Robert J. Marks looks at a recent theory: One issue to be aware of is this: AI is performed by computers and computers are entirely algorithmic. That is to say, they are constrained to obey a set of operations written by a computer programmer. Mathematics is algorithmically constructed, based on logic and foundational axioms. And physics is built algorithmically on foundational laws. In this sense, common naturalistic phenomena are largely algorithmic. They operate according to the logic of mathematics and the laws of physics. Penrose wondered, is anything in nature nonalgorithmic? He points to the collapse of a quantum mechanical wave function into a deterministic state. Such quantum effects can be found in the microtubules found in the brain. Penrose Read More ›

Possibly. They certainly rule out experimenter interference: Quantum particles appear to behave randomly when measured. But what if there is no free will? In that case, the physicists were fated, so to speak, to set up the experiment to achieve a certain set of results which might appear to them to be random. But that was fated too. Koberlein explains, “It’s often said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but it’s really information that can’t travel faster than light. We can send each other telegrams or text messages, but never faster than the time it takes for light to travel between us. In a small lab, light has plenty of time to travel back and forth Read More ›

Yes, they all end up being related and here’s how: Yesterday evening, gpuccio published “Mechanosensing and Mechanotransduction: how cells touch their world here,” on the extracellular matrix (ECM) by which a cell communicates with its environment. A reader wrote, Great ……. The only explanation that is scientific and logic is that all of this awesome activities are directed and guided by God , no other explanation is possible since the information needed to construct biostructures are not contained in nature or the cosmic laws. and gpuccio replied: Welcome to the discussion and thank you for your comment. I just want to clarify that my argument about ID as applied to biology is about the design inference. It clearly infers design Read More ›

Seventeen individuals from three unrelated multi-generation families have shown the trait (a high level of mtDNA heteroplasmy, ranging from 24 to 76 percent): A new study led by geneticist Taosheng Huang from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre shows human mitochondrial DNA can be paternally inherited, in a landmark case that started with the treatment of a sick four-year-old boy. The child, who was showing signs of fatigue, muscle pain, and other symptoms, was evaluated by doctors, and tested to see if he had a mitochondrial disorder. When Huang ran the tests – and then ran them again to be sure – he couldn’t make sense of the results that came back. “That’s impossible,” he told NOVA Next. The reason Read More ›

Proton: stable subatomic particle that has a positive charge equal in magnitude to a unit of electron charge and a rest mass of 1.67262 × 10−27 kg, which is 1,836 times the mass of an electron. (Britannica) Only 9% of the proton’s mass comes from its quarks: The rest of the proton’s mass comes from complicated effects occurring inside the particle, researchers report in the Nov. 23 Physical Review Letters. … Instead, most of the proton’s 938 million electron volts of mass is due to complexities of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, the theory which accounts for the churning of particles within the proton. Emily Conover, “Physicists finally calculated where the proton’s mass comes from” at Science News These results provide figures for what’s long been suspected. Seems like Read More ›

In a move reminiscent of Tom Wolfe tackling The Kingdom of Speech near the end of his life, Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) decided to tackle consciousness: Consciousness is a hard problem for science, principally because no one quite understands what makes us the subjects of our experiences. According to one critic, the problem that has preoccupied Stoppard throughout his career is “Are the materialists right, or is there more to man than mere flesh?”: Hilary (Adelaide Clemens), the protagonist, is a youthful research psychologist-in-the-making who longs above all things to crack the hardest problem in to her field, the conundrum of human consciousness: “Who’s the you outside your brain? Where? The mind is extra….We’re dealing in mind-stuff that doesn’t show Read More ›

Fig. 1: Cnidaria are probably one of the most ancient phyla of known Metazoa.   Metazoa, or multicellular organisms, are one of the amazing “novelties” in natural history. At some point, single eukaryotic cells begin to be organized in a new, incredibly complex plan: a multicellular organism. It is well known and understood that one of the main tools to realize that innovation, that new expression of life, is cell differentiation. Cells, while sharing the same genome, become different, incredibly different one from the other. Stem cells differentiate and acquire, through amazing and still poorly understood epigenetic trajectories, completely different cellular phenotypes and functions. The miracle of transcription regulation, as we have seen in another recent OP, is at the Read More ›

Okay, okay, not bringing them to “life” but giving us a much better sense of life over half a billion years ago. The Canadian Rockies have, it turns out,  many more Cambrian sites than the big 1909 find that lay neglected at the Smithsonian so long: Each new stop has offered striking views of unfamiliar animals, many already described in high-profile papers: the little fish relative Metaspriggina, a vertebrate ancestor that Caron now speculates clustered in schools; the pincered Tokummia; and the ice cream cone–shaped fossils called hyoliths, which Caron’s Ph.D. student Joseph Moysiuk last year linked to shelled animals called brachiopods, some of which persist today. New finds in various parts of the world generate new interpretations: In fossils of the Read More ›

In recent years, a number of theoretical physicists have raised concerns about stagnation and cool-sounding programs that produce little but TED talks. Now one replies, pointing out that if we leave the wild world of string theory out of the picture, theoretical physicists work with experimentalists more than ever before: In one example, theorists teamed with experimentalists to probe quantum correlations spread across space and time. In another example, theorists posited a mechanism by which superconducting qubits interact with a hot environment. Other illustrations from the past five years include discrete time crystals, many–body scars, magic-angle materials, and quantum chaos. These collaborations even offer hope for steering quantum gravity with experiments. Certain quantum-gravity systems share properties with certain many-particle quantum Read More ›

Your co-workers just won’t know WHAT to think, when they hear you expound this Ted Talk: Self proclaimed “thought leader,” Pat Kelly gives his talk on “thought leadership” at the annual This Is That Talks in Whistler, B.C. In the seminar, Kelly covers: How to talk with your hands, how to get a standing ovation, and how to inspire people by saying nothing at all. Courtesy the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation * Yes, a parody, but we knew we didn’t need to tell our readers that. Follow UD News at Twitter! See also: “Neil deGrasse Tyson” debuts at the Babylon Bee in an op-ed Babylon Bee: Bill Nye To Dress Up As Real Scientist For Halloween and Yes, there IS an Old Earth Creation Read More ›

What do Americans think matters in life? Americans with high levels of household income and educational attainment are more likely to mention friendship, good health, stability and travel. A quarter of Americans who earn at least $75,000 a year mention their friends when asked to describe, in their own words, what makes life meaningful, compared with 14% of Americans who earn less than $30,000 each year. Similarly, 23% of higher-income U.S. adults mention being in good health, compared with 10% of lower-income Americans. And among those with a college degree, 11% mention travel and a sense of security as things that make their lives fulfilling, compared with 3% and 2%, respectively, who name these sources of meaning among those with Read More ›

Ken Francis, author, with Theodore Dalrymple, of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd, writes to tell us of an effort to account for objective moral laws and duties form the perspective of pure naturalist atheism. He thinks it doesn’t work but you, the reader, shall judge: From Reasonable Faith: And the atheist answer to all these moral dilemmas (Slavery, Child Abuse, Genocide, Molestation, Murder, Rape, etc.) is, “Well, it’s all relative!” Dr. William Lane Craig and Ravi Zacharias tells atheist Dr. Bernard Leikind that if his morality rests upon relativism he cannot in principle label literally anything as absolutely wrong, be it slavery, child abuse, or child molestation, torture, genocide, racism, murder, etc., This clip Read More ›

Here’s the take of a Christian scholar, Hans Madueme, review of a book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve , by a secular Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt: Greenblatt tells the Adam and Eve story from a non-Christian, outsider’s perspective. On the one hand, he treats many of the historical actors fairly and avoids anachronism or trivializing their unique concerns. I commend him for that. On the other hand, the book is far less helpful at conveying the deep theological significance of our first parents. Many readers will therefore likely disagree with key elements of Greenblatt’s narrative. Theological insights are scattered throughout, but they’re cut off from their deeper, organic connections to Adam and Eve. This problem is heightened Read More ›

Or someone does. We haven’t quite figured this out yet: All modern humans descended from a solitary pair who lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, scientists say. Scientists surveyed the genetic ‘bar codes’ of five million animals – including humans – from 100,000 different species and deduced that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race. These bar codes, or snippets of DNA that reside outside the nuclei of living cells, suggest that it’s not just people who came from a single pair of beings, but nine out of every 10 animal species, tooLeigh McManus, “All humans are descended from just TWO people and a catastrophic event almost wiped out Read More ›

The crackdown on religion is said to stem from Xi Jinping, who became President in 2012. After he got term limits removed in March 2018, some have begun to privately call him “Emperor Xi”: Pastor Bob Fu, a Chinese civil rights activist since Tiananmen Square in 1989 and founder of ChinaAid, reports that facial recognition technology is being used to discourage churchgoing in China: “The government-sanctioned churches that are allowed to exist right now have unique restrictions. Each church has to install a facial-recognition camera in front of the pulpit. The purpose is to identify certain people in the congregation.” … Christians are treated with special wariness because they are associated with Western political values but, as Shepherd points out, Read More ›