November 2017

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The flurry of findings started last year with a paper that reported the first traversable wormhole that doesn’t require the insertion of exotic material to stay open. Instead, according to Ping Gao and Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Aron Wall of Stanford University, the repulsive negative energy in the wormhole’s throat can be generated from the outside by a special quantum connection between the pair of black holes that form the wormhole’s two mouths. When the black holes are connected in the right way, something tossed into one will shimmy along the wormhole and, following certain events in the outside universe, exit the second. Remarkably, Gao, Jafferis and Wall noticed that their scenario is Read More ›

One eventually gets used to science claims with a lot of “may”s in them. From ScienceDaily: Fast-moving flows of interplanetary dust that continually bombard our planet’s atmosphere could deliver tiny organisms from far-off worlds, or send Earth-based organisms to other planets, according to the research. The dust streams could collide with biological particles in Earth’s atmosphere with enough energy to knock them into space, a scientist has suggested. Such an event could enable bacteria and other forms of life to make their way from one planet in the solar system to another and perhaps beyond. The finding suggests that large asteroid impacts may not be the sole mechanism by which life could transfer between planets, as was previously thought. Okay, Read More ›

From Jennifer Franklin at Elsevier Connect: A new sort of peer review: RMR articles are sent for review without the results, discussion or conclusion (although data has already been collected) and reviewers are asked to evaluate the article on the research question and the methodology only. The review process is split into two stages. In stage 1, only the research question and methodology are sent for review, and reviewers are asked to provide a recommendation. If the paper is given an in-principle “accept” decision, the paper moves into stage 2 where the author submits the full paper for review. More detail on this process can be found here. Get this: If you asked a compelling question, used rigorous methods and Read More ›

At this point, is “species” just homage to Darwin’s Origin of Species? From ScienceDaily: The Atlantic sea nettle is one of the most common and well known jellyfish along the U.S. East Coast, especially in the Chesapeake Bay and Rehoboth Bay where they commonly sting swimmers in large numbers. Since it was described nearly 175 years ago, the jellyfish has been assumed to be a single species. The discovery that is was actually two distinct species, Gaffney said, was made possible by DNA sequencing techniques. “Before DNA came along, people in museums looked at organisms and counted spines and bristles, measured things, and sorted organisms by their physical characteristics in order to identify species,” Gaffney said. “In the case of Read More ›

Extinct animals? Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to Theo Murphy International scientific meeting organised by Dr Rob Knell, Dr Dave Hone and Professor Doug Emlen [May 9-10 2018] Sexual selection is potentially an important driver of macroevolutionary processes like speciation and extinction, but this has rarely been tested using the fossil record. This meeting will bring biologists and palaeontologists together to discuss sexual selection’s role in macroevolution, how to detect it in extinct animals and how to measure its influence on the history of life across geological time. One thing about studying sexual selection in extinct animals, we may never be able to find out if we are wrong. Sexual selection was Darwin’s other Really Big Theory of how evolution happens, Read More ›

Linguist Noel Rude (Native American languages) writes, Recently listened to “Noam Chomsky speaks about Universal Linguistics: Origins of Language” on YouTube. The talk was at Winona State University in Minnesota on March 20, 1998. This is about 20 years back, and the man could more comfortably sound like an ID person than he could now. He is a Cartesian, meaning that for all practical purposes he accepts the mind-body distinction, that is, that human language is creative yet operates within the parameters of grammar that is innate. Yet he says there is no physical-mental distinction because there is no physical. Newton’s law of gravitation–an attractive force at a distance–is as mystical and unexplainable as the telekinesis of a psychic (if Read More ›

Wintery Knight reminds us that philosopher of consciousness John Searle wrote about the basic instincts behind post-modernism in Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy In The Real World in 2008: I have to confess, however, that I think there is a much deeper reason for the persistent appeal of all forms of antirealism, and this has become obvious in the twentieth century: it satisfies a basic urge to power. It just seems too disgusting, somehow, that we should have to be at the mercy of the “real world.” It seems too awful that our representations should have to be answerable to anything but us. This is why people who hold contemporary versions of antirealism and reject the correspondence theory of truth Read More ›

Readers may recall the recent flap about Canada’s governor-general ridiculing anyone who thinks that life did not originate randomly, to which Canadian biophysicist Kirk Durston responded, among other things: The third problem with the Governor General’s example of unquestioning faith in science is the corruption that has reached crises proportions in certain areas of science itself, with a special nod to the biological sciences. In 2012 the journal Nature published an exposé which found that 89% of “landmark” papers in the field of cancer research, could not be reproduced. More. This is not a good time to be gung-ho for scientism but anyway, Durston notes: that other astronauts do not agree with Payette: On two different occasions, I spent time Read More ›

A brand new early eukaryote (“its own eukaryotic lineage”) From Katarina Zimmer at The Scientist: From an aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, scientists have identified a unicellular species that could shed light on how eukaryotes evolved, they report in Current Biology this week (November 22). The tiny organism—named Ancoracysta twista—is not only its own species, says lead author of the study, Jan Janouškovec, but “it represents a whole new lineage in the eukaryotic tree of life.” A. twista is about 10 micrometers long and moves by using its whip-like flagellum. It is named after its distinguishing feature—the “ancoracyst,” a gun-like organelle that it uses to “shoot” at and immobilize its prey, usually other flagellate Read More ›

From Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica: The Cambrian Explosion gets a lot of play because it was the first time multicellular creatures ruled the planet. What few people (other than geologists and paleontologists) realize is that there was an even crazier time for early life. It came during the Ordovician period, right after the Cambrian came to a close 485 million years ago. The Ordovician Radiation, also called the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), saw a quadrupling of diversity at the genus level (that’s the category one step above species). Life also started occupying new ecological niches, clinging to plants floating in the ocean’s water column and burrowing deep into the seabed. More. All life, so far as is known, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Oxygen has provided a breath of fresh air to the study of the Earth’s evolution some 400-plus million years ago. A team of researchers, including a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow from Washington University in St. Louis, found that oxygen levels appear to increase at about the same time as a three-fold increase in biodiversity during the Ordovician Period, between 445 and 485 million years ago, according to a study published Nov. 20 in Nature Geoscience. … This explosion of diversity, recognized as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, brought about the rise of various marine life, tremendous change across species families and types, as well as changes to the Earth, starting at the bottom of the ocean floors. Read More ›

And most don’t think life will be found on an exoplanet by 2040. From Alexandra Witze at Nature: It turns out that water worlds may be some of the worst places to look for living things. One study presented at the meeting shows how a planet covered in oceans could be starved of phosphorus, a nutrient without which earthly life cannot thrive. Other work concludes that a planet swamped in even deeper water would be geologically dead, lacking any of the planetary processes that nurture life on Earth. “Habitability is not only about finding the signature of an alien life form taking a deep breath,” says Elizabeth Tasker, an astronomer and exoplanet researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Institute Read More ›

Not good news for Mars life. From ScienceDaily: Dark features previously proposed as evidence for significant liquid water flowing on Mars have now been identified as granular flows, where sand and dust move rather than liquid water, according to a new article. These findings indicate that present-day Mars may not have a significant volume of liquid water. The water-restricted conditions that exist on Mars would make it difficult for Earth-like life to exist near the surface. … Scientists from the USGS, the University of Arizona, Durham University (England) and the Planetary Science Institute analyzed narrow, down-slope trending surface features on Mars that are darker than their surroundings, called Recurring Slope Lineae, or RSL. These RSL features grow incrementally, fade when Read More ›

New Scientist offers this item by Colin Barras: The origins of our species might need a rethink. An analysis of an ancient skull from China suggests it is eerily similar to the earliest known fossils of our species –found in Morocco, some 10,000 kilometres to the west. The skull hints that modern humans aren’t solely descended from African ancestors, as is generally thought. (paywall) Paleontologist Gunter Bechly (the guy Wikipedia disappeared) responds at Evolution News & Views on what they leave out: Sometimes predictions are not only fulfilled but over-fulfilled. Writing here recently at Evolution News (Bechly 2017a), I listed seven major discoveries in paleoanthropology that have made 2017 an annus horribilis for the established scientific consensus on human evolution. Read More ›

At least where Neanderthals are concerned: A new study in Heliyon suggests that Neanderthals survived at least 3,000 years longer in Spain than we thought: The authors of the study, an international team from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalonian, German, Austrian and Italian research institutions, say their findings suggest that the process of modern human populations absorbing Neanderthal populations through interbreeding was not a regular, gradual wave-of-advance but a “stop-and-go, punctuated, geographically uneven history.” Over more than ten years of fieldwork, the researchers excavated three new sites in southern Spain, where they discovered evidence of distinctly Neanderthal materials dating until 37,000 years ago. “Technology from the Middle Paleolithic in Europe is exclusively associated with the Neanderthals,” said Dr. João Zilhão, from the Read More ›