2017

From Rachel Cernansky at Nature: Biodiversity moves beyond counting species Ecologists are increasingly looking at how richness of traits — rather than number of species — helps set the health of ecosystems. From the article: Biodiversity, it states, doesn’t have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to keeping an ecosystem healthy and resilient are the species’ different characteristics and the things they can do — measured in terms of specific traits such as body size or branch length. … “Just going for species numbers basically doesn’t allow us to harness all this incredibly rich information we have of how the real world operates,” says Sandra Díaz, an ecologist with Argentina’s National Scientific Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Evolutionary biologists have long assumed that when an individual of a species wanders into a different environment than it is adapted to, it will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to natives of the same species which are adapted to that environment. Studying fish in Canada, scientists found the opposite. … Evolutionary theory suggests that taking the fish that are adapted to the lake environment and placing them into the stream would put them at a competitive disadvantage compared with the residents. In the dog-eat-dog world of natural selection, outsiders are often poorly adapted to a new environment and less likely to survive or pass on their genes. In the case of the sticklebacks, that’s because the lake-adapted Read More ›

Often used to dismiss the masses of evidence for fine-tuning of our universe, as opposed to chance. From Tim Barnett at Salvo: This response may have some rhetorical force, but it makes a fundamental mistake. To expose the error, let me give you another illustration. Imagine your best friend has been murdered and the lead suspect is on trial. In fact, DNA evidence puts the suspect at the scene with the murder weapon in hand. As a result, the defense attorney turns to the jury and says, “The DNA evidence makes it highly unlikely that my client is innocent. But unlikely things happen all the time. For example, for you to exist, your mom and dad had to meet, fall Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo: s there a “crisis” in cosmology, as science writer Dennis Overbye tells us at the New York Times? Or does cosmology merely face “challenges,” as we read at Scientific American? Either way, the tale grows strange. We have so much more data now, but it does not provide the evidence many expected. For example, the ardent faith placed in string theory—the hypothesis that the particles of conventional physics are actually vibrating, one-dimensional “strings”—has proven fruitless for decades. But what if evidence, or its absence, actually matters? Peter Woit, a Columbia University mathematician, is a brave academic. He is an atheist who has long critiqued fashionable string theory (Not Even Wrong, 2007) and the multiverse it Read More ›

Sure. That’ll work. From Nature: Keep shouting to save science: As political leaders on either side of the Atlantic set out contrasting positions on science funding, researchers everywhere need to ensure that their voices are heard. It is the best and worst of political times for science. … The US government has always been one of the largest and most reliable backers of basic science, but that would clearly change if Trump controlled the purse strings. Many scientists draw hope from the fact that he does not, and it’s already quite clear that Congress — which allocates funding — takes a different view of things. The NIH saw its 2017 budget increase in the deal announced in late April, and Read More ›

From ENV: Kin selectionists think that natural selection favors genes of related individuals. The idea, also called inclusive fitness, purports to explain self-sacrifice in animals and humans — why worker ants serve the queen without reproducing themselves, and why humans put themselves in danger for their families. Some of their genes, presumably, will be passed on through their kin. Kin selection theory was given a mathematical formulation by W. H. Hamilton in 1964, to the relief of many Darwinians eager to find an explanation for altruism. It was promoted by E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology (which led to evolutionary psychology), Richard Dawkins, father of Selfish Gene theory, Jerry Coyne, and many other Darwinians. But when E.O. Wilson jumped ship in Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The origin of animals was one of the most important events in the history of Earth. Beautifully preserved fossil embryos suggest that our oldest ancestors might have existed a little more than half a billion years ago. … However, using a recently developed relaxed molecular clock method called RelTime, a team of scientists at Oakland (Michigan) and Temple (Philadelphia) dated the origin of animals at approximately 1.2 billion years ago reviving the debate on the age of the animals. Puzzled by the results of the American team, researchers from the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London decided to take a closer look at RelTime and found that it failed to relax the clock. Their findings Read More ›

The Antikythera mechanism is a fascinating object (thanks, EA . . . ), one that is often called the “first” [Analogue] Computer. It was recovered from a Roman shipwreck (likely c. 50 – 80 BC) near the island of that name, and the origin of the mechanism has been a challenge ever since a key observation described thusly by Wiki inadvertently speaking against interest: The Antikythera mechanism was discovered in 45 metres (148 ft) of water in the Antikythera shipwreck off Point Glyphadia on the Greek island of Antikythera. The wreck was found in April 1900 by a group of Greek sponge divers, who retrieved numerous large artefacts, including bronze and marble statues, pottery, unique glassware, jewellery, coins, and the mechanism. All Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at the College Fix: Feminist researcher invents ‘intersectional quantum physics’ to fight ‘oppression’ of Newton: ‘Binary and absolute differences’ are ‘exploitative’ A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University Press. Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review. More. Paper. (pay wall) The abstract reads In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. Read More ›

Bill Whittle, an “an American conservative blogger, political commentator, director, screenwriter, editor, pilot, author and the voice of The Common Sense Resistance” offers some entertaining thoughts on the gap between Bill Nye and science as an intellectual enterprise: See also: The war on reality will be waged street by street and Marchin’, marchin’ for Science (Hint: the problems are back at your desk, not out in the streets)

Earlier, we noted an interesting find: Archaea: Salt-loving methanogen found: They appear to have specialized in living off environments nothing else wants by using processes nothing else does. We will see stranger things yet, doubtless. Now, from Jonathan Wells in Zombie Science: The archaea are very different from bacteria in the chemical makeup of their cell walls and in their DNA replication machinery. Indeed, some of the enzymes the archaea use to replicate DNA are similar to those used by eukaryotes. Woese concluded that the differences between archaea and bacteria, and between them and eukaryotes, were too great to be explained by descent from a universal common ancestor, as that term is normally understood. Carl Woese proposed that there had Read More ›

Such as global warming causing glaciers to shrink even though the local temperatures have NOT warmed.  Robert Tracinski explains here. BTW, medieval inquisitors called those who did not accept their views “heretics” or “infidels.”  The religion of environmentalism also has heretics and infidels, but they are called “deniers.”

From ScienceDaily: A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked, anatomically, to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. … Scientists believe that modern human and common chimpanzee/bonobo lineages split about 8 million years ago with the two great ape species splitting about 2 million years ago. As common chimpanzees and bonobos evolved after their split, they developed different traits and physical characteristics, even though they remained geographically relatively close, with their main division being the Congo River. Because of this, researchers have been curious as to what those differences are and how they compare to humans. By studying the muscles of bonobos (which indicates how they Read More ›

Perfect. From Quirin Schiermeier at Nature: Monument to peer review unveiled in Moscow: Cornerstone of modern science immortalized in concrete. Last year, the director of the HSE’s Institute of Education, Isak Froumin, had asked his faculty for ideas about how to turn a useless block of concrete outside the university into something attractive and meaningful. More. Unfortunately, the way things are going, peer review is more likely to be the tombstone of science than the cornerstone and one can only hope that the debate about the problem is as vigorous in Moscow as here. Keep up to date with Retraction Watch See also: Breaking: National Academy of Sciences notices research integrity problem Hat tip:Pos-Darwinista

From Abby Olena at The Scientist: Many strains of archaea are capable of living in environments with high salt concentrations, and others are able to produce methane, but only a few can do both. In a study published today (May 26) in Nature Microbiology, researchers identified and cultured two lineages of methane-generating archaea that thrive in salty lakes. The two strains—part of a class the authors named “Methanonatronarchaeia”—appear to be most closely related to the Halobacteria, a class of archaea found in salt-rich environments worldwide. … The authors compared representative genomes of the two lineages to each other, as well as to the genomes of other archaea. These comparisons suggested that the common ancestor of archaea was a methane-producer, a Read More ›