From Dan Garisto at ScienceNews: Storms of powdery Martian soil are contributing to the loss of the planet’s remaining water. This newly proposed mechanism for water loss, reported January 22 in Nature Astronomy, might also hint at how Mars originally became dehydrated. Researchers used over a decade of imaging data taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to investigate the composition of the Red Planet’s frequent dust storms, some of which are vast enough to circle the planet for months. During one massive dust storm in 2006 and 2007, signs of water vapor were found at unusually high altitudes in the atmosphere, nearly 80 kilometers up. That water vapor rose within “rocket dust storms” — storms with rapid vertical movement — Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The team studied the transparent roundworm (C. elegans), which shares about 60-80% of the same genes as humans, to shed light on the importance of mechanisms regulating the frequency of gene mutations in different cells and organs. “C. elegans and humans share very similar mitochondria, and it is a useful organism as we can genetically tease apart the mechanisms of what is happening at a cellular level,” he said. The researchers developed an exceptionally pure method of isolating mitochondria from specific cells in the body to study them in detail. “We now suspect that there is a mechanism in all animals that can filter out these mutations before they are passed to future offspring, which could otherwise cause Read More ›

The Meltdown-Spectre processor architectural flaw crisis we have been monitoring has deepened as Intel has to patch its initial patch: . . . and as a first wave of the inevitable lawsuits hits. Here, we clip one in San Francisco:   NB: Comment 3 below links and clips documentation AMD has been sued over its response to Spectre. Where also, The Register further reports that there are problems with embedded systems using microprocessors and microcontrollers: >>Patches for the Meltdown vulnerability are causing stability issues in industrial control systems. SCADA vendor Wonderware admitted that Redmond’s Meltdown patch made its Historian product wobble. “Microsoft update KB4056896 (or parallel patches for other Operating System) causes instability for Wonderware Historian and the inability to Read More ›

From molecular biologist Jonathan Wells at Salvo: In 2005, Douglas Futuyma published a textbook about evolution claiming that “no intelligent engineer would be expected to design” the “functionally nonsensical arrangement” of cells in the human retina. That same year, geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote that the human eye is “certainly not the sort of eye an engineer would create from scratch.” Instead, “the whole system is like a car in which all the wires to the dashboard hang inside the driver’s compartment instead of being tucked safely out of sight.” Like Dawkins, Williams, Miller, and Futuyma, Coyne attributed this arrangement to unguided evolution, which “yields fitter types that often have flaws. These flaws violate reasonable principles of intelligent design.” We can be Read More ›

Extinct species’ DNA suggests so, according to researchers. From Ewen Callaway at Nature: Scientists had assumed from fossil evidence that an ancient predecessor called the straight-tusked elephant (Paleoloxodon antiquus), which lived in European forests until around 100,000 years ago, was a close relative of Asian elephants. In fact, this ancient species is most closely related to African forest elephants, a genetic analysis now reveals. Even more surprising, living forest elephants in the Congo Basin are closer kin to the extinct species than they are to today’s African savannah-dwellers. And, together with newly announced genomes from ancient mammoths, the analysis also reveals that many different elephant and mammoth species interbred in the past. More. Speciation ain’t what it used to be. Read More ›

Retired linguist Noel Rude writes to offer further thoughts on language and agency*: –0– English is, of course, quite capable of describing random and deterministic states and events. It is because the origin of life and its history are neither random nor deterministic that the materialists have such trouble. As for ambitransitive verbs, languages do differ. At one extreme is a Liberian language, Loma, that I once worked with. All its verbs are ambitransitive. In English, not all verbs are. Consider ‘eat’, for example. The Loma, however, can say (I don’t remember the words), He ate the food The food ate Where 2) is best translated by our passive: ‘the food was eaten’. At the other extreme are languages like Read More ›

From Sarah Gibbens at National Geographic: The appearance of the 18-year-old woman, whom researchers named named Avgi, or ‘Dawn,’ is based on a female skull excavated from a cave occupied in 7,000 B.C. … Facial features have “smoothed out” over millennia, and humans look less masculine today, says reconstructor Oscar Nilsson. More. Now if we could just get a group reconstruction we would know whether she looked typical for her era. Or whether the facial expression is usual. See also: Could Stone Age clubs really kill? and Code written in Stone Age art?

From ScienceDaily: In this study the authors were able to identify how a protein called p62 is activated to induce autophagy. They found that p62 can be activated by reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS are by-products of our metabolism that can cause damage in the cell. This ability of p62 to sense ROS allows the cell to remove the damage and to survive this stress. In lower organisms, such as fruit flies, p62 is not able to do this. The team identified the part of the human p62 protein which allows it to sense ROS and created genetically modified fruit flies with ‘humanised’ p62. These ‘humanised’ flies survived longer in conditions of stress. Dr Korolchuk adds: “This tells us that Read More ›

At Evolution News & Science Today, various reflections are offered on Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight’s Adam and the Genome: Genomic science indicates that humans descend not from an individual pair but from a large population. What does this mean for the basic claim of many Christians: that humans descend from Adam and Eve? Leading evangelical geneticist Dennis Venema and popular New Testament scholar Scot McKnight combine their expertise to offer informed guidance and answers to questions pertaining to evolution, genomic science, and the historical Adam. (jacket copy) From ENST: Much of Dennis Venema’s Adam and the Genome Isn’t About Adam and the Genome: While Discovery Institute takes no view on Adam and Eve, the book does offer an opportunity Read More ›

From Pallava Bagla/Debjani Chatterjee at NDTV: Junior Education minister Satyapal Singh stands by his statement questioning Charles Darwin’s theory, says “I am a man of science”. The scientific community has called it “polarising” and an “insult to scientific community” “Darwin’s theory is being challenged the world over. Darwinism is a myth,” Mr Singh told NDTV.” If I’m making a statement I can’t make it without a basis… I am a man of science, I’m not coming from Arts background… I have completed my PhD in Chemistry from Delhi University,” he said. Here the story gets a bit messy because Mr. Singh accuses the Darwinians of claiming that apes morphed into humans, which is not exactly what they say. Mr Gadagkar, Read More ›

From Lorna Siggins at the Irish Times: Though this species of brittle star (which are closely related to starfish) first developed nearly half a billion years ago, its modern day descendants are remarkably similar.  … According to Doyle, this brittle star is incredibly resilient — it was around during the Silurian period, when the first land plants evolved. More. Well, everything new is old again, right? And when we are talking about evolution, that matters. See also: “Confounding”: Moths and butterflies predate flowering plants by millions of years and Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen

Given its widespread popularity and acceptance you might not have realized that the so-called RNA-World hypothesis suffers from some dramatic problems. At the top of the list is the rather awkward fact that there is, err, no evidence for it. While skeptics have pointed this out for years, we now see evolutionists coming clean on this inconvenient truth as well. To wit, here is how Peter Wills and Charles Carter open their recent BioSystems paper:  Read more

From math prof Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Sean Carroll has a new paper out defending the Multiverse and attacking the naive Popperazi, entitled Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse. He also has a Beyond Falsifiability blog post here. Much of the problem with the paper and blog post is that Carroll is arguing against a straw man, while ignoring the serious arguments about the problems with multiverse research. … the problem with the multiverse is that it’s an empty idea, predicting nothing. It is functioning not as what we would like from science, a testable explanation, but as an untestable excuse for not being able to predict anything. In defense of empty multiverse theorizing, Carroll wants to Read More ›

From Leah Crane at New Scientist: Some exoplanets around red giant stars may be no more than an optical illusion. Variations in starlight that appear to be caused by orbiting worlds could come from ripples in the stars’ surfaces instead. … (paywall)More. Actually, they are never a mirage. No, really. Never. Some things are just true but many things are true but mustn’t be and then there are things that are true no matter what. The millions of habitable planets are definitely in that last category. See also: Researchers: Chances of life on exoplanets less than supposed, due to stellar winds Rob Sheldon: NASA’s big announcement about exoplanets “underwhelming.” A inside-Mercury-orbiting rock that is over 800 degrees hot? And the Read More ›

Language requires a sense of agency and purpose is for meaningful speech. And Darwinists are looking for ways to change language, for that very reason. Friend have written to offer some helpful bibliography items along those lines: – Andrew Moore Editor-in-Chief, “We need a new language for evolution… everywhere,” BioEssays, Volume 33, Issue 4, page 237, April 2011 : It is about time that we stopped such  anthropomorphic terminology and thinking, and confronted the likelihood that – far from being ‘excusable short-hand’ – it is an important contributor to a false impression of evolution among many non-scientists. I feel that much of the ‘excuse’ for using terms that evoke will, direction and strategy in evolutionary processes is a problem of Read More ›