June 2018

From Helen Briggs at the BBC: The fossil’s weird features suggests it is the earliest known living relative not just of the turacos, but of cuckoos and bustards (large long-legged birds). And the fact the remains were unearthed in North America shows the distribution of different birds around the globe would have been very different in the past. … This raises questions about how, when, and why the birds became restricted to tropical latitudes. Dr Field said there are over 11,000 living species of bird today, and trying to understand how this incredible diversity is only possible “by appealing to what the fossil record tells us about how those evolutionary transitions have taken place”. More. In this case, what the Read More ›

From Michelle Starr at ScienceAlert: These findings bolster the hypothesis that, deep under its icy crust, Enceladus could be harbouring simple marine life, clustered around the warmth of hydrothermal vents. Previously, simple organic molecules detected on the little moon were under around 50 atomic mass units and only contained a handful of carbon atoms. “We are, yet again, blown away by Enceladus,” said geochemist and planetary scientist Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute. “We’ve found organic molecules with masses above 200 atomic mass units. That’s over ten times heavier than methane. “With complex organic molecules emanating from its liquid water ocean, this moon is the only body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for Read More ›

From Asher Elbein at New York Times: Europe’s migratory songbirds can’t fight off diseases as well as African species that stay put. But that may be to the European birds’ advantage. The evolutionary origins of bird migration are a longstanding puzzle for ornithologists, and the role of disease in influencing the behavior has never been entirely clear. A recent study by Dr. O’Connor and her colleagues examined the genealogy and immune responses of about 1,300 species of songbirds from both continents. The surprising result: Migratory birds have weaker immune systems than tropical species that stay put. Researchers have assumed that migratory birds, travelling between different pathogen populations, woud have especially tough immune systems. To their surprise, the team found that African Read More ›

Okay, They’re not Out There. But maybe something is. Any form of extraterrestrial life could shed light on at least some questions. In that spirit, we learn from ScienceDaily of a newly published guidebook, in th form of a seriesof papers based on finds here on Earth: Some of the leading experts in the field, including a UC Riverside team of researchers, have written a major series of review papers on the past, present, and future of the search for life on other planets. Published in Astrobiology, the papers represent two years of work by the Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science (NExSS), a NASA-coordinated research network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability, and by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Scientists have Read More ›

Further to researchers announcing that they have dissolved the Fermi Paradox (They can’t be Out There), physicist and science commentator Jim Al-Khalili at the Guardian: In 1950 Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born American Nobel prize-winning physicist, posed a very simple question with profound implications for one of the most important scientific puzzles: whether or not life exists beyond Earth. The story goes that during a lunchtime chat with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the issue of flying saucers came up. The conversation was lighthearted, and it doesn’t appear that any of the scientists at that particular gathering believed in aliens. But Fermi merely wanted to know: “Where is everybody?” Indeed. It’s not as though the aliens Read More ›

From Jonathan Wells at ENST: For English anatomist Alice Roberts, however, the human body is a “hodge-podge” of parts assembled in an “untidy” fashion “with no foresight” by evolution. So, like many evolutionary biologists before her, she set out with some colleagues to “design and build the Perfect Body.” Her results were aired on BBC Four on June 13, 2018. … The Perfect Human Body would also have legs like ostriches. Ostrich legs are “digitigrade” — they rest on their toes. They are also very fast, enabling ostriches to run very quickly on the plains of Africa. And ostrich legs have proven to be a good model for making prosthetics to help people whose legs have been amputated above the Read More ›

The question of, if there are aliens out there, where are they? In short, they ain’t.  From Dissolving the Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord: Abstract: The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A cranium of a four-million-year-old fossil, that, in 1995 was described as the oldest evidence of human evolution in South Africa, has shown similarities to that of our own, when scanned through high resolution imaging systems. The cranium of the extinct Australopithecus genus was found in the lower-lying deposits of the Jacovec Cavern in the Sterkfontein Caves, about 40km North-West of Johannesburg in South Africa. … “Our study revealed that the cranium of the Jacovec specimen and of the Ausralopithecus specimens from Sterkfontein in general was thick and essentially composed of spongy bone,” says Beaudet. “This large portion of spongy bone, also found in our own cranium, may indicate that blood flow in the brain of Australopithecus may Read More ›

From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at her blog BackRe(Action): The Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found evidence for any new particles besides the Higgs-boson (at least not so far), so now particle physicists are at a loss for how to proceed. Even if they find something in the data that’s yet to come, it is clear already that their predictions were wrong. She distinguishes between the currently popular top down (theory first) approach to particle physics and the bottom up (evidence first) one she recommends. About the latter, she writes, quoting particle physicist Ben Allanach, It’s an exceedingly unpopular approach because the data have just told us over and over and over Read More ›

For Big Science, credibility is tied up with money. And what happens when those who control the money believe that astrology is just as legitimate as quantum mechanics? Krista Burton professes and justifies her beliefs at the New York Times: Is Astrology Religion for Those of Us With No Religion? Major beauty brands like Glossier, Aveda and Dr. Brandt have crystal- and gemstone-enhanced products. You can buy clear quartz yoni eggs off Instagram to tap the inherent chakral sexual energy radiating from your genitals. And people who say things like “Oh! You’re a Gemini? That makes so much sense” in public are met with solemn nods, not scorn. … Why is all of this so trendy now, though? Is astrology Read More ›

What? We have been told that natural selection acting on random mutations explains diversity! From ScienceDaily: For years, it was assumed other nematodes’ neurons were similar to those of C. elegans, until researchers at the University of Illinois demonstrated the vast diversity in neuronal anatomy present across species. Now Nathan Schroeder, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at U of I and leader of the previous study, has shown that gonad development also varies in other nematodes relative to C. elegans. Specifically, he and graduate student Hung Xuan Bui focused on Steinernema carpocapsae, a nematode used in insect biocontrol applications in lawns and gardens. The gonads in all nematodes develop within a structure called the gonad arm, a Read More ›

Also, who predicted in 2014 that life would be created in the lab in three years? In five years? Origin of life is thought to be a “low” or “very low” probability event, according to two recent articles (in Life and Nature).* Suzan Mazur reports at Oscillations on an upcoming conference at McMaster University in Canada and wonders if the goals might be changing in origin of life research — but that’s not certain: The first conference, opening June 24 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is being called “Science of Early Life.” Why the downgrade from origin(s) to early life? Does it signal that the caravan has already moved on? … What would Harry say about the Canadian Read More ›

From Daniel Sarewitz at the Weekly Standard, reflecting on Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, … What, then, joins Hossenfelder’s field of theoretical physics to ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, and geology? Why do they all get to be called science? Certainly it is not similarity of method. The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact Read More ›

From climate scientist Kate Marvel at Scientific American: Once you put established facts about the world up for argument, you’ve already lost In fact, as a general rule, I refuse to debate basic science in public. There are two reasons for this: first, I’m a terrible debater and would almost certainly lose. The skills necessary to be a good scientist (coding, caring about things like “moist static energy”, drinking massive amounts of coffee) aren’t necessarily the same skills that will convince an audience in a debate format. It is very fortunate that things like the atomic model of matter do not rest on my ability to be charming or persuasive. But second, and maybe more importantly: once you put facts Read More ›

William Lane Craig offers some thoughts at YouTube: More. Relevant article: Man, writes Loren Eiseley, is the Cosmic Orphan. He is the only creature in the universe who asks, “Why?” Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. “Who am I?” man asks. “Why am I here? Where am I going?” Since the Enlightenment, when he threw off the shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. “You are the accidental by-product of nature, a result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death.” Modern Read More ›