2017

From Sarah Kaplan at Washington Post on a recent find in northern Canada: The straw-shaped “microfossils,” narrower than the width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye, are believed to come from ancient microbes, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Scientists debate the age of the specimens, but the authors’ youngest estimate — 3.77 billion years — would make these fossils the oldest ever found. Some apparent finds in recent years have not been found to be the residue of life, but in this case: But the scientists behind the new finding believe their analysis should hold up to scrutiny. In addition to structures that look like fossil microbes, the rocks contain a cocktail of Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at The Stream: Hidden Figures — the true story of three brilliant African-American women who proved themselves in a 1960s NASA culture dominated by white men — is sure to inspire. The film is filled with emotive lessons, most powerfully a vindication of the hope that those who persevere honorably for a just cause will not be disappointed. Another lesson, more pragmatic, occurred to me as the drama unfolded. Having migrated in my own career from the measurable-fact culture of engineering to the more descriptive culture of biology, I felt a tinge of nostalgia as I watched a roomful of nerds with their calculators and chalk boards working together to find the answer to Read More ›

Well, that’s what some cosmologists fear. Call it a futurist’s dystopia if you like. Sci-tech writer Geoff Manaugh explains at BLDGBLOG: As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years, Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will no longer be visible from one another. Upon reaching that moment, it will no longer be possible to understand the universe’s history—or perhaps even that it had one—as all evidence of a broader cosmos outside of one’s own galaxy will have forever disappeared. Cosmology itself will be impossible. … There would be no reason to theorize that other galaxies had ever existed in the first Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Euchambersia was a dog-sized pre-mammalian reptile living 260 million years ago in a deadly South African environment: Living in the Karoo, near Colesberg in South Africa, the Euchambersia developed a deep and circular fossa, just behind its canine teeth in the upper jaw, in which a deadly venomous cocktail was produced, and delivered directly into the mouth through a fine network of bony grooves and canals. “This is the first evidence of the oldest venomous vertebrate ever found, and what is even more surprising is that it is not in a species that we expected it to be, ” says Dr Julien Benoit, researcher at the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Read More ›

Locally, we refer to people who review books without reading them as noviewers. Mostly, they want to encourage others to follow their example and not read the book either. The usual low-tech technique for spotting noviewers in the review stream is that they engage with the text only via canned talking points at best. They show little interest in the ideas as such. But how to prove that? From Dave Lee at BBC we learn, So imagine my delight today when, via the excellent Nieman Lab, I read about Norwegian broadcaster NRK. The tech section of its site, NRKBeta, is trying a simple experiment. You can’t leave a comment unless you’ve read the story. How will they know? There’s a test! Read More ›

. . . (of the concept, functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information, FSCO/I) Sometimes, a longstanding objector here at UD — such as RVB8 — inadvertently reveals just how weak the objections to the design inference are by persistently clinging to long since cogently answered objections. This phenomenon of ideology triumphing over evident reality is worth highlighting as a headlined post illustrating darwinist rhetorical stratagems and habits. Here is RVB8 in a comment in the current Steve Fuller thread: RVB8, 36: >> for ID or Creationism, I can get the information direct from the creators of the terminology. Dembski for Specified Complexity, Kairos for his invention of FSCO/I, and Behe for Irreducible Complexity.>> For a long time, he and Read More ›

Laura Geggel interviews virologists at LiveScience, who offer arguments against the idea, for example: “Take a cat, a plant and a rock, and leave them in a room for days,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and an affiliated scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. “Come back, and the cat and the plant will have changed, but the rock will essentially be the same,” he said. Like a rock, most viruses would be fine if they were left indefinitely in a room, Adalja said. In addition, he noted that living beings have self-generated and self-sustaining actions — meaning they can seek out sustenance and behave in self-preserving ways. In other words, “they’re taking actions Read More ›

Vs. tailoring science news while claiming to be a neutral arbiter. From Jon Entine at Genetic Literacy Project, on the New York Times’ Oscar-worthy protestations that it presents “the truth: Whether a journalist presents a story in good faith but wrongly can be a matter of healthy debate. But increasingly, a more troubling ethical line is being crossed: some writers choose to arrange facts, or even invent them, in ways that grey out nuances to advance a storyline arrived at before independent reporting even commences. … Two recent Times articles on the swirling farm controversy about bee health and food—one two years ago and another last week—raise serious questions about whether the paper’s editors are still wearing ideological blinders on Read More ›

From Journal of Molecular Evolution: ABSTRACT: A general framework for conventional models of the origin of life (OOL) is the specification of a ‘privileged function.’ A privileged function is an extant biological function that is excised from its biological context, elevated in importance over other functions, and transported back in time to a primitive chemical or geological environment. In RNA or Clay Worlds, the privileged function is replication. In Metabolism-First Worlds, the privileged function is metabolism. In Thermal Vent Worlds, the privileged function is energy harvesting from chemical gradients. In Membrane Worlds, the privileged function is compartmentalization. In evaluating these models, we consider the contents and properties of the Universal Gene Set of life, which is the set of orthologous Read More ›

From Sciencedaily: New research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals that the Earth’s unique iron composition isn’t linked to the formation of the planet’s core, calling into question a prevailing theory about the events that shaped our planet during its earliest years. Lin said that one of the most popular theories to explain the Earth’s iron signature is that the relatively large size of the planet (compared with other rocky bodies in the solar system) created high pressure and high temperature conditions during core formation that made different proportions of heavy and light iron isotopes accumulate in the core and mantle. This resulted in a larger share of heavy iron isotopes bonding with elements that make up the rocky Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: A study has now revealed how this genetic legacy is still controlling how some people’s genes work, with possible consequences for their health. But note this: Tellingly, the Neanderthal influence has waned fastest in parts of the body that evolved most rapidly around that time, especially the brain. It suggests that once our direct human ancestors had evolved the equipment for sophisticated language and problem-solving, mating with Neanderthals – and the DNA that came with it – rapidly fell out of fashion. That’s a vast speculation based on minimal evidence about a subject on which we know very little, charitably put. The most reasonable explanation for what happened to the Neanderthals is that they Read More ›

For years I have closely followed both the evolution debate and the global warming debate.*  There are some important differences between the two debates, which may be the subject of a subsequent post.  However, the number of similarities is striking.  Enough so that for some time I have seriously considered writing a book detailing the parallels.  I believe it would be highly instructive for many– particularly for those who accept the party line of one of the theories but not the other – to recognize the many similarities between the two debates. Given the realities of other time commitments, however, I suspect my nascent efforts will never make it to publication before catastrophic global warming either fades with a whimper or Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: These new results indicate that the Asian Horned Frogs family may have originated as recently as 77 million years ago in contrast to 100-126 mya as previously estimated, and suggest that scientists might have been also overestimating the age of many other families of frogs by up to 35%. The results have completely changed our understanding of how the different Asian Horned Frog species and their species groups are related. Many of the species that look similar, and so were considered to be closely related, were found to be distant relatives of each other, and those that look different were found to be closely related. Paper. (public access) – Stephen Mahony, Nicole M. Foley, S.D. Biju, Emma C. Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Archaeologists found 16 limestone tablets dating to the Aurignacian period, named for the first known people to settle in Europe. The tablets were engraved with pictures of horses, mammoths and aurochs (extinct wild cows). Most notably, the pictures were drawn using a series of dots and lines — or as archaeologists call the technique, pointillism. Modern pointillism was invented in the 1880s by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who developed the technique by using small dots to create the illusion of a larger image. Other artists, including Camille Pissarro and Roy Lichtenstein, followed suit. More. We know we are dealing with stasis in human evolution when we now find ourselves referring to “modern” pointillism. See Read More ›