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 Read More…
Month: March 2018
Could Neanderthals’ lack of drawing ability relate to hunting methods?
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 Read More…
Nature’s new rules: Can scientists be honest if they don’t believe that lying is a sin?
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 Read More…
Peer review 9-11: China leads the world in biomedical fraud
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, Read More…
Becky’s Lesson, a Viginette
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 Read More…
Michael Egnor on why evil shows that there IS a God
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 Read More…
Video: Richard Weikart on his book, The Death of Humanity, and Darwinism
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 Read More…
John Gray offers harsh words for Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: therapy for liberals
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 Read More…
Are atheists the true enemies of science? Well, that depends…
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 Read More…
Mormons “need not shy away from evolution” – provided they don’t read the fine print
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 Read More…
Five Christian experts in quantum mechanics, one venue, Pittsburgh April 6-7
The cat may or may not attend.
Toxic snow has claimed Stone Age artwork: Willendorf Venus banned from Facebook
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, Read More…
How do memristors work? [Onward implications for Strong AI.]
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 Read More…
Peter Ridd: Coral reef expert hounded for failing to produce apocalypse NOW!
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 Read More…
Paleoproteomics: Ancient proteins shed more light on the past
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 Read More…