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From Bob Henderson, a finance writer with a physics background, at Nautilus: Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out. All of my classmates had taken up with advisors who were, like most physicists, experimentalists, the researchers who do the hands-on work of, say, smashing particles together at accelerators to see what comes out. Theorists like Rajeev, or for that matter Einstein and Feynman, who instead do the noodling necessary to explain the results of experiments with math are fewer and further between. A couple of Rochester’s experimentalists had pressured me to drop my dream of doing theory because, they explained, theory was so ridiculously difficult and had so few jobs. But I’d brushed them off. The Read More ›

So we hear, from Kate Lunau at Motherboard: 2017 might just be the year we finally catch one. And if we don’t, well, it may be that our best theories about dark matter are wrong—that we’re looking in the wrong places, with the wrong instruments. Maybe dark matter, whatever it is, will turn out to be even weirder and more surprising than anyone has so far predicted. Maybe it’s not a WIMP, but some other bizarre kind of particle. Then there’s the outside possibility that dark matter doesn’t exist, that it’s an illusion. If that’s the case, we’ll have to consider whether we’ve been fundamentally misreading the universe’s clues. … Buried deep in a mine near Sudbury in northern Ontario Read More ›

From Lydia Pyne at Ars Technica: Forty years after she was discovered, Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil australopithecine, just might have a cause of death. In August of this year, a team of paleoanthropologists led by John Kappelman argued in Nature that Lucy died 3.2 million years ago by falling out of a tree. Their conclusion has been met with skepticism among fellow researchers, and Lucy’s death-by-tree-fall hypothesis has generated no shortage of debate within the scientific community of paleoanthropology. Doubts about whether ancient hominin Lucy fell to her death 3.18 million years ago But there’s a takeaway here that’s more significant than the study’s conclusion—this study’s approach to sharing data with the scientific community and the public at Read More ›

In the wake of the bogus petition against teaching evolution, we might as well throw in “A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia” by Kevin Carey at New York Times: OMICS International is a leader in the growing business of academic publication fraud. It has created scores of “journals” that mimic the look and feel of traditional scholarly publications, but without the integrity. This year the Federal Trade Commission formally charged OMICS with “deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.” OMICS is also in the less well-known business of what might be called conference fraud, which is what led to the call from John. Read More ›

It would have looked great as a three-dollar bill. A number of high-profile Darwinians ended up passing it around. David Klinghoffer updates the story at Evolution News & Views: I called out the Darwin activists who were promoting this “news,” including Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project. Well, they’re back and defending themselves and each other. P.Z. Myers now agrees with me that “Joe Hannon” is a fake name — used, he informs us, by an often-banned Internet troll from Manchester, England, who haunts blog comments sections under a variety of pseudonyms. Myers cites University of Toronto’s Larry Moran, saying that “Hannon” is “a holocaust denier. He used to run a business ‘selling components — just nuts and bolts Read More ›

Yes, 20 years old: The hoax journal paper genre was started, as Dreier explains, by New York University physicist Alan Sokal in 1996. Sokal aimed to skewer the postmodern dogma that facts, even in mathematics and physics, are merely a social construct. He submitted an article to Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal, that, “shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder.” From Jennifer Ruark at Chronicle of Higher Education: How the physicist Alan Sokal hoodwinked a group of humanists and why, 20 years later, it still matters. (paywall) But do Sokal hoaxes still matter? Are we not now in the age of post-fact science? (“I’m a factual Read More ›

In Greenland. From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: The species, dubbed Tamisiocaris borealis, used large, bristly appendages on its body to rake in tiny shrimplike creatures from the sea, and likely evolved from the top predators of the day to take advantage of a bloom in new foods in its ecosystem, said study co-author Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in England. More. This is tremendous, but let’s all revise our expectations about “gigantic”: These ancient sea monsters grew to about 70 centimeters (2.7 feet) long and “looked like something completely out of this planet,” with massive frontal appendages for grasping prey, huge eyes on stalks, and a mouth shaped like a piece of canned pineapple, Vinther told Read More ›

For example, Life on Mars: New focus on deciding where to look vs. The aliens went extinct before we found them— there, that’s the answer! But now, consider all the other theses about why the aliens, they never write, they never phone Astrobiology is, as has been famously said, at present a discipline without a subject. And, one would add, philosophy of science hobby where hidden theology rules, in the absence of evidence. You know the sort of thing: What kind of a God would/wouldn’t …? What warm pillows for an academic grantsman when we actually don’t know what is going on out there. Either we can’t know about extraterrestrial life, in which case we should just forget about it. Read More ›

From physician Nathaniel P. Morris at Scientific American: Take an example of a man who walks into an emergency department, mumbling incoherently. He says he’s hearing voices in his head, but insists there’s nothing wrong with him. He hasn’t used any drugs or alcohol. If he were to be evaluated by mental health professionals, there’s a good chance he might be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. But what if that same man were deeply religious? What if his incomprehensible language was speaking in tongues? If he could hear Jesus speaking to him? He might also insist nothing were wrong with him. After all, he’s practicing his faith. It’s not just the ambiguities of mental health diagnoses that create Read More ›

Not what we consider most interesting, not what got us the most hits, but stories that seem to signal a growing trend: 1. The Royal Society’s almost aborted efforts to free evolution studies from the stranglehold of Darwinism have been hope in the midst of stagnation. It is safer to be a non-Darwinian now that many are rethinking evolution. Also, much more interesting, as a recent books list shows. Note: The issue isn’t really whether Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism or whatever) will be disconfirmed. It has long functioned as a religion, or if you like, a metaphysic, as Darwinist historian Michael Ruse has often pointed out: Evolution after Darwin had set itself up to be something more than science. It was Read More ›

In the fact of changes at NASA. Release your inner adult. From Debra Werner at SpaceNews: “You are leaders in your community, please be a source of signal, not a source of noise,” Zurbuchen said Dec. 12 during the annual Earth Science Town Hall meeting at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. The names of two key new figures, NASA administrator and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are not yet announced. Funding for NASA’s Earth science program has traditionally waxed and waned with changing administrations. Funding as a percent of NASA’s overall budget declined sharply from 2001 to 2006, the early years of the George W. Bush presidency, dipping from about 11 Read More ›

Yet it isn’t happening, and we have no idea how it happened even once… From science writer Michael Gross at Cell: Rapid progress in several research fields relating to the origin of life bring us closer to the point where it may become feasible to recreate coherent and plausible models of early life in the laboratory. (paywall) It’s a survey article, and it concludes: on our own planet and on many others. “One of the main new aspects of origins research is the growing effort to connect chemistry to geology,” Jack Szostak notes. “Finding reasonable geological settings for the origin of life is a critical aspect of understanding the whole pathway. We’ve moved beyond thinking that life emerged from the Read More ›

From Jeff Foust at Space.com: Ellen Stofan, NASA’s Chief Scientist, Departs Space Agency She served three years. In the NASA interview, Stofan cited a range of “fun challenges” she worked on while chief scientist, including helping develop NASA’s long-term strategy for human Mars exploration. That effort, she said, is a key part of a broader scientific theme of searching for evidence of life beyond Earth … Institutionally, she said one of the achievements she was most proud of as chief scientist was getting the agency to voluntarily request demographic information in grant proposals submitted by scientists. That information, she said, is important to understanding any biases in how the agency awards those grants. “Implicit or unconscious bias is all around Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: When you’re doing two things at once – like listening to the radio while driving – your brain organizes itself into two, functionally independent networks, almost as if you temporarily have two brains. That’s according to a fascinating new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientists Shuntaro Sasai and colleagues. It’s called Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm. To study authors link their work to the experiences of split-brain epilepsy patients. In other words, when the GPS voice was helping the participants to drive (“integrated task”), the brain ‘driving network’ and ‘listening network’ were acting in concert, with a high degree of functional connectivity. But when the drivers were listening to the radio show (“split task”), Read More ›

To hear lobbyists and pop science mags tell it. Except, that is, for a lot of insiders over the years. A friend started making a list of books that doubt all or most of modern Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, the slightly elastic Extended Synthesis, and came up with a three-tiered, hardly exhaustive, shelf: St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (1871) Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism (1874) Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New (1879) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907/tr. 1911) Svante Arrhenius Worlds in the Making (1908) Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (1940) Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (1941) Lecomte du Nouy, Human Destiny (1947) Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) Norman Macbeth, Read More ›