2016

From Jason Bittel at National Geographic: This week, headlines have been swirling about a paper published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics that seemed to offer tantalizing signs of dolphinese. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins were recorded exchanging a series of sounds that resembled “a conversation between two people.” The dolphins took turns producing the sounds and did not interrupt each other, according to study author Vyacheslav Ryabov, a senior researcher at the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station in Russia. Ryabov suggests that the variation seen in these pulses represents the equivalent of phonemes, or words, and that the strings of pulses could reasonably be considered dolphin sentences. However, many of the world’s leading experts Read More ›

From Peter Ellerton at RealClearScience: Claims that the “the science isn’t settled” with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works. So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong? The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general. More. Ellerton writes an average good article on the scientific method but it has almost no relationship to why people doubt the human-caused global warming a-crock-a-lypse. Most doubters suspect that marketing doomsday is a means of raising taxes and Read More ›

From forester Peter Wohlleben at Daily Mail: There’s increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn. If that’s true — and my experience as a forester convinces me it is — then they must be able to store and transmit information. And scientists are beginning to ask: is it possible that trees possess intelligence, and memories, and emotions? So, to cut to the quick, do trees have brains? It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it’s hard to be sceptical.More. No one familiar with the area now Read More ›

  Offered by author Bruce Buff via Evolution News & Views: For months, he and Alex Robertson had spent a nearly continuous stream of long nights toiling in secret, trying to crack what had to be the most extraordinary encryption ever devised. What they had encountered should have been unbreakable. It was remarkable that, through a series of astounding discoveries, they had gotten as far as they had, only to be stymied by a final puzzle that had defied solving. It was even more remarkable that the answer to hat last obstacle had suddenly come to him this morning. Realizing the implications of what they were about to obtain, he had decided to wait until he was certain what it Read More ›

We usually save these treats for Sunday but, oh well: From Daily Mail: TV shows designed to inspire awe at the natural world could make viewers less inclined to believe scientific theories about existence, a study suggests. It found religious people who watch programmes such as BBC’s Planet Earth, presented by Sir David Attenborough, are more likely to have their faith in God reaffirmed by the beauty they see on screen. Atheists, meanwhile, are more likely to believe scientific theories that involve order rather than randomness in the universe. More. Well, the obvious solution is to mainly air nature shows about ugly, boring places and tell people to watch them out of a sense of duty. Or pass laws making Read More ›

Apparently, the US House is on an anti-science rampage. From himself at New Yorker: From climate change and evolution to sex education and vaccination, there has always been tension between scientists and Congress. But Smith, who has been in Congress since 1987 and assumed the chairmanship of the Science Committee in 2013, has escalated that tension into outright war. Smith has a background in American studies and law, not science. He has, however, received more than six hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions from the oil-and-gas industry during his time in Congress—more than from any other single industry. With a focus that is unprecedented, he’s now using his position to attack scientists and activists who work on climate change. Under his Read More ›

Adam Frank confronts the question at NPR: One difference, he says, is data: There are literally thousands of studies now of those rotating-too-fast galaxies out there — and they all get the same, quite noticeable result. In other words, data for the existence of dark matter is prevalent. It’s not like you see the effect once in a while but then it disappears. The magnitude of the result — meaning its strength — also stays pretty consistent from one study to the next. The same holds true for studies of dark energy. No such luck with ghosts. Sure, but a true believer in ghosts would be sure to point out that ghosts are considered intelligent, not inanimate. So seeing them Read More ›

Readers will surely remember Stanford’s John Ioannidis, scourge of bad data. Now, at Milbank Quarterly: The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses Currently, there is massive production of unnecessary, misleading, and conflicted systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Instead of promoting evidence-based medicine and health care, these instruments often serve mostly as easily produced publishable units or marketing tools. Suboptimal systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be harmful given the major prestige and influence these types of studies have acquired. The publication of systematic reviews and meta-analyses should be realigned to remove biases and vested interests and to integrate them better with the primary production of evidence. Context: Currently, most systematic reviews and meta-analyses are done retrospectively with Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey at ScienceNews: Color vision may actually work like a colorized version of a black-and-white movie, a new study suggests. Cone cells, which sense red, green or blue light, detect white more often than colors, researchers report September 14 in Science Advances. The textbook-rewriting discovery could change scientists’ thinking about how color vision works. Like a coloring book. The large number of cells that detect white (and black — the absence of white) create a high-resolution black-and-white picture of a person’s surroundings, picking out edges and fine details. Red- and green-signaling cells fill in low-resolution color information. More. Maybe that helps explain the craze for adult coloring? Not just that some people have too much time on Read More ›

Fulfilling Thomas Huxley’s famous assertion, sort of. Hat tip Oliver Moody, for this item: Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare were produced in response to the familiar idea that if an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. It was translated to a computer environment, producing live updates published on the web, alongside a webcam view of the production scene showing the creative activity in its fuller context. The text was first produced in Paignton Zoo by a group of Sulawesi Macaque monkeys as their contribution to the exhibition GENERATOR (1 May – 22 June 2002, Spacex Gallery), curated by SPACEX & STAR, and supported Read More ›

From time to time materialists come into these pages and argue that DNA is not a true “code.”  This proves nothing other than that materialists are often quite shameless in the arguments they make to prop up their religious views.  We would do well to remind that that arch-materialist Richard Dawkins did not get the memo.  Testifying against interest he writes: After Watson and Crick, we know that genes themselves, within their minute internal structure, are long strings of pure digital information. What is more, they are truly digital, in the full and strong sense of computers and compact disks, not in the weak sense of the nervous system. The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Experiments have shown that it is remarkably easy for protein-like, two-dimensional structures — amyloids — to form from basic building blocks. This discovery supports the researchers’ hypothesis that primal life could have evolved from amyloids such as these. But then we learn: The ETH scientists stress, however, that there is still an important piece of the puzzle missing from their argument in support of the “amyloid hypothesis”: Are amyloids also capable of self-replication, just like RNA molecules? This is conceivable, claim Riek and Greenwald, but there is still no experimental evidence to support it. The professor and his team are working on it. And then we suddenly hear, almost for the first time, what’s wrong with RNA world, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Shimmering carapaces and rattling claws make colourful freshwater crabs attractive to pet keepers. To answer the demand, fishermen are busy collecting and trading with the crustaceans, often not knowing what exactly they have handed over to their client. Luckily for science and nature alike, however, such ‘stock’ sometimes ends up in the hands of scientists, who recognise their peculiarities and readily dig into them to make the next amazing discovery. Such is the case of three researchers from University of New South Wales, Australia, The Australian Museum, Sun Yat-sen University, China, and National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan, who have found a new species and even a new genus of freshwater crab, and now have it published in the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Several years ago, biologists discovered a new type of genetic material known as long noncoding RNA. This RNA does not code for proteins and is copied from sections of the genome once believed to be “junk DNA.” Since then, scientists have found evidence that long noncoding RNA, or lncRNA, plays roles in many cellular processes, including guiding cell fate during embryonic development. However, it has been unknown exactly how lncRNA exerts this influence. Inspired by historical work showing that structure plays a role in the function of other classes of RNA such as transfer RNA, MIT biologists have now deciphered the structure of one type of lncRNA and used that information to figure out how it interacts with Read More ›

From Uri Bram at Nautilus: Human learning is always social, embodied, and occurs in specific practical situations. Mostly, you don’t learn to dance by reading a book or by doing experiments in a laboratory. You learn it by dancing with people who are more skilled than you. … Yes. In its first few decades, artificial intelligence research concentrated on tasks we consider particular signs of intelligence because they are difficult for people: chess, for example. It turned out that chess is easy for fast-enough computers. Early work neglected tasks that are easy for people: making breakfast, for instance. Such easy tasks turned out to be difficult for computers controlling robots. Early AI learning research also looked at formal, chess-like problems, Read More ›