2017

At Sapientia: Breaking News: Science Disproves the Bible Briefly, traditional media worldwide swallowed the claim that the Bible said the Canaanites were wiped out. No one apparently knew that the opposite is the case, or cared, in any event. A study in genomic sciences that was on most counts not newsworthy has made big headlines in recent days, both in the media’s initial declarations and in the ensuing reaction. The cynic in me suspects that the whole thing was predictable from the very get-go. No one need be a cynic today to predict that. Woodward and Bernstein are retired, okay? Today’s soon-to-be-let-go hack often has a huge load of angst and grievances against the nature of things, without the talent Read More ›

From Clay Routledge at New York Times: Furthermore, evidence suggests that the religious mind persists even when we lose faith in traditional religious beliefs and institutions. Consider that roughly 30 percent of Americans report they have felt in contact with someone who has died. Nearly 20 percent believe they have been in the presence of a ghost. About one-third of Americans believe that ghosts exist and can interact with and harm humans; around two-thirds hold supernatural or paranormal beliefs of some kind, including beliefs in reincarnation, spiritual energy and psychic powers. These numbers are much higher than they were in previous decades, when more people reported being highly religious. People who do not frequently attend church are twice as likely Read More ›

From Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine: he p-value is defined as the probability of the results of an experiment deviating from the null by as much as they did or greater if the null hypothesis is true. If that sounds difficult to parse, don’t feel bad. Many scientists cannot give the correct technical definition. To put it more simply, what are the odds that you would have gotten the results you did (or greater) if your hypothesis is not true? In medicine this usually refers to an effect, such as the difference in pain reduction between a placebo and an experimental treatment. Is that difference statistically significant? A p-value of 0.05, the traditional threshold, means that there is a 5% Read More ›

From University of Bern at ScienceDaily: Neutrinos and antineutrinos, sometimes called ghost particles because difficult to detect, can transform from one type to another. The international T2K Collaboration announces a first indication that the dominance of matter over antimatter may originate from the fact that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently during those oscillations. This is an important milestone towards the understanding of our Universe. A team of particle physicists from the University of Bern provided important contributions to the experiment. The Universe is primarily made of matter and the apparent lack of antimatter is one of the most intriguing questions of today’s science. The T2K collaboration, with participation of the group of the University of Bern, announced today in a Read More ›

From David Warmflash at Genetic Literacy Project: There’s a problem facing college biology educators on how to teach evolution in a setting where many students hold creationist views. These evolution deniers are not a fringe element on college campuses, even among students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. There are substantial numbers of college STEM students who begin college biology already with minds set against evolution. Instead of writing those students off as lost causes, educators are trying different approaches to reach them. … A few years ago, evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins spoke one-on-one with students at London’s Park High School, where students were known to have an anti-evolution mindset connected with religious upbringings. Dawkins was Read More ›

From Casey Smith at National Geographic: In essence, the researchers say, only the death of the sun will ultimately lead to the total extinction of life on Earth, including tardigrade [water bears]. “It seems that life, once it gets going, is hard to wipe out entirely,” Sloan says. “Huge numbers of species, or even entire genera, may become extinct, but life as a whole will go on.” And that’s an encouraging message for scientists seeking signs of life beyond our planetary shores. “Tardigrades are as close to indestructible as it gets on Earth,” Alves Batista says, “but it’s possible that there are other resilient species examples elsewhere in the universe.” More. Provided, that is, it can get started there. Someone should tell Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr. Barr used computer simulation to model what the fossil record might look like over time in the absence of any climate change and found clusters of species originations that were of similar magnitude to the clusters observed in the fossil record. This means random patterns are likely under-credited for their role in speciation fluctuation, he said. Dr. Barr’s findings mean scientists may need to rethink widely-accepted ideas about why human ancestors became smarter and more sophisticated. “The idea that our genus originated more than 2.5 million years ago as part of a turnover pulse in direct response to climate change has a deep history in paleonthropology,” Dr. Barr said. “My study shows that the magnitude of that Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to draw our attention to A quick guide to effective grassroots advocacy for scientists Abstract: The current political climate in the United States has mobilized scientists to become more cognizant of the need to advocate for sustainable science funding from the federal government and for acceptance of evidence-based policy making that relies on the best available scientific data. Many scientists, however, do not learn about science policy or how to advocate in Washington, D.C., or at the local level as part of their scientific training. Here we explain why science advocacy is important and provide steps on how to get involved by communicating with elected officials and engaging in the local community. pdf (public access) What’s the problem Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Because all the iron-60 from the Solar System’s formation has long since decayed, Telus’ research, published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, focused on its daughter product, nickel-60. The amount of nickel-60 found in meteorite samples — particularly in comparison to the amount of stable, “ordinary” iron-56 — can indicate how much iron-60 was present when the larger parent body from which the meteorite broke off was formed. There are not many options for how an excess of iron-60 — which later decayed into nickel-60 — could have gotten into a primitive Solar System object in the first place — one of them being a supernova. While her research did not find a “smoking gun,” definitively proving that the Read More ›

From Rebecca Boyle at Quanta: Textbooks say that the moon was formed after a Mars-size mass smashed the young Earth. But new evidence has cast doubt on that story, leaving researchers to dream up new ways to get a giant rock into orbit. In the past five years, a bombardment of studies has exposed a problem: The canonical giant impact hypothesis rests on assumptions that do not match the evidence. If Theia hit Earth and later formed the moon, the moon should be made of Theia-type material. But the moon does not look like Theia — or like Mars, for that matter. Down to its atoms, it looks almost exactly like Earth. Confronted with this discrepancy, lunar researchers have sought Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: (What Would Warhol Say?) Jonathan Schooler: The Science of Imagination Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Factory? Not unimaginable. In any case, the John Templeton Foundation, with $5.6M or so from its deep pockets, has given birth to the Imagination Institute—-a Philadelphia think tank that for the last two years has been tapping an array of talent for insight into the creative process, hoping ultimately to come up with an “imagination quotient.” Three dozen scientific investigators at 16 institutions have been awarded Templeton research money related to the project. But can imagination really be quantified? … One of the Imagination Institute’s grantees is University of California, Santa Barbara psychologist Jonathan Schooler. Schooler and UCSB postdoctoral researcher, Claire Read More ›

From Charlie Martin at PJ Media: Hawking is certainly the most famous theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein, and rightly so, as he’s been very creative, developed theoretical ideas that have turned out to explain real physical observations — as well a a lot which haven’t been physically verified — and has done so while setting an apparent world record for the longest-surviving Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. This means that anything Hawking says about any scientific topic is news. On the other hand, that doesn’t make it right, especially as he strays beyond the edges of his own field. Recently, he has been doomsaying about artificial intelligence as well as carbon dioxide and evil alien intelligences. Re the latter (2010): Even Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” Since then, England, Read More ›

From Robert Marks II, author (with Dembski and Ewert) of Evolutionary Informatics at Evolution News & Views: On a new episode of ID the Future, CSC Director of Communications Rob Crowther talks with Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University, about Marks’s new book, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, which makes an important but esoteric-sounding field accessible to the general reader. Dr. Marks talks about how he and William Dembski originally connected as researchers, and began working on the subject in 2007, how intelligent design can inform thinking on artificial intelligence, and what a “search for a search” means in evolutionary terms. More. Search for a search?: Needle-in-the-haystack problems look for small targets in large spaces. Read More ›

From Bob Grant at The Scientist: After a sweeping research misconduct investigation, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) has found nearly 500 researchers guilty of engaging in a peer-review fraud scam. Announced late last week (July 27), MST’s findings indicate that 486 scientific paper authors engaged, to some degree, in a scheme to nominate either fictitious or paid peer reviewers who would write positive reviews of their manuscripts. … MST is meting out stiff penalties to the guilty researchers. These range from suspending their research projects and canceling grants to rescinding promotions or even harsher retribution. “They will face punishment according to the Communist Party of China discipline regulations and the regulations on personnel from public institutions,” He told Read More ›