So reports Andrea Taroni at New Scientist: Chances are, too, you’re nowhere near the vision of particles painted by our best picture of how they work, quantum theory. This says that despite making up stuff that definitely has a size – ourselves, the paper or screen you’re reading this on – particles occupy a point in space precisely zero metres across. While you’re chewing that one over, you might consider how quantum theory also allows these size-zero particles to occupy multiple places at once, or be “entangled” so the state of one becomes inextricably bound up with the state of another. But even that doesn’t prepare you for the latest assault on any common-sense conception of a particle that physicists Read More ›

Para nuestros lectores bilingues (se que tenemos algunos), un video que demuestra que el debate no es nada complicado: [youtube xWgjZ6h6T8U] Here is the English version, highlighted earlier at UD: [youtube 259r-iDckjQ] Y en el caso poco probable que alguien se interesa en saber en que he trabajado los ultimos 40 anos, puede verlo aqui. Hey, I’m from El Paso, we all switch languages en medio de una frase aqui. And as long as I’m pushing my Youtube videos, here is my most entertaining and recent one, the only one with any chance to go viral, “Isaac has to wait” (essential to turn on closed captions, CC): [youtube tycSRzBy5zc]

From ScienceDaily: This week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom shows that fossils of the 360 million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega, one of the iconic transitional forms between fishes and land animals, are not adults but all juveniles. This conclusion, which is based on high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans of fossil limb bones performed at the ESRF sheds new light on the life cycle of Acanthostega and the so-called conquest of land by tetrapods. The tetrapods are four-limbed vertebrates, which are today represented by amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Early tetrapods of the Devonian period (419-359 million years ago) Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A team of Japanese researchers led by Homma’s laboratory of Nagoya University have now purified the stator protein MotA from a bacterium found in hot springs (Aquifex aeolicus) and analyzed its three-dimensional structure using electron microscopy mainly in cooperation with Namba’s laboratory of Osaka University. They found that it can form a structure of four MotA molecules (called a tetramer), which differs in shape from the previously predicted complex. The study was recently published in Scientific Reports. The MotA protein spans the bacterial membrane, and has previously been shown to form a tetramer complex with another transmembrane protein, MotB, creating the stator. In this latest work, MotA was expressed and purified from A. aeolicus, and found to be Read More ›

Here. MCDOWELL: What do you consider some of the greatest successes, and also challenges, in the ID movement? DEMBSKI Unlike creationism, with which it is often conflated, intelligent design shifts the discussion of biological origins from a religion vs. science controversy to a science vs. science controversy. This is a success, even if ID’s critics continue to try to claim that it is religion in scientific garb. There are really two strands to ID’s scientific program. There’s the pure information-theoretic side, as represented by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, and then there’s the molecular biology research side, as represented by the Biologic Institute and its journal Bio-Complexity.[ii] We continue to push the research frontiers forward on both sides. The biggest challenge Read More ›

From Dan Falk at Quanta, Many physicists have made peace with the idea of a block universe, arguing that the task of the physicist is to describe how the universe appears from the point of view of individual observers. To understand the distinction between past, present and future, you have to “plunge into this block universe and ask: ‘How is an observer perceiving time?’” said Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, and one of the founders of the theory ofcosmic inflation. Others vehemently disagree, arguing that the task of physics is to explain not just how time appears to pass, but why. For them, the universe is not static. The passage of time is physical. “I’m Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New findings published in eLife draw connections between some of these pieces, revealing an extensive web of molecular interactions that may ultimately inform the development of new epigenetic drugs for cancer and other diseases. Specifically, the study reveals a mechanism that helps explain how dividing cells pass patterns of epigenetic information called methyl tags to their daughter cells, a crucial part of regulating gene expression across cell generations. Epigenetic tags help tell genes — stretches of DNA that act as biological instruction manuals — when to switch “on” and “off,” ultimately determining cell type and function. DNA methylation, or the addition of methyl tags to DNA, is one of the most well-studied epigenetic signals; errors in this process Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have long known that infants born to women who are obese show higher risks of obesity, but they don’t fully understand what boosts those risks. Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center now have demonstrated that umbilical cells from children of obese or overweight mothers show impaired expression of key genes regulating cell energy and metabolism, compared to similar cells from babies of non-obese mothers. … Isganaitis adds that mothers and healthcare providers also could carefully monitor the growth patterns and nutrition of children at risk of obesity, both in the first two years of life and afterwards. “Your risk of chronic diseases isn’t set in stone at birth; there are many different periods in which your lifelong disease Read More ›

From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: That fossil, recently described in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, is only the second of its kind ever found, revealing three levels of an ancient food chain nested one inside the other in paleontology’s version of Russian nesting dolls—or its culinary equivalent, a turducken. More. This is interesting but what is even more interesting is when life forms choose to live inside other life forms, abandoning machinery that creates independence—devolution: Sometimes, devolution offers an apparent advantage. Many plankton microbes eliminated the genes for producing key vitamins, and now outsource the function. One account suggests, “… most of the time, the fitness advantages of smaller genomes and lower cell replicating costs offset the potential fitness gains that Read More ›

From Belinda Smith at Cosmos: A Mercury-sized planetary embryo that slammed into Earth around 4.4 billion years ago delivered virtually all of the planet’s carbon, new research suggests. … Unravelling the early Earth’s composition is no easy feat. Billions of years ago, the solar system was a whirling mess of comets, asteroids and proto planets. … One scenario that could yield today’s volatile concentrations was if a carbon-rich Mercury-sized planet with a core full of silicon or sulfur smashed into and was absorbed by Earth. The dynamics of the collision meant the silicon sank straight to Earth’s core while the carbon was mixed with the mantle, ready to be cycled up to the crust and eventually, develop life. More. Two Read More ›

From Douglas Axe’s Undeniable, Consider popular wisdom about genes and DNA. Just as most peole think scientists havefigured out how the brain works, so too they think scientists have figured out how DNA works. By my casual observation, most nonscientists—and some scientists as well—think the blueprint from which every living organism was formed is written on that individual’s genome in the language of genes. Accordingly, geese honk because they have the honk gene, and hyperactive dogs yap because they have the hyperactive-dog gene. Likewise, by this popular view people who can sing or whistle received these abilities by receiving the corresponding genes. The master template for specifying all our attributes became public with the publishing of the human genome, supposedly, Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals. Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive, all of them… to do with as we wish. (pp 262-263, Read More ›

“Lucy” is the iconic imputed human ancestor from 3.2 mya, Austropithecus afarensis. From Deborah Netburn at Los Angeles Times: After examining high-resolution CT scans of broken bones in Lucy’s right shoulder, as well as the damage to other parts of her skeleton, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin propose that the small hominid’s life ended shortly after a catastrophic fall from a great height — probably from a tree. “What we see is a pattern of fractures that are well documented in cases of people who have suffered a severe fall,” said John Kappelman, a UT professor of anthropology and geological sciences. “This wouldn’t happen if you just fell over.” More. But there are doubts: From Washington Post: Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: To me, Facebook is perhaps the most worrisome of all the Big Data concerns of the book [Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction ]. It now exercises an incredible amount of influence over what information people see, with this influence sometimes being sold to the highest bidder. Together with Amazon, Google and Apple, our economy and society have become controlled by monopolies to an unparalleled degree, monopolies that monitor our every move. In the context of government surveillance, Edward Snowden remarked that we are now “tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets.” A very small number of huge extremely wealthy corporations Read More ›