2016

From H. Allen Orr in “DNA: ‘The Power of the Beautiful Experiment,’” in a review of Matthew Cobb’s Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code (Basic Books)New York Review of Books: The “information” that is “encoded” in DNA gets “read” by cells. You likely didn’t notice because this is now a nearly reflexive way of talking about DNA, even in popular culture. It’s just obvious to us that DNA stores information—for curly hair or blue eyes—and it’s natural to think of it as an information storage device much like the hard disk of a computer. Yet one of Cobb’s main points is that this is a remarkably recent way of thinking about biology. True Then it gets Read More ›

A friend draws our attention to a current festival in Britain, “How the light gets in,” with presenters in the sci tech area such as: Steve Fuller, one of the few philosophers of science who has tried to write seriously about the ID community (Dissent over Descent) Massimo Pigliucci (one of the Altenberg 16, back when challenging Darwinism wasn’t normal) “This morning, Massimo Pigliucci poses the radical question: does science need evidence?”* Rupert Sheldrake, who challenged Darwinism back in the late 1960s, when it was the sign of a sick mind. Denis Noble, who, many say, is the point man behind the rethinking evolution project (here). See how many others you spot. * An attempted non-radical answer: Not if science Read More ›

From Futurism: When it comes to building at the nanoscale, DNA is the construction material of choice. That may seem a little strange. After all, DNA is nature’s hard drive, encoding the software of life. But the macromolecule turns out to be a very hardy and versatile building material, perfectly suited to building complex structures with dimensions measured in nanometers-what is known as “DNA origami.” Biology has settled on the DNA double helix as the default configuration, but there are many more possibilities. Rearrange the base pairs or insert other molecules, and DNA can twist into just about any shape you could wish for. More. “Biology has settled on DNA?” After due consideration, at a series of committee meetings? When Read More ›

But so? Mars is interesting. But, apart from life, why do we study it with such intensity? Just wondeing. From ScienceDaily: “Because the climate on Mars fluctuates with larger swings in axial tilt, and ice will distribute differently for each swing, Mars would look substantially different in the past than it does now,” said Smith. “Furthermore, because Mars has no oceans at present, it represents a simplified ‘laboratory’ for understanding climate science on Earth.” Detailed measurements of ice thickness show that about 87,000 cubic kilometers of ice have accumulated at the poles since the end of the last ice age about 370,000 years ago; the majority of the material accumulated at the martian north pole. This volume is equivalent to Read More ›

From Phys.org: An important amino acid called glycine has been detected in a comet for the first time, supporting the theory that these cosmic bodies delivered the ingredients for life on Earth, researchers said Friday. Glycine, an organic compound contained in proteins, was found in the cloud around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the European Space Agency’s probe, Rosetta, said the study in the journal Science Advances. That said, Previous data from Rosetta has shown that water on Comet 67P/C-G is significantly different from water on Earth, suggesting that comets did not play as big a role in delivering water as once thought.More. Our favourite physicist Rob Sheldon thinks comets played a role, and that sounds reasonable. The big problem is that Read More ›

It’s real. From Nature: Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research. More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.More. Excuse me. In community medicine, this is called “denial.” 1. Read More ›

Not that you’d ever guess from the story at Scienmag, but It took nearly a half trillion tries before researchers at The University of Texas at Austin witnessed a rare event and perhaps solved an evolutionary puzzle about how introns, non-coding sequences of DNA located within genes, multiply in a genome. The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, address fundamental questions about the evolution of new species and could expand our understanding of gene expression and the causes of diseases such as cancer. … For a long time, scientists have known that much of the DNA within any given organism’s genome does not code for functional molecules or protein. However, recent research has found that Read More ›

Here: It does not seem that the evidence supports evolutionary theory as Venema concludes. In fact, there seem to be several significant problems with this claim, as I will explain. First, as we saw in my previous article, the genetic data from the different species do not fall into the expected evolutionary pattern. Here Venema focuses on the high genetic similarity between the primates, claiming it confirms evolution. But if this is what is required to confirm evolutionary relationships, then the substantial genetic differences that are so often found between otherwise similar species must falsify evolutionary relationships in those cases. But evolutionists have never entertained any such doubts. Those evolutionary relationships are intact, according to evolutionists, and this suggests that Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: The editors of a journal that recently retracted a paper after the peer-review process was “compromised” have published the fake reviews, along with additional details about the case. In the editorial titled “Organised crime against the academic peer review system,” Adam Cohen and other editors at the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology say they missed “several fairly obvious clues that should have set alarm bells ringing.” For instance, the glowing reviews from supposed high-profile researchers at Ivy League institutions were returned within a few days, were riddled with grammar problems, and the authors had no previous publications. The case is one of many we’ve recently seen in which papers are pulled due to actions of a third Read More ›

Anyone who has ever lived with animals knows that they do. So what’s with all the pop science fluff about how monkeys grieve, as if it is supposed to prove something? A friend offers some vids: Penguin mourns the death of her chick Mourning doves care for deceased mates Chickens also. Birds make monkey mourning look average. One wishes the zeal did something for animals, instead of crackpots. But nope. There’s no money in that. See also: Claim: Monkeys understand irreversibility of death No. and Are apes entering the Stone Age?

Unless you believe New Scientist: Giant flare-ups from the young sun might have kept early Earth warm – and any life nicely fertilised. By splitting inert nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere, charged particles from the sun could have sparked chemical reactions that heated the planet and could be the precursor for life. This suggestion is the latest attempt to solve a famous paradox known as the “faint young sun” problem. About 4 billion years ago, the sun was only 70 per cent as bright as it is today, which should have made the Earth a frozen snowball. But geological evidence shows that ancient Earth was warm enough for liquid water. The same holds true for Mars. Now, Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Read More ›

Robert Tracinski tells us why the greenies will never admit that they were dead wrong (pun intended) about DDT, even though their mistakes have led to the death of millions: So why not just admit that the hysteria whipped up over DDT was wrong? Because this was the founding issue of the environmentalist movement. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was the first book to convince the common man that “chemicals” are scary and that modern industry and technology were going to destroy us. Banning DDT was the first triumph of the environmentalist movement in using political pressure to override scientific skepticism and impose its agenda by force. http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/27/yes-you-can-blame-the-ddt-ban-for-zika/  

From physicist Paul Davies (who was on a committee(2009) to discuss what to do if aliens landed) Scientific American: Another common argument is that the universe is so vast there just has to be life out there somewhere. But what does that statement mean? If we restrict attention to the observable universe there are probably 1023 planets. Yes, that’s a big number. But it is dwarfed by the odds against forming even simple organic molecules by random chance alone. If the pathway from chemistry to biology is long and complicated, it may well be that less than one in a trillion trillion planets ever spawns life. Affirmations that life is widespread are founded on a tacit assumption that biology is not Read More ›

Even icon Carl Sagan doesn’t get a pass these days. From Cara Giaimo at Atlas Obscura: Throughout human history, people have struggled with two competing impulses: the desire to make a mark for future generations, and a deep confusion about what, exactly, that mark should be. The Golden Records, though probably the most extreme manifestation of this impulse, are far from the first. “There have been time-capsule type experiences ever since humans have measured time,” writes librarian William Jarvis in Time Capsules: A Cultural History. It’s easy to make fun of time capsules, but, as Jarvis details, it’s much harder to fill them with the kind of material that will actually stand the test of time. Often, the things we Read More ›

In another thread, after a lengthy debate about whether or not we treat morality like it is a subejctive preference or an objective commodity, Zeroseven graciously admits: Fair enough. I don’t disagree with most of what you say. I agree we behave as if morals are objective. But I don’t agree that this is because they are objective. … I see the argument of objective morals in the same way. Its a nice way to look at a human process for making decisions about the world. But of course its a pure fiction. First, I’d like to thank Zeroseven for having the courage to admit what few moral subjetivists will; all sane people act as if morality refers to an Read More ›