Seems like a bold claim re this 520 mya fossil, from Rasmus Kragh Jakobsen at ScienceNordic: A new study has described the mouth apparatus of a half billion year old fossilised carnivore, the Pambdelurion, in fine detail for the first time. In doing so, scientists have discovered that this primitive animal, discovered in Sirius Passet in Greenland, is the common ancestor of all living arthropod animals today. Arthropods make up 90 per cent of all living animals and include insects, scorpions, mites, and crustaceans. … In the new study, Vinther and colleagues describe Pambdelurion’s mouth apparatus as a circle of needle sharp parts arranged around a central hole, which is similar to that of the present-day penis worm. More. We Read More ›

Because many mutations are benign. From an editorial at Nature: One of the major findings of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), the largest-ever catalogue of genetic variation in the protein-coding regions of the human genome, is that many genetic mutations have been misclassified as harmful (M. Lek et al. Nature 536, 285–291; 2016). Authors of that study estimate that each person has lurking in their genome an average of 54 mutations that are currently considered pathogenic — but that about 41 of these occur so frequently in the human population that they aren’t in fact likely to cause severe disease. That finding is having major consequences for some people with such variants, lifting the equivalent of genetic death sentences. More. Read More ›

From Charles Q. Choi at Space.com: New craters are forming on the surface of the moon more frequently than scientists had predicted, a new study has found. The discovery raises concerns about future moon missions, which may face an increased risk of being hit by falling space rocks. The moon is dotted with a vast number of craters, some billions of years old. Because the moon has no atmosphere, falling space rocks don’t burn up like they do on Earth, which leaves the moon’s surface vulnerable to a constant stream of cosmic impacts that gradually churn the top layer of material on its surface. You can see a before-and-after video of a new moon crater here.More. From New Scientist: The Read More ›

From Carrie Arnold at Nova: One of the few survivors of the asteroid impact 65 million years ago was a small, furry, shrew-like creature that lived in underground burrows and only ventured out at night, when predators weren’t active. The critter—already the product of some 100 million years of evolution—looked like a modern mammal, with body hair and mammary glands, except for one tiny detail: according to a recent genetic study, it didn’t have a placenta. And its kind might never have evolved one if not for a chance encounter with a retrovirus. Unlike most viruses, which infect, replicate, and then leave their host, retroviruses elbow their way into their host’s genome where they are copied and passed on to Read More ›

Recently, we have covered the war on falsifiability and objectivity. A friend points us to a back to a 2003 paper that gives us t he lowdown on “post-normal science,” where common-sense approaches need not make sense any more: Post-Normal Science (PNS) is a new conception of the management of complex science-related issues. It focuses on aspects of problem solving that tend to be neglected in traditional accounts of scientific practice: uncertainty, value loading, and a plurality of legitimate perspectives. PNS considers these elements as integral to science. By their inclusion in the framing of complex issues, PNS is able to provide a coherent framework for an extended participation in decision-making, based on the new tasks of quality assurance. The Read More ›

… because we aren’t really anyone anyway, says neuroscientist. From Cody Delistraty, interviewing neurocientist Thomas Metzinger (Being No One, 2003) at Nautilus: We know there is a robust experience of self-consciousness; I don’t doubt this. The question is how could something like that emerge in evolution in an information-processing system like the human brain? Can we at all conceive of that being possible? Many philosophers would have said no, that’s something irreducibly subjective. In Being No One I tried to show how the sense of self, the robust experience of being someone, could emerge in a natural way in the course of many millions of years of evolution. The question was how to arrive at a novel theory of self-consciousness, Read More ›

From professor of pharmacology David Colquhoun at Aeon: The aim of science is to establish facts, as accurately as possible. It is therefore crucially important to determine whether an observed phenomenon is real, or whether it’s the result of pure chance. If you declare that you’ve discovered something when in fact it’s just random, that’s called a false discovery or a false positive. And false positives are alarmingly common in some areas of medical science. … In 2005, the epidemiologist John Ioannidis at Stanford caused a storm when he wrote the paper ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, focusing on results in certain areas of biomedicine. He’s been vindicated by subsequent investigations. For example, a recent article found that Read More ›

From neuroscience PhD student Joel Frohlich at Psychology Today: While it is impossible to ever truly breach this epistemological hurdle, most of us operate on the assumption that other minds exist and individuals with behavior similar to our own experience the world as we do. Accepting this axiom, meaningful questions may be asked: Which brain architectures best support consciousness? Why does consciousness feel like “one thing” despite containing so much information? Why does consciousness vanish during seizures? Why do cerebellar lesions minimally impact consciousness? Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi has developed a system to answer these questions using the framework of information theory. In this context, information is a reduction in uncertainty, as in knowing the value of a variable with many Read More ›

From John Wenz at Astronomy News: It’s (probably) not aliens, yet again. The slightest whiff of aliens is enough to send the public into a frenzy. There have been quiet rumblings after a pre-print paper was released on ArXiv from two French-Canadian researchers who interpreted certain sky signal data to be possibly of intelligent extraterrestrial origin. But “Apparently several — more than three or four — referees have been disinclined to see this published,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute says in an email. “I am quite skeptical, in particular of the data processing that can take spectrally sampled data, and infer time variations. So I’d be a little careful.”More. We can be sure that if there were Read More ›

From Catherine Caruso at Scientific American: In the study, published Thursday in Science, a team of scientists recorded the eye movements of three great ape species while the animals watched videos of a man searching for a hidden object that had been moved without his knowledge, and found that they looked more frequently at the location where the man expected the object to be (a belief the apes knew was false), even though the object was no longer there. The findings suggest the apes were able to intuit what the human was thinking. … Apes from all three species consistently passed the test; even though the animals knew King Kong or the rock was gone, when the researcher returned to Read More ›

To be held at Hughes Hall, Cambridge University. Full details are here: Book here. Note: It doesn’t cost a lot but tickets are limited. Conference Description Since Darwin, biology has been dominated by a bottom-up, materialistic framework in which living things are ultimately derived from undirected physical processes — at the origin of life itself — and then change via random variations sifted by natural selection (or drift) throughout three billion years of organismal evolution. Within the past three decades, however, the sufficiency of this materialist framework has been strongly challenged by unexpected evidence. What if information, and not physical or material causes, provides the key to understanding biology? What are the principles governing the origin and transmission of biological information? Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The original recipe for gene soup may have been simple — rain, a jumble of common molecules, warm sunshine, and nighttime cooling. Then add a pinch of thickener. The last ingredient may have helped gene-like strands to copy themselves in puddles for the first time ever, billions of years ago when Earth was devoid of life, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found. Their novel discoveries add to a growing body of evidence that suggests first life may have evolved with relative ease, here and possibly elsewhere in the universe. Then they added an off-the-shelf thickener. Easy is crucial, said Martha Grover, a professor who oversaw the research at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Read More ›

This issue is directly relevant to the ID controversy, but also to much more of what has gone wrong with our civilisation and the utter, stark peril we now face because we ignored warning signs for decades: This has to be decoded a bit, as it is of course in the usual context of our being concerned over sawdust in the other fellow’s eyes while there is a plank in our own.  In an overnight comment, I gave a few clues: >> –> Ask yourself, are ALL the moneybags on one side? (E.g. Koch vs Soros. [And no, I am not endorsing or opposing any parties or individuals, I am pointing out balancing facts given the known tendencies of pundits Read More ›

Over in this thread, a number of us have been having a discussion with daveS regarding the alleged possibility of an actually infinite past. DaveS seems to think that an infinite past is a perfectly viable model that does not entail any logical contradictions.  Various arguments for the necessary finitude of the past were offered in that thread by myself and others, however, in comment #187 I offered the following argument for the finitude of the past that did not rely on the impossibility of an actual infinite existing in the world: 1) The past consists of moments that were once the present 2) If the past is infinite, then for any given moment there were infinitely many moments that Read More ›

Awarded to Drs. Frasier Stoddart, Ben Feringa, and Jean-Pierre Sauvage. From Akshat Rathi at Quartz: Stoddart’s inspiration came from nature. All life is powered by tiny biological machines that nature has had billions of years to perfect. The most fundamental processes of life, such as translating genetic code to make proteins or ensuring that cellular waste is recycled, require the use of molecular machines, which are 10,000 times smaller than a human hair, and function only on chemical energy. “Stoddart wanted to use chemistry to make similar-sized machines that would do our bidding. Like traditional machines, these would need parts, motors and a source of energy, but doing so on a molecular level is far more complicated.” More. Notice how Read More ›