2016

From Jacob Aron at New Scientist, A planet just 30 per cent more massive than Earth orbits in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.25 light years away. How Earth-like is it really? … The planet – Proxima b – was discovered by astronomers who spent years looking for signs of the tiny gravitational tug exerted by a planet on its star, after spotting hints of such disruption in 2013. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years from Earth, making it slightly closer than the binary star system of Alpha Centauri, which the Proxima star is thought to loosely orbit. More. From Rob Sheldon I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Years ago, people didn’t put this type of Read More ›

Here: “It’s not a coincidence that the great pop icon of Science made his name hosting a children’s show.”  

From Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: Only a very few research scientists have the opportunity to work against that disjoined view by openly studying life as something clearly and cleverly designed. I am one, and I can count the others on my fingers. There are more who would like to have ths opportunity, as shown every now and then by a paper th at gets past the policing system of an establishment science journal. A recent example is a description oft the architecture of the human hand as being “the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.” Infractions like this almost always bring out the whistle-blowers, which almost always brings reprimand. Everyone must Read More ›

From Brit tax TV: All the other chimps feared Frodo, which helped his rise to the top. He even pushed himself on his own mother, and fathered a sickly infant with her, who would not survive for long. “He was aggressive towards all of the other chimps,” says anthropologist Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who first met Frodo in 2001. “A lot of the other males had a bare patch of fur on their lower back side from where Frodo would bite them.” Many other primates show similar behaviour to Frodo’s. His actions hint at something rather dark about our shared ancestry with chimpanzees. They suggest that bullying your way to the top has a long Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at his blog, Not Even Wrong: The “SUSY Bet” event in Copenhagen took place today, with video available for a while at this site. It appears to be gone for the moment, will put up a better link if it becomes available. An expensive bottle of cognac was presented by Nima Arkani-Hamed to Poul Damgaard, conceding loss of the bet. On the larger question of the significance of the negative LHC results, a recorded statement by Gerard ‘t Hooft (who had bet against SUSY), and a statement by Stephen Hawking (not in on the bet, but in the audience) claimed that if arguments for SUSY were correct, the LHC should have seen something, so they Read More ›

From Daily Galaxy: “After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the Universe,” said Webb. “The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely “local by-laws”, it might be that whilst our observable part of the Universe favors the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it. “If our results are correct, clearly we shall need Read More ›

Oxygen should be on the stock market; the numbers go up and down all the time. From ScienceDaily: Geologists are using new direct methods to measure the Earth’s oxygenation. They identified, for the first time, exactly how much oxygen was in Earth’s atmosphere 813 million years ago — 10.9 percent. This finding, they say, demonstrates that oxygenation on Earth occurred 300 million years earlier than previously concluded from indirect measurements. … “Diversity of life emerges right around this time period,” Benison said. “We used to think that to have diversity of life we needed specific things, including a certain amount of oxygen. (The findings) show that not as much oxygen is required for organisms to develop.” More. Paper. (paywall) – Read More ›

From Richard P. Grant at Guardian: How many science communicators do you know who will take the time to listen to their audience? Who are willing to step outside their cosy little bubble and make an effort to reach people where they are, where they are confused and hurting; where they need? Atul Gawande says scientists should assert “the true facts of good science” and expose the “bad science tactics that are being used to mislead people”. But that’s only part of the story, and is closing the barn door too late. Because the charlatans have already recognised the need, and have built the communities that people crave. More. How convenient that the world is divided neatly between “charlatans” and Read More ›

A friend writes that letters sent to the incoming class of 2020 make it clear the University of Chicago isn’t a fan of trigger warnings or safe spaces. From John Miltimore at Intellectual Takeout: Letters sent to the incoming class of 2020 make it clear the University of Chicago isn’t a fan of trigger warnings or safe spaces. … The University of Chicago recently made it clear to its crop of incoming students that academic freedom and inquiry remain pillars at the institution, and that the university does not support “so-called” trigger warnings or offer safe spaces that allow students “to retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. Here is how the university welcomed its incoming class Read More ›

From Got Questions: Answer: Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (also known as Pastafarianism) is a “religion” created by a man named Bobby Henderson. Mr. Henderson created this satire in protest of the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to teach intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution. In essence, he was asking, “If foolish religious ideas like that of Intelligent Design have to be given equal time in high school biology classes, then why can’t other foolish religious ideas be taught alongside with it?” So, in protest, he made up a silly set of religious beliefs and demanded that they be given equal time in biology classes alongside the theories of evolution and Intelligent Design. His point seems to Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at MercatorNet: Social science, our “science of us”, is more susceptible to self-deception than other sciences. It is very much softer than particle physics and it has been especially hard hit by recent scandals. One factor may be the almost universally admitted progressive bias that makes frauds and hoaxes easy to perpetrate. There’s a technical term for that: “confirmation bias”, a tendency to attach more weight to evidence that confirms one’s own view. Much social science research seems to exist in order to provide evidence for theses that are already believed because they confirm the progressive worldview of the researchers. This background is helpful in understanding the fate of whistleblowers in the field, including Mark Regnerus (an Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The take-home points from this review are that the sex difference in sports interest is (1) substantial and widespread, (2) partly due to evolutionary pressures that differentially affected males and females, and (3) unlikely to be fully overturned by socialization. These points challenge the bedrock assumptions of many scholars and policy makers. Most notably, Title IX is a U.S. law that prohibits sexual discrimination in educational opportunities, including sports, and Title IX is generally implemented under the assumption that females’ sports interest is intrinsically equal to that of males. The present research indicates that this implementation may require revision. More. (paywall) Paper. – Robert O. Deaner, Shea M. Balish, Michael P. Lombardo. Sex differences in sports interest and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Sociality is a ubiquitous feature of life, but the reasons why animals cluster together can vary. In nature, there is great diversity in social organization and in the complexity of interactions among group members. It is widely accepted that high predation risk may select for group living, but predation is not regarded as an important driver of social complexity. This view neglects the important effect of predation on dispersal and offspring survival, which may require cooperation among group members. The significance of predation for the evolution of social complexity can be well illustrated by behavioural and morphological adaptations of highly social animals showing division of labour, such as ants and cooperatively breeding fishes like cichlids. More. Paper. (paywall) Read More ›

Chapter 6, “Is God Really Good?” of my new Wipf and Stock book Christianity for Doubters is almost the same as the “Epilogue” of my 2015 Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. What does the problem of pain have to do with intelligent design? A lot, I think, because after 40 years of promoting intelligent design, it is obvious to me that many of the strongest opponents of design, for all their talk about defending science, are completely immune to scientific arguments, they will never look objectively at the scientific evidence until they can find answers to some very legitimate theological questions they have, three of which I try to address in chapters Read More ›

From evolutionary biologist Matthew Wills at RealClearScience: Ultimately, the jury is out on the extent to which intelligent aliens – if they exist – would resemble us. It may or may not be significant that humans have just two eyes and ears (just enough for stereo vision and hearing), and just two legs (reduced from the initially more stable four). Many other organs also come in pairs as a consequence of our evolutionarily deep-seated – and perhaps inevitable – bilateral symmetry. Still other elements of our body plan are probably nothing more than chance. The fact that we have hands and feet with five digits is a consequence of the fixation on five in our early tetrapod ancestors – close Read More ›