you might expect they found a Read More ›