From Springer: To celebrate the 25th International Congress of the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST), from 23 – 29 July 2017, we have have commissioned a Virtual Special Issue, available for free until August 20. — Local and Global Properties of the World Jacques Demaret, Michael Heller, Dominique Lambert German Water Infrastructure in China: Colonial Qingdao 1898–1914 Agnes Kneitz From ecological records to big data: the invention of global biodiversity Vincent Devictor, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent Moon-Struck: Artists Rediscover Nature And Observe Jay M. Pasachoff, Roberta J. M. Olson Reconfiguring the centre: The structure of scientific exchanges between colonial India and Europe Dhruv Raina Frits Went’s Atomic Age Greenhouse: The Changing Labscape on the Lab-Field Border Sharon Kingsland The ecological transformation of Cuba Read More ›

From astrophysics prof Geraint Lewis at New Scientist: What if aliens are out there after all, only they are sleeping, awaiting a glorious future when the universe is cooler, providing the right conditions for them to fulfil their ultimate ambitions? According to this new idea, alien civilisations emerged and flourished in the early universe, growing in size and developing technology to harness the energy from stars and galaxies. Eventually, after material expansion, these aliens would turn to more philosophical musings, pondering the big questions of the cosmos. Lewis spots flaws in the hypothesis and suggests, It is little more than guesswork and speculation. There is nothing wrong with a bit of speculation, it can inspire new thinking and new solutions, Read More ›

Ed Yong tells us at the Atlantic: In the 150 years since Schwendener, biologists have tried in vain to grow lichens in laboratories. Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures. It was as if something was missing—and Spribille might have discovered it. He has shown that largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed. Instead, they’re alliances between three. All this time, a second type of fungus has been hiding in plain view. “There’s been over 140 years of microscopy,” says Spribille. “The idea that there’s something so fundamental that people have been missing is stunning.” Read More ›

LIGO = Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory From Roger Penrose at Arxiv: Correlated “noise” in LIGO gravitational wave signals: an implication of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology It has recently been reported by Cresswell et al. [1] that correlations in the noise surrounding the observed gravitational wave signals, GW150194, GW151226, and GW170194 were found by the two LIGO detectors in Hanford and Livingston with the same time delay as the signals themselves. This raised some issues about the statistical reliability of the signals themselves, which led to much discussion, the current view appearing to support the contention that there is something unexplained that may be of genuine astrophysical interest [2]. In this note, it is pointed out that a resolution of this puzzle Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: he National Science Foundation (NSF) gave out more than three million dollars to fight “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and “lack of diversity” in STEM fields this July. Founded by Congress in 1950, the NSF is a federal agency that seeks to “promote the progress of science” by funding research and collaborating with scientists, according to its website. This month alone, the NSF has funded at least three social-justice themed projects, which together cost taxpayers $3,173,684. And you thought it was being spent on cancer research and space exploration? It will be interesting to see, now that post-modernism is hitting the sciences, which bureaucracies will buckle and which will respond as if a science-based way of Read More ›

I thought I’d let you all know that Jerry Bergman’s latest book, Fossil Forensics: Separating Fact from Fantasy in Paleontology has been holding steady as Amazon’s #1 Hot New Release for several weeks now.
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Here: Notice how the shriveling of free expression smoothly proceeds to the next diminished staging post: Once upon a time, Berkeley professed to believe in free speech. Then it believed in free speech except for “hate speech”. Now it supports “serious” free speech, but not “hurtful” speech. Well, we live in a world of hurt. Personally, I’m hurt by people who say they don’t like my cat album, or by the director’s decision to give me purple hair in this video. But what’s really hurtful is that KPFA and Berkeley can’t even be bothered to pretend to a principled defense of free speech. What is “serious” free speech? Not so long ago, arguments for same-sex marriage or tampons for menstruating Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: He’s Australian, around half a centimetre long, fairly nondescript, 300 million years old, and he’s currently causing astonishment among both entomologists and palaeontologists. The discovery of a beetle from the late Permian period, when even the dinosaurs had not yet appeared on the scene, is throwing a completely new light on the earliest developments in this group of insects. … “Beetles, which with nearly 400,000 described species today make up almost one-third of all known organisms, still lived a rather shadowy and cryptic existence in the Permian period,” explains Jena zoologist Beutel. “The fossils known to date have all belonged to an ancestral beetle lineage, with species preferring narrow spaces under bark of coniferous trees. They exhibit a Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: For over a century, distinctions between types of cells relied on how they appeared under a microscope: their shapes, sizes, locations and their uptake of staining dyes. Recent decades, however, witnessed a shift to molecular methods that use fluorescently labeled antibodies to target protein markers on the cell’s surface. Although this approach allowed researchers to isolate more cell types, it was not enough, according to Hacohen. Until 2009, biologists could analyze cells only in bulk, averaging signals from multitudes of them to get a picture of what was going on in a tissue. When sequencing RNA from individual cells finally became possible, the initial analyses were what Hacohen called “biased” and “shallow” because the few Read More ›

From comments made to Jamie Condliffe by Demis Hassabis at Technology Review: Building AI that can perform general tasks, rather than niche ones, is a long-held desire in the world of machine learning. But the truth is that expanding those specialized algorithms to something more versatile remains an incredibly difficult problem, in part because human traits like inquisitiveness, imagination, and memory don’t exist or are only in their infancy in the world of AI. In a paper published today in the journal Neuron, Hassabis and three coauthors argue that only by better understanding human intelligence can we hope to push the boundaries of what artificial intellects can achieve. First, they say, better understanding of how the brain works will allow Read More ›

Further to the claim that dropping the algebra requirement would enable more students to enter community college. From David Freddoso at Washington Examiner: For many decades, educators have viewed algebra as something students need to understand in high school, if not earlier. Now, we have college administrators who think it’s too hard, causing too many of their students to fail and thus preventing them from getting a college degree. And that, of course, means we should get rid of algebra, the chancellor of California’s community college system told NPR this week. … I don’t even want to get into the laughable and arguably racist assumption that algebra creates some kind of color barrier ? and by the way, the Arabs Read More ›

With comments by linguist Noel Rude. From Arika Okrent at Aeon, summarizing the story told in Tom Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech, of how linguist Daniel Everett challenged grey eminence Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar: The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). More. But Everett found that the Amazonian language Piraha did not have recursion, and felt the wrath of the Chomskyites. Chomsky and his supporters replied that … even if Pirahã has no recursion, it matters not one bit for the theory of universal grammar. The capacity is Read More ›

From Cortney O’Brien at Townhall: The Los Angeles Times recently did an interview with Bill Nye the Science Guy about his new book, “Everything All at Once.” One of the pressing topics of discussion was climate change and those who deny it. More. About which he said, “Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational,” Nye told the Los Angeles Times. Nye said that he is calling them out with “due respect,” acknowledging that he is “now one of them.” “We’re just going to have to wait for those people to ‘age out,’ as they say,” Nye went on, adding that “age out” is a euphemism for “die.” “But it’ll happen, I guarantee you — that’ll happen.” (LA Read More ›

From Jesse Dunietz at Scientific American: Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting The evidence comes from electrons and their more massive cousins, muons and tau leptons. According to the Standard Model, these three particles should behave like differently sized but otherwise identical triplets. But three experiments have produced growing evidence—including results announced in just the last few months—that the particles react differently to some as-yet mysterious influence. The findings are not yet conclusive, but if they hold up, “it would be a complete revolution,” says California Institute of Technology theorist Mark Wise. More. Many have been revolting against the Standard Model and the Big Read More ›

Further to Dawkins dumped from Berkeley due to “hurtful words,” neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and editor David Klinghoffer weigh in: Egnor: Dawkins gets expelled: You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh Why, one asks, is it fine to criticize Islam, but not Darwin? Dawkins has fought mightily to “de-platform” intelligent design scientists and anyone who harbors even a shimmer of doubt about Darwinian theology. But now he’s shocked — shocked — that defenders of another religion get to silence heretics too. Atheism and its Darwinian creation myth have gained ascendancy in the Western world over the past century, and in several unfortunate nations, have grasped state power. It’s been an ugly ascent, complete with gulags and holocausts Read More ›