News

From Gerd Bossinger and Antanas Spokevicius at Phys.org: From ancient European beech trees to gigantic Californian redwoods and Australian mountain ashes, new research has found the enormous trunks of these trees are all formed from a single layer of cells no wider than the tip of a needle. … Wood is one of the world’s most important renewable resources, so you’d think we’d have an understanding of how it grows. But until now we didn’t know exactly how cells within the vascular cambium go about their business. The number of cell layers that make up the vascular cambium, and to what degree the fate of individual cells within the cambium is predetermined, has been a matter of debate for over Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at ENST: This week we’re celebrating the tenth anniversary of the passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act. It was a turning point in the effort to secure academic freedom for science teachers. That effort was never going to be an overnight success, but the LSEA marked an important beginning. Yes. Who could forget Pants-in-knot and the hysteria he generated about the dark ages emerging from the swampy Bayou? In fact, West notes, the LSEA shattered clichés like that in several ways. For one, it enjoyed broad bipartisan support — it was not a matter of Republicans versus Democrats. That’s got to be one reason it has resisted attempts at repeal led by activist Zack Kopplin, who Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: New Scientist today has a feature article headlined How to think about… The multiverse The idea of an infinite multitude of universes is forced on us by physics. It starts off quoting Sean Carroll: “One of the most common misconceptions is that the multiverse is a hypothesis,” says Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In fact, it is forced upon us.”It is a prediction of theories we have good reason to think are correct.” The problem with this claim is that it’s simply not true. There is no model that “we have good reason to think [is] correct” that predicts a multiverse of universes with different physics Read More ›

The reality that earth is fine-tuned for life screams out at us from stories that seem to make a point of not emphasizing the fact. From ScienceDaily: The researchers suggest that Kepler-186f’s axial tilt is very stable, much like the Earth, making it likely that it has regular seasons and a stable climate. The Georgia Tech team thinks the same is true for Kepler-62f, a super-Earth-sized planet orbiting around a star about 1,200 light-years away from us. How important is axial tilt for climate? Large variability in axial tilt could be a key reason why Mars transformed from a watery landscape billions of years ago to today’s barren desert. “Mars is in the habitable zone in our solar system, but Read More ›

While we are talking about retractions, from Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki at the New Food Economy: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that a widely cited result on farmer suicides was wrong. Over the past several months, numerous writers and reporters have relied on the finding, originally from a 2016 CDC report, to argue that farmers have the highest suicide rate in the country. That report found that workers in the “farming, fishing, and forestry,” job category killed themselves at over four times the national average, far and away the highest in the study. But on Friday, Courtney Lenard, a public relations official, confirmed to us in an email that CDC had misclassified Read More ›

From Alison McCook at Retraction Watch: n a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington (also on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization), Roger Davis of the University of Massachusetts (and former MCB editor), and Amy Kullas, ASM’s publication ethics manager — found 59 potentially problematic papers, of which five were retracted. Extrapolating from these findings and those of another paper that scanned duplication rates, the researchers propose that tens of thousands of papers Read More ›

From Steven Novella at The Ness: For example, as I said above, even though I am highly aware of what neuroscience has to say about the illusion of free will and decision making, I also recognize that we have to live our life as if we have free will. We do make decisions, and those decisions have moral and ethical implications. … To give yet another example, is there meaning in life? From a purely abstract philosophical perspective, I would have to say no. There is no objective source of meaning. But from a practical point of view I say – humans have a need for meaning, and we can make our own meaning in life. Sure, it’s subjective, but Read More ›

From John Saxbee at Church Times, reviewing Keith Eyeons’ The Theology of Everything: Renaissance Man joins the 21st century: … Yet scientists continue to pursue a theory of everything, and this irony is not lost on Eyeons, who sets out to reclaim this territory for theologians in general, and for Christian theology in particular. The subtitle channels Renaissance Man (sic) as the archetype of a mindset committed to a comprehensive and all-embracing account of reality. Modern dualisms that attribute what is physical or spiritual, objective or subjective, religious or scientific to separate silos need to be roundly challenged — especially when they are then co-opted to support atheism as the only respectable option for people today. More. People who insist on Read More ›

Plus a bunch of useful stuff. In a month when we have been heard hearing about all things alien, from everything from it’s good news that they probably don’t exist through to they might be hoarding stars… here is a book that has it all in one place: From Sophia Centre press: An anthology of works stemming from the ninth Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena conference. Editors: Nicholas Campion & Chris Impey Series: Studies in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, Vol. 9 Publisher: Sophia Centre Press, 2018 Format: Paperback, 352 pp. ISBN 978-1-907767-11-1 Human beings have long imagined what other worlds are like. They have imagined travelling to them, have endowed them with meaning and mystery, and have fantasised about the beings Read More ›

From Chuck Dinerstein at American Council for Science and Health: There is increasing evidence that a correlation exists between a person’s social support and engagement and their longevity. At a bare minimum, it makes sense because it is challenging to manage chronic disease or recovery from hospitalization on your own. A new study looks at religious participation as a marker for that social integration and to avoid the bias of self-reported religious activity; the researchers measured religious involvement noted in obituaries. (Of course, they might also have induced a bit of bias on the report of grieving family members writing those obituaries) There is a clear link between attendance at religious services and social support, even the number of close Read More ›

Karsten Pultz, author of a book on intelligent design in nature (in Danish) Exit Evolution, writes to comment on this recent exchange at ENST between Doug Axe, ID theorist and author of Undeniable, and Hans Vodder, theistic evolutionist, at ENST : In my [Axe’s] previous response to Hans, I tried to show why all attempts to explain life as something accidental require unreasonable appeals to coincidence. Biologists have been charmed into thinking that natural selection demystifies would-be miracles by performing them a bit at a time, but brilliant invention is actually no less miraculous in slow motion. Hans has responded with these points: First, as God can “make” things in a variety of ways, including ways that involve natural processes, I Read More ›

Readers will remember Sam Harris as one of the Four Horsemen of the atheist apocalypse (with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens). Recently, he fell out with the progressives and ended up on the Dark Internet. He talks with Dan Hall at the Independent: Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, best-selling author, philosopher and host of the podcast Waking Up. He describes his job as ‘someone who thinks in public’ and has established a reputation as one of the leading lights in both New Atheism and secular spirituality. We sat down ahead of the biggest live event of his career – his upcoming show at the O2 Arena with psychology professor Jordan Peterson and Centre for Social Cohesion founder Douglas Read More ›

From Michael Shermer at Scientific American: Are these “hard” problems, as philosopher David Chalmers characterized consciousness, or are they truly insoluble “mysterian” problems, as philosopher Owen Flanagan designated them (inspired by the 1960s rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians)? The “old mysterians” were dualists who believed in nonmaterial properties, such as the soul, that cannot be explained by natural processes. The “new mysterians,” Flanagan says, contend that consciousness can never be explained because of the limitations of human cognition. I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems—not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in principle, relating to how the Read More ›

From Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: In the seventh episode of Crazy/Genius, a new podcast from The Atlantic on tech, science, and culture, we put the question to several experts, including Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist of nasa and current director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Adam Frank, a writer and astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; Anders Sandberg, a scientist and futurist at the University of Oxford; and Tim Urban, the science essayist at Wait But Why.More. Answers fell into three broad, predictable categories: There re no aliens. There are extraterrestrial life forms but they re not smart. And, the all-time favorite, they are out there but hiding. One wonders why there is a renewed Read More ›

Otherwise how do we explain this? From Matthew Olson at Digg: This Collaborative Map Of The Paranormal In Seattle Is The Best Thing Online This Week Founded by Seattleites Garrett Kelly (@boontdustie) and Jeremy Puma, the Liminal Seattle map is the region’s new go-to tool for tracking “fairies, ghosts, bigfoot, time travelers, extraterrestrials, ultraterrestrials, crow conferences, sentient lawn computers, lanyard’d ogres, broccoli wizards, etc.” … The project seems fairly tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t doubt that several of the stories marked on the map are real and genuinely inexplicable to the people who submitted them. More. Seattle? From Marcie Sillman & Kate O’Connell KUOW, If you don’t believe in God, Seattle may be the city for you. Ten percent of Seattle Read More ›