Recently, we published a story on a recent research finding that globular clusters may be four billion years younger than previously thought. In a universe that is only a little over 13 billion years old (so far as we know) that seems to some of us like a large room for error. However, Rob Sheldon writes to say, This is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. Background From astronomy 101, we talk about the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. HR diagrams plot the stars in our galaxy on a 2D plot, where the vertical axis is luminosity or brightness, and the horizontal axis is temperature or color. Most stars are clustered around a straight line, with blue-white giants stars like Rigel Read More ›

From Tom Bartlett at Inside Higher Ed: What would Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, a very friendly robot, plus a bevy of scientists, mystics, and wannabe scholars do at a fancy resort in Arizona? Perhaps real harm to the field of consciousness studies, for one thing. Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them Read More ›

From Matt Williams at Universe Today: For decades, scientists have believed that there could be life beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Since that time, multiple lines of evidence have emerged that suggest that it is not alone. Indeed, within the Solar System, there are many “ocean worlds” that could potentially host life, including Ceres, Ganymede, Enceladus, Titan, Dione, Triton, and maybe even Pluto. But what if the elements for life as we know it are not abundant enough on these worlds? In a new study, two researchers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics (CfA) sought to determine if there could in fact be a scarcity of bioessential elements on ocean worlds. From a recent email from Read More ›

From David Darling at New Scientist: But, as far as I am concerned, the fact that the Universe was an incredibly weird place 10-43 seconds after “time zero” is no big deal. What is a big deal—the biggest deal of all—is how you get something out of nothing. Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either—despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem. “In the beginning,” they will say, “there was nothing—no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which . . . ” Whoa! Stop right there. You see what Read More ›

Last November, Crossways published a collection of essays, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, which is critical of that tendency in theology. Theistic evolutionist Denis O. Lamoureux published a review of the book in American Scientific Affiliation’s Perspectives, “Intelligent Design Theory: The God of the Gaps Rooted in Concordism,” of which this excerpt gives some sense: But the root of ID Theory has now been publically revealed. About one-quarter of Theistic Evolution is a strident defense of a concordist hermeneutic, which ultimately undergirds this antievolutionary God-of-the-gaps view of origins. Evidence of the theological underpinnings of ID Theory is demonstrated by the inclusion in this book of a seven-page scripture index that cites over 1,500 Bible verses. [Note: The Read More ›

Is it due to natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinian evolution)? Is it adaptive? A byproduct? A stop on the road to extinction? Papers wanted here: — Evolutionary perspectives on atheism/unbelief Despite increasing secularization and a decreasing role played by institutionalized religions in the western world, many scholars within the study of religion – from history through sociology and evolutionary accounts – continue to focus their inquiries on the study of the religious, without giving much attention to non-believers. There are few evolutionary explanations of atheism, and those that exist are either under-developed or investigate atheism through the lens and default starting position of religious belief. An example of this is the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), since even Read More ›

From Ann Gauger at ENST, from her essay, “Beauty leads us home,” Evolutionary biologists attribute our perception of beauty in nature to our evolutionary history. In 2004 two Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, commissioned a poll to determine which kinds of art people from various countries found beautiful, and which kinds they found ugly. The poll revealed that people in almost every culture liked landscapes with a heavy dose of blue. Why? Denis Dutton explains: The lush blue landscape type that the Russian artists discovered is found across the world because it is an innate preference. This preference is not explained just by cultural traditions…. This fundamental attraction to certain types of landscapes is not socially constructed but Read More ›

Yes (Robin Collins) or no ( Peter Millican)? Wintery Knight recalls the 2016 debate and offers a summary: Science has revealed that the fundamental constants and forces of the cosmos appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned to allow a universe in which life can develop. Is God the best explanation of the incredibly improbable odds of the universe we live in being a life-permitting one? … From ‘Unbelievable?’ on ‘Premier Christian Radio’, Saturday 19th March 2016. From Wintery Knight: Brierley [host]: What is the fine-tuning argument? Collins: the fine-tuning is structure of the universe is extremely precisely set to allow the existing of conscious, embodied agents who are capable of moral behavior. There are 3 kinds of fine-tuning: 1) the laws Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The Dyeing Dart Frog, for example, is highly toxic and warns its predators with a bright yellow-and-black pattern. However, new research led by scientists at the University of Bristol has revealed that the colour pattern does more than simply signal “danger.” Counterintuitively, it also works as camouflage. … “Certain predators have evolved tolerance of toxins that would be deadly for humans, and some individual predators may have not encountered the warning signal prey before (a dangerous mistake for the predator, but also for the frog). … “So, colour patterns that could be distinctive close-up, but work as camouflage from a distance, would provide a clear advantage.” … They found that, despite being highly conspicuous at close range, the Read More ›

From Hank Berrien at the Daily Wire: A law under consideration in Brazil that would outlaw ritual infanticide and child killings by indigenous groups, called “Muwaji’s Law,” is vehemently opposed by the the Brazilian Association of Anthropology, which called it “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, which were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.” The association disparaged the proposed law as placing indigenous peoples “in the permanent condition of defendants before a tribunal tasked with determining their degree of savagery.” The Brazilian Association of Anthropology is not the only depraved participant in the drama; Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, according to Davidson, won’t “collect data on Read More ›

Based on Fermi’s Paradox (where are all the space aliens, if they exist?). From RT: A Russian theoretical physicist has predicted a grim future for our civilization that “is even worse than extinction.” Alexander Berezin, a highly-cited scientist from Russia’s National University of Electronic Technology Research, outlined his bleak prediction in an article entitled ‘First to enter, last to leave: a solution to Fermi’s paradox’. He thinks that the aliens will try to eradicate all competition, including us, to fuel their own expansion and be the power in the universe. While that dog-eat-dog theory may seem harsh, Berezin says total destruction of other life forms likely won’t be a conscious obliteration. “They simply [will] not realize, in the same way Read More ›

From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, world’s richest man, at Fellowship of the Minds: From Fox News: The recently anointed richest person in the world, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, says we need to colonize the moon — and time is of the essence. … “We will have to leave this planet,” he said, according to Geek Wire. “We’re going to leave it, and it’s going to make this planet better. We’ll come and go, and the people who want to stay, will stay.” … Mr. Bezos believes it will happen in our lifetime because the human race has little alternative. “The alternative is stasis,” he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe “will have to stop growing” Read More ›

From Carolyn Gramling at ScienceNews: Earth’s earliest land-walking vertebrates didn’t paddle about in freshwater lakes or rivers. Instead, these four-footed creatures, which appeared about 375 million years ago, lived in the brackish waters of an estuary or delta, researchers report online May 30 in Nature. Early tetrapods, such as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, lived an amphibious existence between land and sea: They had feet, but also gills and tails made for swimming. … An ability to tolerate different salinity environments could have helped tetrapods — a group that includes today’s amphibians, reptiles and mammals — survive a mass extinction of ocean-dwellers that occurred by the end of the Devonian Period about 359 million years ago, the researchers say. More. Some life Read More ›

Organic matter has been found on Mars in soil samples taken from 3 billion-year-old mudstone in the Gale crater by the Curiosity rover, NASA announced Thursday. The rover has also detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. It is not evidence for life as such, but methane is mostly produced on Earth by life forms. See also: Signs of life on Mars from 4 billion years ago?

Further to them being oversold, from researcher Filip Piekniewski at his blog: When the software fails and e.g. the control system of the vehicle hangs, it is more than likely that the end result of such situation would not be good (anyone working with robots knows how rapidly things escalate when something goes wrong – robots don’t have the natural ability to recover from a deteriorating situation). If that happened on a freeway at high speed, it would easily have lead to a serious crash with either another car or a barrier. If it happened in a dense urban area at small speed it could lead to injuring pedestrians. Either way, note that Waymo only reports the events that fulfill the Read More ›