2018

Uploaded to computer.You thought AI was just about a robot downsizing your job? From Antonio Regolado at Technology Review: Nectome will preserve your brain, but you have to be euthanized first. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere. This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect Read More ›

What? Someone noticed? From Manchester University: A comprehensive new study looking at variations in Ichthyosaurus, a common British Jurassic ichthyosaur (sea-going reptile) also known as ‘Sea Dragons’, has provided important information into recognizing new fossil species. Professor Judy Massare (SUNY College at Brockport, NY, USA) and Dean Lomax (The University of Manchester) have studied hundreds of specimens of Ichthyosaurus. After their latest research project the pair urge caution in naming new fossil species on the basis of just a few fragmentary or isolated remains. For their research Prof Massare and Lomax focused on one particular part of the Ichthyosaurus skeleton, the hindfin (or back paddle). The purpose was to evaluate the different forms among the six-known species of Ichthyosaurus. They Read More ›

From Mel Greaves et al. at BNC Biology: Paraphrasing Dobzhansky’s famous dictum, I discuss how interrogating cancer through the lens of evolution has transformed our understanding of its development, causality and treatment resistance. The emerging picture of cancer captures its extensive diversity and therapeutic resilience, highlighting the need for more innovative approaches to control. Abstract: ) PDF. Jonathan Wells, author of Zombie Science, offers, Greaves’s article is more silliness from “Darwinian medicine.” Greaves: “An evolutionary logic pervades all major areas of cancer sciences.” Me: So evolutionary logic can explain the progression of a deadly disease. How does this help us explain the origin of new species, organs, and body plans—except, perhaps by invoking the opposite of evolution? Greaves: “The majority Read More ›

From Daniel Cossins at New Scientist: An almost religious devotion to beauty remains commonplace among theorists of fundamental physics, even if the standards of attractiveness have changed over time. One vision of elegance in particular has surged to the fore: the principle of naturalness. Broadly speaking, it is the belief that the laws of nature ought to be sublime, inevitable and self-contained, as opposed to makeshift and arbitrary. But what if they aren’t? That’s the disquieting possibility being entertained by a growing band of physicists in the aftermath of what should have been the breakthrough discovery of the decade, the snaring of the Higgs boson in 2012. The discovery of the Higgs, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Read More ›

Of course we knew the PoMos would get round to this. From John Sexton at Hot Air, quoting a now hard-to-find memo from Evergreen College: Earlier this week, some graffiti was spotted on campus that sought to couterpose intersectionality and the sciences, equating the latter with white supremacy. Facilities staff have completed the chore of cleaning up the graffiti. The slur against the sciences, however interpreted, is offensive and disappointing to see given the values we espouse and our shared commitment to equity and interdisciplinarity. Using graffiti to condemn one discipline or summarilty dismiss one group in favor of others runs counter to these values. Evergreen strives to bring multiple lenses into our work, to afford respect to all who Read More ›

Chicago Tribune: >>Stephen Hawking, the British physicist whose body was chained to a wheelchair by the ravages of a degenerative neuromuscular disease, but whose mind soared to the boundaries of the universe and beyond, died Wednesday morning in Cambridge, England. He was 76. His death came from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, from which he had suffered since he was 20. “He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years,” his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. “His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humor inspired people across the world…. We will miss him Read More ›

Spiders evolving disguises separately, in parallel, are another problem for Darwinism Not that one can directly admit it. From Catherine Offord at The Scientist: The Hawaiian stick spider has evolved the same three color morphs on multiple different islands in parallel, according to research led by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team’s findings, published today (March 8) in Current Biology, provide a rare example of evolution producing the same outcome multiple times and could throw light on the factors constraining evolutionary change. “The possibility that whole communities of these spiders have evolved convergently is certainly exciting,” Ambika Kamath, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who didn’t take part in the study, tells Read More ›

A machine with parts that each do one thing. From Neuroskeptic at Discover: This “behavior-first” approach has revealed many associations between particular functions and particular brain regions. However, Genon et al. say, it has become clear that any given behavioral function involves more than one brain region, and it may be that there is no ‘necessary and sufficient brain area’ for any behavioral function. … his is a fascinating paper. I wonder, however, whether we might end up discovering that all brain regions – or at least, the bulk of the cerebral cortex – have the same core cognitive function? It might be that most of the cortical ‘modules’ are actually doing the same kind of processing, but operating on Read More ›

From Lisa Grossman at Science News, on an effort to update the Drake Equation: If the civilization lasted less than 100,000 years — the time it takes light to cross the galaxy — then the odds of the signals reaching Earth while the civilization is still broadcasting are vanishingly small, the researchers report February 27 at arXiv.org. Humans, for example, have been transmitting radio waves for only about 80 years, so our radio waves cover less than 0.001 percent of the Milky Way. “If the civilization emitted from the other side of the galaxy, when the signal arrives here, the civilization will already be gone,” says Grimaldi, of the Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne in Switzerland.More. The space aliens have Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: why, and when, can we use mathematics to learn something about our physical Universe? We don’t know the answer to why, but we do know the answer to when: when it agrees with our experiments and observations. So long as the laws of physics remain the laws of physics, and do not whimsically turn on-and-off or vary in some ill-defined way, we know we can describe them mathematically, at least in principle. Mathematics, then, is the toolkit we use to describe the functioning of the Universe. It’s the raw materials: the nails, the boards, the hammers and saws. Physics is how you apply that mathematics. Physics is how you put it all together to make Read More ›

From Andrew Urevig at National Geogaphic: Contradicting some previous accounts, the team argues that this new evidence appears to show that the common ancestor of all panarthropods did not have a complex three-part brain—and neither did the common ancestor of invertebrate panarthropods and vertebrates. … That structure can be traced back through the fossil record. Kerygmachela’s relatively simple brain, preserved as thin films of carbon, includes only the foremost of the three segments present in living arthropods. The researchers are relying on the remarkably hardy tardigrade (water bear) as a surviving example. Not everyone agrees: Tardigrade brains may or may not develop based on segments at all, says Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona who was not Read More ›

Last year the commentariat erupted in a frenzy of tut-tutting when it was revealed that Vice President Mike Pence has a personal rule never to eat alone with a woman other than his wife or attend events serving alcohol unless she is with him.  I thought about this story yesterday during a fruitful discussion I had with gpuccio about the limits of free will.  See comments 13-15 to this post. GP summed up his position as follows: I mean that we cannot really know what our real choices are, but that we always have choices.  I will try to be more clear. Your example of an addict is very good for that. We could think that the choice for an addict Read More ›

From NASA: The Twin Study propelled NASA into the genomics era of space travel. It was a ground-breaking study comparing what happened to astronaut Scott Kelly, in space, to his identical twin brother, Mark, who remained on Earth. The perfect nature versus nurture study was born. The Twins Study brought ten research teams from around the country together to accomplish one goal: discover what happens to the human body after spending one year in space. NASA has a grasp on what happens to the body after the standard-duration six-month missions aboard the International Space Station, but Scott Kelly’s one-year mission is a stepping stone to a three-year mission to Mars. More. So what did they find? Among other things, After Read More ›

Here’s my (O’Leary for News) review of James O’Keefe’s American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News (off-topic, unless you intend to rely on them in any way for communications): — Has North American journalism gone undercover? If traditional media were doing their job, few people would have heard of James O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s career as a provocateur started as a prank. On St. Patrick’s Day, 2005, he persuaded an unusually dense Rutgers administrator that persons of Irish descent might be offended by Lucky Charms cereal. She took the bait and removed the “offensive” boxes of cereal from the dining hall. … He was later propelled to fame by his exposure of community organizing group ACORN for Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at New Scientist, No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it’s there; we just haven’t been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter “dark DNA”. And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature. The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how Read More ›