2017

From Mike Macrae at ScienceAlert: New Simulations Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist 68 percent of the Universe might not exist. Physicists from Loránd University in Hungary and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii are now questioning if approximations in Einstein’s equations introduced “serious side effects” that gave the illusion of a vast, unknown force pushing space apart. … The thing is, right now it’s little more than an empty box without any other properties to describe the nature of its existence. More. Empty box? That’s what the hamburger poll in the lunchroom here said too. Apart from that, we can’t keep up. Is it possible that the sheer ability to make up theories without consequence is Read More ›

From Sally Adee at New Scientist: For people like Cerf and many American companies, who view online speech through the lens of the US First Amendment, Germany’s approach may look like a heavy-handed suppression of the right of free expression. However, it may be a necessary first step in re-establishing a shared moral reality. In the age of bots, misinformation, and anonymity, free speech itself may be used to enact a kind of censorship. … There are many good reasons to be wary of outsourcing the policing of moral beliefs to private corporations, even if they are only tasked with implementing a country’s national laws, as would be the case with the draft German proposal. But we should focus on Read More ›

. . . here (at 194) in his amazing engineering thread as he responds to Dionisio: >>Dionisio: Thank you for summarizing that interesting discussion. I will summarize it even more. 1) Nobody knows how morphogenesis is controlled and guided. 2) Moran is no exception to that. 3) “Experts” are no exception to that. 4) However, according to Moran (and, unfortunately, he is probably quite right): “experts do not see a need to encode body plans and brain in our genome” 5) You and I, and probably some more sensible people, do see that need. 6) So, it seems, the problem is not about what we know, but about what we see as a need. Now, I notice that Moran says: Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: A billion years ago, two dancing black holes make a final spin, merge, and – in a matter of seconds – release a cataclysmic amount of energy. Much as a falling pebble spreads waves on the surface of a still lake, the merger initiates gravitational waves in the space-time continuum. Fast-forward to planet Earth and the year 2015. After an immense journey, the gravitational waves from the black-hole merger pass through our solar system. On the morning of 14 September, they oh-so-slightly wiggle the arms of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington state. A pattern of light-waves shifts in a distinctive, long-sought way. A computer sounds the alarm. Niayesh Read More ›

From Jag Bhalla at BigThink: 1. Life’s games are not all “red in tooth and claw” fights. And you need no brain to see that a “war of all against all” might not be the best way. Even single-celled bacteria “know” that. Stop, wait. Single-celled bacteria do not “know” anything and never will. The reason that they do not behave according to the survival of the fittest is that because the Darwinian theory of evolution is wrong. Better theory can explain how they behave co-operatively without attributing minds to them. To “know”what is going on in Bhalla’s sense is to have a mind like a human being. 2. In “Survival of the Friendliest” Kelly Clancy describes the evolutionary logic of relationships Read More ›

Is the field full of “undead” theories? From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Science is embattled in a raging replication crisis, in which researchers are unable to reproduce a number of key findings. On the front lines of this conflict is psychology. In a 2015 review of 98 original psychology papers, just 36 percent of attempted replications returned significant results, whereas 97 percent of the original studies did. “Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature,” reporter Monya Baker warned. “In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.” How did psychology reach such a sorry state of affairs? Back in 2012, when the replication crisis was just beginning to gain prominence in the popular media, psychology professors Moritz Read More ›

From Jonathan McLatchie: Here is the recording of part 1 of Paul Nelson’s webinar series on “Evolution is a Theory of Transformation, Not Similarity.” More. He intends to schedule more webinars with Dr. Nelson. Nelson’s scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Biology & Philosophy, Zygon, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Touchstone, and book chapters in the anthologies Mere Creation (Intervarsity Press), Signs of Intelligence (Brazos), Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics (MIT Press), and Darwin, Design, and Public Education (Michigan State University Press). Paul is one of the authors of the biology textbook Explore Evolution, and has appeared in several films on intelligent design for Illustra Media. He is a member of the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) Read More ›

From Nick Hines at VinePair, on why we like to drink alcohol: The theory was originally put forth by Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2000 article called “Evolutionary origins of human alcoholism in primate frugivory.” The hypothesis proposes that apes and early humans evolved to seek out ethyl alcohol because it led them to food. These early primates are known as frugivores, referring to their preference for fruit over any other food. But in order to locate that desirable fruit and those crucial calories, frugivores couldn’t just hit the local Whole Foods. They had to rely on their sense of smell. And one thing that routinely led them to fruit Read More ›

One doesn’t use the word “miracle,” of course, but a friend pointed recently in passing to an older paper by Israeli philosopher of science Iris Fry, arguing that “near miracle” is a form of creationism: This paper calls attention to a philosophical presupposition, coined here “the continuity thesis” which underlies and unites the different, often conflicting, hypotheses in the origin of life field. This presupposition, a necessary condition for any scientific investigation of the origin of life problem, has two components. First, it contends that there is no unbridgeable gap between inorganic matter and life. Second, it regards the emergence of life as a highly probable process. Examining several current origin-of-life theories. I indicate the implicit or explicit role played Read More ›

They got smarter every time we noticed them again. From Sam Wong at New Scientist: A bone from a raven’s wing with seven regularly spaced notches carved into it is the strongest evidence yet that Neanderthals had an eye for aesthetics. Evidence that Neanderthals used pigments, buried objects alongside their dead, and collected bird feathers and claws had been taken as signs of behaviours that were once considered unique to our species of Homo sapiens. But interpreting the motives of ancient humans based on their relics is fraught with difficulty. Incisions in bones and stone objects could be the result of butchery or other practical activities, rather than artistic engravings. More. Yes but, at a certain point, even meat carving Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The results on searches for supersymmetry reported this week have all been negative, further pushing up the limits on possible masses of conjectured superparticles. Typical limits on gluino masses are now about 2.0 TeV (see here for the latest), up from about 1.8 TeV last summer (see here). ATLAS results are being posted here, and I believe CMS results will appear here. This is now enough data near the design energy that some of the bets SUSY enthusiasts made years ago will now have to be paid off, in particular Lubos Motl’s bet with Adam Falkowski, and David Gross’s with Ken Lane (see here). A major question now facing those who have spent Read More ›

From BeauHD at Slashdot: Computer hardware is getting a softer side. A research team has come up with a way of genetically engineering the DNA of mammalian cells to carry out complex computations, in effect turning the cells into biocomputers. The group hasn’t put those modified cells to work in useful ways yet, but down the road researchers hope the new programming techniques will help improve everything from cancer therapy to on-demand tissues that can replace worn-out body parts. More. No, they were not “turned into” complex biocomputers. They always were that. The researchers found a way to potentially make them work for us instead of just themselves, somewhat like milking cows. See also: Cells communicate to navigate a crowded Read More ›

From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: Scientists have discovered a link between the amount of fruit eaten by primates and the size of their brains. … The researchers suggest that the bigger brains probably evolved to recall fruit locations, and work out new ways to extract flesh from tough skins. Fruits also contain for more energy than plants, giving brains a boost. “Fruit is patchier in space and time in the environment, and the consumption of it often involves extraction from difficult-to-reach-places or protective skins,” said doctoral student Alex DeCasien, the lead author. “Together, these factors may lead to the need for relatively greater cognitive complexity and flexibility in fruit eating species. “Complex foraging strategies, social structures, and cognitive abilities, are Read More ›

Poetic. From Joshua Rothman at New Yorker: Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and Read More ›

From William Nardi at The College Fix: The latest “privilege” identified within the hallowed halls of higher education appears to be human privilege. This year, the Modern Language Association of America has put out a call for papers on “critical plant studies,” seeking papers addressing the “vitality, agency, sentience, and/or emotional life of plants.” Critical plant studies “aims to do for plants what human animal studies began to do for animal life over 20 years ago — attributing greater agency and autonomy to the non-human world strengthens the ethical standing of beings historically relegated to the lower rungs of the chain of life,” said John Ryan, honorary research fellow at the University of Western Australia, in a 2016 lecture hosted Read More ›