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From Robin Nixon, Elizabeth Peterson and Karen Rowan (October 2016) at LiveScience: 25 Medical Myths that Just Won’t Go Away Despite what you may have heard, drinking eight glasses of water a day isn’t the key to good health. Also, neglecting to wear a coat on a cold day won’t make you sick. And — you might want to sit down for this — pregnancy doesn’t last nine months. Health-related myths are often repeated as fact, even though any diligent Google search will reveal the truth behind these fallacies. Here are 26 of the most common medical myths, debunked.More. Hmmm. Some women distinctly recall pregnancy lasting a year and a half. 😉 No, but seriously, while it’s good to read Read More ›

Dover cleared the decks for critical discussion of Darwinism and design by getting school board micro-politics out of it. Fuller studies ID as a social movement in science. We hear some colleagues don’t like his views much. See also: Dover all over White cliffs. Dover: Creationism invades Europe The Dover case, John West, and intelligent design Steve Fuller: Humans will merge with AI and Steve Fuller’s Dissent over Descent Follow UD News at Twitter!

We didn’t realize it was still legal to say so. From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Countries in the EU, including the UK, are throwing away money by subsidising the burning of wood for energy, according to an independent report. While burning some forms of wood waste can indeed reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in practice the growing use of wood energy in the EU is increasing rather than reducing emissions, the new report concludes. Overall, burning wood for energy is much worse in climate terms than burning gas or even coal, but loopholes in the way emissions are counted are concealing the damage being done. More. Report.* The Times was going on about this too: Chopping down trees and transporting Read More ›

From astrophysicist Paul Sutter at LiveScience: 1) What we now call science, philosophy and theology were all mixed up together. 2) Early (proto-)scientists made claims and arguments that would sound totally bananas today. I’ll leave Copernicus’ motivations to another article, but he did indeed publish a book in 1543 detailing his new cosmology with the sun at the center of the universe. While it did have some advantages over the en vogue geocentric model (like neatly explaining the precession of planetary orbits and requiring fewer circles-within-circles), it did have weaknesses (how, exactly, does something like the Earth move?), and the reaction among the literate community — including the Catholic clergy — was neither hostile nor supportive. At the time, the Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at at RealClearScience: On a recent broadcast of BBC Radio Four’s The Infinite Monkey Cage centered around science and the paranormal, Cox had this to say on the topic: “Before we ask the first question, I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist.” He continued: “If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection Read More ›

From Cassandra Willyard at Nature: At the time, biologists were getting excited about the epigenome — the broad array of chemical marks that decorate DNA and its protein scaffold. These marks act like a chemical notation, telling the cell which genes to express and which to keep silent. As such, the epigenome helps to explain how cells with identical DNA can develop into the multitude of specialized types that make up different tissues. The marks help cells in the heart, for example, maintain their identity and not turn into neurons or fat cells. Misplaced epigenetic marks are often found in cancerous cells. Why didn’t it happen sooner?: The governing rule of molecular biology – the central dogma – holds that Read More ›

From Adrian Barnett at New Scientist, reviewing Mark Maslin’s All this allows Maslin to buttress his central contention, that human evolution as we know it wouldn’t have occurred without the uplift of the Tibetan plateau and the formation of the Great Rift valley. These events, and the cycling between salt flats and shallow sea that mark the history of the Mediterranean, are the great drivers of human evolution – the climatic starting gun that set off the human race. Maslin also provides a fine overview of the evolution of evolutionary thinking over the past 150 years, to the point where we now see it less as an orderly march towards an inevitable Homo sapiens and more of a random stumble Read More ›

From Dennis Overbye at New York Times: There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say. Recent measurements of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with a hard-won “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. The latest result shows a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. But in a measure of how precise cosmologists think their science has become, this small mismatch has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. “If it is real, Read More ›

“Prebiotic” chemistry means the development and demonstration of theories about how chemicals washed together and somehow formed the immensely complex structures of life. There is no shortage of single-event scenarios. A hairpin loop is “an unpaired loop of messenger RNA (mRNA) that is created when an mRNA strand folds and forms base pairs with another section of the same strand. The resulting structure looks like a loop or a U-shape. (Suitable)” In DNA too. From ScienceDaily: The evolution of cells and organisms is thought to have been preceded by a phase in which informational molecules like DNA could be replicated selectively. New work shows that hairpin structures make particularly effective DNA replicator. In the metabolism of all living organisms there Read More ›

Says Eric Scerri at Los Angeles Times: Detailed case studies on the history of chemistry and physics show that the role of genius in advancing those fields — and even the role of rationality — is overstated. Rather than a hyper-intellectual, alien activity practiced by a remote priesthood, science is hit and miss, the ever-changing product of less-than-brilliant people, just like every other human activity. … In the 1910s, the English mathematical physicist John Nicholson published a number of articles in which he proposed that several proto-elements (his term) existed in outer space and were the basis of our familiar terrestrial elements. Their presence in a number of celestial bodies, he claimed, enabled him for the first time to do Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post, a chat with molecular biologist Jeffrey Errington about L-form bacteria, which lack a strong cell wall: Jeffery Errington: I became interested in the problem because I was aware of L-forms from the scientific literature of the 1950s and 60s. Curiously, however, right around the end of the 1970s or so, publishing on L-forms just sort of petered out. I haven’t really been able to get to the bottom of exactly why that happened. … Suzan Mazur: How pervasive are L-forms in nature now and earlier in evolution? Jeffery Errington: There are a few bacteria that are naturally cell wall-deficient, like Mycoplasma, which is a pathogen, and Phytoplasma, which inhabits plants. They’re both cell-wall deficient, Read More ›

From Tom Feilden at at BBC: From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies. … After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings. … Writing in the latest edition of Nature, [Edinburgh neuroscientist Prof Malcolm Macleod] outlines a new approach to animal studies that calls for independent, statistically rigorous confirmation of a paper’s central hypothesis before publication. “Without efforts to reproduce the findings of others, we don’t know if the facts out there actually Read More ›

Yesterday, NASA reported a record-breaking discovery of seven new Earth-size planets around a single star, three in the habitable zone: The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system [TRAPPIST-1]. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone. “This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: We’re looking forward to the March for Science this coming April 22, planned for Washington, DC, and with satellite marches across the country. If you’ve read about it, it promises to be a screechy and politicized protest against questioning orthodox scientific views or criticizing scientists. Scientists, as you know, are now held by many to enjoy a status granting them permanent immunity from criticism (much like the media, judges, and intelligence officials). In this way, scientific authority transmutes into scientific authoritarianism. Meanwhile we’re told it’s the skeptics on Darwinism and other scientific ideas, perpetually dodging threats to their careers and reputations, that we are supposed to fear and revile. More. It’s increasingly Read More ›

Of course. What other motive could there be? Re the South Dakota academic freedom bill, David Klinghoffer offers at Evolution News & Views : In a surreal move, a group called the National Coalition Against Censorship has plunged into the South Dakota situation to demand continued restraints on teachers and their academic freedom — in other words, censorship. They complain that SB 55 would “remov[e] accountability in science education.” “Accountability” there would seem to mean instructors being vulnerable to career retaliation for teaching critical thinking skills to science students. These “anti-censorship” proponents advocate retaining the option of punishing biology teachers for going off message on Darwinism. They go on: “Essentially, [the bill] removes the restraints on teachers that prevents them Read More ›