News

So reports Ethan Siegel at Forbes: Yesterday, results were released from an international team led by Alexandre Santerne from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, where they measured 129 objects-of-interest identified by Kepler for a period of five years. They did spectroscopic analysis, which means they studied the individual wavelengths of light coming from the star, and expected a false positive rate of about 10-to-20%, which is what most scientists estimated. But they found, instead, that over half (52%) of the planetary candidates were, in fact, eclipsing binaries, with another three candidates turning out to be brown dwarfs. … But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the majority of these thought-to-be planets aren’t planets at all, but are massive Read More ›

Six new kind of brain cells discovered, maybe don’t form until later in life From Popular Mechanics: “Just asking ‘what types of cells make up the brain’ is such a basic question… that establishing a complete census of all neuron cell types is of great importance in moving the field of neuroscience forward,” says Tolias, at Baylor College of Medicine. Most previous studies investigating the odd menagerie of brain cells have used juvenile mice, mostly because it’s easier to get high-resolution pictures of their brains. But there’s a problem: Brains keep maturing and complicating as they get older, and Jiang’s team believes that their new-found neurons might not form until adulthood. More. But stop, wait, the brain is a machine, Read More ›

From Alva Noe at NPR, we learn: For some time now, I’ve been skeptical about the neuroscience of consciousness. Not so much because I doubt that consciousness is affected by neural states and processes, but because of the persistent tendency on the part of some neuroscientists to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon. Nothing epitomizes this tendency better than Francis Crick’s famous claim — he called it his “astonishing hypothesis” — that you are your brain. At an interdisciplinary conference at Brown not so long ago, I heard a prominent neuroscientist blandly assert, as if voicing well-established scientific fact, that thoughts, feelings and beliefs are specific constellations of matter that are located (as it happens) inside the head. Read More ›

Here.

We don’t think the World Wildlife Fund would welcome the news, put that way. Anyway, from ScienceDaily: Periods of high extinction on Earth, rather than evolutionary adaptations, may have been a key driver in the diversification of amniotes (today’s dominant land vertebrates, including reptiles, birds, and mammals), according to new research. … The new study examined the issue of adaptive radiations among early amniotes, from 315 to 200 million years ago. This time period witnessed some of the most profound climate changes on a global scale, including the dramatic shrinking of the southern polar icecap, the disappearance of equatorial rainforests, a substantial increase in temperature, and prolonged drought conditions. The time period under study also included the largest mass extinction Read More ›

At Salvo, Casey Luskin writes, Hominid Hype, Take 2015 This Time It’s “Homo Naledi” The discoverers of Homo naledi are calling it an “anatomical mosaic.” That terminology raises a red flag. In the parlance of evolutionary biology, that usually means the fossil is a unique organism that doesn’t fit easily into the standard evolutionary tree. As one technical paper concluded, “the H. naledi skeleton is a unique mosaic previously unknown in the human fossil record.” Indeed, just four years ago, the hominin Australopithecus sediba—also discovered and promoted by Berger—was the transitional form du jure between the australopithecines and our own genus, Homo. Yet sediba is very different from naledi in some important ways, including the pelvis. If the same researchers Read More ›

U Tech’s Granville Sewell recalls: Author’s note: To paraphrase Barbara Mandrell, I was ID when ID wasn’t cool. What, intelligent design still isn’t cool, you say? Oh…well, compared to 1985 it is. I offer for your interest the Postscript to my 1985 Springer book, Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN. This Postscript draws an analogy between the evolution of the software described in the book (now calledPDE2D) and the evolution of life, and it is primarily about irreducible complexity, although Michael Behe would not coin that term until 11 years later. It is also clear that I was an intelligent design proponent then, though I had never heard of that term either at the time. In fact, as far Read More ›

So says some new research. First, remember “vestigial organs”? We learned in high school that  vestigial organs, including the appendix, show that there is no design in nature. Being teens, we never considered the implications of the fact that the proposition is never supposed to work the other way. That is, now that almost all such organs have been found to be functional (so far), the no-design PR lobby just moved to other claims. For example, junk DNA! Oh wait, let’s check our notes here on junk DNA… whoops… Okay, and now the humble appendix has the floor: Immune cells make appendix ‘silent hero’ of digestive health “Popular belief tells us the appendix is a liability,” she said. “Its removal is one Read More ›

Hey, ‘tis the season to exchange gifts, so give it to every friend who has ever wondered why you think there is more to know about evolution than the Darwin-in-the-schools lobby wants the world to know: Major scientists from a dozen countries present evidence that a paradigm shift is underway or has already taken place, replacing neo-Darwinism (the standard model of evolution based on natural selection following the accumulation of random genetic mutations) with a vastly richer evolutionary synthesis than previously thought possible. Regular readers may recall that I (O’Leary for News) have long admired Suzan Mazur, a journalist with good credentials in name media, who could have done much better for herself, had she just joined in on the Read More ›

Because the bill is due for cosmology’s free, non-falsifiable lunch. At least, that is the impression one gets from Columbia mathematician Peter Woit’s comments Here: Next week there will be a workshop in Munich with the title Why Trust a Theory? Reconsidering Scientific Methodology in Light of Modern Physics. It’s organized by Richard Dawid, to discuss his ideas about “non-empirical theory confirmation”, developed to defend string theory research against accusations that its failure to make any testable predictions about anything make it a failure as a research program. I guess the idea of such a workshop is to bring together string theory proponents and critics to sort things out, but looking at the program and talk abstracts, this doesn’t look Read More ›

Further to astronomer Hugh Ross on degrees of certainty in science, from Christie Aschwanden, Five Thirty-Eight’s lead science writer: P-values have taken quite a beating lately. These widely used and commonly misapplied statistics have been blamed for giving a veneer of legitimacy to dodgy study results, encouraging bad research practices and promoting false-positive study results. But after writing about p-values again and again, and recently issuing a correction on a nearly year-old story over some erroneous information regarding a study’s p-value (which I’d taken from the scientists themselves and their report), I’ve come to think that the most fundamental problem with p-values is that no one can really say what they are. More. Here’s the theory, from Dummies, but apparently Read More ›

Ross, here at : : How to Understand the Degree of Certainty in Key Discoveries An international team of astronomers has recently determined the rate of expansion for the universe based on studies of HII regions (star-forming gaseous nebulae) in 69 galaxies over a broad range of distances. This seems to be a straightforward scientific determination, but it is loaded with philosophical implications. Here’s why: Since the cosmic expansion rate measured is at least approximately constant, the inverse of that rate: (1) establishes that the universe had a beginning, (2) yields the amount of time that has transpired since the cosmic beginning, and (3) implies that a cosmic Initiator must exist to have set the cosmos in motion. Thus, if we Read More ›

This guy argues so. Drink yer brew and decide. Note: For a serious look at devolution in nature, see “Getting back to the simple life …” Hat tip: ’s blog, Signs of the Times

From Salvo, a comparison: Our Dystopia, the worst of both worlds Orwell’s vs. Huxley’s dystopias (1984 vs. Brave New World) Unsettlingly, Orwell is gaining on Huxley “So who wins? Huxley retains a slight advantage in my view because a perpetual 1984 reign of terror may be less viable over time than a BNW technotopia where few would be sober enough to rebel. But the growth in size and scope of government in recent decades has narrowed Huxley’s lead, and that is sobering. The attitude to science is interesting. Both novelists foresee their dystopias as inevitable outcomes of post-Enlightenment thinking. But significantly, while the World State of BNW is a technotopia, its interest in science apart from technology is quite limited. Read More ›

Wake up. From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found eight well-preserved fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, in southwest China dating back more than two and a half million years. Despite their age, the fossils appear nearly identical to modern peach pits. … “We found these peach endocarp fossils just exposed in the strata,” Su said. “It’s really a fantastic finding.” Su said the discovery provides important new evidence for the origins and evolution of the modern fruit. Peaches are widely thought to have originated in China, but the oldest evidence had been archeological records dating back roughly 8,000 years. No wild population has ever been found, and its long trade history makes tracing its beginnings difficult. More. Of course, humans have done Read More ›