Isn’t “making sense” a human construct? From Kenneth Francis at New English Review: About seven years ago, during a talk on Hawking at a university, I raised my hand and criticised comments he made in his then latest book, The Grand Design, which he co-wrote with Star Trek screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow. My question was, “why […]
Month: August 2017
Netherlands sponsors major origin of life research project
From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: The Dutch Origins Center, a virtual project, has been led by Nobel laureate Ben Feringa (2016, Chemistry)—-keynote speaker of this week’s two-day conference. The project is a Dutch national initiative involving 17 of the country’s universities and institutes. … Curiously, Steve Benner’s $5.4M Templeton-funded Origins project isn’t represented, but inorganic […]
Claude Shannon: the man who failed to transform our understanding of information
Well, Columbia’s Rob Goodman thinks he did, at Aeon: Shannon’s ‘mathematical theory’ sets out two big ideas. The first is that information is probabilistic. We should begin by grasping that information is a measure of the uncertainty we overcome, Shannon said – which we might also call surprise. What determines this uncertainty is not just […]
Researchers: Hands-on tests contradict black hole model
From ScienceDaily: A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine. Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance […]
Bird navigation designed around smell?
Sense of smell is key factor in bird navigation researchers from the universities of Oxford, Barcelona and Pisa have shown in a new experiment that olfaction – or sense of smell – is almost certainly a key factor in long-distance oceanic navigation, eliminating previous misgivings about this hypothesis. . . .although the anosmic birds made […]
Researchers: “Junk DNA” lowers risk of heart disease
From ScienceDaily: Gene therapy using ‘junk DNA’ could lower risk for heart disease Scientists from UCLA and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute successfully used a gene that suppresses cholesterol levels as part of a treatment to reduce plaque in mice with a disorder called familial hypercholesterolemia. In a preclinical study, researchers found that the gene, […]
The Size of the Stars Issue in 17th Century Astronomy
OK, raise your hand if you knew that the in the 1600’s advocates of the heliocentric view appealed to God’s greatness to answer geocentric arguments. Yep. In fact, the “size of the star” issue was not fully resolved until the 1800s. The point is that the debate was not purely religion (geo) vs. science (helio). […]
Study: Global patterns in human epigenetics show strong methylation-mRNA-genotype links
From Ashley Yeager at the Scientist: A study of five far-flung human populations gives clues to adaptations to environmental pressures. The results revealed a strong link between population-specific DNA methylation, mRNA levels, and genotypes. However, the CpG sites where methylation occurred that had the highest degree of population specificity were more strongly associated with a […]
Breaking! Breaking! U profs discover existence of human mind
From Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: As the fall semester begins, 15 professors from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have published a letter of advice for the class of 2021. Think for yourself. The “vice of conformism” is a temptation for all faculty and students, they argue, due to a climate rife with group think, where […]
Postmodern language studies weighs in on design in nature
From Politics in science—High modulation of engagement in intelligent design discourse at Journal of Language and Politics: Intelligent design is a pseudoscientific concept conceived in an attempt to bring religion-based teaching into the classroom. As such, it is involved in a constant struggle for dialogic space with the dominant scientific discourse of the theory of […]
Can we test for information, as the basis of the universe, as opposed to matter or energy?
From science writer Philip Perry at BigThink: If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have […]
Is origin of life a fluke, physics… or just not a science question at present?
From Ian O’Neill at LiveScience: Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there’s life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws […]
Noncoding (“junk”) RNA predominates in genome
From Jun-An Chen and Simon Conn at Genome Biology: Abstract: A report on the Second Aegean International Conference on the Long and the Short of Non-Coding RNAs, held in Heraklion, Greece, 9–14 June 2017. Investigations into gene regulation and disease pathogenesis have been protein-centric for decades. However, in recent years there has been a profound […]
Self-organization: New James Shapiro paper on the Read-Write genome
From U Chicago’s James Shapiro at Pub Med: Biological action in Read-Write genome evolution. Many of the most important evolutionary variations that generated phenotypic adaptations and originated novel taxa resulted from complex cellular activities affecting genome content and expression. These activities included (i) the symbiogenetic cell merger that produced the mitochondrion-bearing ancestor of all extant […]