At Mind Matters Today: “Machine learning” is a hot field, and tremendous strides are being made in programming machines to improve as they work. Such machines work toward a goal, in a way that appears autonomous and seems eerily like human learning. But can machines really learn? What happens during machine learning, and is it the same thing as human learning? Because the algorithms that generate machine learning are complex, what is really happening during the “learning” process is obscured both by the inherent complexity of the subject and the technical jargon of computer science. Thus it is useful to consider the principles that underlie machine learning in a simplified way to see what we really mean by such “learning.” Read More ›

We’ve often noticed that people who are bound and determined to find intelligent aliens treat it as a sort of religious quest. But now, as National Geographic reports from Brazil, it is taking an institutional form: According to Sunrise Valley followers, extraterrestrial beings landed on Earth 32,000 years ago to advance human civilizations. The beings then returned to Earth through successive incarnations across various cultures and eras. Valley members, known as mediums, believe themselves to be the beings’ latest incarnation, the Jaguars.Vale do Amanhecer, “Meet the Worshipers Who Believe They’re Aliens in Human Form” at National Geographic There is also a religion growing up around artificial intelligence. And the of course, there was Carl Sagan and the dolphins. It’s not Read More ›

America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism is now available on DVD: From IMDB: Human Zoos tells the story of how thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Often touted as “missing links” between man and apes, these native peoples were harassed, demeaned, and jeered at. Their public display was arranged with the enthusiastic support of the most elite members of the scientific community, and it was promoted uncritically by America’s leading newspapers. The documentary also tells the story of a courageous group of African-American ministers who tried to stop one such ‘Human Zoo’ in New York City. The documentary features Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Pamela Newkirk, author of Spectacle: Read More ›

It wouldn’t really be “us” anyhow. Some thoughts from a political theorist: The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value – and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life – must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings. Sure, we can imagine what Read More ›

Frank Turek takes on the size of the universe: Many atheists think that the universe has a lot of “wasted space” and this is in some way evidence against theism. Note: “Naturalism” means the claim that nature is all there is, often called “materialism,” Hat tip: Ken Francis See also: What is “dualism” and why is it controversial? (FrankTurek)

Yesterday, we noted the hunt for a mysterious fifth force of the universe involving dark photons. Here’s an item from last April that suggests the hunt may prove a disappointment: But the most precise measurement yet of the fine structure constant — which determines how strongly electrons and photons interact, or “couple” — has eliminated the possibility of dark photons at a large range of masses and coupling strengths. If they did exist, they would have to be much heavier than previously predicted, scientists wrote in a new paper describing the work. One possible hope: However, there’s still a narrow escape path, through which theoretical dark photons could escape the dustbin of discarded physics theories. The field of particle physics Read More ›

Can you believe a typical science site coming to a conclusion that is so evidence-based? We all know that parrots can talk. Some people may have even seen elephants, seals, or whales mimicking speech sounds. So why can’t our closest primate relatives speak like us? Our new research suggests they have the right vocal anatomy but not the brainpower to use it. … We also found that apes have particularly large cortical association areas, as well as a bigger hypoglossal nucleus than other primates. The hypoglossal nucleus is associated with the cranial nerve that controls the muscles of the tongue. This suggests that our closest primate relatives may have finer and more voluntary control over their tongues than other primate Read More ›

Everyone understands that the only conceivable alternative to Darwinism is intelligent design, and everyone understands that ID is a religious idea. Thus if you criticize Darwinism on any minor point you are promoting ID, and promoting religion in the classroom is forbidden by the “freedom from religion” amendment. That is why, no matter how many scientific problems you see with Darwin’s explanation for the causes of evolution, it is unconstitutional to criticize his theory in the classroom. Nevertheless, in case any of you biology teachers want to try this, I have an idea on how you might be able to point out some problems with Darwinism in your classroom without violating the U.S. Constitution, by sharing the following New York Read More ›

He and Gunter Bechly should talk. Recently, Barry Arrington noted the story out of Brown University, where a paper got “disappeared” for making the point — that would seem so obvious to anyone who spends much time with teen girls as to hardly merit a paper — that sexual attitudes can be contagious. Ted Hill is discovering what it is like to be Gunter Bechly (driven from his post and “disappeared” from Wikipedia). In Bechly’s case, it came about because, a former Dawkins fan, he saw that there is evidence for design in nature. In Hill’s case, he was not just marketing eye candy about why men pay on the first date (or don’t) or promoting anti-Semitism (fashionable once again). Read More ›

At Rutgers: How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts – essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function – may have existed when life began. Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser postulated that life began on iron- and sulfur-containing rocks in the ocean. Wächtershäuser and others predicted that short peptides would have bound metals and served as catalysts of life-producing chemistry, according to study co-author Vikas Nanda, an associate professor at Rutgers’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Human DNA Read More ›

They are looking for dark photons: When positrons slam into the diamond wafer, they immediately merge with electrons and vanish in a faint burst of energy. Normally, the energy released is in the form of two particles of light called photons. But if a fifth force exists in nature, something different will happen. Instead of producing two visible photons, the collisions will occasionally release only one, alongside a so-called “dark photon”. This curious, hypothetical particle is the dark sector’s equivalent of a particle of light. It carries the equivalent of a dark electromagnetic force. Unlike normal particles of light, any dark photons produced in Padme will be invisible to the instrument’s detector. But by comparing the energy and direction of the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Two broad findings have been seen in memory reconsolidation, which is the retrieval and strengthening of a recent memory. The first broad finding is that, during memory reconsolidation, changes in translational control — the process of forming new proteins from activated genes — occur in areas of the brain related to memory formation. The second broad finding is that epigenetic mechanisms — various molecular modifications known to alter the activity of genes without changing their DNA sequence — are also somehow actively involved during memory reconsolidation or strengthening. Now, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have described a novel mechanism that links epigenetic change to translational control. In the Journal of Neuroscience, they report how several Read More ›

About 237 million years ago: The sites underscore that this burst of evolution took place much earlier than researchers had thought, particularly for water-loving insects. Among the remains are fossil dragonflies, caddisflies, water boatmen, and aquatic beetles. Until now, paleontologists had thought such aquatic insects didn’t diversify until 130 million years ago. These insects—which include both predators and plant eaters—helped make freshwater communities more complex and more productive, says Zheng, moving them toward the ecosystems we see today. Elizabeth Pennisi, “Ancient insect graveyards reveal an explosion in bug diversity 237 million years ago” at Science A friend writes to say that the find is “significantly” earlier than expected – partly on account of fossil evidence, but also partly on account Read More ›

That’s a big part of the problem with peer review and replication failures. Don’t believe me? Get this: In response to massive failures in so-called social sciences: “The findings reinforce the roles that two inherent intuitions play in scientific decision-making: our drive to create a coherent narrative from new data regardless of its quality or relevance, and our inclination to seek patterns in data whether they exist or not,” he says. Dingledine also says the results speak to a bigger problem, something Kahneman famously described in an open letter to colleagues in 2012 as a “train wreck looming”: the widespread failure to replicate the findings of many important studies in the social sciences. That wreck may well be upon us. Paul Read More ›

That’s dark energy.topic The most mysterious phenomenon in cosmology – dark energy – may not exist at all, according to Professor Subir Sarkar, head of the particle theory group at the University of Oxford in the UK. In the late 1990s, astronomers found evidence from supernovae that the universe has been expanding faster and faster as it gets older. Having no explanation for what was driving it, they dubbed this accelerating expansion ‘dark energy’. What did you think about these findings at the time? ‘I was sceptical from the beginning. I’m unusual in the cosmology community in that I’ve had experience working in experiments as well as theory, and I didn’t think the astronomers were taking full account of the Read More ›