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From Joshua Howgego at New Scientist: On 11 November last year, a small birthday party was held in an apparently unremarkable hangar onthe outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. Nothing too fancy, just a few people gathered around a cake. The honourees were there. Well, sort of – they were still locked in the cage where they had spent their first year. But then again, there is no other way to treat a brood of antimatter particles. The antimatter realm is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable: a mirror world of particles that destroy themselves and normal matter whenever the two come into contact. But it’s real enough. Cosmic rays containing antiparticles constantly bombard Earth. A banana blurts out an anti-electron Read More ›

From philosopher Hans Halvorson at Nautilus blog: This new fine-tuning design argument claims the imprimatur of physics, and is presented in quantitatively precise terms: among the set of all possible universes, the percentage that could sustain life is so small that the human mind cannot imagine it. By all rights, our universe shouldn’t have existed. What wonder that our universe has given birth to life, especially intelligent life. It seems the only explanation for this wildly improbable outcome is the supposition that there is a Designer. … There’s a deep problem lurking in the background of the fine-tuning argument, which rests on two factual claims. One is that a life-conducive universe exists. And the second is that this kind of Read More ›

And gets anything, everything, and nothing as a result. From Moshe Averick, rabbi and author of Nonsense of a High Order – The Confused World of Modern Atheism at Algemeiner: For the non-believer, the statement “murder is immoral” does not reflect some underlying existent reality or truth about our universe. It is simply a statement about the way people in our society feel about things today. … The realization that the term “moral values” is interchangeable and synonymous with personal preference, societal conditioning and the latest public opinion poll, is not very uplifting. As atheist philosopher Michael Ruse put it: “Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothaches and marking student papers…Now Read More ›

Interesting point from a response by mathematician Sheldon Glashow to Daniel Kleitman’s review of Max Tegmark’s 2015 book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,  again in Inference: Chapter 9 is devoted to what can only be called mathematical epistemology. Tegmark alleges the plausible hypothesis that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans to imply a rather more startling Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.8 The Level IV multiverse, it turns out, is nothing other than the set of all mathematical structures, each of them constituting a universe unto itself. According to Tegmark, our universe is (rather than merely “is described by”) the long sought Theory Read More ›

 In a review of Max Tegmark’s 2015 book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, mathematician Daniel Kleitman observes at Inference: Tegmark’s chief argument now follows. Our local universe arose through the process of inflation; since this inflation happened, it had a finite non-zero probability of happening. In an infinite universe, inflation must have taken place infinitely often. There must therefore be an infinite number of local universes. Tegmark then claims that, since you also have a finite non-zero probability of existing in the infinite universe, there must be infinitely many copies of you in the other local universes. He then weakens his claim, though he does not acknowledge this, by pointing out that the physical Read More ›

From philosopher Catarina Dutilh Novaes at Aeon: In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant stated that no progress in logic had been made since Aristotle. He therefore concludes that the logic of his time had reached the point of completion. There was no more work to be done. Two hundred years later, after the astonishing developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the mathematisation of logic at the hands of thinkers such as George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski and Kurt Gödel, it’s clear that Kant was dead wrong. But he was also wrong in thinking that there had been no progress since Aristotle up to his time. According to A History of Formal Logic Read More ›

From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: In a study published last week (January 3) in eLife, Burchard and colleagues showed that about 75 percent of methylation signatures could be explained by the children’s genetic ancestry. The other 25 percent, however, is likely due to social or environmental factors that co-vary with self-identified race/ethnicity. The study is among the first to probe how the epigenome is influenced by genetic ancestry. Additional investigations are needed to better understand to what extent race and ethnicity are interchangeable with genetic ancestry, experts say. … It is challenging to draw conclusions from methylation analyses like this one because “a lot of the variation can be explained by background genetic variation of individuals,” noted Conley. In Read More ›

Taking issue wth paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes at Air and Space Smithsonian: Since we doubtlessly did originate from animal ancestors, the gap between us and them must have been bridged at some point in time. Perhaps it was not a jump, but a continuous evolution. Were the mental abilities of the cavewoman or caveman really as advanced as today’s humans? How much ability for abstraction and appreciation of complex numbers did they have? Since modern humans are the evidence that bridging the gap is possible, we might ask why it wasn’t bridged earlier, perhaps by an intelligent octopus, a smart dinosaur, a dolphin, or another ape? They’ve had millions more years to evolve than we have, Read More ›

After the asteroid hit. The extinction of the dinosaurs is, in certain ways, the pop science equivalent of the falls of great houses in ancient literature. It’s  fascinating and it accommodates dozens of plausible explanations and hundreds of possible ones. Good for business. From ScienceDaily: “It became cold, I mean, really cold,” says Brugger. Global annual mean surface air temperature dropped by at least 26 degrees Celsius. The dinosaurs were used to living in a lush climate. After the asteroid’s impact, the annual average temperature was below freezing point for about 3 years. Evidently, the ice caps expanded. Even in the tropics, annual mean temperatures went from 27 degrees to mere 5 degrees. “The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: As they were able to see, the catalysis of the reaction took place when the fatty acids formed compartments. As they are in an aqueous medium, and due to the hydrophobic nature of lipids, they tend to join with each other and form closed compartments; in other words, they take on the function of a membrane; “at that time the membranes obviously weren’t biological but chemical ones,” explained Ruiz-Mirazo. In their experiments they were able to see that the conditions offered by these membranes are favourable for amino acids. “The Montpellier group had the prebiotic reactions of the formation of dipeptides very well characterised, so they were able to see that this reaction took place more efficiently in Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: A new analysis of lunar rocks brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts suggests that the moon formed 4.51 billion years ago — just 60 million years after the solar system itself took shape. Astronomers think the Moon took shape from a collision between Earth and a Mars-size body but just when is unclear, from the jumbled rock samples available to be gathered by astronauts: “You don’t have pristine, old rock preserved on the moon,” Barboni said. “That’s one of the biggest problems — the whole-rock record on the moon is not there.” But zircon samples collected by Apollo 14 appear to provide reasonably clear information. The moon’s advanced age also makes sense from a dynamics Read More ›

From the Daily Galaxy: On Earth, simple life appears to have formed quickly, but it likely took many millions of years for very simple life to evolve the ability to photosynthesize. “The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that,” said Harrison [UCLA]. “The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.” UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago — 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. The new research suggests that life existed prior to the massive bombardment of Read More ›

Well, that didn’t take long. They’re not stunned any more, they’re mad. Mad as stink. From Phillip Williamson at New Scientist: Ocean acidification is an inevitable consequence of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s a matter of fact. We don’t know exactly what will happen to complex marine ecosystems when faced with the additional stress of falling pH, but we do know those changes are happening and that they won’t be good news. UK journalist James Delingpole disagrees. In an article for The Spectator in April 2016, he took the sceptical position that all concerns over ocean acidification are unjustified “alarmism” and that the scientific study of this non-problem is a waste of money. He concluded that the only reason Read More ›

From Tracy Vence at The Scientist: Foamy-like endogenous retroviruses (FLERVs), which are found in fish and amphibian genomes, may have originated with their vertebrate hosts more than 450 million years ago, according to a study published in Nature Communications this week (January 10). … “They date back to the origins of vertebrates, and this gives us the context in which we should consider their present-day activity and interactions with their hosts.” More. Maybe they were all part of a package with the fish and amphibians who hosted them? See also: Endogenous retroviruses made us human? Note the role of supposed junk DNA. and Stasis: When life goes on but evolution does not happen very much Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: The human genome is peppered with the DNA of extinct hominins—Neanderthals and Denisovans—as a result of interbreeding with early Homo sapiens. According to some reports, the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA retained at specific loci, such as immune system-related genes, likely conferred adaptive advantages against infectious microorganisms. In a study published last month (November 29) in Genome Biology, researchers provide strong evidence that the Neanderthal DNA present at one such locus within the modern human genome is likely the result of positive selection. The study authors also suggest that this Neanderthal haplotype is not unique to Neanderthals. Rather, interbreeding reintroduced the beneficial genetic variant present in early African humans that had been lost during the Read More ›