News

Uniting gravitation with the other forces of nature still eludes us: What we have done recently is to discover a gap in the mathematics that led to the idea that black holes are totally bald. In 2016, Stephen, Andy and I found that black holes have an infinite collection of what we call “soft hair”. This discovery allows us to question the idea that black holes lead to a breakdown in the laws of physics. Stephen kept working with us up to the end of his life, and we have now published a paper that describes our current thoughts on the matter. In this paper, we describe a way of calculating the entropy of black holes. The entropy is basically Read More ›

We thought “purposeful efficiency” was enough to get a researcher fired, but read on: From ScienceDaily: The steps cells take in response to challenges are more complex than previously thought, finds new research published in the journal eLIFE. The study investigates a system relevant to cancer, viral infection, and diabetes as well as Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, revealing many cases of “purposeful inefficiency” in cellular behavior. These new pathways might offer routes for understanding and perhaps even treating these diseases, the study’s scientists note. “Surprisingly, cells often take an approach that seems quite inefficient,” explains Christine Vogel, an associate professor at New York University’s Department of Biology and the study’s lead author. “However, discovering these unexpected routes helps us Read More ›

And, he says, there is no nice way to put it: A new survey by Gallup shows that only 48% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in academia, down from 57% in 2015. And it’s not just due to partisanship; confidence has fallen among people of all political persuasions. While it is true that confidence has fallen the most among Republicans (17 points), it’s also down among Independents (4 points) and Democrats (6 points). Alex Berezow, “Confidence In Academia Falls Nine Points In Three Years” at American Council on Science and Health Here’s the survey. About the only group enjoying a lot of confidence are the military and small business. Pollsters are not mindreaders, of Read More ›

From the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences The world of quantum phenomena is full of paradoxes incomprehensible to human intuition and inexplicable to classical physics. This is the thesis we almost always hear when it comes to quantum mechanics. Here are some examples of phenomena that are commonly considered to be typically quantum: a single electron generating interference fringes behind two slits, as if it were passing through both at the same time; particles that are in different states at the same time, only to appear “magically” in one selected state at the moment of observation; measurements without interactions; erasing the past by means of a quantum eraser; or finally, nonlocality, which gives Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Sharing meat after hunting and exchanging other valued food items is considered key in the evolution of cooperation in human societies. One prominent idea is that humans share valuable foods to gain future favors, such that those we chose to share with are more likely to cooperate with us in the future. Despite regularly occurring in humans, sharing food outside of kinship or mating relationships is rare in non-human animals. Our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, are two of the rare exceptions, and because of the important role of food sharing in human evolution, examining the sharing patterns of chimpanzees can help to answer questions on how sharing food amongst adults evolved and how it may Read More ›

From report on a study of the rules developed by East African hunter-gatherers (the Hadza) around sharing food: Some camps share food more than others, but Hadza circulate among all camps rather than clustering in the most cooperative ones. Hadza individuals adjust their willingness to share food to the accepted standards, or social norms, of whatever temporary camp they live in, researchers report online September 20 in Current Biology. Social norms develop in poorly understood ways. But factors such as the presence of prolific hunters probably encourage sharing in Hadza camps, says a team led by psychologists Coren Apicella and Kristopher Smith of the University of Pennsylvania. In groups with such norms, cooperators interact only with cooperators and don’t get Read More ›

And he is serious. Even bout the predictive power. At the Guardian Michael Dixon, director of London’s Natural History Museum is upset about the downplaying the teaching of evolution which he perceives to be happening in the United State and Israel (not many details offered). Sarah Chaffee reminds us: If you remember, this is the museum founded by structuralist Richard Owen. The leadership there demonstrated its respect for Owen, a great scientist ahead of his time, by replacing a prominently placed 2,000-pound statue of him with one of Charles Darwin. Removing evolution from biology classes is a bad idea. But Dixon’s attitude is strangely dogmatic. He notes: “Darwin’s theory of evolution not only underpins all biological science, it has an Read More ›

The more that software encompasses the whole of life, the more it needs to take into account the whole of the person using it: In the early days of computing, software developers could completely ignore the spiritual needs of users. Computers were a tool—usually a business tool, used for brief periods to accomplish a task. They were not the backdrop of our lives. Today, however, users are practically attached to their computers—sometimes day and night. More and more human interaction takes place digitally. As the percentage of time that users spend with computers increases, the amount of humanity that software developers need to take into consideration increases as well. In short, because humans are spiritual beings, software needs to start Read More ›

Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk Anil Seth’s talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors. Part II Does your brain construct your conscious reality? In a word, no. Your brain doesn’t “think”; YOU think, using your brain The brain understands nothing, imagines nothing, sees nothing. It wills nothing. We understand, we imagine, we see, and we will, using our brains. See also: Can machines really learn? A parable of a book that learned Machine learning is a powerful and important tool that is likely to be of great Read More ›

If we can be forced to *want* something, is the will still free? If an electrode is applied to a specific brain region during “awake” neurosurgery, the patient may experience a strong desire to perform a related action and may even be mistaken about whether he has done so. For example, the study Movement intention after parietal cortex stimulation in humans (Karen Reilly et al, 2009), cited over 100 times at Pub Med, reported on patients undergoing awake brain surgery … Reilly’s work appears to demonstrate that a sense of agency—and free will—can be elicited by direct brain stimulation. It implies that free will is probably an illusion. Materialists frequently cite this and similar research as evidence that the experiential Read More ›

You can picture yourself eating a chocolate ice cream sundae: John Searle’s Chinese Room scenario is the most famous argument against the “strong AI” presumption that computation-writ-large-and-fast will become consciousness: … His argument shows that computers work at the level of syntax, whereas human agents work at the level of meaning: … I still find Searle’s argument persuasive, despite decades of attempts by other philosophers to poke holes in it. But there’s another, shorter and more intuitive argument against a materialist account of the mind. It has to do with intentional states. Michael Egnor and others have offered versions of this argument here at Mind Matters and elsewhere but I’d like to boil it down to its bare bones. Then Read More ›

Vid with Gunter Bechly The fossil record is dominated by abrupt appearances of new body plans and new groups of organisms. This conflicts with the gradualistic prediction of Darwinian Evolution. Here 18 explosive origins in the history of life are described, demonstrating that the famous Cambrian Explosion is far from being the exception to the rule. Also the fossil record establishes only very brief windows of time for the origin of complex new features, which creates an ubiquitous waiting time problem for the origin and fixation of the required coordinated mutations. This refutes the viability of the Neo-Darwinian evolutionary process as the single conceivable naturalistic or mechanistic explanation for biological origins, and thus confirms Intelligent Design as the only reasonable Read More ›

I (O’Leary for News) just discovered this fact because, acting on a tip, I was trying to find out whether mine was one of the millions of recently hacked accounts. I haven’t found that out yet but here is a list of posts Facebook removed from various groups’ Facebook pages as spam: Sociologist Steve Fuller: How ID Foxes Can Beat the Darwinian Lions Fuller clearly finds the ID foxes more interesting and sympathetic figures than the Darwinian lions: “The lion rules by focused shows of force, as opposed to the fox’s diverse displays of cunning.” [We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn’t follow our Community Standards. CLOSED] [From Evolution News, removed from Sanctuary, ID Consistent with the Read More ›

Researchers have found some of the oldest and slowest life forms on Earth: In a bid to hone in on the lower energy limits for life, Hans Røy at Aarhus University in Denmark probed the clays below the North Pacific gyre. Under the microscope, he found a community made up of bacteria and single-celled organisms called archaea in vanishingly small numbers. “There are only 1000 tiny cells in 1 cubic centimetre of sediment, so finding just one is literally like hunting for a needle in a haystack.” The microbes rely on oxygen, carbon and other nutrients in their deep environment to live, but Røy’s team found that carbon is so limited that the cells respire oxygen 10,000 times slower than bacteria Read More ›

Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally incompatible with our current understanding of “dark energy” — but only with “dark energy” can we explain the accelerated expansion of our current universe. Timm Wrase of the Vienna University of Technology quickly realized something odd about this conjecture: it seemed to be incompatible with the existence of the Higgs particle. His calculations, which he carried out together with theorists from Columbia University in New Read More ›