From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Based on everything we know, it seems like the conditions that make life possible are a lot more diverse and flexible than most people would expect. … Take Earth’s large moon, for example. The gravitational forces from it keep our planet rotating on the same axis over time. Our present axial tilt is 23.5 degrees, but this will vary over very long timescales between 22.1° and 24.5°. A world like Mars, on the other hand, has almost the same axial tilt as Earth: around 25°. But over tens of millions of years, this will vary by ten times as much as it does on Earth: from a minimum of 13° to a maximum of 40°. Read More ›

From Dan Vergano at Buzzfeed: When she was 9 years old, a genetic test revealed that she had two identical copies of a rare gene. At first, the scientists thought it was extremely bad luck, inheriting the same super-rare gene twice, once from each parent. But as it turned out, the rare gene was, “surprisingly, not in her mother,” wrote the scientific team, led by Irena Borgulová of the Centre for Medical Genetics and Reproductive Medicine Gennet in Prague. Which meant she had inherited two copies of her father’s gene. Subsequent testing showed that it wasn’t just that one gene — she had doubled up on her father’s genes in almost all of her chromosomes in most of her cells. Read More ›

Abstract: Seventeen years after the sequencing of the human genome, the human proteome is still under revision. One in eight of the 22 210 coding genes listed by the Ensembl/GENCODE, RefSeq and UniProtKB reference databases are annotated differently across the three sets. We have carried out an in-depth investigation on the 2764 genes classified as coding by one or more sets of manual curators and not coding by others. Data from large-scale genetic variation analyses suggests that most are not under protein-like purifying selection and so are unlikely to code for functional proteins. A further 1470 genes annotated as coding in all three reference sets have characteristics that are typical of non-coding genes or pseudogenes. These potential non-coding genes also Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog Back(re)action: It occurred to me some years ago, however, that there is a much simpler example for how reductionism can fail. It can fail simply because the extrapolation from the theory at short distances to the one at long distances is not possible without inputting further information. This can happen if the scale-dependence of a constant has a singularity, and that’s something which we cannot presently exclude. With singularity I here do not mean a divergence, ie that something becomes infinitely large. Such situations are unphysical and not cases I would consider plausible for realistic systems. But functions can have singularities without anything becoming infinite: Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: From Philip Cunningham: Darwin’s theory vs. falsification

But leaves himself a fine-tuning loophole. From Sacramento Bee via AP: The 73-year-old leader said that if there’s “one single witness” who can prove, perhaps with a picture or a selfie that a human was “able to talk and to see God,” he will immediately resign. … Duterte, however, suggested that there must be a God or a supreme being that prevents billions of stars and celestial bodies from colliding in a frequency that could have long threatened the human race. More. A selfie with God will not help Dutarte think more clearly. See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter?

From Christie Aschwanden at Five Thirty Eight: In part one, the researchers presented 2,560 participants2 with 306 abstracts related to political beliefs or behavior drawn from 10 years’ worth of Society for Personality and Social Psychology meetings. Raters were asked to assess how the research characterized political conservatives and political liberals. They were also asked the extent to which conservatives were the target of “explanation.” Suppose, for instance, a study finds that conservatives are less likely to change their opinions on moral issues than liberals are when exposed to counterarguments. “The researchers could explain this as ‘conservatives are cognitively rigid, inflexible, and resistant to new arguments,’ ” said Eric Luis Uhlmann, a psychologist at INSEAD in Singapore and the study’s Read More ›

From Brian Resnick at Vox: Zero is in the mind, but not in the sensory world,” Robert Kaplan, a Harvard math professor and an author of a book on zero, says. Even in the empty reaches of space, if you can see stars, it means you’re being bathed in their electromagnetic radiation. In the darkest emptiness, there’s always something. Perhaps a true zero — meaning absolute nothingness — may have existed in the time before the Big Bang. But we can never know. Nevertheless, zero doesn’t have to exist to be useful. In fact, we can use the concept of zero to derive all the other numbers in the universe. Kaplan walked me through a thought exercise first described by Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus: Certain features of human behavior recur regardless of culture. Does that mean that we are in some sense fine-tuned by natural selection to be a particular kind of creature? Nope, says Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist and the former chairman of the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. The notion that evolutionary forces sculpted humans in a certain way is misleading. In fact, he says, it’s the biggest misapprehension about human origins. “We can basically blame evolution for our shortcomings and look upon ourselves as somewhat optimized, and therefore not have to change our behaviors,” he told Nautilus. “We are not the product of perfectionizing. We are, in many ways, totally accidental. Read More ›

Or just at the New York Times? From an op-ed by Steven Petrow at The New York Times: Do You Believe in Magic? I Do Talismans and amulets — objects believed to have magical powers — were once part of any self-respecting doctor’s medicine bag. More. Petrow, a writer, is a cancer survivor who is sure that a magical stuffed rabbit played a role. He tells us, And the use of medical talismans has persisted. Dr. William Bartholome, a pediatrician and bioethicist at Kansas University Medical Center, wrote prolifically about his struggle with metastatic esophageal cancer — and his collection of 40 frogs. “Bill’s frogs were totems or talismans that he believed brought him luck,” said Martha Montello, his friend Read More ›

From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Plough Quarterly: I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water. Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life. She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained Read More ›

Wolf Ekkehard Loennig is certainly one of the leading ID biologists in the world, he studied mutations for 32 years, 25 at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Koeln, and has written many well-researched documents on intelligent design. You can see some of them here, as well as several peer-reviewed scientific publications favorable to ID. As the prototype of the biologist who should not exist, he has naturally endured a lot of persecution, but has survived and is more prolific than ever in retirement. Many of his writings are long and characterized by great attention to detail, loaded with technical references and footnotes, so they unfortunately tend to be a little difficult for the layman to follow. Read More ›

Explanations of the dramatic Cambrian explosion of life forms (540 million years ago) are a cottage industry, with arguments about oxygen a staple of the discussion. See, for example, Maverick theory: Cambrian animals remade the environment by generating oxygen Did a low oxygen level delay complex life on Earth? There was only a small oxygen jump Animals didn’t “arise” from oxygenation, they created it, researchers say Theory on how animals evolved challenged: Some need almost no oxygen New study: Oxygenic photosynthesis goes back three billion years Enough O2 long before animals? Life exploded after slow O2 rise? So the Cambrian really WAS an explosion then? and finally, Researchers: Cambrian explosion was not an explosion after all (When in doubt, insist that nothing happened.) And this Read More ›

From Philip Lieberman at The Scientist: In On the Origin of Species, Darwin noted “the strange fact that every particle of food and drink which we swallow has to pass over the orifice of the trachea, with some risk of falling into the lungs.” Because of this odd anatomy, which differs from that of all other mammals, choking on food remains the fourth leading cause of accidental death in the United States. This species-specific problem is a consequence of the mutations that crafted the human face, pharynx, and tongue so as to make it easier to speak and to correctly interpret the acoustic speech signals that we hear. In humans, however, a developmental process that spans the first 8 to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists at Washington State University and China Jiliang University have discovered that the quality of the host rice plant determines whether the brown planthopper, a major pest on rice in Asia, grows short wings or long wings. Wing size determines whether the insect can fly long distances to other plants or stick around and feed off nearby rice plants, said Laura Lavine, professor in WSU’s Department of Entomology. “It’s all about the amount of glucose, or sugar, in the plant,” Lavine said. “Rice plants with higher glucose levels are older and dying. That increase in glucose causes adolescent brown planthoppers to develop into the long-winged adults. The plant really is telling the insect how to grow.” … “It’s Read More ›