2017

Asked at ScienceDaily: In order to examine the frequency distribution and chronology of different near-death experiences, the researchers collected and analyzed written accounts from 154 individuals who had gone through a near-death-experience. They took note of which specific near-death-experiences where present in each narrative and then examined the order of appearance of the different phenomena in each story. They found that on average, a person experiences about 4 different phenomena during a near-death-experience. The most frequently reported features were feeling of peacefulness (80% of participants), seeing a bright light (69%) and encountering with spirits/people (64%), whereas the two most uncommon experiences were speeding thoughts (5%) and precognitive visions (4%). In terms of chronology, they found that a third of the Read More ›

From Elizabeth Howell, at Space.com: Would it be easy to determine if the source of a mysterious radio signal was aliens? Probably not. A new paper argues that contact with extraterrestrials will likely be discovered through a prolonged, incremental process rather than an instantaneous eureka-like moment. Eureka — what the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes allegedly said when he cracked a tough science problem about water displacement — tends to be the exception in science rather than the rule. … Cirkovic said in an email that the community involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) should instead be prepared for a process that would take a very long time. It may take decades as the SETI community looks at all Read More ›

You know, Dawkins dumped at Berkeley and all that. From Elliot Kaufman at National Review: Why must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the type of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western secularism — be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination? These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of David Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace Read More ›

From Ian Crawford at Space.com: Beyond the more narrowly intellectual benefits of astrobiology are a range of wider societal benefits. These arise from the kinds of perspectives – cosmic in scale – that the study of astrobiology naturally promotes. It is simply not possible to consider searching for life on Mars, or on a planet orbiting a distant star, without moving away from the narrow Earth-centric perspectives that dominate the social and political lives of most people most of the time. Today, the Earth is faced with global challenges that can only be met by increased international cooperation. Yet around the world, nationalistic and religious ideologies are acting to fragment humanity. At such a time, the growth of a unifying Read More ›

But leaves phylogeny unclear. From ScienceDaily: Tardigrades are microscopic animals, justly famous for their amazing ability to withstand complete dehydration, resurrecting years later when water is again available. Once desiccated, they have been frozen in ice, exposed to radiation, sent into space vacuum… and still they spring back to life. Tardigrades became more famous recently when it was suggested that their DNA was a mix of animal and bacterial segments, making them “Frankenstein” hybrids. The new research has now laid the Frankenstein idea to rest by arguing that tardigrade DNA looks “normal,” with no evidence that these special animals use extraordinary means to survive. Previous ideas that they might have taken up large numbers of foreign genes from bacteria are Read More ›

Missed this one a while back, but worth noting: From Erin Ross at Nature: “In the past, I’ve done armchair activism — you know, ‘hashtag activism’,” says Bradley, who works at Pennsylvania State University’s Brandywine campus in Media. But this year, he says, “I felt it was important to get involved on the ground.” His trip to Capitol Hill was organized by the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). For the past three years, the group has invited linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists from across the country in Washington DC, for a brief training session before a whirlwind day of meeting with members of Congress and their aides to advocate for science funding. This year, participation set a record: Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to call our attention to several preprints on why dissent is bad in science. Okay, okay, there is good dissent, which is accepted by the Establishment, and then there is bad dissent, which is not accepted by the Establishment. Text Galileo. 1. Climate Skepticism and the Manufacture of Doubt: Can Dissent in Science be Epistemically Detrimental?: Biddle, Justin and Leuschner, Anna (2015) [Preprint] Abstract: The aim of this paper is to address the neglected but important problem of differentiating between epistemically beneficial and epistemically detrimental dissent. By “dissent,” we refer to the act of objecting to a particular conclusion, especially one that is widely held. While dissent in science can clearly be beneficial, there might be some instances Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts on junk DNA, the claim that most of the human genome does nothing (often an argument for explicitly Darwinian evolution): a) Chance is the truly unfalsifiable hypothesis, because all it gives you is a number. 1:10, 1:10^500 are all the same as far as the Darwinist is concerned. Even Dembski’s “1:10^150” possibility bound is not a limit to them. So everything I say about designers has to be seen against that light. Of course, in the Darwinist’s defense, they don’t really get probability and logarithms. b) A designer is recognized by a pattern. Writing experts can isolate a piece of scribal work to within 50 years by looking at the style. Read More ›

How do we think we know that a skeleton is the remains of a woman who has given birth? From ScienceDaily: The presence of parturition scars — marks often found on female pelvis bones — have commonly been used as an indicator of child birth. This technique is used in police investigations to narrow down the identity of human remains. … Ms McFadden also said that use of the method in archaeology could lead to historical inaccuracies. Despite the practise being in common use, particularly in the US, since first being proposed in the 1910s, a number of studies into parturition scars have resulted in conflicting findings. Ms McFadden reanalysed data used for those studies and found the scarring was Read More ›

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0, on how a garden product got labeled, evidence-free, as a cancer risk (carcinogens): When I give talks in front of audiences about science, I often joke about conspiracy beliefs promoted by anti-science groups like Center for Biological Diversity about the science and health community. In reality, we are not helping each other, much less conspiring with each other for the benefit of industry, we are instead a loose confederation of pro-science anarchists. The really organized long game is played by environmental groups; they truly help each other. And they ask to be rewarded by getting jobs as government insiders. Count the employees from Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups who got jobs in Read More ›

Here is his report. If his testimony is accurate (and we expect it is), American taxpayers are funding the equivalent of a prison riot: No wonder Weinstein is suing. So where are the science organizations that should be supporting him? Communing with their shoes? Added: Note: Crash course for sci nerds: How political correctness morphed into a monster. Don’t look at me. Look at yourselves. You let this happen. Take note that the new approach to intellectual freedom does not permit anyone to just mind their own business. Even silence can be violence. Bari Weiss quotes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the Wall Street Journal: “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or Read More ›

From Alun Anderson at New Scientist, reviewing The Truth about Language: The Truth about Language What it Is and Where it Came from: During the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace doubted whether natural selection could explain such a unique power. In our century, Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who has dominated linguistics for 60 years, has supported a hypothesis that language and thought arose suddenly within the past 100,000 years. In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such “miraculist” explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated. … When Read More ›

Physicist Sokal perpetrated the first hoax paper over two decades ago, to prove a point. From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: Mitochondria: totally real cell organelles that convert sugars, fats and oxygen into usable energy for cells. Midi-chlorians: completely made-up and widely derided microscopic life-forms that give Jedi warriors their ability to use the Force in the “Star Wars” movies. See the difference? A handful of “peer reviewers” apparently didn’t, as a paper that subbed in “midi-chlorians” for “mitochondria” got accepted into four journals this week. The paper mashed up lightly altered text from Wikipedia on mitochondria with Star Wars-related rambling, including the infamous monologue on the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise from “Revenge of the Sith.” The paper was Read More ›

Guest post by Evgeny Selensky: An interesting summary of an abiogenetic hypothesis of prebiotic metabolic networks can be found here. The bottom line is, it is interesting but it raises many serious questions. The hypothesis is based on the observed similarity of the core structure of metabolic networks across all organisms. It is then hypothesised that the core must have had an early evolutionary origin. As is expected of a naturalistic hypothesis, it relies on extremely favourable starting conditions (the lucky concentrations of all necessary reagents in an Archean ocean, the right temperature, etc.) and other physico-chemical constraints, which, according to its proponents, helped form a prebiotic metabolic complex. The summary makes a correct distinction between thermodynamically controlled reactions and Read More ›

From Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data: There is no scare quite like a good food scare; no scam quite like a food scam. People are downright obsessional about what they put in their mouths. California now requires the labeling of more than six hundred chemicals that you might meet in your food. The creation of true miracle foods by genuine scientists has been met with leftist hysteria, scientific fraud, threats, and lawsuits. For example, as we’ll see, a new strain of rice that could save hundreds of thousands of children from blindness has never gone to market. We look at this disaster in chapter seven. More. The war on evidence that Ruse addresses is widespread, Read More ›