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Or does he get a pass because he is pop culture squared? Or (hold your breath) does progressivism make people stupid as well as unpleasant? From Philip Ball at the Guardian: The row over racist remarks made by Einstein says more about the pedestals we put great scientists on than the man himself Was Albert Einstein racist? In pondering the disobliging remarks he made about Chinese and Japanese people in the private diaries he kept about his travels to east Asia in 1922-3, just published by Princeton University Press, it’s not a particularly helpful question. On the one hand, there’s the view that even this famously humane and broadminded scientist was inevitably a man of his time. Accordingly, we can’t Read More ›

Further to Why we should trust “science,” whatever that is, from a long form article by Rebecca Trager at Chemistry World: Concerns about forensic science have lurked for some time. Major science advisory bodies in the US and UK had warned about deficiencies in the field that require action. In 2013, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) initiated a study, known as Mix13, which involved more than 100 crime labs analysing the same DNA mixtures in five mock cases. The complexity of the mixture increased in each case, and in the final case, which was the most complex, about 70% of those labs falsely included a DNA profile that was not actually in the mixture. Nist has Read More ›

From Haley Dunning at Imperial College of London: The vast majority of life on Earth uses visible red light in the process of photosynthesis, but the new type uses near-infrared light instead. It was detected in a wide range of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) when they grow in near-infrared light, found in shaded conditions like bacterial mats in Yellowstone and in beach rock in Australia. As scientists have now discovered, it also occurs in a cupboard fitted with infrared LEDs in Imperial College London. … The standard, near-universal type of photosynthesis uses the green pigment, chlorophyll-a, both to collect light and use its energy to make useful biochemicals and oxygen. The way chlorophyll-a absorbs light means only the energy from red Read More ›

As if psychology were not troubled enough. Psychologist Cristine Legare argues at Nautilus: My high school biology teacher, Mr. Whittington, put a framed picture of a primate ancestor in the front of his classroom—a place of reverence. In a deeply religious and conservative community in rural America, this was a radical act. Evolution, among the most well-supported scientific theories in human history, was then, and still is, deliberately censored from biological science education. But Whittington taught evolution unapologetically, as “the single best idea anybody ever had,” as the philosopher Dan Dennett described it. Whittington saw me looking at the primate in wonder one day and said, “Cristine, look at its hands. Now look at your hands. This is what common Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have captured the one cell that is capable of regenerating an entire organism. For over a century, scientists have witnessed the effects of this cellular marvel, which enables creatures such as the planarian flatworm to perform death-defying feats like regrowing a severed head. But until recently, they lacked the tools necessary to target and track this cell, so they could watch it in action and discover its secrets. … “This is the first time that an adult pluripotent stem cell has been isolated prospectively,” says Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., an investigator at the Stowers Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute and senior author of the study. “Our finding essentially says Read More ›

From a new paper by AI researcher Gary Marcus at ArXiv: Although deep learning has historical roots going back decades, neither the term “deep learning” nor the approach was popular just over five years ago, when the field was reignited by papers such as Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton’s now classic (2012) deep network model of Imagenet. What has the field discovered in the five subsequent years? Against a background of considerable progress in areas such as speech recognition, image recognition, and game playing, and considerable enthusiasm in the popular press, I present ten concerns for deep learning, and suggest that deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence. From the Conclusion: As Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: Pro-GMO Professor Fired for Endorsing Glyphosate David Zaruk is an expert in European Union regulations and risk communication. He writes a blog, titled The Risk-Monger, which largely examines regulatory issues involving biotechnology, such as GMOs and glyphosate. For nearly a decade, he also was an adjunct professor of communications at Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, Belgium. As Dr. Zaruk writes in a lengthy blog post, he recently lost his job from the university. Why? According to Dr. Zaruk, it’s because he is avidly pro-biotechnology and another professor (at a different university!) didn’t like it. So, he pulled a few strings and got Dr. Zaruk fired. It should be noted that Olivier Read More ›

From Mara Johnson-Groh at Astronomy: Despite residing in it, it’s hard for us to know exactly how big the Milky Way is. But new research has found that our galaxy is bigger than previously thought. Using a large survey of stars instead of just models (as previous researchers did), astronomers have now determined the disk of our galaxy to be 200,000 light-years across — twice as large as was believed a decade ago. … With a process known as spectroscopy, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and at the National Astronomical Observatories of Beijing studied the chemical composition of over 4,600 stars from two surveys, APOGEE and LAMOST, and mapped out which stars are part of the disk Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In 2013, the discovery of two giant viruses unlike anything seen before blurred the line between the viral and cellular world. Pandoraviruses are as big as bacteria, and contain genomes that are more complex than those found in some eukaryotic organisms (1). Their strange amphora shape and enormous, atypical genome (2) led scientists to wonder where they came from. The same team has since isolated three new members of the family in Marseille, continental France, Nouméa, New Caledonia, and Melbourne, Australia. With another virus found in Germany, the team compared those six known cases using different approaches. Analyses showed that despite having very similar shapes and functions, these viruses only share half of their genes coding for proteins. Read More ›

From Bill Dembski at Freedom, Technology, Education: Artificial Intelligence’s Homunculus Problem: Why AI Is Unlikely Ever to Match Human Intelligence So how can we see that AI is not, and will likely never be, a match for human intelligence? The argument is simple and straightforward. AI, and that includes everything from classical expert systems to contemporary machine learning, always comes down to solving specific problems. This can be readily reconceptualized in terms of search (for the reconceptualization, see here): There’s a well-defined search space and a target to be found and the task of AI is to find that target efficiently and reliably. … If intelligence were simply a matter of finding targets in well-defined search spaces, then AI could, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: One day in Myanmar during the Cretaceous period, a tick managed to ensnare itself in a spider web. Realizing its predicament, the tick struggled to get free. But the spider that built the web was having none of it. The spider popped over to the doomed tick and quickly wrapped it up in silk, immobilizing it for eternity. We know the outline of this primordial worst-day-ever because the silk-wrapped tick subsequently was entombed in amber that may have dripped from a nearby tree. Its fate, literally, was sealed. … “It’s really just an interesting little story — a piece of frozen behavior and an interaction between two organisms,” he said. “Rather than being the oldest thing or the Read More ›

A friend writes to mention this page (2016) at National Center for Biotechnology Information: — The following genetic codes are described here: 1. The Standard Code 2. The Vertebrate Mitochondrial Code 3. The Yeast Mitochondrial Code 4. The Mold, Protozoan, and Coelenterate Mitochondrial Code and the Mycoplasma/Spiroplasma Code 5. The Invertebrate Mitochondrial Code 6. The Ciliate, Dasycladacean and Hexamita Nuclear Code 9. The Echinoderm and Flatworm Mitochondrial Code 10. The Euplotid Nuclear Code 11. The Bacterial, Archaeal and Plant Plastid Code 12. The Alternative Yeast Nuclear Code 13. The Ascidian Mitochondrial Code 14. The Alternative Flatworm Mitochondrial Code 16. Chlorophycean Mitochondrial Code 21. Trematode Mitochondrial Code 22. Scenedesmus obliquus Mitochondrial Code 23. Thraustochytrium Mitochondrial Code 24. Pterobranchia Mitochondrial Code 25. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: An international team of academics undertook a large-scale review of research into turn-taking behaviour in animal communication, analysing hundreds of animal studies. Turn-taking, the orderly exchange of communicative signals, is a hallmark of human conversation and has been shown to be largely universal across human cultures. The review, a collaboration between the Universities of York and Sheffield, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, reveals that this most human of abilities is actually remarkably widespread across the animal kingdom. While research on turn-taking behaviour is abundant, beginning more than 50 years ago with studies of the vocal interactions of birds, the literature is currently fragmented, making Read More ›

“Just like primates can.” From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The skill could help the birds forage for food and avoid predators, suggesting that there are good evolutionary reasons why pigeons might instinctively understand percentages. (paywall) More. This recalls the Monty Hall dilemma: From Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience: Scientists tested six pigeons with an apparatus with three keys. The keys lit up white to show a prize was available. After the birds pecked a key, one of the keys the bird did not choose deactivated, showing it was a wrong choice, and the other two lit up green. The pigeons were rewarded with bird feed if they made the right choice. In the experiments, the birds quickly reached the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In research published in the journal Science, Australian and French researchers tested whether honey bees can rank numerical quantities and understand that zero belongs at the lower end of a sequence of numbers. Associate Professor Adrian Dyer, from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said the number zero was the backbone of modern maths and technological advancements. “Zero is a difficult concept to understand and a mathematical skill that doesn’t come easily — it takes children a few years to learn,” Dyer said. … But bee brains have fewer than 1 million neurons — compared with the 86,000 million neurons of a human brain — and little was known about how insect brains would cope with being tested on Read More ›