From Laura Sanders at ScienceNews: Somewhere in the brain is a storage device for memories What is the physical basis of memory? Somehow, memories get etched into cells, forming a physical trace that researchers call an “engram.” But the nature of these stable, specific imprints is a mystery. Today, McConnell’s memory transfer episode has largely faded from scientific conversation. But developmental biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and a handful of other researchers wonder if McConnell was onto something. They have begun revisiting those historical experiments in the ongoing hunt for the engram. Applying powerful tools to the engram search, scientists are already challenging some widely held ideas about how memories are stored in the brain. New Read More ›

AI — artificial intelligence — is emerging as a future-driver. For example, we have been hearing of driver-less cars, and now we have helmsman-less barges: As The Guardian reports: >>The world’s first fully electric, emission-free and potentially crewless container barges are to operate from the ports of Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam from this summer. The vessels, designed to fit beneath bridges as they transport their goods around the inland waterways of Belgium and the Netherlands, are expected to vastly reduce the use of diesel-powered trucks for moving freight. Dubbed the “Tesla of the canals”, their electric motors will be driven by 20-foot batteries, charged on shore by the carbon-free energy provider Eneco. The barges are designed to operate without any Read More ›

I wonder what you make of this “Keeling Curve.” I especially wonder what you make of the inset–which can be seen to oscillate on the actual graph of this ‘curve’ below the inset. This might be a very teachable moment. I await your brilliant responses.

From Sarah Sloat at Inverse: To fully grasp how we evolved to become modern humans, scientists argue that we need to better understand our ancient ancestors’ brains. Adult human brains today are large and globular, but whether ancient human brains looked like that when our species first emerged has been subject to much speculation. In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology announced that the earliest Homo sapiens did not have globular brains like we have today. Instead, their brains had a shape intermediate between that of Homo erectus and that of the Neanderthals, both of which were somewhat more elongated horizontally. The brain, the authors write, gradually became globular over Read More ›

From Bret Stetka at Scientific American: A study that compares us with other primates finds a brain region linked to social behavior that may offer a biological explanation for why humans, not chimps, produced Shakespeare, Gandhi and Einstein Something is going wrong already if we think that the difference between human beings and gorillas is measured by extreme outliers. Raghanti and Lovejoy believe the human brain’s neurochemical profile was shaped by natural selection due to the various reproductive and survival benefits it conferred. Our evolving chemical signature, they suggest, allowed us to outcompete other apes and early hominins, referring to the numerous humanlike species that arose after our split with chimpanzees over six million years ago. The team speculates humans’ Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Science Today: AIVA [a music generation program] can combine musicals styles — that of, say, Bach and Beethoven, if you feed it enough of those two composers’ works. What such a program can’t do is innovate, says Dr. Marks. It can’t strike out in a new direction of its own, put Bach together with Beethoven and come up with…Stravinsky. Such a leap would be uncomputable, therefore permanently beyond the reach of even the most cleverly designed artificial intelligence. Marks explains the Lovelace test which, unlike the better-known Turing test, focuses precisely on this hard limit to what computer algorithms can do. AI cannot, in this sense, truly create. That indicates an impassable border Read More ›

The opportunity is open and it is time to seize the day. So, I think a comment in a discussion with GP and Dionisio should be headlined: >>My observation is those who are closed minded, indoctrinated and hostile will simply flare up in anger at anything that threatens their favoured evolutionary materialistic scientism or their comfortable fellow-traveller views calibrated not to get them in hot water with the domineering atheists. The issue then is, how well cultured they are. The cultured play at subtle rhetorical games pivoting on evasions and how could you concern trolling which provide more or less respectable “good cop” cover. Then come the “bad cops” who try to run riot, bully, intimidate, slander and stalk. I Read More ›

Sometimes, an issue comes to a head, and there is then need to deal with it. The headline inadvertently shows that we are at such a juncture and the post yesterday on time to take the lead is therefore timely. For, the underlying problem at work on ID is that there is an often implicit but sometimes quite explicit ideologically loaded redefinition of science at work. Accordingly, I think it appropriate to headline my response to Seversky, including the onward accusation of religious bias: KF, 28 (in reply to 21): >>Strawman soaked in ad hominems and set alight to cloud, confuse, poison and polarise the issues: a lot of this reads like complaining because science isn’t coming up with observations Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Paleontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto have entirely revisited a tiny yet exceptionally fierce ancient sea creature called Habelia optata that has confounded scientists since it was first discovered more than a century ago. In those days, we had it all sewn up except for a few outliers. Then… The researchers argue that this difference in anatomy allowed Habelia to evolve an especially complex head that makes this fossil species even more peculiar compared to known chelicerates. The head of Habelia contained a series of five appendages made of a large plate with teeth for mastication, a leg-like branch with stiff bristle-like spines for grasping, and an Read More ›

Not always how we think. Forewarned is forearmed. From Emerging Technology at MIT Review: How easy is it for malicious actors to distort the public perception of science? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of James Owen Weatherall, Cailin O’Connor at the University of California, Irvine, and Justin Bruner at the Australian National University in Canberra, who have created a computer model of the way scientific consensus forms and how this influences the opinion of policy makers. The team studied how easily these views can be distorted and determined that today it is straightforward to distort the perception of science with techniques that are even more subtle than those used by the tobacco industry. … Indeed, the Read More ›

From Rebecca Boyle at Quanta: From a seam in one of these hills, a jumble of ancient, orange-Creamsicle rock spills forth: a deposit called the Apex Chert. Within this rock, viewable only through a microscope, there are tiny tubes. Some look like petroglyphs depicting a tornado; others resemble flattened worms. They are among the most controversial rock samples ever collected on this planet, and they might represent some of the oldest forms of life ever found. Last month, researchers lobbed another salvo in the decades-long debate about the nature of these forms. They are indeed fossil life, and they date to 3.465 billion years ago, according to John Valley, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin. If Valley and his Read More ›

From Christian Scientific Society: The meeting will take place January 26-27 at Biola University. On Friday night, we will have a debate between David Snoke (me) and Mike Keas on “Are predatory animals a result of the Fall?” (Mike: yes; David: no). This question lies at the core of much of the debate about science and Christianity: could God have had a hand in what we consider to be natural evils? Are they the result of people’s sin, or random forces, not God? Saturday afternoon, we will have four speakers addressing issues on the general topic of natural evil More. Christian Scientific Society also notes, Save the date for the April meeting in Pittsburgh Dates are April 6-7, at the Read More ›

I recently cited a paper on the evolution of embryonic development and how the evidence contradicts evolutionary theory and common descent. Even the evolutionists, though in understated terms, admitted there were problems. Evolutionary analyses are “reaching their limits,” it is difficult to “conclude anything about evolutionary origins,” genetic similarities “do not necessarily imply common ancestry,” and “conserved regulatory networks can become unrecognizably divergent.” In other words, like all other disciplines within the life sciences, embryonic development is not working. The science contradicts the theory.  Read more

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of the forthcoming Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (June, 2018), at NPR: For centuries, progress in the foundations of physics has been characterized by simplification. Complex processes — such as the multitude of chemical reactions — turned out to arise from stunningly simple underlying equations. And simplicity carried us a long way. According to physicists’ best theories today, everything in our universe emerges from merely 25 elementary particles and four types of forces. So, yes, simplicity — often in the form of unification — has been extremely successful. For this reason, many physicists want to further simplify the existing theories. But you can always simplify a theory by removing an assumption. Like the assumption that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto have described an exceptionally well-preserved new fossil species of bristle worm called Kootenayscolex barbarensis. Discovered from the 508-million-year-old Marble Canyon fossil site in the Burgess Shale in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia, the new species helps rewrite our understanding of the origin of the head in annelids, a highly diverse group of animals which includes today’s leeches and earthworms. This research was published today in the journal Current Biology in the article “A New Burgess Shale Polychaete and the Origin of the Annelid Head Revisited.” … One key feature of the new Burgess Shale worm Kootenayscolex barbarensis is the presence of hair-sized bristles called chaetae on the Read More ›