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Readers may vaguely remember Francis Collins’* colleague at BioLogos, Karl Giberson. In an expected pan review, he tells us: Dogged by controversy since its conception, the project overcame many challenges. Tax incentives were controversial, given the organization’s view on LGBT hiring. Raising funds was a problem, solved partially by Ham’s high-profile debate with Bill Nye, who was an early visitor to the Ark Encounter. Scientists expressed concern about the promotion of pseudoscience. Biblical scholars objected to treating the myth of Noah’s flood as a historical event. Having overcome so many problems—which he views as the work of Satan—Ham now confidently states, “The Lord has worked mightily over the years to make this project a reality.” The Ark Encounter is based on Read More ›

From Sarah Lewin at Space.com: When life originates on a planet, whether Earth or a distant world, the newborn life-forms may have to overcome incredible odds to come into existence — and a new equation lays out exactly how overwhelming those odds may be. Well, it’s good that someone is admitting that there aren’t billions and billions of them out there. If we can’t factor in information, we can get precisely nowhere, though there may be some good luncheon talks in the meantime. “It’s not an answer; it’s a new tool for trying to think about the issues involved,” Ed Turner, an astronomer at Princeton University, told Space.com. Turner was not involved in the work, but the paper’s definition of Read More ›

A clip from Flight: The genius of birds “Avian flight requires a cause that’s able to visualize a distant endpoint and bring together everything necessary to achieve that endpoint. Only intelligence is capable of that kind of causal process.” Paul Nelson, Philosopher of Biology More. At dusk on a winter evening in southern England a flock of 200,000 European starlings congregate to soar in breathtaking formations before roosting for the night. These incredible displays of aerial precision and biological engineering are captured in this memorable sequence from Flight: the Genius of Birds. See also: Genius of Birds: Embryonic development Follow UD News at Twitter!

From a review of Steve and Hillary Rose’s Can Neuroscience Change Our Minds? in Times Higher by Louise Whiteley, Whether or not you end up cheerleading for the book’s political agenda, its deconstruction of faulty claims about how neuroscience translates into the classroom is relevant to anyone interested in education. The authors tear apart the scientific logic of policy documents, interrogate brain-based interventions and dismantle prevalent neuro-myths. … The Roses’ descriptions of how experimental set-ups are extrapolated to real-world contexts add a seam of humour to the serious business of myth-busting. I smiled to learn that statements about the negative effects of poor environment on the learning brain often refer to studies that compare rats raised in empty cages with Read More ›

BioLogos exists to reconcile Christians to evolution, which today seems to mainly mean Darwinism (“modern science” ). From their prez Deborah Haarsma: When people accept the AiG narrative that these scientific conclusions are essential to Christianity, then their faith is often shaken when they encounter the incredible explanatory power of modern science. In fact, we hear from individuals on a daily basis who have experienced a deep crisis of faith when their young-earth creationist beliefs were exposed as scientifically (and biblically) weak. While we are grateful that BioLogos has helped recover and strengthen the faith of these Christians, we mourn the fact that countless others have drifted away from the faith. Young-earth creationist teaching is causing unnecessary harm to the Read More ›

From Richard Chirgwin at the Register: This is what your brain looks like on bad data A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” fMRI-based science has been potentially invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data. The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters. When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software. Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the Read More ›

Remember Bill Nye, who wants global warming skeptics prosecuted for the sake of his peace of mind? Well now, Nye went to visit Ken Ham at Ark Encounter in rural Kentucky: Ark Encounter features a full-size Noah’s Ark, built according to the dimensions given in the Bible. Spanning 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high, this modern engineering marvel amazes visitors young and old. Ark Encounter is situated in the beautiful Williamstown, Kentucky, halfway between Cincinnati and Lexington on I-75. From the moment you turn the corner and the towering Ark comes into view, to the friendly animals in the zoo, to the jaw-dropping exhibits inside the Ark, you’ll experience the pages of the Bible like never before. Read More ›

From Sophie Saint Thomas at Death and Taxes: Pastafarian lodges complaint with ACLU over right to wear pasta strainer A Pastafarian woman is fighting for her right to wear a pasta strainer on her head, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Rachel Hoover, 21, wore a colander atop her dome for her driver’s license photo as a symbol of her religious beliefs when she renewed her license on June 27. The Chicago Northern Illinois University student is a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a religion that promotes chuckles, meatballs and pirates, but opposes intelligent design and creationism taught in schools. In an attempt to mock organized religions, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has birthed what appears Read More ›

Recently, one of our star commenters, Sandwalk’s Larry Moran, mooted that the Royal Society meeting on assessing where we are with evolution maybe should be cancelled. Then he said he doesn’t want it to be cancelled but “they may cancel the meeting because the IDiots and the kooks are gloating about destroying evolution.” We hadn’t heard much from people who are gloating about destroying evolution but we’ve heard plenty from people who can do without the Darwin lobby running the field into the ground. Some of the episodes we’ve noted are pretty crazy. The University of Kentucky had to settle with astronomer Martin Gaskell for $125,000 because one of his colleagues was obsessing with a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist about his possible support Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It turns out that forests in the Andean and western Amazonian regions of South America break long-understood rules about how ecosystems are put together, according to new research. … They discovered that the leaf economics of forests are not as straightforward as scientists once believed. “We found that Andean and Amazonian forests have evolved into diverse communities that break simple ecological ‘rules’ previously developed through field-based studies. These forests are actually much more interesting and functionally diverse than previously thought, and have sorted themselves out across a variety of environmental templates like geology, elevation and temperature,” Asner added. It turns out the forests aren’t so simply split between high-rollers and prudent investors either. Rather the authors found a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “For the first time ever, we looked at the evolution of venom across all fishes,” said lead author William Leo Smith, assistant curator at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute. “Nobody had attempted to look across all fishes. Nobody had done sharks or included eels. Nobody had looked at them all and included all fishes in an evolutionary tree at the same time.” … According to Smith, the 18 independent evolutions of venom each pose an opportunity for drug makers to derive therapies for a host of human ailments. “Fish venoms are often super complicated, big molecules that have big impact,” he said. “Venom can have impacts on blood pressure, cause local necrosis, breakdown of tissue and blood, Read More ›

From James Coyne’s Mind the Brain blog at PLOSOne: Despite thousands of studies, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and related meditation approaches have not yet been shown to be more efficacious than other active treatments for reducing stress. Nonetheless many cancer patients seek MBSR or mindfulness-based cancer recovery (MBCR) believing that they are improving their immune system and are on their way to a better outcome in “fighting” their cancer. … Responsible scientists and health care providers should dispel myths that patients may have about the effectiveness of psychosocial treatments in extending life. But in the absence of responsible professionals speaking out, patients can be intimidated by how these studies are headlined in the popular media, particularly when they believe that Read More ›

From Elizabeth Gibney at Nature: No astronomer had ever seen anything like it. No theorist had predicted it. Yet there it was — a 5-millisecond radio burst that had arrived on 24 August 2001 from an unknown source seemingly billions of light years away. “It was so bright, we couldn’t just dismiss it,” says Duncan Lorimer, who co-discovered the signal1 in 2007 while working on archived data from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. “But we didn’t really know what to do with it.” Such fleeting radio bursts usually came from pulsars — furiously rotating neutron stars whose radiation sweeps by Earth with the regularity of a lighthouse beam. But Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Read More ›

Not according to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the diphoton bump, at Forbes: Despite the fact that it would be the nightmare of most of my colleagues, I’m hoping the diphoton bump turns out to be nothing more than noise. … During my professional career, all I have seen is failure. A failure, that is, of particle physicists to uncover a more powerful mathematical framework that improves upon the theories we already have. Yes, failure is part of science – it’s frustrating, but not worrisome. What worries me much more is our failure to learn from those failures. Rather than trying something new, we’ve been trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. … If the bump Read More ›

Readers may remember Lehrer from a 2012 uproar around his making up Dylan quotes, The truth losing its facts From a review of Jonah Lehrer’s new Book about Love by Jennifer Senior at New York Times: In retrospect — and I am hardly the first person to point this out — the vote to excommunicate Mr. Lehrer was as much about the product he was peddling as the professional transgressions he was committing. It was a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new. Apparently, he’s learned nothing. This book is a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be Read More ›