With Nature (don’t watch this if you are afraid of snakes): Is there any corner of possibility that is not occupied by some sort of life form?
Author: News
Denyse O'Leary is the News blogger for Uncommon Descent
Oxford mathematician: Computers will not out-think humans
Lennox: Our undoubted progress in technology in terms of speed and competence can easily mask the huge barrier that stands in the way of superior intelligent machines — consciousness.
At Mind Matters News: George Montañez on what’s wrong with the Turing Test
Marks: It’s very easy to determine if who you’re talking to is a computer. You just ask them to compute the square root of 30 or something, because a human would take a while to get the square root of 30.
How do cells have the “talent” to just change their settings?
Hmm. Either cells are smarter than we think or some sort of fine-tuning underlies biology.
Did cosmic rays cause right-handed DNA?
At Quanta: Many researchers believe the selection to be random: Those right-handed genetic strands just happened to pop up first, or in slightly greater numbers. But for more than a century, some have pondered whether biology’s innate handedness has deeper roots.
Paper: Inflation doesn’t solve fine-tuning puzzles
From Physical Review D: We investigate the initial conditions of inflation in a Bianchi I universe that is homogeneous but not isotropic. We use the Eisenhart lift to describe such a theory geometrically as geodesics on a field-space manifold. We construct the phase-space manifold of the theory by considering the tangent bundle of the field Read More…
Eric Holloway: Why Bell’s theorem matters
Especially to conservation of information theory: This brings us to a more general result known as the conservation of information. Design theorists William Dembski and Robert J. Marks defined the law of conservation of information in their 2009 paper “Conservation of Information in Search” and then proved the result in their follow-on 2010 paper “The Read More…
Dino death: Asteroid impact more likely than volcanoes, new study says
t Phjys.org: Now, a research team from Imperial College London, the University of Bristol and University College London has shown that only the asteroid impact could have created conditions that were unfavourable for dinosaurs across the globe.
Humans vs monkeys Science claims we should question more sharply
ScienceDaily: “In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures and species, researchers found that indigenous Tsimane’ people in Bolivia’s Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for “recursion,” But aren’t these claims a bit ridiculous? When was the last time a monkey conveyed a complex idea?
At Forbes: What we are getting wrong about Schrodinger’s cat
Siegel: In other words, pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about Schrödinger’s cat is probably a myth, with the sole exception of the fact that quantum systems actually are well-described by a probabilistically weighted superposition of all possible, allowable states, and that an observation or measurement will always reveal one and only one definitive state.
There is an “underlying design principle” in plants?
“Our model shows that by absorbing only very specific colors of light, photosynthetic organisms may automatically protect themselves against sudden changes — or ‘noise’ — in solar energy, resulting in remarkably efficient power conversion,” said Gabor, an associate professor of physics and astronomy, who led the study appearing today in the journal Science.
A big evolution theory is NOT backed up?
ust the title. Punk Eek was supposed to be the final smack in the face to Darwin doubters. As if the science pr site’s purpose is not just to defend Darwinism.Could we someday have a discussion of the various ways evolution happens?
Asked at Mind Matters News: How Do Sounds Contain Ideas?
Well, how do they? It’s not a simple question! Human language differs from animal and plant communication systems in that it enables the transmission of ideas, which are abstractions. Think of the Pythagorean theorem or tripartite government. Many explanations of how human language came to exist seem to be stabbing in the dark.
Theoretical physicist: Physics has made huge strides, but has not upset free will
George Ellis: If you seriously believe that fundamental forces leave no space for free will, then it’s impossible for us to genuinely make choices as moral beings. We wouldn’t be accountable in any meaningful way for our reactions to global climate change, child trafficking or viral pandemics. The underlying physics would in reality be governing Read More…
At Gizmodo: A black hole collides with something that “shouldn’t exist”?
Dvorsky: Astronomers are puzzling over observations that show a black hole smashing into a mystery object of unusual size.