News

From Mark Barna at Discover: A study published today in Science indicates that people are indeed living longer and that the maximum lifespan for humans has not yet been reached. … And what they found was that after the age of 105, human mortality seems to hit a plateau. That is, you aren’t any more likely to die at 110 than at 105. It’s a contradictory finding, because mortality ticks steadily upward as we get older at all previous ages. Hit that golden age, a temporal “island of stability” if you will, though, and your odds of surviving stay about the same. … A report in 2016 out of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine concluded that maximum human life Read More ›

In a world where some researchers earnestly study the question of why so many people don’t ”trust science,” we learn from Michael Marlow & Edward Archer at RealClearScience: In contrast [to confidence in politicians], public confidence in the ‘scientific community’ runs at 40% and has remained stable since the 1970s. This trust, however, turns out to be seriously misplaced when it comes to the government’s data on what we eat and drink. The nutrition research methods of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) are based on the naïve but politically expedient notion that a person’s usual diet can be measured simply by asking what he or she remembered eating and drinking. Read More ›

From Victoria Gill at the BBC: Now, an experiment using a vending machine specifically designed for crows has revealed something about how intelligence evolves. These are, of course, the famous New Caledonian crows, very smarter at manipulating objects. They were able to peck the right size paper token in order to get a treat from a vending machine. Scientists who have studied these birds for years say they have already revealed the very earliest stages of innovation. Of his own insights into the animals’ abilities, Prof Christian Rutz, from University of St Andrews, has said: “When I see these crows making hooked tools, I have a glimpse of the very foundations of a technology that is evolving.” No. The ability Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In almost all adult mammals, testes are located either in a scrotum or in the lower abdomen. But testes initially develop deep inside the abdomen at a position close to the kidneys, as seen in mammalian embryos. The final testicular position is the result of a descent process that occurs during animal development. However, several African species such as elephants, tenrecs, golden moles, elephant shrews, manatees, and rock hyraxes differ from the other mammals by lacking any descent and having testes at their initial abdominal position. It is an open question whether these African species lost the testicular descent process or whether other mammals gained that feature. Thomas Lehmann from the Senckenberg Frankfurt adds: “The evolution of testicular Read More ›

From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel: No amount of fancy probabilistic analysis can justify treating guesswork and wishful thinking as having any sort of scientific weight. Applying scientific techniques to an inherently unscientific endeavor, such as inventing estimates to unknowns about the Universe, doesn’t make it any more scientific. The opposite of knowledge isn’t ignorance; it’s the illusion of knowledge. It’s still possible that life, and even intelligent life, is ubiquitous in our galaxy and the Universe. It’s also possible that one is common and one is uncommon, or that both are extraordinarily rare. Until we have more information, don’t be fooled by the headlines: these aren’t brilliant estimates or groundbreaking work. It’s guessing, in the absence of any good evidence. That’s Read More ›

How it got to North America is a conundrum for evolution studies thugh hardly a new or unusual one. From Evolution News and Science Today: In a delightful article here yesterday, German paleontologist Günter Bechly documents the many absurdities that result when the Darwinian teaching on universal common ancestry runs up against a consideration of the field of biogeography. … His examples include ratite birds, freshwater snails, trapdoor snails, worm-lizards, iguanas and boine snakes, and more. Note: Gunter Bechly got erased from Wikipedia on account of having too many doubts and questions. They like their Darwinism simple there. Apart from individual career setbacks, why does it matter? It matters because at 52 million years ago, North America was completely separated from Read More ›

The library named in honor of the well-known theistic evolutionist and 2010 Templeton winner is to be renamed. From a university media release: IRVINE, Calif., June 28, 2018 – The University of California, Irvine is taking steps to remove the Ayala name from its biology school and central science library after an internal investigation substantiated a number of sexual harassment claims against Francisco J. Ayala, the signature donor of both institutions. The investigation by the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (OEOD) began in November 2017 and ended in May 2018. Four women from the School of Biological Sciences, who asked to be identified, filed reports with the OEOD: Kathleen Treseder, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology; Jessica Read More ›

From the University of Bonn: A new study found a way to determine whether the mysterious “star putty” really exists Researchers at the University of Bonn and the University of California at Irvine used sophisticated computer simulations to devise a test that could answer a burning question in astrophysics: is there really dark matter? Or does Newton’s gravitational law need to be modified? The new study, now published in the Physical Review Letters, shows that the answer is hidden in the motion of the stars within small satellite galaxies swirling around the Milky Way. Using one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the scientists have simulated the matter distribution of the so-called satellite “dwarf” galaxies. These are small galaxies Read More ›

“…stuck in an unproductive state of arrested development…” From Tim Collins at the Daily Mail: A rare galaxy stuck in a state of arrested development is providing scientists with a unique window into the early days of the universe. The unusual cosmic region has remained frozen for the past 10 billion years, producing no new stars in all of that time. Only one in a thousand galaxies is thought to be like NGC 1277, which comprises approximately a trillion stars in the central zone of the Perseus Cluster, started out very active but then just stopped. From astronomer Michael Beasley, ‘I’ve been studying globular clusters in galaxies for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The research, led by the University of Cambridge, found that the most successful organisms living in the oceans more than half a billion years ago were the ones that were able to ‘throw’ their offspring the farthest, thereby colonising their surroundings. The results are reported in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. Prior to the Ediacaran period, between 635 and 541 million years ago, life forms were microscopic in size, but during the Ediacaran, large, complex organisms first appeared, some of which — such as a type of organism known as rangeomorphs — grew as tall as two metres. These organisms were some of the first complex organisms on Earth, and although they look like ferns, they may Read More ›

The discovery of complex organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Enceladus raises the question:What about introducing organisms from Earth, even if none exist out there now? From Laurie Fickman at the University of Houston: In professor George Fox’s lab at the University of Houston, scientists are studying Earth germs that could be contaminating other planets. Despite extreme decontamination efforts, bacterial spores from Earth still manage to find their way into outer space aboard spacecraft. Fox and his team are examining how and why some spores elude decontamination. Their research is published in “BMC Microbiology.” To gain access into the uber-sanitized clean rooms at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the world’s largest clean room, or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Read More ›

From Helen Briggs at the BBC: The fossil’s weird features suggests it is the earliest known living relative not just of the turacos, but of cuckoos and bustards (large long-legged birds). And the fact the remains were unearthed in North America shows the distribution of different birds around the globe would have been very different in the past. … This raises questions about how, when, and why the birds became restricted to tropical latitudes. Dr Field said there are over 11,000 living species of bird today, and trying to understand how this incredible diversity is only possible “by appealing to what the fossil record tells us about how those evolutionary transitions have taken place”. More. In this case, what the Read More ›

From Michelle Starr at ScienceAlert: These findings bolster the hypothesis that, deep under its icy crust, Enceladus could be harbouring simple marine life, clustered around the warmth of hydrothermal vents. Previously, simple organic molecules detected on the little moon were under around 50 atomic mass units and only contained a handful of carbon atoms. “We are, yet again, blown away by Enceladus,” said geochemist and planetary scientist Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute. “We’ve found organic molecules with masses above 200 atomic mass units. That’s over ten times heavier than methane. “With complex organic molecules emanating from its liquid water ocean, this moon is the only body besides Earth known to simultaneously satisfy all of the basic requirements for Read More ›

From Asher Elbein at New York Times: Europe’s migratory songbirds can’t fight off diseases as well as African species that stay put. But that may be to the European birds’ advantage. The evolutionary origins of bird migration are a longstanding puzzle for ornithologists, and the role of disease in influencing the behavior has never been entirely clear. A recent study by Dr. O’Connor and her colleagues examined the genealogy and immune responses of about 1,300 species of songbirds from both continents. The surprising result: Migratory birds have weaker immune systems than tropical species that stay put. Researchers have assumed that migratory birds, travelling between different pathogen populations, woud have especially tough immune systems. To their surprise, the team found that African Read More ›

Okay, They’re not Out There. But maybe something is. Any form of extraterrestrial life could shed light on at least some questions. In that spirit, we learn from ScienceDaily of a newly published guidebook, in th form of a seriesof papers based on finds here on Earth: Some of the leading experts in the field, including a UC Riverside team of researchers, have written a major series of review papers on the past, present, and future of the search for life on other planets. Published in Astrobiology, the papers represent two years of work by the Nexus for Exoplanet Systems Science (NExSS), a NASA-coordinated research network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability, and by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Scientists have Read More ›