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From Emily Conover at ScienceNews, describing the work of physicist Nicholas Gisin: Gisin — known for his work on the foundations and applications of quantum mechanics — takes issue with real numbers that consist of a never-ending string of digits with no discernable pattern and that can’t be calculated by a computer. Such numbers (for example, 1.9801545341073… and so on) contain an infinite amount of information: You could imagine encoding in those digits the answers to every fathomable question in the English language — and more. But to represent the world, real numbers shouldn’t contain unlimited information, Gisin says, because, “in a finite volume of space you will never have an infinite amount of information.” Instead, Gisin argues March 19 Read More ›

From Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic: As you read this article, the cells in your body are dividing and the DNA in them is being copied, letter by letter. So long is the human genome—more than 3 billion letters—that even an astonishingly low error rate of one in many million letters could amount to 10 new mutations every time a cell divides. Oh, perhaps you’re also catching some sun (ultraviolet rays) while you read this, or enjoying a beer (alcohol), or have recently been high in the atmosphere on an airplane (cosmic rays). Congratulations, you’ve given yourself even more mutations. In a typical day, scientists estimate, the 37 trillion cells in your body will accumulate trillions of new mutations.More. We Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: See also: Why do science journalists promote “fake physics” to the public? and Distinguishing between causation and correlation: Microwaves and cancer edition, with David Nguyen.

From Tyler Krueger at Astronomy: Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is just over 100 years old, and so far it has predicted the interaction between celestial objects and the space-time field very well. There are a few troublesome spots, however, in which the theory of general relativity doesn’t agree with quantum mechanics. These gaps have confounded researchers for decades, and have sprouted a handful of hypotheses attempting to explain the dissonance. Dark matter and dark energy are the prevailing stand-in answers for this problem, but they are, as of yet, merely stand-ins. And there are some physicists that do not buy into these explanations. Erik Verlinde, a professor of science mathematics, and informatics at the University of Amsterdam, is Read More ›

From cognitive scientist Alan Jasanoff, author of The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are, at Aeon: But lost in the public’s romance with the brain is the most fundamental lesson neuroscience has to teach us: that the organ of our minds is a purely physical entity, conceptually and causally embedded in the natural world. Although the brain is required for almost everything we do, it never works alone. Instead, its function is inextricably linked to the body and to the environment around it. The interdependence of these factors is masked however by a cultural phenomenon I call the ‘cerebral mystique’ – a pervasive idealisation of the brain and its singular importance, which Read More ›

From Eugene Koonin at Immunoconcept: Abstract: The CRISPR-Cas systems of bacterial and archaeal adaptive immunity have become a household name among biologists and even the general public thanks to the unprecedented success of the new generation of genome editing tools utilizing Cas proteins. However, the fundamental biological features of CRISPR-Cas are of no lesser interest and have major impacts on our understanding of the evolution of antivirus defense, host-parasite coevolution, self vs non-self discrimination and mechanisms of adaptation. CRISPR-Cas systems present the best known case in point for Lamarckian evolution, i.e. generation of heritable, adaptive genomic changes in response to encounters with external factors, in this case, foreign nucleic acids. CRISPR-Cas systems employ multiple mechanisms of self vs non-self discrimination Read More ›

From Jeremy P. Shapiro, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, at Raw Story: Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways. … As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder. … This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists. They seem to misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: See also: Distinguishing between causation and correlation: Global warming edition

From Matthew Hutson at Science: Ali Rahimi, a researcher in artificial intelligence (AI) at Google in San Francisco, California, has charged that machine learning algorithms, in which computers learn through trial and error, have become a form of “alchemy.” Researchers, he says, do not know why some algorithms work and others don’t, nor do they have rigorous criteria for choosing one AI architecture over another. Now, in a paper presented on 30 April at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Vancouver, Canada, Rahimi and his collaborators document examples of what they see as the alchemy problem and offer prescriptions for bolstering AI’s rigor. … (paywall) Science 04 May 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6388, pp. 478 DOI: 10.1126/science.360.6388.478More. AI, meaning Read More ›

Off topic, that is, unless you are thinking of going into debt for someone’s education. From California educator Steven Ma at his blog: The SAT and ACT are important standardized tests in the college admissions process that is inundated with more applications than there is time to read. However, the article in the Wall Street Journal (March 8, 2018) by Nathan Kuncel and Paul Sackett (K&S) is exceptionally misleading regarding evidence that “research is clear: [the SAT/ACT] is an invaluable measure of how students are likely to perform in college and beyond.” The authors state six myths about “standardized tests,” though they primarily are discussing the SAT and ACT, but offer evidence that undermines their own claims as to why Read More ›

Anatomy category: From Rui Diogo at Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution: Just-so stories are prominent in human evolution literature because of our tendency to create simple progressionist narratives about our “special” place in nature, despite the fact that these stories are almost exclusively based on hard tissue data. How can we be so certain about the evolution of human facial communication, bipedalism, tool use, or speech without detailed knowledge of the internal anatomy of for instance, one of the two extant species more closely related to us, the bonobos? Here I show how many of these stories now become obsolete, after such a comprehensive knowledge on the anatomy of bonobos and other primates is finally put together. Each and every Read More ›

Readers may well remember Adam Perkins, a scientist who has spoken out on the importance of free speech in science. Why? From Sarah Chaffee at ENST: Adam Perkins, King’s College London lecturer in Neurobiology of Personality, was scheduled to deliver a talk at his institution. But King’s College cancelled the event because they considered it too “high risk.” What was he going to say that was so “risky” that he needed to be shut down? … He starts off with a bang. “We need free speech in science because science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is Read More ›

From professor of electrical engineering Karl J. Stephan at MercatorNet: “For one low price,” the magician said, “I can give you the power to change your servants into perfectly obedient machines. They’ll look just like they do now, but you won’t have to feed them or let them sleep or rest. And they will do your every bidding exactly the way you want.” “Hmm,” said the king. “Sounds too good to be true.” “I have references!” said the magician. And he pulled out a sheaf of letters written by kings of nearby kingdoms, some of whom King Minsky even knew. They all swore by the magician’s abilities and said they were delighted with what he was offering. “Well, all right, Read More ›

The eukaryote smashes and rearranges its genome. Our results show that a great diversity of scrambled gene maps are present in the germline genome of O. trifallax. The presence of such highly nested architectures was a surprise and suggests that layers upon layers of MDS and gene translocations constantly alter the genome, while the detection of highly scrambled patterns reveals architectures that transcend simple twists and turns of the DNA. We present new metrics of topological genome complexity, that go beyond the linear nature of eukaryotic chromosomes and consider their deeply structured and layered history. While several models of genome rearrangement have been reported, the unprecedented levels of rearrangements in this system necessitate additional descriptive and mathematical tools, some of Read More ›

About time too. From Jim Daley at The Scientist: The biological species concept, proposed by Ernst Mayr in the 1940s, defines a species as a group of individuals that can make fertile offspring only with one another, a notion he termed “reproductive isolation.” But that idea doesn’t jibe with Detwiler’s observations of monkeys in Gombe. By analyzing the mitochondrial DNA from epithelial cells found in 144 monkeys’ poop, she showed that red-tailed guenons (Cercopithecus ascanius) and blue guenons (C. mitis) have been mating and producing hybrid offspring for many generations. Using the sequencing data, she found that all of the monkeys in the park—hybrids, red-tails, and blues alike—can trace their ancestry back to an original group of female red-tailed guenons Read More ›