From University of Plymouth at Eurekalert: Funders need to take more responsibility for the efficiency of the research they fund It has been estimated that up to 85% of medical research is wasted because it asks the wrong question, is badly designed, not published or poorly reported. Health research around the world depends heavily on funding from agencies which distribute public funds. But a new study has found that these agencies are not as open as they could be about what they are doing to prevent this waste and that governments responsible for the public money they distribute are not holding them to account. The findings come in response to a question posed by a letter published on-line today, 9th Read More ›

From Eric Berger at Ars Technica: Thanks to the ominous warning in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, much of the science and technical community shares Culberson’s fascination with Europa. But for the general public, the icy moon remains largely an unknown. Eight billion dollars to peck at the ice on some moon around Jupiter? What is the sense of that? As he works on his peers in Congress, Culberson will eventually have to convince Joe the Plumber, Ken Bone, and the rest of America about the relevance of Europa, too. For this mission, he has a secret weapon. During the briefings at JPL, Culberson brought a friend with him, the famed Director James Cameron. The two men share Read More ›

From Brian Switek at Nature: A study1 published 2 March in PLOS Genetics gives a rare insight into how genomes change as a species dies out. Towards the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago, woolly mammoths ranged through Siberia and into the colder stretches of North America. But by about 4,000 years ago, mainland mammoths had died out and only 300 remained on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. In order to examine this disappearance at the genetic level, biologists Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin at the University of California, Berkeley, compared the complete genome of a mainland mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that lived about 45,000 years ago with that of a Wrangel Island mammoth from about Read More ›

Well, how could they lose? Just recently, they turned up again with documents. From Gaia Vince at Digg: But by 39,000 years ago, Neanderthals were struggling. Genetically they had low diversity because of inbreeding and they were reduced to very low numbers, partly because an extreme and rapid change of climate was pushing them out of many of their former habitats. A lot of the forested areas they depended on were disappearing and, while they were intelligent enough to adapt their tools and technology, their bodies were unable to adapt to the hunting techniques required for the new climate and landscapes. … “It could’ve gone the other way – if instead the climate had got wetter and warmer, we might Read More ›

But what are they? From Charles Cockell at Physics Today: Look at the menagerie of life—for example, as depicted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in the painting to the left. The casual viewer could easily conclude that life is limitless in its scope, that its forms and shapes are constrained only by the imagination. But however trite the observation may be, life must conform to the laws of physics. Science still does not know how many possible solutions there are to building a self-replicating system within those laws, however, or to what extent physics constrains the products of the evolutionary process. At the scale of organisms, physical laws certainly do limit the engineering solutions to life’s problems. For example, consider locomotion. Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie kindly writes to say, This coming Saturday, at the usual time of 8pm GMT / 3pm EST / 2pm CST /12noon PST, I am going to be hosting another edition of the *Apologetics Academy* live interactive webinar. This week, our guest is astrophysicist Dr. Luke Barnes of the University of Sydney. Dr. Barnes is arguably the world’s leading authority on the fine-tuning evidence for the existence of God. There will be plenty of opportunity to interact and ask questions (you can even do so anonymously!). Go here and make sure no one sees you install the Zoom software (a minute or two). See also: Cosmologist Luke Barnes on fine-tuning of the universe Webinar with Scott Minnich: Reinterpreting long-term evolution Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Gene transfers are particularly common in the antibiotic-resistance genes of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. When mammals breed, the genome of the offspring is a combination of the parents’ genomes. Bacteria, by contrast, reproduce through cell division. In theory, this means that the genomes of the offspring are copies of the parent genome. However, the process is not quite as straightforward as this due to horizontal gene transfer through which bacteria can transfer fragments of their genome to each other. As a result of this phenomenon, the genome of an individual bacterium can be a combination of genes from several different donors. Some of the genome fragments may even originate from completely different species. In a recent study combining machine Read More ›

From Nature: (paywall) Although it is not known when or where life on Earth began, some of the earliest habitable environments may have been submarine-hydrothermal vents. Here we describe putative fossilized microorganisms that are at least 3,770 million and possibly 4,280 million years old in ferruginous sedimentary rocks, interpreted as seafloor-hydrothermal vent-related precipitates, from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada. These structures occur as micrometre-scale haematite tubes and filaments with morphologies and mineral assemblages similar to those of filamentous microorganisms from modern hydrothermal vent precipitates and analogous microfossils in younger rocks. The Nuvvuagittuq rocks contain isotopically light carbon in carbonate and carbonaceous material, which occurs as graphitic inclusions in diagenetic carbonate rosettes, apatite blades intergrown among carbonate rosettes and magnetite–haematite Read More ›

From Jonathan McLatchie, who writes, Saturday’s webinar with Scott Minnich (U Idaho) was really excellent. He talked about his recent work on long-term evolution experiments with *E. coli *and responded to the various criticisms from Lenski & Blount. See also: Why microbiologist Scott Minnich acknowledges design in nature and Iowa State did it to Gonzalez, Now U of Idaho is doing it to Minnich  Note: That was in 2005. Someone must have forgotten to change the batteries in the local Darwinbots. Follow UD News at Twitter! In this webinar, pro-ID bacterial geneticist Dr. Scott Minnich (University of Idaho) talks to the Apologetics Academy about his recent research published in the Journal of Bacteriology, in regards to the long-term E. coli evolution experiments of Dr. Read More ›

As recently reported. Worse luck, most of us probably didn’t even know about the Tully Monster. Well, … from ScienceDaily: Last year, news headlines declared that a decades-old paleontological mystery had been solved. The ‘Tully monster,’ an ancient animal that had long defied classification, was in fact a vertebrate, two groups of scientists claimed. Specifically, it seemed to be a type of fish called a lamprey. The problem with this resolution? According to a group of paleobiologists, it’s plain wrong. “This animal doesn’t fit easy classification because it’s so weird,” said Sallan, an assistant professor in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Science. “It has these eyes that are on stalks and it has this Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers at the University of Oslo (UiO) keep discovering surprises in the Atlantic cod genome. The most recent study has revealed an unusual amount of short and identical DNA sequences, which might give cod an evolutionary advantage. Or else it is something the cod could live with or else it makes no difference at present. If we don’t have any very definite information, why talk about “evolutionary advantage” at all? Interesting: “We have already found a fish species that has even more tandem repeats than cod, namely the related haddock. Both cod (Latin name: Gadus morhua) and haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) are members of the cod family (Gadidae). This may indicate that the whole group has an increased proportion Read More ›

Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt. Your time here. To join, go here.

At New York Times: Almost all people believe that it is a crime to kill an innocent human, but not to kill an innocent tapeworm. And almost all people regard tapeworms as incapable of innocence in any case — not because they are always guilty, but because the distinction between innocent and guilty does not apply to them. They are the wrong kind of thing. We, however, are the right kind of thing. So what kind is that? Do any other beings, animal or otherwise, belong to it? And what follows? These questions lie at the center of philosophical inquiry today, as they have since the ancient Greeks. In a thousand ways we distinguish people from the rest of nature, Read More ›

To him it’s all  real simple: It happens because some people reject expert information when it goes against their personal values … For its part, the American public is in the grip of a sullen, almost paranoid, narcissism about science and experts. This is not a function of education; the anti-vaccine movement, for example, is actually concentrated among parents with more education than their poorer counterparts. Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication. (Consider the number of otherwise intelligent people who advocate consuming raw milk, for example, against the advice of a horrified medical community.) Instead, the public rejection of science is an extension of our Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Five neuroscientists argue that fancy new technologies have led the field astray. John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.” He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they Read More ›