Rob Sheldon is our physics color commentator, and he offers some thoughts on the claims made in A SETI hypothesis: We are Them: a) The paper is a sequel to this one: “The WoW! signal of the terrestrial genetic code” In that original paper, the same authors argue that the mapping between nucleotides and amino acids shows peculiar arrangements of high Shannon information, and is therefore a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. As you might guess, the authors took a lot of flak for saying this. This paper is the response. b) This paper tries to argue the opposite direction, that if you were a supremely intelligent person designing the mapping from DNA–>amino acids, how would you go about putting information Read More ›

From Marcelo Gleiser at NPR: To me, what’s fascinating is that consciousness is what makes the universe exist. Just think that before humans came to be, and discounting other potentially smart creatures out there, the universe was just doing its thing, expanding, stars being born and dying, entropy increasing overall. But as matter organized itself into living things in our planet, it eventually reached a level of complexity that allowed for self-awareness, the ability to know that thyself is a self. This emergent picture of animal consciousness is the one that is meaningful to us, as it places humans back in the driver’s seat of existence. We will never know all things about the universe, but we have the amazing Read More ›

A friend sends this from the International Journal of Astrobiology (Cambridge): Maxim A. Makukov (a1) and Vladimir I. shCherbak (a2) Published online: 10 July 2017 After it was proposed that life on Earth might descend from seeding by an earlier extraterrestrial civilization motivated to secure and spread life, some authors noted that this alternative offers a testable implication: microbial seeds could be intentionally supplied with a durable signature that might be found in extant organisms. In particular, it was suggested that the optimal location for such an artefact is the genetic code, as the least evolving part of cells. However, as the mainstream view goes, this scenario is too speculative and cannot be meaningfully tested because encoding/decoding a signature within Read More ›

From Michelle Malkin at Townhall: As I’ve been chronicling in my newspaper columns and CRTV.com investigative reports, many state crime labs and police departments are particularly ill-equipped and inadequately trained to interpret DNA evidence, especially “touch” or “trace” DNA — minute amounts of DNA of unknown origin often transferred through incidental contact — which has resulted in monstrous miscarriages of justice against innocent people. The aura of infallibility conferred on crime lab analysts by “CSI”-style TV shows exacerbates the problem when juries place undue weight on indeterminate DNA evidence of little to no probative value. Just last week, North Carolina’s Mark Carver, who was convicted of murdering a college student based on dubious touch DNA that was likely the result Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: They call their theory the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis.” The basic idea is that, for much of human history, living and sleeping in mixed-age groups of people with different sleep habits helped our ancestors keep a watchful eye and make it through the night. “Any time you have a mixed-age group population, some go to bed early, some later,” Nunn said. “If you’re older you’re more of a morning lark. If you’re younger you’re more of a night owl.” The researchers hope the findings will shift our understanding of age-related sleep disorders. “A lot of older people go to doctors complaining that they wake up early and can’t get back to sleep,” Nunn said. “But maybe there’s nothing Read More ›

From Joel Shurkin at InsideScience: It’s hard to think of dinosaurs as being loving, caring parents, but scientists have found some of them may have been just that. Take the oviraptorosaurs, a group of feathered creatures that look as if they were constructed by a malignant committee from spare bird parts. By studying fossilized oviraptorosaur eggs, researchers from France and China have found that oviraptorosaurs lay across those eggs in nests and warmed them with body heat just as modern birds do. Paleontologists had previously theorized that oviraptorosaurs incubated their eggs, but the French-Chinese team came up with the numbers. They also added to the theory that at least some dinosaurs were warm-blooded reptiles. More. With dinosaurs, as with Neanderthal Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher, Nautilus blog editor, at Nautilus:  In 2008 in Louisiana, and then in 2012 in Tennessee, laws passed allowing teachers to discuss the supposed “weaknesses” of evolutionary theory—a loophole, some science-education advocates said, through which creationism would creep in. And there’s good reason to think that it is: A 2008 nationally representative survey of U.S. high school biology teachers found that nearly half of the responders agreed or strongly agreed that creationism or intelligent design was “a valid, scientific alternative” to evolution, just over 15 percent reported adhering to young-Earth creationism, and 18 percent said they either explicitly advocated creationism in class or endorsed it in passing. … How to fix this? They argue the U.S. needs its prospective Read More ›

From Phys.org: The transition from an egg to a developing embryo is one of life’s most remarkable transformations. Yet little is known about it. Now Whitehead Institute researchers have deciphered how one aspect—control of the all-important translation of messenger RNAs (mRNAs) into proteins—switches as the egg becomes an embryo. That shift is controlled by a beautiful mechanism, which is triggered at a precise moment in development and automatically shuts itself off after a narrow window of 20 to 90 minutes. As an egg develops, it stockpiles mRNAs from the mother because it will not have time to create new mRNAs during the rapid development of a very early embryo. When fertilized the egg becomes an embryo, the stashed maternal mRNAs Read More ›

Missed this earlier: From Phys.org: Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA. In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable. DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from Read More ›

From Jonny Anomaly and Brian Boutwell at Quillette: “Actually Studies Show…” Chances are you’ve found yourself in a heated conversation among a group of friends, family, or colleagues when someone throws down the gauntlet: “Actually, studies show…” Some nod in silent agreement, others check their text messages, and finally someone changes the subject. It’s hard to know what to say when people cite scientific studies to prove their point. Sometimes we know the study and its relative merits. But most of the time we just don’t know enough to confirm or refute the statement that the study is supposed to support. We are floating in a sea of information, and all we can do is flounder around for the nearest Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: The road to bringing back the mammoth — a giant that went extinct at the end of the last ice age — is filled with barriers.More. Of the eleven hurdles Geggel cites, here’s Even if pieces of preserved ancient DNA are uncovered, they might be contaminated with foreign DNA from fungus, bacteria, plants, animals and even from humans handling it for research purposes. This DNA contamination can make it difficult for researchers to know which DNA molecule belongs to the animal, and which is from contamination, especially if the extinct animal doesn’t have a living relative whose DNA can serve as a roadmap, Shapiro wrote. John Hawk noted back in February that the breathless predictions Read More ›

In our time there is a tendency to treat Mathematics as though it is a natural science. This reflects in part the shift in meaning of the term Science in recent centuries, from knowledge and systematic bodies of more or less established knowledge, to the natural sciences based on inductive reasoning on observation and experiment. Where, inductive here denotes arguments whereby evidence — typically empirical — supports but does not logically demonstrate a conclusion, as a rule provisionally. Such has been multiplied by Scientism, the view, assumption or implication that Science ring fences and monopolises reliable, serious knowledge. (Of course, such Scientism is self-referentially incoherent as this is an epistemological and thus philosophical claim; it fails its own test.) In Read More ›

Rabbi Moshe Maverick, author of Nonsense of a High Order, at USA Today: Why are researchers having such difficulties discovering a naturalistic origin of life? “Certainly,” says Koonin, “this is not due to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life…. These make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.” In other words, discovering how unguided naturalistic forces could assemble a living cell–a molecular machine that is more sophisticated and functionally complex than anything human technology ever has produced–is a problem of nightmarish proportions.More. Because naturalism cannot consider intelligence as a feature of the universe, it’s Read More ›

From Veronique Greenwood at Nova Next: In 1987, a group of researchers in France discovered something peculiar. When they protected single-celled organisms from background radiation—the sort that comes from cosmic rays and radioactive rocks—the creatures’ growth was stunted. Colonies that receive a background dose of radiation actually grew more quickly than their shielded brethren. That’s radiation—not vitamins, not nutrition, not anything people generally suggest you should get more of. Was background radiation somehow required for life? … It’s a peculiar finding—why would being without radiation make cells more vulnerable? One theory is that very low doses of radiation can cause cells to keep their repair machinery switched on, and those without it are unprepared, like a runner who skipped one Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Mind-body interventions (MBIs) such as meditation, yoga and Tai Chi don’t simply relax us; they can ‘reverse’ the molecular reactions in our DNA which cause ill-health and depression, according to a study by the universities of Coventry and Radboud. The research, published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology, reviews over a decade of studies analysing how the behaviour of our genes is affected by different MBIs including mindfulness and yoga. Experts from the universities conclude that, when examined together, the 18 studies — featuring 846 participants over 11 years — reveal a pattern in the molecular changes which happen to the body as a result of MBIs, and how those changes benefit our mental and physical health. Paper. Read More ›