Collectively, they are, um, dumb. After a while, one gets plumb tired of it. From Graham Lawton at New Scientist: IT COST more than $13 billion and took 14 years, but eventually, as expected, God showed up. The joy and relief were immense. That was in 2012, and the evidence has only become stronger. Disbelief is no longer an option. God is real. Not the God of course, but Her particle, aka the Higgs boson. If only proving the existence of God were that simple. Gallons of ink and blood have been spilled over this question but have largely got us nowhere. Belief in a god or several gods is a leap of faith. So is disbelief. The only coherent Read More ›

From Hugh Ross at Salvo: With access to gravitational waves emanating from both medium-sized and supermassive black hole binaries, astronomers will be able to explore new properties of gravity and general relativity. They will be able to determine in much more detail the formation histories of both stars and galaxies in the universe. These advances will lead to a more precise understanding of the cosmic creation event and the subsequent development of the universe. Inevitably, worldviews will come into play, but scientific testing can and should overcome preconceived ideas. How did our universe come to exist? Was it by chance? For a fair-minded person, the understanding to be gained by these advances promises to remove any remaining doubts about the Read More ›

Cleaning out the in tray here, and came across this from science writer John Farrell, a while back, at Forbes, on evangelicals (BioLogos types) “coming out” for Darwin in a recent book: While I appreciate the candor in There is more to the challenge of evolution than just accepting the age of the universe and that all species, including humans, are deeply related. … The way the world came to be has to say something about the character of its creator, according to many theologians.many of these essays, the book could have cut even closer to the bone. And how does “evolution” portray the world? As Farrell quotes contributor Schneider, Schneider, in particular, lays out this challenge: worth quoting from an Read More ›

From Charles Q. Choi at Inside Science News: Now researchers examining 153 galaxies find that by looking solely at where stars and gases in those galaxies are located, they could precisely predict the anomalous ways in which they moved. This may hint that dark matter is more strongly coupled to normal matter than currently thought. It could also indicate that dark matter does not exist and that another explanation is needed for the discrepancies that dark matter models were invoked to solve, said study lead author Stacy McGaugh, an astrophysicist and chair of astronomy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Previous analyses of the orbital velocities of the stars in galaxies often depended on visible wavelengths of light. However, Read More ›

One wouldn’t think anyone had to point that out, but physicist Christopher Graney does a good job at Aeon: … Yes, [an opponent] said, a moving Earth messes with certain Biblical passages, like Joshua telling the Sun to stand still. But it also messes with certain astronomical terms, such as sunrise and sunset. Copernicans had work-arounds for all that, Locher said, even though they might be convoluted. What Copernicans could not work around, though, were the scientific arguments against their theory. Indeed, Locher even proposed a mechanism to explain how Earth could orbit the Sun (a sort of perpetual falling – this decades before Isaac Newton would explain orbits by means of perpetual falling), but he said it would not Read More ›

So thinks Francis Thackeray at RealClearScience: Dawson’s role in the Piltdown Man hoax appears to have been confirmed in 2016 by palaeo-anthropologist Dr Isabelle de Groote and her colleagues. High-tech forensic analyses led them to conclude that only a single hoaxer, presumably Dawson, was responsible. The case seems closed. But is it? Yes, everyone is blaming Dawson now. Research I have conducted recently and published in the South African Journal of Science suggests that Dawson may not necessarily have been the culprit in this particular case. I suspect someone realised that Dawson was a fraudster and decided to play a joke on him. Archival research in London and Paris leads me to believe that a French Jesuit priest was in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily, re UC Berkeley’s Richard Muller’s new book NOW: The Physics of Time (W. W. Norton) Ever since the Big Bang explosively set off the expansion of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmos has been growing, something physicists can measure as the Hubble expansion. They don’t think of it as stars flying away from one another, however, but as stars embedded in space and space continually expanding. Muller takes his lead from Albert Einstein, who built his theory of general relativity — the theory that explains everything from black holes to cosmic evolution — on the idea of a four-dimensional spacetime. Space is not the only thing expanding, Muller says; spacetime is expanding. And we are surfing Read More ›

  Well, not “evolution,” even though it must be marketed that way. From ScienceDaily: For many thousands of years, humans have bred dogs, goats, chickens and other animals to make them suitable for use as domestic animals, in a process known as domestication. Humans have selected the individuals that possess desirable traits and bred them with similar individuals, such that the offspring possess the same traits. The genetic material of the animal has partially changed during the development of the species from its wild form to a domesticated one. The opposite process also takes place, when domesticated animals readapt to life in the wild, in a process known as feralization. By investigating what happens in an animal’s genetic material, we Read More ›

A new theory, via Phys.org: “Even if you believe in a RNA-only world, you have to believe in something that existed with RNA to help it move forward,” said Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, associate professor of chemistry at TSRI and senior author of the new study. “Why not think of RNA and DNA rising together, rather than trying to convert RNA to DNA by means of some fantastic chemistry at a prebiotic stage?” More. But wouldn’t the confluence of DNA and RNA point to design? Anyway, why do w only hear of the problems with RNA world (“fantastic chemistry”) when some other theory that won’t work is being promoted? See also: Welcome to “RNA world,” the five-star hotel of origin-of-life theories Follow Read More ›