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From astronomy journalist Stuart Clark at Aeon: To get computer models to look similar to the Universe around us, cosmologists have assumed that around 96 per cent of matter and energy are in forms that we cannot directly detect. You might think that this would make cosmologists wary of relying on such hypothetical substances. Yet for the majority working today, dark matter and dark energy are every bit as real as the stars and galaxies that we can see. Such corporate belief might work for business, but it has no place in science. Back in 1620, Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum (The New Method). In his description of how to investigate nature, he cautioned would-be scientists about four ‘idols of Read More ›

From Bernie Hobb at ABC: The Standard Model of particle physics — which accurately describes all the particles and interactions that make up our universe — says our universe shouldn’t exist. Or at least, the matter that makes up all the stuff in existence shouldn’t be here. It should have been wiped out by the matching antimatter that was created with it in the first second after the Big Bang. And unless we’re all part of some universe-wide delusion, that’s clearly not right. Why must it be a delusion? Why can it not be design? Something led to a tiny imbalance in the matter/antimatter numbers at the beginning of time, with matter slightly in the lead. That imbalance — called Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Research in mutant mice has shown that these two mammalian features are controlled by the same gene, MSX2, which also controls the development of the mammary glands and the maintenance of body hairs. “This is the gene that makes us mammals” Benoit says. Based on the CT based anatomical observations in probainognathians, it appears that the MSX2 gene underwent a significant change in its expression 240-246 million years ago and triggered the evolution of many typical mammalian traits including hair and whiskers, an enlarged cerebellum, complete ossification of the skull roof, and more importantly, the mammary glands, that define mammals today. “Our research has shown that these features of mammals were already present in advanced therapsids, prior to Read More ›

That’s how they’re telling the story now. From U Bath: Over 90 per cent of mammal species were wiped out by the same asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, significantly more than previously thought. A study by researchers at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath and published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, reviewed all mammal species known from the end of the Cretaceous period in North America. Their results showed that over 93 per cent became extinct across the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, but that they also recovered far more quickly than previously thought. … Following the asteroid hit, most of the plants and animals would have died, so Read More ›

From Creation-Evolution Headlines: If David Johnson is right, politicians put up with conservative efforts to put up anti-evolution bills only to appease their religious constituents. Johnson, a postdoc at Rice University, looked into the outcomes of “anti-evolution curricular challenges” in various states. According to PhysOrg, only 25% of bills under consideration passed out of committee, and only two states–Louisiana and Tennessee – succeeded in getting laws passed. More. And all hell broke loose after people weren’t forced to just spout Darwin. Right? No? Remember that the next time you hear from the Ivy League. See also: The Ivy League’s Pants in Knot Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Symmetry: Finding a theory of everything is unlikely to change the way most of us go about our business, even if our business is science. That’s the normal way of things: Chemists and electricians don’t need to use quantum electrodynamics, even though that theory underlies their work. But finding such a theory could change the way we think of the universe on a fundamental level. Even a successful theory of everything is unlikely to be a final theory. If we’ve learned anything from 150 years of unification, it’s that each step toward bringing theories together uncovers something new to learn.More. What if we found a theory of everything and it indicated design? Would that be anti-science? See also: Physicist: Read More ›

Despite the fact that, as noted earlier, “Aliens are real. And astrobiology is exceedingly rigorous,” there are doubters like Ethan Siegel at Forbes: There may never have been another intelligent, technologically advanced alien species in the entire history of the Universe. Last week, in the New York Times, scientist Adam Frank emphatically wrote that Yes, There Have Been Aliens, concluding that given all the potentially habitable worlds we know must be out there from our astrophysical discoveries, intelligent life must have arisen. What he fails to account for, however, is the magnitude of the unknowns that abiogenesis, evolution, long-term habitability and other factors bring into the equation. Although it’s true that there are an astronomical number of possibilities for intelligent, Read More ›

From Adam Frank at New York Times: You might assume this probability is low, and thus the chances remain small that another technological civilization arose. But what our calculation revealed is that even if this probability is assumed to be extremely low, the odds that we are not the first technological civilization are actually high. Specifically, unless the probability for evolving a civilization on a habitable-zone planet is less than one in 10 billion trillion, then we are not the first. To give some context for that figure: In previous discussions of the Drake equation, a probability for civilizations to form of one in 10 billion per planet was considered highly pessimistic. According to our finding, even if you grant Read More ›

Cancel your Darwin. From Science: The first fish that stepped onto land more than 350 million years ago wasn’t a fluke. Our ocean friends may have evolved the ability to come out of the water at least 30 times over the ages, according to a new study of the diversity of amphibious fish alive today. The work highlights the factors that foster extreme lifestyle changes—and may hint at how the very first fish took to land. “It’s fascinating that … these transitions may not be as difficult as presumed,” says Sandy Kawano, a comparative biomechanist at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis in Knoxville, Tennessee, who wasn’t involved with the study.Paper. (paywall) More. The transitions are very difficult Read More ›

From Ohio State University: A study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the strongest evidence yet that proteins—the large and complex molecules that fold into particular shapes to enable biological reactions—can’t fold themselves. Rather, the work of folding is done by much smaller water molecules, which surround proteins and push and pull at them to make them fold a certain way in fractions of a second, like scores of tiny origami artists folding a giant sheet of paper at blazingly fast speeds. Dongping Zhong, leader of the research group at The Ohio State University that made the discovery, called the study a “major step forward” in the understanding of water-protein interactions and said it answers Read More ›

Did you even wonder? You need “help”. From Motherboard: Recently Elon Musk made internet headlines by claiming that the probability we live in “base reality” is one in billions. Instead, we are much more likely to be living in a historical ancestor simulation created by an advanced future civilization some 10,000 years from now. Internet headlines. If a simulated waterfall is not wet, why should a simulated mind think or feel? A mind, unless one believes in disembodied souls, requires a brain, a body, and a world. A mind without a physical world is a myth. And a simulated world is a myth too. The fact is that all minds we know of, human minds and possibly animal minds, are Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Cats understand the principle of cause and effect as well as some elements of physics. Combining these abilities with their keen sense of hearing, they can predict where possible prey hides. These are the findings of researchers from Kyoto University in Japan, led by Saho Takagi and published in Springer’s journal Animal Cognition. Of course cats understand cause and effect. The cat who jumped onto the hot stove does not do it again, as Mark Twain observed. That has nothing to do with understanding the elements of physics, which are a pure abstraction. Which is why, as Twain observed, the cat never jumps up on any stove again, and learns nothing further from the experience. Researchers suggest that Read More ›

From a 2015 journal paper, Engines of creationism? Intelligent design, machine metaphors and visual rhetoric: Machine metaphors are ubiquitous in the molecular sciences. In addition to their use by scientists, educators and popularizers of science, they have been promoted intensively by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in arguments for the necessity of a god-like designer to account for the complexities of life at the molecular level. We have investigated the visual rhetoric employed in a movie by ID proponents, with particular emphasis on machine metaphors. After presenting examples, we argue that science communicators could reduce the persuasive impact of ID visual rhetoric based on machine metaphors by emphasizing that selfassembly is fundamental to molecular complexes. Paper. (public access) – Gunnar Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although scientists generally agree that eukaryotes can trace their ancestry to a merger between archaea and bacteria, there’s been considerable disagreement about what the first eukaryote and its immediate ancestors must have looked like. As Thattai and his colleagues Buzz Baum and Gautam Dey of University College London explain in their paper, that uncertainty has stemmed in large part from the lack of known intermediates that bridge the gap in size and complexity between prokaryotic precursors and eukaryotes. As a result, they say, the origin of the first eukaryotic cell has remained “one of the most enduring mysteries in modern biology.” That began to change last year with the discovery of DNA sequences for an organism that no Read More ›

From the Guardian: Jerome Ravetz has been one of the UK’s foremost philosophers of science for more than 50 years. Here, he reflects on the troubles facing contemporary science. He argues that the roots of science’s crisis have been ignored for too long. Quality control has failed to keep pace with the growth of science. Excuse us. That is not growing pains. That is systemic rot. Under these harsh conditions, quality becomes instrumentalised. To strive for ‘excellence’ may be impractical; ‘impact’ is the name of the game. The self-sacrificing quest for scientific rigour is displaced by the need to jockey among journals, and perhaps also engage in p-hacking to obtain interesting results. Such conditions can go far to explain the Read More ›