From at CTV: Researchers are coming forward with examples of junk science distributed by an international company that now has ties to respectable Canadian journals. OMICS Group Inc., an online publishing firm headquartered in India, has been accused of duping academics and publishing bogus research with little to no vetting by experts in the field. Read More…
Month: September 2016
Popular Mechanics: Time only exists because Big Bang started out ordered?
From Avery Thompson at Popular Mechanics: The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the reason you can’t go back to the past. The universe, like an unmixed cup of coffee, started in an extremely ordered state. Over time, the universe mixed together and became less ordered, like what happens when you stir the coffee. Going back Read More…
Our prehistoric ancestors were just as violent as ourselves?
From Amy Middleton at Cosmos: The team calculated the percentage of deaths caused by members within the same species, which might include aggression, infanticide or cannibalism; or, among humans, war, homicide or execution. According to the findings, interpersonal violence represents about 2% of all deaths across the history of humans. This number was close to Read More…
On Comparing Dotted Apples With Solid Oranges
This time the climate alarmist Chicken Littles are lauding a cartoon. Yes, you read that right, a cartoon. But the cartoon is fundamentally false in that it links two wildly different kinds of data sets on the same line and pretends they are the same. Robert Tracinski sets them right here.
Dark matter theory “running out of room to hide”?
From Jeff Hecht at Nature: Most of the Universe is missing. The motion of the stars and galaxies allows astronomers to weigh it, and when they do, they see a major discrepancy in cosmological accounting. For every gram of ordinary matter that emits and absorbs light, the Universe contains around five grams of matter that Read More…
Royal Society meeting on evolution appears to be going ahead
That much-diminished meeting on rethinking evolution, remember, which couldn’t really come off, or not much anyway? Some of us thought it would go the way of the firm that used to teach the peace sign to grizzly bears. But here it is again: — New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives Read More…
War on cancer could benefit from design perspective?
From Oregon State U: Researchers have discovered a mechanism of intercellular communication that helps explain how biological systems and actions – ranging from a beating heart to the ability to hit a home run – function properly most of the time, and in some scenarios quite remarkably. The findings are an important basic advance in Read More…
The Ubiquitous Miracles Of Our Existence
In another thread, I asked daveS why he was an atheist. He responded: The proposition “there is no god” also appears to me to be consistent with what I observe in the world. When asked what that meant, he expanded: Well, I don’t know of any inconsistencies between this proposition and my observations. For example, I’m not Read More…
Paul Davies: Cosmos mostly devoid of life?
At SciAm: Many distinguished scientists proclaim that the universe is teeming with life, at least some of it intelligent. Biologist Christian de Duve went so far as to call life “a cosmic imperative.” Yet the science has hardly changed. We are almost as much in the dark today about the pathway from nonlife to life Read More…
Peer reviewers influenced by prestige? Say it ain’t so!
Well, Ben Andrew Henry is saying this at The Scientist: When a manuscript goes out for peer review, most medical journals inform their reviewers of the authors’ identities and affiliations, in what’s called a single-blind review. But new research suggests that concealing the identities of authors—double-blind review—could help reduce reviewer bias. In a study published Read More…
Scary climate predictions in the light of Earth’s history
From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Somewhere around a million years ago, the climate underwent a transition. Earlier, it was going through glacial cycles every 40,000 years, but it shifted to taking 100,000 years to cycle (this shift is termed the mid-Pleistocene transition). Snyder’s new record shows that the planet was getting slowly but progressively Read More…
Brazilian chemist explains how intelligent design informs his science
We talk to Marcos Eberlin, Thomson Mass Spectrometry Lab, Brazil: 1. Enezio tells me you are interested in the concept of design in nature. Do you relate it to your work in mass spectrometry or to other, larger issues, or both? J. J. Thomson, the father of mass spectrometry—the man who discovered the electron and won the Nobel Read More…
Does Moore’s Law apply to origin of life?
What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Moore’s Law The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable Read More…
Wayne Rossiter: Time is all in our heads?
From Wayne Rossiter,, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, on the recent claim that time is all in our heads: 1) Don’t a series of events have to pass in order to arrive at a state of the universe in which observers can exist? On atheistic naturalism, doesn’t intelligent life emerge from Read More…
Time is all in our heads? Then we can reverse time!
Reader Ilion Troas kindly writes to say, re the pop science of the week (Time is all in our heads:” “… In other words, if we do experience the future (which we might), we are not able to store the memories about such processes. You can’t go back in time without this information being erased Read More…