According to a report in New Scientist, the tool-making behavior of New Caledonian crows may be simply part of their natural repertoire. If this finding turns out to be true, it would cast doubt on claims that the birds are intelligent. A crow that astonished the world by bending a straight piece of wire was simply acting out behaviour in her species’ natural repertoire. Betty bent a straight piece of garden wire into a neat hook to lift a food-baited bucket from a vertical tube in a laboratory at the University of Oxford in 2002. At the time, it was known that New Caledonian crows manufacture tools from twigs in the wild, but it seemed highly unlikely that this involved Read More ›

From Jonathan Webb at BBC News: They conclude that the forged fossils were made by one man: the prime suspect and “discoverer” Charles Dawson. The human-like skull fragments and an ape-like jaw, complete with two teeth, shook the scientific world in 1912 but were exposed as a hoax in 1953. New tests show the bones came from two or three humans and one orangutan. The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, was a multi-disciplinary collaboration including palaeobiologists, historians, dental experts and ancient DNA specialists.More. Dawson ((1864-1916) See also: Who was responsible for forging Piltdown Man? Follow UD News at Twitter!

In the next video from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism (AM-Nat) conference, Arminius Mignea points out that when we force science to adhere to naturalism, it requires scientists to simply ascribe supernatural powers to ordinary matter. Remember, the AM-Nat biology conference is coming up in November. We already have several abstracts submitted and you should get registered now during our early bird special! More information is available at http://www.am-nat.org/

From Massimo Pigliucci at Aeon: The broader question then is: are we on the verge of developing a whole new science, or is this going to be regarded by future historians as a temporary stalling of scientific progress? Alternatively, is it possible that fundamental physics is reaching an end not because we’ve figured out everything we wanted to figure out, but because we have come to the limits of what our brains and technologies can possibly do? These are serious questions that ought to be of interest not just to scientists and philosophers, but to the public at large (the very same public that funds research in fundamental physics, among other things). What is weird about the string wars and Read More ›

From T’Mir Danger Julius at RealClearScience: But just because our classical electromagnetic theories are consistent with our observations, that does not imply that there are no magnetic monopoles. Rather, this just means that there are no magnetic monopoles anywhere that we have observed. Once we start to delve into the murky depths of theory, we begin to find some tempting arguments for their presence in the universe.More. It’s August. See also: Is fine-tuning a fallacy? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Early modern humans dressed for ice age success – Neanderthals, not so much. An analysis of animal remains at prehistoric hominin sites across Europe suggests modern humans clad themselves in snug, fur-trimmed clothing, while Neanderthals probably opted for simple capes. Even so, the finding suggests our extinct cousin was far more sophisticated than once thought. Some researchers argue that Neanderthals didn’t bother with clothes at all, others that they dressed in much the same way as early members of our species. Mark Collard at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, and his colleagues think the truth lies somewhere in between.More. A single find would overturn all this. See, for example, Neanderthal artwork found: “Academic Read More ›

Now that we think about it … From Independent: A quirk of evolution means a particular gene stays ‘switched on’ for longer than usual during snakes’ embryonic development Dr Rita Aires, from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC) in Lisbon, Portugal, said: “The formation of different body regions works as a strong-arm contest of genes. Genes involved in trunk formation need to start ceasing activity so that genes involved in tail formation can start working. “In the case of snakes, we observed that the Oct4 gene is kept active during a longer period of embryonic development, which explains why snakes have such a long trunk and a very short tail.” An evolutionary change caused the Oct4 gene to be placed Read More ›

On stone tools. From ScienceDaily: How smart were human-like species of the Stone Age? New research reveals surprisingly sophisticated adaptations by early humans living 250,000 years ago in a former oasis near Azraq, Jordan. “What this tells us about their lives and complex strategies for survival, such as the highly variable techniques for prey exploitation, as well as predator avoidance and protection of carcasses for food, significantly diverges from what we might expect from this extinct species,” continues Nowell. “It opens up our ability to ask questions about how Middle Pleistocene hominins lived in this region and it might be a key to understanding the nature of interbreeding and population dispersals across Eurasia with modern humans and archaic populations such Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Unlike humans, which are diploids — with two copies of each of their 23 chromosomes (one from each parent), — polyploids can have three, four or more copies of each chromosome. This makes them particularly prone to producing hybrids and, — in contrast to better-known hybrids such as the mule which is (the sterile product of a cross between a male donkey and a female horse), means that crosses between polyploids are often fertile. While hybrids might be expected to be a blend of the two parent species, the researchers found that they tended to have shorter and wider flower openings than both of the parent species which means that a wider range of pollinators can enter the Read More ›

From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC’s two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn’t produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics. This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year’s run. According to their data, the area of Read More ›

A friend writes to urge that we have a look at the last book Wan-Ho wrote before she died: Meaning of Life and the Universe And added, “At the end of her life she seemed most fascinated by water, reflected in her science and art. She was inspired by the work of Emilio del Guidice:: See also: Mae Wan-Ho on electrons and consciousness

Pack a lunch. Bring a towel to sit on. From our favorite physicist, Rob Sheldon: The “2-sigma” bump in data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was widely touted in early summer: “If the observations are confirmed, it will be revolutionary. This could mean nothing less than the fall of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM), which has passed every experimental test thrown at it since it was first put together over four decades ago.” Not everyone was so enthusiastic. One particle physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, wrote in an article for Forbes: “If the bump goes away, this would catapult us into what has become known as the “nightmare scenario” for the LHC: The Higgs and nothing else. Many particle physicists Read More ›

Daniel Payne writes in How The Left Is Weaponizing The American Legal System: For quite some time the American Left has been busy turning American law into a partisan political weapon. Various progressive factions have undertaken a disparate and uncoordinated but still ideologically homogeneous effort to criminalize dissent using the courts and statutory law. By most traditional metrics, these efforts have been failures: the liberals have often lost, and the conservative targets have avoided jail time or crippling criminal or civil convictions or penalties. But the weaponization of our legal system should not be judged by traditional metrics. The point is not for liberals to “win” any particular lawsuit or legal enforcement so much as it is to use lawsuits and Read More ›

From Douglas Axe’s Undeniable, Only a very few research scientists have the opportunity to work against that disjointed view by openly studying life as something clearly and cleverly designed. I am one and can count the others on my fingers. There re more wwho would like to have this opportunity, as shown every now and then by a paper that gets past the policing system of an establishment science journal. A recent example isa description of the architecture of the human hand as being “the proper design by the Creator t perform multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.” Infractions like this always ” almost always bring a reprimand. Everyone must decide for himself or herself what they can Read More ›

Granville Sewell in Christianity for Doubters: The odea of a judgment after death is terribly difficult for our modern minds to take seriously. But, for me, the idea that there will be no final justice – no reward for generosity, kindness, mercy, and courage, and no punishment for selfishness, betrayal, arrogance, and cruelty—is even harder to accept. That would mean that those who are confident that they will never be punished for their corruption and cruelty will be proved right, while those who believe their unselfishness and sacrifices will someday be recognized are deluding themselves.Christianity for Doubters:, p. 50 Maybe the mathematician in him sees unjust judgement as somehow wrong? See also: Granville Sewell on resurrection as metamorphosis Follow UD Read More ›