Not how we are all apes but how bacteria can get the better of us? Jathink? From ScienceDaily: That may sound scarce; however, .” ..as only a small number of strains (<10%) were isolated from farm and urban environments, we were surprised to find one with mcr-1 on a transferable plasmid, which is a relatively high frequency of detection compared to the clinical strains,” the researchers wrote. (Plasmids are independent, mobile genetic elements that can be transmitted from one bacterium to another — sometimes across species, bestowing the traits they carry upon a new bacterial host — in this case, resistance to the last resort drug, colistin.) “Isolation of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance in S. flexneri from animal feces on a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Visual imagery used in drawing regulates arm movements in manner similar to how hunters visualize the arc of a spear. Neanderthals had large brains and made complex tools but never demonstrated the ability to draw recognizable images, unlike early modern humans who created vivid renderings of animals and other figures on rocks and cave walls. That artistic gap may be due to differences in the way they hunted, suggests a University of California, Davis, expert on predator-prey relations and their impacts on the evolution of behavior. Neanderthals used thrusting spears to bring down tamer prey in Eurasia, while Homo sapiens, or modern humans, spent hundreds of thousands of years spear-hunting wary and dangerous game on the open grasslands Read More ›

From the editors of Nature: As part of a broader effort to improve reporting quality, Nature and the Nature journals introduced a reporting checklist for life-sciences papers in 2013. This asked authors to reveal some key details of experimental design. Last year, this checklist evolved into a broader reporting-summary document that is published alongside manuscripts to promote greater transparency. We have now developed two new versions of the reporting summary: one for the behavioural and social sciences, launching this week, and one for ecology, evolution and environment (EEE) research, to follow later this month. Authors will be prompted to use these documents to provide important details of study design, data collection and analysis before papers are sent out for review. More. Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at Foreign Policy Review: In early 2017, R&D Magazine forecast that China would spend nearly $430 billion on research and development by the end of the year, amounting to nearly 21 percent of the estimated global total — a contribution second only to that of the United States ($527 billion). That money, however, is not being put to good use. In 2010, Nature reported that “many of the country’s scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism.” A 1998 study found that Chinese scientists almost never reported negative results — a scientific impossibility.A 1998 study found that Chinese scientists almost never reported negative results — a scientific impossibility. Little Read More ›

Friday, May 12, 2017 Hermann Göring High School Brooklyn, New York Wilhelm Johnson was at the top of his game.  He held a master’s degree in history from NYU and had spent over 35 years working hard to become a master teacher.  In all his decades in the classroom he had never stopped honing his skills.  Even now, at a time in his career when many of his colleagues had begun to coast toward retirement, Johnson worked into the evening every day, personally grading essays and polishing his lesson plans for the next day.  He loved his job and considered it a great honor and privilege that the Reich had bestowed on him the responsibility of molding young minds in Read More ›

From Michael Egnor at ENST, replying to one of the universe is “itself a mind” philosophers, Phillip Goff: Evil is not a problem, and in fact does not exist, if there is no God. And Goff errs in proposing that the universe is a Mind and that the Mind embodied in the universe is the ground of existence. The universe is not a Mind. It is a manifestation of a Mind, the creation of a Mind, but it has no mind itself. A mind is an aspect of a soul, and what characterizes a mind is its ability to hold the form of another substance in it without becoming that substance. For example, my mind can grasp the idea of Read More ›

Richard Weikart, UCal history prof, writes to note that he recently gave a talk at North Dakota State Univ. on “Darwinism and the Death of Humanity,” using material from his book, The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life: It’s still legal to offend people by talking about this stuff. See also: Weikart vs Darwin on the value of human life

From John Gray at New Statesman, reviewing Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress: To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”. He is an evangelist for science – or, to be more exact, an ideology of scientism. Along with reason, humanism and progress, science features as one of the core Enlightenment values that Pinker lists at the start of the book. But for him science is more than a bunch of methods that are useful in conjecturing how the world works: it provides the basis of ethics and Read More ›

From Peter Kwasniewski at Lifesite News: Modernity expects people to hand over their intellects to a mysterious oracle called “Science,” a source of dogmas more unquestioned and blindly trusted than ever the papacy was in the Dark Ages. Christianity, in contrast, requires believers to submit their minds to an infinite God of truth who created all things—a worthy object of worship and obedience. The “new atheists” assert that Christians, by profession as it were, have a contempt for hard facts. In reality, it would be impossible to find a religion more friendly to truths of nature and history and more encouraging of those who devote their time and effort to studying them. Consider the five proofs for the existence of Read More ›

From Peggy Fletcher Stack at Salt Lake City Tribune: Mormons should be as friendly to evolution as any people on Earth, a Brigham Young University biologist unequivocally declared this week. They believe in “eternal progression,” for example, and that the universe was organized from pre-existing matter, Steven L. Peck told a packed audience Thursday on the Utah Valley University campus. Those are ideas embraced by evolutionary biologists, too. Hmmm. Typical Mormons probably don’t believe what 78% of evolutionary biologists believe: No God and no free will. Could that matter? There certainly are surprises in the development of complex structures, he said. “Things that occur on one level — like DNA mutations — are truly random. And they can bubble up Read More ›

The cat may or may not attend.

Since reinstated. That’s what comes of hiring toxic snowflakes to make decisions. No, really: From Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason: A pudgy little figure with wide hips and ample breasts, the Venus of Willendorf was discovered in 1908 but originally dates to the Stone Age. One of the oldest surviving art works in the world, the limestone sculpture now resides in Vienna’s Natural History Museum, where a woman named Laura Ghianda snapped a pic last December and then posted the image to Facebook. It was promptly removed. A notice from Facebook explained that the naked figure was inappropriate for the social site. According to the company’s official policy, “photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures” are Read More ›

Memristors are in effect tunable resistors; where a resistive state can be programmed [and changed, so far a very finite number of times]. This means they can store and process information, especially by carrying out weighted-product summations and vector-based matrix array product summations. Such are very powerful physically instantiated mathematical operations. For example, here is a memristor crossbar matrix: . . . and here is one in use to recognise patterns:   They hold promise for AI, high density storage units and more. How they work turns out to be a bit of a challenge, as IEEE Spectrum reported in 2015: >>Over the last decade researchers have produced two commercially promising types of memristors: electrochemical metallization memory (ECM) cells, and Read More ›

From Sarah Chaffee at ENST: Professor Peter Ridd heads up the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia. He has over a hundred scientific papers to his name and has spent thirty years studying the Great Barrier Reef. But he wrote a chapter in the volume Climate Change: The Facts 2017 for a think tank, critiquing claims that the Great Barrier Reef is nearly dead due to global warming and other factors. When he talked about the article on television last August, his university went ballistic. Ridd took his situation to the public, writing an op-ed for Fox News, “Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great Barrier Reef.” More. From that job-endangering op-ed: Around Read More ›

From Catherine Offord at the at The Scientist: In one recent project, for example, Schroeter and her advisor Mary Schweitzer extracted and analyzed collagen peptides from just 200 mg of an 80-million-year-old fossil of a Cretaceous-era herbivore, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, excavated in Montana. The amino acid sequences of those peptides, published last year, placed the dinosaur on a branch of the phylogenetic tree between crocodiles and basal birds such as ostriches.1 What’s more, the team’s collection of analyzable peptides from the ancient specimen suggests that there might be other fossils out there with similar molecular information hidden in them. Although the findings were controversial—some researchers still doubt that proteins can resist degradation for tens of millions of years—Schroeter is one of a Read More ›