A real advantage is that promising “biomarkers” may be found in fossils that are too fragmentary to make it into the display collection. If so, expect to hear expressions like “unexpected,” “remarkable,” “earlier than thought” and “more complex than expected” quite frequently.
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Weird new species of comb jelly detected only by video
Remote vehicles and autonomous vehicles may have a huge role to play in exploring the vast proportion of the ocean that is currently largely unknown. We will probably see stranger stuff yet.
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor challenges neurologist Steven Novella to prove that the mind is just what the brain does
Novella has said that a recent study of mice disproves mind-body dualism.
The monolith has disappeared…
The CORRECT explanation, of course, is that it lost the battle for survival of the fittest to fitter competitors and will not contribute, starting from non-life, to the origin of a new type of life via abiogenesis. But apparently, a new monolith has evolved and then suddenly gone extinct in Romania. Nature red in tooth and claw, and all that…
Tens of thousands of rock paintings from 12,500 ya discovered in Colombia
From The Guardian: Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
Dark matter and dark energy as 21st century Ptolemaic epicycles? – Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Why can’t they find dark matter, despite much search? Sheldon: The old joke is that a man is looking under a lamppost one night. The policeman asks what he is doing. “Looking for my keys” he replies. “Did you lose them here?” “No, but the light is better over here.” (And the funding is better for some research than for others.)
Snowball Earth prof attacked by Cancel Culture
Jacobson warns, “What is so disturbing is the large number of graduate and post-doctoral students who signed the list of demands. I warned in 2017 that STEM would not be immune to the social justice (and racial) warfare tearing through universities.”
At Geological Society of America’s house rag: QUIT calling it the Cambrian Explosion!
Sorry, guys. The Cambrian is a bit like quantum theory. Anyone who ISN’T flummoxed by it doesn’t understand it. Now comes the punch line: “We suggest, as an alternative to “Cambrian explosion,” the Great Cambrian Biodiversification (GCB)…” Sure, that’ll catch on. It sounds like a large animal vet’s description of an elephant’s bowel problems.
At Nautilus: How Einstein reconciled religion to science
Actually, despite the article’s title, Einstein didn’t reconcile anything. He said different things at different times to different people. And it didn’t matter. People took what they wanted from it. It sounds as though he didn’t really have a firm opinion.
Crybullies in publishing attack Jordan Peterson but not Mein Kampf
This would be off topic except that we may anticipate similar scenes played out in the future around books with any theme that Cancel Culture deems ID-friendly (or whatever their beech is). As it happens, Penguin’s UK branch publishes Hitler’s Mein Kampf but that’s okay with the Woke because shut up.
Cancel Culture tries to get a Nature Communications paper retracted
We are informed that all science Twitter is in a ghastly rage over an open access paper in Nature Communications which seems to show that female scientists benefit more from male mentors than from female mentors. To a layperson with some life experience, that wouldn’t be a surprising outcome at all. In a system that has been male-dominated since forever, more guys would be higher up on the pole. And if you want to get ahead, it pays to know Top People… But, of course, the Outrage Mob is sharpening the guillotine. Their final enemy is, after all, reality in any of its forms.
Proposed anxiety remedy: Your brain isn’t for thinking, just surviving
If the brain is really just a mechanism for deposits and withdrawals, who or what thought up the image that describes it that way? Unthinking things cannot characterize themselves. The brain is characterized, correctly or otherwise, by something that operates with but beyond the brain. For convenience, we refer to it as the mind.
A laugh from the world of predatory journals
Our intrepid narrator had reason to wonder when the badly written letter soliciting papers had an odd attachment: “The editor who sent it to me had, inexplicably, attached a handbook on Covid-19 hospital protocols, a document that detailed at length the precise mechanism of sealing the dead in a “leak-proof corpse wrapping sheet.”
At Quanta: Are we looking at the end of physics?
Ah yes, the problem of dead-endedness that Sabine Hossenfelder often writes about. As does Columbia mathematician Peter Woit, on the subject of string theory. But surely much of the nonsense around string theory and the multiverse is in part due to a practical failure—the inability to find even a single particle of dark matter or similar evidence for dark energy.
Asked at The Conversation: Could dinosaurs re-evolve?
We are told no. But just a minute. According to the story, some dinos evolved into birds. If so, massive changes ARE possible. It’s not clear why changed circumstances could not cause some of those changes to be reversed.