Nick Stockton asks, at Wired, why didn’t the ice ages that began at 800,000 ago just remain? What reversed the cooling trend? A new study, published today in Nature Geoscience, has a hypothesis what that something was: plants. Or, more specifically, a complicated process in which plants wear down certain kinds of rocks, and how those rocks remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they wear down—leaving just enough CO2 out there to trap solar warmth, and gradually bring summer back. More. Most ecology on the planet actually depends on plants. Everything seems organized around them, including temperatures. See also: How plants see, hear, smell, and respond without animal sense organs Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Anna Nowogrodzki at : The ability to absorb light at short wavelengths and re-emit it at longer wavelengths is called fluorescence, and is rare in terrestrial animals. Until now, it was unheard of in amphibians. Researchers also report that the polka dot tree frog uses fluorescent molecules totally unlike those found in other animals. … The researchers first thought that they might find red fluorescence in these frogs, because they contain a pigment called biliverdin. Normally, biliverdin turns the amphibian’s tissues and bones green. However, in some insects, says Carlos Taboada, a herpetologist at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, proteins bound to biliverdin emit a faint red fluorescence. But in the polka dot tree frog, biliverdin turned Read More ›

. . . on just what it is that we are killing in the womb: >>“Why are you giving me robotic responses? I’m asking you a human question, and I hope you’ll favor me with a human answer?” That was Tucker Carlson on his primetime Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight” interviewing Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens Monday night. Carlson was looking for the answer to a simple question – the most basic, yet profound, question of the entire abortion debate: What exactly is the little “something” with a beating heart, residing in a mother’s womb, that is destroyed during an abortion? Is it a human being, a clump of tissue or something else? . . . . Read More ›

From Adam Frank at Aeon: It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. … Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained Read More ›

From Leah Crane at New Scientist: It’s an absolute. Mathematics has put speed limits on cooling, finally proving a century-old law – that unless you have infinite time and resources, you can’t get to the absolute zero of temperature. … Now Jonathan Oppenheim and Lluís Masanes at University College London have mathematically derived the unattainability principle and placed limits on how fast a system can cool, creating a general proof of the third law. … By applying mathematical techniques from quantum information theory, they proved that no real system will ever reach 0 kelvin: it would take an infinite number of steps. More. Paper is open access. Abstract: The most accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics, the unattainability principle, Read More ›

The other day, we noted that NASA has been spending money on the question of how world religions would view the discovery of life on other planets. (Meanwhile, Stephen Hawking insists that we must colonize other planets to avoid extinction (he gives us 1000 years) and that world government is needed to stop technology destroying us, which will sound to most people like a choice of methods of execution. 😉 ) From Siobhan Lyons at MercatorNet: Numerous writers and film-makers have turned their attention to the question of what it means for humanity to be annihilated. In Nevil Shute’s critically acclaimed On the Beach (1957), a hallmark Nuclear Age sci-fi work alongside Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959), a cloud of radiation slowly drifts from the Northern Read More ›

Yesterday was pi day (3.14) From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: Pi is definitely weird, but is it normal? Though mathematicians have plumbed many of the mysteries of this irrational number, there are still some unanswered questions.   Mathematicians still don’t know whether pi belongs in the club of so-called normal numbers — or numbers that have the same frequency of all the digits — meaning that 0 through 9 each occur 10 percent of the time, according to Trueb’s website pi2e.ch. In a paper published Nov. 30, 2016, in the preprint journal arXiv, Trueb calculated that, at least based on the first 2.24 trillion digits, the frequency of the numbers 0 through 9 suggest pi is normal. Of course, given Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Most people are familiar with the well-known ‘X’ shape of chromosomes, but in fact chromosomes only take on this shape when the cell divides. Using their new approach, the researchers have now been able to determine the structures of active chromosomes inside the cell, and how they interact with each other to form an intact genome. This is important because knowledge of the way DNA folds inside the cell allows scientists to study how specific genes, and the DNA regions that control them, interact with each other. The genome’s structure controls when and how strongly genes — particular regions of the DNA — are switched ‘on’ or ‘off’. This plays a critical role in the development of organisms Read More ›

Oldest so far. From ScienceDaily: The cranium represents the westernmost human fossil ever found in Europe during the middle Pleistocene epoch and one of the earliest on this continent to be associated with the Acheulean stone tool industry. In contrast to other fossils from this same time period, many of which are poorly dated or lack a clear archaeological context, the cranium discovered in the cave of Aroeira in Portugal is well-dated to 400,000 years ago and appeared in association with abundant faunal remains and stone tools, including numerous bifaces (handaxes). Paper. (public access) – Joan Daura, Montserrat Sanz, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Dirk L. Hoffmann, Rolf M. Quam, María Cruz Ortega, Elena Santos, Sandra Gómez, Angel Rubio, Lucía Villaescusa, Pedro Read More ›

From Gautam Naik at Nature: An editor on the board of a journal published by the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA) has been asked to resign in a controversy over data sharing in peer review. Gert Storms — who says he won’t step down — is one of a few hundred scientists who have vowed that, from the start of this year, they will begin rejecting papers if authors won’t publicly share the underlying data, or explain why they can’t. The idea, called the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, was launched by psychologists hoping to increase transparency in a field beset by reports of fraud and dubious research practices. And the APA, which does not ask that data be made available Read More ›

From Jonathan McLatchie at Apologetics Academy: This coming Saturday (8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST / 12noon PST), our own Dr. Richard Weikart (California State University) is going to do a webinar for my *Apologetics Academy* on his book, which argues that secular philosophies have eroded a Judeo-Christian sanctity of life ethic. Here is the link for joining this week’s webinar. Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic. has a new book out, The Death of Humanity. See also: Richard Weikart’s new book, Death of Humanity Follow UD News at Twitter!

Schedule and abstracts here. Note: 10:00 A.M. Kevin Birdwell. “Understanding Climate Change Factors” What variables affect climate change? Are they natural? Manmade? Both? Do greenhouse gases provide the sole basis for modern climate concerns? Or are their other important factors to consider? How does the need for large sources of energy to power society affect the climate debate? Finally, how do we approach these issues ethically? Bio: Kevin Birdwell received a PhD in physical geography, with emphasis in meteorology and environmental change, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2011. He also holds a BS and an MS in geography, with an emphasis in remote sensing and math, from Murray State University, as well as an AA in the Bible Read More ›

Well, what happens when human complexity foils electoral predictions? From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Salvo: The Pew polling group admits it was stumped by last November’s U.S. presidential election. The results “came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling.” Most pollsters put Hillary Clinton’s chances of defeating Donald Trump at 70 to 99 percent. Few will care if fashion critics call the hemlines wrong this season. But election pollsters consider their work both important and scientific: “Polling is an art, but it’s largely a scientific endeavor,” says Michael Link, president and chief executive of the Abt SRBI polling firm in New York City and former president of the American Read More ›

Which 15 computer whizzes have now been putting back together at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. From Constance Gustke at New York Times: A chronic reorganizer, Darwin arranged his notes according to topics that interested him at the time. One page, for example, might be observations made about bees visiting flowers in 1840, originally placed in a portfolio on the behavior of bees. Perhaps 10 years later, he tore or cut that page, moving some of the observations into a portfolio on the pollination of flowers. By reassembling the original pages, researchers hope to understand fully the long arc of Darwin’s research and the gradual maturation of his thinking. Before the manuscripts project began 10 years ago, Read More ›

I would hardly trust anyone but Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, to get to the bottom of this one, at Huffington Post: A Chat w/ NASA-funded Italian Jesuit Andrea Vicini Andrea Vicini was one of two dozen religious scholars who between 2015 and 2017 shared nearly $3M awarded jointly by NASA and the John Templeton Foundation (administered by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton) to investigate how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space. As I’ve already reported, informants at NASA tell me we will not find life anywhere else in the solar system. So why blow 5% of the NASA Astrobiology Institute budget on such a project? I spoke recently by Read More ›