2017

Huh? In a field where one must avoid getting “bought,” we hacks rarely run into people who are not sending us tons of mail/pix/vids. But this just in: From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: German theologian Ulrike Auga’s space images advisory role for NASA seems particularly suspect not just because it smacks of Leni Riefenstahl-style manipulation but because some weeks ago (February 8) Auga abruptly cancelled an interview with me about her work on the nearly $3M NASA/Templeton/Center of Theological Inquiry investigation (2015-2017) into how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space plus we have not seen any report in the US from Auga about her US publicly funded advisory activity for NASA. Auga Read More ›

When some of us were young, our parents would scold us for wasting our time with, like, SuperGirl. But our own Jon Bartlett explains, I have been very pleased with the way that Marvel’s TV show “Agents of Shield” has been at promoting an ID-friendly worldview. Last year I noted that their super-scientists explicitly promoted the idea of “Intelligent Design” (using that terminology) in examining biological phenomena. This season, Agents of Shield addresses moral questions about virtual vs. physical worlds. A common idea in pop culture is the idea that, as computers get bigger, eventually we can just plug our minds into a large computer and live forever. Well, Agents of Shield decided to play with that idea, and look Read More ›

Read the following and then read why it matters to you: From Ed Morrisey at HotAir: The video shows top Planned Parenthood staffers attending meetings of the National Abortion Federation in 2014 and 2015 and it is the latest in a series of over a dozen videos from the organization showing the Planned Parenthood abortion business and others engaging in potentially illegal sale of body parts of aborted babies. The new undercover video shows Planned Parenthood executives and other top abortion advocates making shocking comments about abortions. Several attendees made jokes about eyeballs from aborted babies and other aborted baby body parts “rolling down into their laps.”More. Look, it is probably true. It was true forty years ago but traditional Read More ›

They always have been. And Cool never changed that. Typing “Big Bang Theory” into a search bar links us immediately to the long-running (debut 2007), immensely popular CBS sitcom, a post-modern look at the lives of Caltech physicists. The conventional meaning of the term, our universe’s origin starting with a small singularity currently pegged at 13.8 billion years ago, is a mere second thought. Even “relativity” cannot match that pop culture success: The first hit I tried offered to define the term, as if that really matters. But the Big Bang is unpopular among cosmologists. It survives on evidence alone. And sadly, evidence matters much less than it used to. Science historian Helge Kragh tells us that astronomer Fred Hoyle Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Over the years there has been an ongoing effort to produce “predictions” of SUSY particle masses, based on various sorts of assumptions and various experimental data that might be sensitive to the existence of SUSY particles. One of the main efforts of this kind has been the MasterCode collaboration. Back in 2008 before the LHC started up, they were finding that the “best fit” for SUSY models implied a gluino at something like 600-750 GeV. As data has come in from the LHC (and from other experiments, such as dark matter searches), they have periodically released new “best fits”, with the gluino mass moving up to stay above the increasing LHC limits.More. It Read More ›

See vid intro: The Nebraska Department of Education (NDE) uses a consistent process to develop and revise content area standards. The goal of this process is to develop K-12 content area standards that, when mastered, would allow a student to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing postsecondary coursework without the need for remediation. The collaborative writing process utilizes the expertise of Nebraska educators and includes representation from all stages of Nebraska’s educational system (i.e., early childhood education, K-12 education, and postsecondary education). More. Deadline June 23. What role should evidence-based reasoning play? We keep hearing from people who say our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth, Note: Hey, the only reason your humble hack dares say anything is that her Read More ›

Our physics colour commentator wrote recently to advise us of the deprofessionalization of academy From Rob Sheldon, noting an article at Quillette: Over twelve years, I have watched with increasing dismay and incredulity as academic integrity, fairness, and intellectual rigor have been eroded, with the implicit endorsement of administration and faculty alike. I have witnessed the de-professionalization of the professoriate—hiring policies based on tokenized identity politics and cronyism, the increasing intellectual and ideological conformity expected from faculty and students, and the subsequent curtailment of academic freedom. Just to be clear, most of my faculty colleagues are well-educated, bright, and dedicated teachers. Some are also worthy scholars or creative authors. Yet, in addition to cronyism, the program’s hiring practices have been Read More ›

HAL: Here. Inspired by Galileo’s principle of inertia, the “default state” of inert matter, we propose a “default state” for biological dynamics following Darwin’s first principle, “descent with modification” that we transform into “proliferation with variation and motility” as a property that spans life, including cells in an organism. These dissimilarities between theories of the inert and of biology also apply to causality: biological causality is to be understood in relation to the distinctive role that constraints assume in this discipline. Consequently, the notion of cause will be reframed in a context where constraints to activity are seen as the core component of biological analyses. Finally, we assert that the radical materiality of life rules out distinctions such as “software Read More ›

From Adrian Barnett at New Scientist: Not all of Prum’s analogies or counterexamples worked for me, and the attacks on the prevailing view often seemed strident. However, the book deserves to be read, just as the idea of pure beauty evolving unallied to selection and unalloyed by function deserves to be examined and considered. You may not end up agreeing with the reason for its existence, but the dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. More. Okay, a noble flop. See also: Can sexual selection cause a decline inevolutionary fitness? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: Philipp Khaitovich et al. think neoteny affects the grey matter of the human brain but not the white matter. I gather you agree, but you see the issue as one of bioenergetics, involving mitochondria. You say neoteny is inherent in development of human brain regions where high energy demands are required for cognitive and memory-related functions. Is that right? Vladimir Skulachev: Yes. This is absolutely necessary for technical progress. By the way, I am now writing the next paper concerning the numerous common traits of humans and NMRs. It’s very strange but NMRs are much closer to humans with regard to several components of brain construction than to Read More ›

Yes, if you want credibility. From William G. Kaelin Jr at Nature: worry about sloppiness in biomedical research: too many published results are true only under narrow conditions, or cannot be reproduced at all. The causes are diverse, but what I see as the biggest culprit is hardly discussed. Like the proverbial boiled frog that failed to leap from a slowly warming pot of water, biomedical researchers are stuck in a system in which the amount of data and number of claims in individual papers has gradually risen over decades. Moreover, the goal of a paper seems to have shifted from validating specific conclusions to making the broadest possible assertions. The danger is that papers are increasingly like grand mansions Read More ›

From Carl Zimmer at New York Times: In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people. These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment. More. So? Is this ambivalence an “enormous success” in science today? If you still subscribe to the New York Times, please quit and save trees. See also: Science fictions series 4: Naturalism Read More ›

From Martin Seligman and JohnTierney at the dying New York Times: We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans. What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime Read More ›

From M Anthony Mills at Big Questions Online: Unity, in other words, may be a goal of scientific explanation, even if it is not attainable. Instead, we might think of unity as a kind of regulative ideal — something that guides and orients research. String theory’s vice, on this account, would not be seeking unity — it would be pursuing unity as a goal to be reached rather than an ideal to be approximated. In so doing, other theoretical virtues — parsimony, predictive power, empirical robustness — fall by the wayside. Perhaps relativity and quantum theory will never be unified. But the quest to unify them — if properly tempered by the type of humility Gleiser highlights — might nevertheless Read More ›