Monthly Archives: September 2016
Junk science publishing house buys up journals?
| September 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Media, News, Peer review |
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. […]
Popular Mechanics: Time only exists because Big Bang started out ordered?
| September 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Cosmology, News, Physics |
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 […]
Our prehistoric ancestors were just as violent as ourselves?
| September 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Human evolution, News |
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 […]
On Comparing Dotted Apples With Solid Oranges
| September 30, 2016 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
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”?
| September 30, 2016 | Posted by News under Cosmology, News, Physics |
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 […]
Royal Society meeting on evolution appears to be going ahead
| September 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design |
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 […]
War on cancer could benefit from design perspective?
| September 29, 2016 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design, Medicine, News |
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 […]
The Ubiquitous Miracles Of Our Existence
| September 29, 2016 | Posted by William J Murray under Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Paul Davies: Cosmos mostly devoid of life?
| September 29, 2016 | Posted by News under News, Origin 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 […]
Peer reviewers influenced by prestige? Say it ain’t so!
| September 28, 2016 | Posted by News under News, Peer review |
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 […]
Scary climate predictions in the light of Earth’s history
| September 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Climate change, News |
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 […]
Brazilian chemist explains how intelligent design informs his science
| September 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Chemistry, Intelligent Design |
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 […]
Does Moore’s Law apply to origin of life?
| September 28, 2016 | Posted by News under News, 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 […]
Wayne Rossiter: Time is all in our heads?
| September 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Physics |
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 […]
Time is all in our heads? Then we can reverse time!
| September 28, 2016 | Posted by News under Cosmology |
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 […]
Lee Spetner answers his critics
| September 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution, responds to a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist at Evolution News & Views : In his review, David Levin seems to have set out to perform a hatchet job, and this required dispensing with truth. Before going into that, however, I must describe briefly the major point of my book, which […]
Another smart crow, from Hawaii, distantly related to New Zealand smart crows
| September 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Animal minds, News |
From ScienceDaily: An international team of scientists and conservation experts has discovered that the critically-endangered Hawaiian crow, or ‘Alalā, is a highly proficient tool user, according to a paper published today in the scientific journal Nature. … The discovery of a second tool-using crow species finally provides leverage for addressing long-standing questions about the evolution […]
Epigenetics: Smoking causes long-term gene damage
| September 27, 2016 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, Intelligent Design, News |
From ScienceDaily: Smoking leaves its “footprint” on the human genome in the form of DNA methylation, a process by which cells control gene activity, according to new research in Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics, an American Heart Association journal. … “These results are important because methylation, as one of the mechanisms of the regulation of gene expression, […]
Time is all in our heads?
| September 26, 2016 | Posted by News under Cosmology, News |
Of course. From Robert Lanza, Wake Forest U, at Discover Mag: So if the laws of physics should work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time, then why do we only experience growing older? All our scientific theories tell us that we should be able to experience the future just […]
Life was on Earth when it first formed?
| September 26, 2016 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, News, Origin Of Life |
From Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang: By finding graphite deposits in zircons that are 4.1 billion years old, graphite deposits that show this carbon-12 enhancement, we now have evidence that life on Earth goes back at least 90% of Earth’s history, and possibly even longer! After all, finding the remnants of organic matter […]
