2016

A new moon formation theory, from ScienceDaily: The moon was formed from a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a ‘planetary embryo’ called Theia approximately 100 million years after the Earth formed, almost 4.5 billion years ago. … Scientists had already known about this high-speed crash, which occurred almost 4.5 billion years ago, but many thought the Earth collided with Theia (pronounced THAY-eh) at an angle of 45 degrees or more — a powerful side-swipe (simulated in this 2012 YouTube video). New evidence reported Jan. 29 in the journal Science substantially strengthens the case for a head-on assault. … The fact that oxygen in rocks on the Earth and our moon share chemical signatures was very telling, Young Read More ›

Of course not. That would make Earth a dinner plate circled by globes. From Newsweek: Columbus and the Spaniards knew the Earth was round—Columbus’s plans to sail to Asia were questioned because the ocean was thought to be too vast to sail across, not because anyone thought the Earth was flat, Gould writes. Even the religious authorities of the 15th century knew better. So why on Earth have so many schoolchildren been taught otherwise? The fault lies with 19th century writers such as Washington Irving, Jean Letronne and others. Letronne was “an academic of strong anti-religious prejudices… who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On Read More ›

From Science Daily: Could human suicide have evolutionary roots in self-sacrificial behaviors like those seen in species such as honeybees and ants? … In a paper recently published in the journal Psychological Review, the researchers theorize that humans exhibit the characteristics of eusocial species such as relying on multigenerational and cooperative care of young and utilizing division of labor for successful survival. “Humans are a species that is eusocial, and that’s an important starting point,” Joiner said. “That suggests a certain set of characteristics, including some really striking self-sacrifice behaviors.” Those eusocial behaviors, understood as part of what is called inclusive fitness in evolutionary biology, are adaptive. “The idea is if you give up yourself, which would include your genes, Read More ›

Cartloads of it these days at places like Big Think: Jon Kabat-Zinn: If you put people in a scanner and tell them to just do nothing; just rest in the scanner; don’t do anything at all, it turns out that there’s a region in the midline of the cerebral cortex that’s known as the default mode network that just lights up, that all of a sudden gets very, very active. I mean you’re told to do nothing and then your brain starts to use up energy a lot. A lot of ATP in this, you know, activation in the medial frontal areas. And that’s called the default mode network because when you’re told to do nothing, you default to activity Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study reveals that prairie voles console loved ones who are feeling stressed — and it appears that the infamous “love hormone,” oxytocin, is the underlying mechanism. Until now, consolation behavior has only been documented in a few nonhuman species with high levels of sociality and cognition, such as elephants, dolphins and dogs. More. One difficulty with discussing such issues is anthropomorphism, that is, ascribing states of mind to animals that are probably unique to humans. Animals doubtless have empathy; after all, tortoises can put upended tortoises back on their feet. But reason and moral sense are different from empathy, in that they require some level of abstraction. Moral sense, for example, may compel the view that Read More ›

From New Scientist: How many ways are there to arrange 128 balls? Now Stefano Martiniani of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have found a clever way around the problem. They say there are 10^250 ways to arrange 128 jammed spheres – far more than the 10^80 atoms in the universe. So how did they do it? More. So were some choices made when the universe came to exist? See also: Copernicus, you are not going to believe who is using your name. Or how. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From a recent article in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution: In summary, the long c-genes that are required for accurate reconstruction of species trees using shortcut coalescence methods do not exist and are a delusion. Coalescence approaches based on SNPs that are widely spaced in the genome avoid problems with the recombination ratchet and merit further pursuit in both empirical systematic research and simulations. A delusion? Wow. Story: Well, here’s a ScienceDirect abstract, and you decide: Higher-level relationships among placental mammals are mostly resolved, but several polytomies remain contentious. Song et al. (2012) claimed to have resolved three of these using shortcut coalescence methods (MP-EST, STAR) and further concluded that these methods, which assume no within-locus recombination, are required to unravel Read More ›

With your coffee … At “TGIF: Dawkins disinvited to science conference”: Professor Richard Dawkins has had an invitation to speak at a science event withdrawn by organisers for sharing a “highly offensive” video mocking feminists on Twitter. Here. Make a point of seeing it while it is up. Big Social Media like Facebook and Twitter have taken to censorship of speech that offends whoever complains. If WordPress gets into the act, there’ll probably be some fragile consciousness out there wittering to the new media censors about Uncommon Descent. After all, If someone who has political cachet makes a big to-do about feeling attacked or threatened, their target has committed an offence. So, even if we are nothing more than your daily Read More ›

Probably for all the wrong reasons. From UK Independent: Richard Dawkins dropped from science event for tweeting video mocking feminists and Islamists Professor Richard Dawkins has had an invitation to speak at a science event withdrawn by organisers for sharing a “highly offensive” video mocking feminists on Twitter. Dawkins was scheduled to speak at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism which will take place in New York City in May, but on Thursday organisers issued a statement concerning his participation. “The NECSS has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS 2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet of a highly offensive video. More. A joke song satirising the alliance between radical Read More ›

Or “troo” facts. From APS Physics: Focus: Wikipedia Articles Separate into Four Categories But do we know which category we are reading? Wikipedia allows anyone to contribute to its millions of articles and doesn’t exert any central control, yet striking order has emerged, according to an analysis of the entire editing history of the English portion of the website. Researchers found that articles fall into four main categories based on the way they are edited and that a relatively small number of editors have a major influence on the site. Sure. You would think the multiverse was Settled Science, to listen to them. The four distinct categories found point to a persisting inequality of influence—with a small number of super-editors controlling Read More ›

We figure Dawkins’ selfish gene will die after its proponents retire. Look, even New Scientist was last spotted quietly getting off the boat. It doesn’t get worse than that. Oh wait … from a puff piece in Nature: Matt Ridley reassesses Richard Dawkins’s pivotal reframing of evolution, 40 years on. … Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Read More ›

I’ve already written here about the recent dust-up between the United Methodist Church (UMC)and Discovery Institute. Being involved with this has caused me, as a United Methodist, to take a closer look at some of the official statements of the UMC on science. As regular UD readers will likely know, the church has banned Discovery Institute from exhibiting at the upcoming General Conference. Vince Torley has already written here that probably UMC co-founder John Wesley wouldn’t be welcome at this year’s General Conference, so I won’t rehash that aspect. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the official statements of the UMC on Science to which the Church appealed as rationale for denying Discovery Institute an information table Read More ›

From Quanta: Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links — not space-time — constitute the fundamental structure of the universe. … In 2012, Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph, both physicists at the University of Queensland in Australia, laid out a procedure to encrypt data so that it can be decrypted only at a specific moment in the future. Their scheme exploits quantum entanglement, a phenomenon in which particles or points in a field, such as the electromagnetic field, shed their separate identities and assume a shared existence, their properties becoming correlated with one another’s. Normally physicists think of these correlations as spanning space, linking far-flung locations in a phenomenon that Albert Einstein famously described as Read More ›

From National Geographic: Jaguars are old cats. They first evolved in Eurasia sometime around three million years ago before spreading both west and east, eventually inhabiting a range from southern England to Nebraska and down into South America. Today’s range of southern Arizona to Argentina—over 3.4 million square miles—is only a sliver of their Ice Age expansion. And it wasn’t just the jaguar’s range that shrunk. Today the spotted cats are about fifteen percent smaller than their Pleistocene predecessors.Nevertheless, jaguars survived while the American lion, the sabercats, and other predators vanished. How? In order to investigate this question, biologist Matt Hayward and colleagues looked at the jaguar diet and how the cat’s prey preferences changed over time. … Crunching the Read More ›

From Jonathan Bartlett (aka johnnyb) in his new book, New Programmers Start Here What separates modern computers from the calculating machines of the past is that modern computers are general-purpose computers. That is, they are not limited to a specific set of predesigned features. I can load new features onto a computer by inputting the right program. How did we get the idea of creating such a general-purpose machine? It turns out that a question in philosophy led to the creation of general-purpose machines. The question was this—was there a way to create an unambiguous procedure for checking mathematical proofs? This seems like an odd question, but it was a big question in the 19th century. There had been many Read More ›