2017

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. … “Many exciting things Read More ›

Animals we thought were extinct sometimes aren’t. From Julia Brown at New Scientist: Will Bill Laurance and his team find Tasmanian tigers lurking in Australia’s remote Cape York peninsula? Numerous animals that were thought to be extinct have recently been rediscovered. Here are our top five species that came back from the dead – and two more that might also have been written off too soon. More. This subject has heated up recently on account of possible sightings of the Tasmanian wolf (tiger), a marsupial that was believed to have gone extinct in the last century. Possibly, current technology would help us determine the chances that an actual species has actually gone extinct. The fact that one hasn’t seen any Read More ›

Well, in the age of just shout louder against the marchin’, marchin’ hordes, aw, maybe academic freedom is just a frill anyway. From Erin Ross at Nature: Revamped ‘anti-science’ education bills in United States find success: Legislation urges educators to ‘teach the controversy’ and allows citizens to challenge curricula. State and local legislatures in the United States are experimenting with new ways to target the topics taught in science classes, and it seems to be paying dividends. Florida’s legislature approved a bill on 5 May that would enable residents to challenge what educators teach students. And two other states have already approved non-binding legislation this year urging teachers to embrace ‘academic freedom’ and present the full spectrum of views on Read More ›

Most complete remains: Also in the series of papers released Tuesday in the journal eLife is the announcement of a new chamber within the Rising Star cave where the hominin species was first found. It too contains a collection of H. naledi bones, including at least three individuals and one “remarkably complete” specimen with a nearly intact skull. … While the dating is robust, the presence of such a primitive-looking hominin species so late in our history is perplexing. In addition to an upper body more suited for tree-dwelling, H. naledi had tiny brains, smaller even than a chimpanzee, which would have left them at a disadvantage when competing with the more intelligent hominin species in the same area around Read More ›

The firestorm ignited by Ijjas, Loeb & Steinhardt’s blog post in Scientific American,  is very much worth your time reading. It engages Peter Woit’s string-theory criticism on his blog. But the scientists do not divide into sides very rationally, as Woit notices, “This is getting very weird. It’s not normal to respond to a scientific argument by enlisting letter writers on your behalf, even less normal to put your university press office to work on a response..” Abraham Loeb is a cosmologist age 55 at Harvard who came from a Jewish farming community in Israel. He is known for creativity and writing on many sides of an issue. Paul Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist age 65 at Princeton, Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary  (News) at ENV: “Post-truth” was the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016. The term “post-fact” is also heard more often now. Oxford tells us that “post-fact” relates to or denotes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Post-fact has certainly hit science. Pundits blame everyone but themselves for its growing presence. But a post-fact and post-truth world are implicit and inevitable in the metaphysical naturalist view (nature is all there is) that is now equated with science and often stands in for it. Let’s start at the top, with cosmology. Some say there is a crisis in cosmology; others say there are merely Read More ›

Nylon has only been around for about 40 years. Did the bacteria just happen to evolve their eating habits during that period or is the story more complex? Is design a better explanation? You can comment on the story here at UD (though not at ENV). From Ann Gauger of the BioLogic Institute at Evolution News & Views: A significant problem for the neo-Darwinian story is the origin of new biological information. Clearly, information has increased over the course of life’s history — new life forms appeared, requiring new genes, proteins, and other functional information. The question is — how did it happen? This is the central question concerning the origin of living things. Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe have Read More ›

Over half a billion years earlier than dates usually given. From ScienceDaily: The researchers studied exceptionally well-preserved deposits which are approximately 3.5 billion years old in the ancient Dresser Formation in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia. They interpreted the deposits were formed on land, not in the ocean, by identifying the presence of geyserite – a mineral deposit formed from near boiling-temperature, silica-rich, fluids that is only found in a terrestrial hot spring environment. Previously, the oldest known geyserite had been identified from rocks about 400 million years old. Within the Pilbara hotspring deposits, the researchers also discovered stromatolites – layered rock structures created by communities of ancient microbes. And there were other signs of early life in the Read More ›

A reader offers an interesting quote from Denis Noble´s recent book on Karl Popper´s view of Darwinism ( Dance to the Tune of Life – Biological Relativity, page 199): It is not widely known that Popper gave an important lecture to the Royal Society in 1986 entitled “A new interpretation of Darwinism”. It was given on the presence of Nobel laureates Sir Peter Medawar, Max Perutz and other figures, and it must have shocked his audience. He proposed a completely radical interpretation of Neo-Darwinism, essentially rejecting the Modern Synthesis by proposing that organisms themselves are the source of the creative processes of evolution, not random mutations in DNA. He said that Darwinism (but I am sure he meant Neo-Darwinism) was Read More ›

Meet the unassuming armadillidiidae, more commonly known as the rolly pollie.  When it is not feeling threatened, a rolly pollie looks like this: But if it senses a threat, its defense mechanism is to roll up in a tight hard-shelled ball like this: Yesterday Larry Moran reminded me of the rolly pollie.  “Why is that Barry?” you might ask.  Good question.  You see, over at his blog Sandwalk, Moran often plays a version of smash mouth debate not just with us ID types (whom, like a second grader on the playground, he calls “IDiots”), but also with evolutionists with whom he disagrees.  Moran advocates neutral theory, and he will have no truck with inveterate adaptationists.  Richard Dawkins is an adaptationist, Read More ›

For the last year or so I have been accumulating quite a number of YouTube playlists. Recently I’ve been trying to get it a little more organised and cleaned up, so I thought I would point readers to it as a resource. At the moment I have just under 40 individual playlists. I have created playlists for the key individuals in the ID debate (pro and anti-ID) and also have playlists for different issues that come up (e.g. Irreducible complexity, methodological naturalism etc). There’s also one covering the Dover trial, and any lectures and debates on the subject. For any other videos that don’t readily fit into other categories, I have a playlist of miscellaneous videos: ID YouTube Playlists I’ll Read More ›

He writes, “Information is Physical (but not how Rolf Landauer meant)” and offers the documentary evidence supporting the embedded vid below here. Comments are disabled there, so you will have to comment here. See also: Information: New light on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox? Researchers: If we treat these two particles as described by a single quantum state, we learn that the original uncertainty principle ceases to apply, especially if these particles are entangled. and Book: Computer simulations yield very minor results for Darwinian evolution

From Phys.org: A group of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has shed new light on the famous paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen after 80 years. They created a multidimensional entangled state of a single photon and a trillion hot rubidium atoms, and stored this hybrid entanglement in the laboratory for several microseconds. The research has been published in Optica. In their famous Physical Review article, published in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen considered the decay of a particle into two products. In their thought experiment, two products of decay were projected in exactly opposite directions—or more scientifically speaking, their momenta were anti-correlated. Though not be a mystery within the framework of classical physics, Read More ›

From Denyse O`Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: This year’s March for Science offered some sobering revelations for the future of science as identity politics. One was figurehead Bill Nye. During the aftermath of the March, videos surfaced that won’t likely help his reputation: My Sex Junk and another one in which ice cream cones discover sex. Detractors wondered if he wasn’t now the ”Pee Wee Herman of popular science.” Meanwhile, Nye was also quoted as wanting to shrink science classrooms: “Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?” and also as being open to jailing skeptics of climate change. But the key complaint about Nye that made news during the pre-March publicity Read More ›

From psychology prof Tania Lombrozo at NPR: Skepticism is supposed to reflect a willingness to question and doubt — a key characteristic of scientific thinking. Skepticism encourages us to look at the evidence critically; it allows for the possibility that we are wrong. It seems like a win, then, to learn that courses in skepticism can decrease belief in the paranormal or — as reported in an article forthcoming in Science & Education — that teaching students to think critically about history can decrease belief in pseudoscience and other unwarranted claims. But taken too far, skepticism misses its mark. It’s important to avoid the error of believing something we ought not to believe, but it’s also important to avoid the Read More ›