At her blog, Oscillations, Suzan Mazur reports on the lecture series Simons Center for Geometry and Physics has been hosting at Stony Brook University, on Nonequilibrium Physics in Biology: Among the more interesting presenters is Kim Sneppen, a professor of complex systems and biophysics at Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, who addresses the diversity of shapes in the biological world. Sneppen says, “We are basically all doughnuts” and describes how we go from a sphere to a torus in his talk titled: “Theoretical Tool Bridging Cell Polarities with Development of Morphologies.” Suzan Mazur, “Kim Sneppen, Simons Center Talk: “We are basically all doughnuts”” at Oscillations Mazur discusses his approach to embryology and along the way mentions Stuart Pivar, an early Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: University of Otago researchers have discovered information about a gene that sets primates — great apes and humans — apart from other mammals, through the study of a rare developmental brain disorder. … Dr O’Neill and research collaborators from Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany, then set forth to test the point that the gene drives aspects of brain development that are unique to primates. Some amazing data was found using a novel approach through studying human “mini-brains” in culture. It is now possible to take a skin cell and transform it using a set of genetic tricks, so that it can be triggered to form a tiny brain-like structure in culture in the lab. Their results showed Read More ›

It turns out that other solar systems are not shedding much light on how ours came to be: But as the menagerie of young planetary systems grows, researchers are struggling to square their observations with current theories on how our Solar System and others formed. Such ideas have been in turmoil ever since astronomers started discovering planets around distant stars — a list that now numbers in the thousands. The Solar System has rocky planets near the Sun and giant gas balls farther out, but the panoply of exoplanets obeys no tidy patterns. And the rule book for world-building is getting more complicated as researchers find evidence of planets in the process of being born. Still, astronomers hope that witnessing Read More ›

Probably not wanted either: The latest victim of an academic mobbing is 28-year-old social scientist Noah Carl who has been awarded a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge. Rarely has the power asymmetry between the academic mob and its victim been so stark. Dr Carl is a young researcher, just starting out in his career, who is being mobbed for being awarded a prestigious research scholarship on the basis of his peer-reviewed research … Three hundred academics from around the world, many of them professors, have signed an open letter denouncing Dr Carl and demanding that the University of Cambridge “immediately conduct an investigation into the appointment process” on the grounds Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, talks about predictable claims from theistic evolution: To catch people up to speed, in a facebook conversation, [Jim] Stump made the statements, “Common ancestry [here he means Universal Common Ancestry] is a multiply confirmed theory that explains the observable data in detail. So asking what kind of evidence would contradict that is about like asking what kind of evidence would it take for you to accept geocentrism.” And, “The fossil record continues to be uncovered, and continues to show more and more what you expect to see if common descent is true. At all of the major transitions, there are intermediates found in just the right places.” Read More ›

No, we don’t sit around here, making stuff up: Tania Singer, 48 , had achieved prominence outside the scientific world in recent years. She caused a sensation with her interdisciplinary studies on the foundations of social emotions such as empathy, envy, fairness or revenge. Since 2013 , she has headed the ReSource project at the MPI in Leipzig, one of the largest research projects ever on the effects of meditation on the brain. At events such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, she regularly called for more compassion in business and society. This was missing but apparently in their own laboratory. The science journal Science and the online portal BuzzFeed reported in the summer of this year that Singer Read More ›

Nancy Pearcey is the author of Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. More than Cake is the blog of J. R. Miller: “You Guys Lost!” Is Design a Closed Issue? – Part 1: It is commonly assumed that the battle over Darwinism was waged in the nineteenth century, and that Darwin won the day because his theory was supported by the scientific evidence.,,, Yet I suggest that there are good reasons for returning to the site of battle and asking whether it was won fair and square. I propose to show that the battle was not won by Darwin in the sense normally intended: I will argue that Darwin was a turning point in biology not Read More ›

At the risk of appearing to engage in unseemly schadenfreude, I am going to discuss Neil deGrasse Tyson in this post.  Tyson, whom one wag labeled “the dumbest smart person on Twitter,” famously tweeted that we need a virtual country called “Rationalia,” with a one-line constitution – “All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.”  As Kevin Williamson noted shortly after the infamous tweet, “as men like him have done for ages, Tyson dreams of a world of self-evident choices, overseen by men of reason such as himself who occupy a position that we cannot help but notice is godlike.” Of course, as Williamson notes, the impulse behind Tyson’s observation is far from new.  In the fourth century Read More ›

At least, if you credit a National Academy of Sciences study on the subject: Iyengar and Massey (hereafter I & M) are convinced, in any event, that the revolution in media over the last three decades means that the world is sinking into abject falsehood. In the 1970s, as they relate, media were controlled by a few players: “really only a handful of newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts.” National and international news was dominated by wire services like Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI): In addition to the small number of sources, broadcast news was regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which required broadcasters to reserve a small share of airtime to cover matters of public interest; Read More ›

When Nature’s Books and Arts editor Barbara Kiser’stop five for 2018 came out, #s 1 and 2 were Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder on the troubled state of theoretical physics, of which Kiser says, Lost in Math is a firecracker of a book—a shot across the bows of theoretical physics. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist working on quantum gravity (and author of the blog Backreaction) confronts failures in her field head-on. The foundations of physics have not improved, she reminds us, for more than three decades. and The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen on the troubled state of the concept of the Tree of Life. of which she says, thinking Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon takes exception to my (O’Leary for News)’s post, “The Darwinians’ cowardice before SJW mobs explained in detail: They thought the mob was coming for someone else, ” At least in part. He writes, I thought the Aero article was the most honest I have met in a long while. It is one thing to boast about courage in the faculty lounge, it is quite another in the provost’s office. I have been cursed with both experiences. It is easy to talk about cowardice, but what are you cringing from? If I stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and am taunted to move closer to the precipice, is it cowardice to refuse? Some Read More ›

Well, the guy has guts: Cordelia Fine, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, has carved out a niche for herself by attacking the notion that there are any evolved and genetically-based differences between males and females. Her books have been best-sellers (Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society book prize), probably because her conclusions appeal to those of a certain ideology. But those conclusions are flawed (see here, for instance). Fine’s critiques of some studies purporting to show sex differences are often good, but they’re combined with misguided characterizations of other work as well as the ignoring of results that go against her men-and-women-are-pretty-much-the-same thesis. In other words, Fine is tendentious, not objective, Read More ›

From a truly rotund source: ATHENS, OH—Claiming the finding could shed new light on the diversity of amphibian life, scientists from Ohio University announced Thursday that they had discovered a new species of frog that had evolved the ability to spontaneously grow a top hat and cane. “Herpetologists Discover Species Of Frogs That Evolved To Spontaneously Grow Top Hat And Cane” at The Onion From other seriously elite and stuffed up science sources: See also: A TED talk for the truly erudite “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 Museum! Open six billion years a week.

Is the following really a plant-machine hybrid?: If plants could move around freely, they would move into the most beneficial lighting arrangement. They compensate for their rootedness by growing in the optimum direction and constantly repositioning their leaves. An MIT researcher has helped out a plant by fitting it with electronic sensors attached to robotic wheels. The sensors detect the electrical signals the plant emits when it detects light and convey these signals to a motor that moves the wheels to a more light-friendly location. News, “That plant is not a cyborg” at Mind Matters Or are we “planting” a mistaken idea? See also: Can plants be as smart as animals? Seeking to thrive and grow, plants communicate extensively, without Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, is not enthusiastic about a new video promoting a new, larger collider for CERN. She believes that current, serious problems are being smoothed over for politicians and the public, by general soothing noises that a bigger collider might answer many questions about our universe. Her summaries are worth reading in detail, for example, Why is there no more antimatter? Because if there was, you wouldn’t be here to ask the question. Presumably this item refers to the baryon asymmetry. This is a fine-tuning problem which simply may not have an answer. And even if it has, the FCC may not answer it. In general, she thinks, That particle physicists Read More ›