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From Yahoo News: In unexpected discovery, comet contains alcohol, sugar Scientists on Friday identified two complex organic molecules, or building blocks of life, on a comet for the first time, shedding new light on the cosmic origins of planets like Earth. Ethyl alcohol and a simple sugar known as glycolaldehyde were detected in Comet Lovejoy, said the study in the journal Science Advances. But while the latest study does not end the debate over whether falling comets indeed seeded Earth with the components necessary for life, it does add something to our knowledge, said study co-author Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. More. The story doesn’t offer information as to why those elements might Read More ›

(O’Leary for News’s regular night job) Edward Snowden: “When you collect everything, you understand nothing.” Mass spying on citizens “fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state.” (On the eve of the new Snowden-themed Bond film, Spectre. ) Writing for the internet is like writing on water The internet may be forever; our pages are not. Is our e-mail private? No. What protects most of us is that our words are lost among the trillions no one is looking for. Does new media make us value democracy less? Maybe, and facing elections and upheavals around North America and Europe, it’s bad news. Whoa, Rosie! Twitter is not a family conference! We all have family problems, and let’s Read More ›

Einstein’s hidden variables tests two ways, closing both loopholes. From the Economist: To save physics from the spooky, Einstein invoked what he called hidden variables (though others might describe them as fiddle factors) that would convey information without breaking the universal speed limit. … By now, most physicists reckon the hidden-variable idea is flawed. But no test had closed both loopholes simultaneously—until this week, that is. Ronald Hanson of the University of Delft and his colleagues, writing in Nature, describe an experiment that starts with two electrons in laboratories separated by more than a kilometre. Each emits a photon that travels down a fibre to a third lab, where the two photons are entangled. That, in turn, entangles the electrons that Read More ›

From Popular Science: It’s thought that our hands are what make us human. Combined with our big brains, our fully opposable thumbs enabled our ancestors to make complex tools to conquer the world. But according to biologist David Carrier of Utah State University, that’s not all they were good for. He thinks the human hand’s uniqueness was shaped, in part, so we could punch each other in the face. Carrier introduced this off-beat hypothesis a few years ago, to much controversy. Now he and his colleagues have come out with a study that sort of supports but doesn’t confirm the idea. How could it? The fact that we are the only animals with fists is hardly decisive. There are a Read More ›

From Nautilus: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare? For centuries, we human beings have speculated on the possible existence and prevalence of life elsewhere in the universe. For the first time in history, we can begin to answer that profound question. At this point, the results of the Kepler mission can be extrapolated to suggest that something like 10 percent of all stars have a habitable planet in orbit. That fraction is large. With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life. From this perspective, life in the cosmos is common. However, there’s another, grander perspective from which Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to mention that University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran is hot on the trail again, this time in response to McLatchie’s vid (below) “Is ID a science?” I agree that many ID proponents try to use the science way of knowing to prove that creator gods must have built some complex molecular structures inside modern cells. They try to use evidence and they try to use rational thinking to arrive at logical conclusions. That qualifies as science, in my opinion, even though ID proponents fail to make their case. They don’t have the evidence and their logic is faulty. It’s science but it’s bad science. Lot’s of genuine scientists also publish bad science. Unclear what Dr. Moran Read More ›

Someone reminds us of Lawrence Krauss’ claims that quantum mechanics makes it inevitable that something comes out of nothing just by random processes and that our existence is random and inevitable because of quantum mechanics. See here at BBC News (2014): Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because “nothing” is inherently unstable. This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science’s two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Here, then, is how everything could have come Read More ›

From Digg: Will we recognize alien life when we see it? However, one of his most interesting works is a slim book from 1944, based on a set of lectures Schrödinger gave in Dublin. It poses a single question: What is life? Good question. As it happens, we noted earlier, The definition of life has reached the point where science historian George Dyson tells us, “Life is whatever you define it to be.” Richard Dawkins has suggested it is “anything highly statistically improbable, but in a particular direction.” And at a year 2000 international “What is life?” conference, no two definitions were the same. Biochemist Edward Trifonov noted that there are 123 definitions available and, undeterred, promptly proposed his own: Read More ›

Courtesy Christian Scientific Society, here. Friday night: Doug Axe, Biologic Institute Intelligible Design Although technical work in mathematics and experimental biology has been crucial for establishing the academic legitimacy of intelligent design, the downside of emphasizing technical arguments is that it promotes a perception of elitism. My impression is that the vast majority of people who favor design over Darwinism feel unqualified to offer a robust defense of design, which means everyone is looking to the experts to resolve this controversy. Contrary to this, I argue in my forthcoming book that the key insights for resolving the controversy come from common-sense reasoning and experience-based intuitions shared by all people. This makes everyone qualified to participate in the debate. … Saturday Morning: Read More ›

Maybe. This vid on intelligent design vs creationism has brought up PZ Myers, as well as Larry Moran, Darwin’s tenure tag team. McLatchie keeps this up and we could organize a Darwin beauty pageant. O’Leary for News will serve coffee and iced cupcakes. Vid: One minute apologist: What is the difference between ID and creationism? See also: Vince Torley’s Larry Moran commits the genetic fallacy Follow UD News at Twitter!

Well, there would have to be some, wouldn’t there? Otherwise, genomics would be hardly anything like it’s cracked up to be.* From the Atlantic: These genes might have contributed to the distinctive traits that make us human, but ironically, they are also very hard to study and often ignored. Many are missing from the reference human genome, which was supposedly “completed” in 2003. One such unique human gene is HYDIN2. It first appeared around 3.1 million years ago, as a duplicate of an existing gene called HYDIN. During the duplication process, “the head got chopped off and the tail got chopped off,” explains Max Dougherty from the University of Washington. It was as if someone had transcribed a book but neglected Read More ›

From New Scientist: It’s not the first time that people have claimed the discovery of potentially organic carbon in Hadean zircons – but the carbon in those earlier claims turned out to be an artefact of the preparation techniques used to study the zircons, says Harrison. “I think there will be little dispute regarding the primary nature of the inclusions,” he says. … Ultimately, carbon isotope data on its own is too ambiguous to decide whether Hadean carbon is evidence of Hadean life, says Thomas McCollom at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “I know a lot of people want to use such data as evidence of life, but this is governed more by what they want the outcome to be Read More ›

Here, with Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, a co-founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS): Yesterday the Gina Kolata published a story in the New York Times about the fact that many clinical studies are not published. This is a serious problem and it’s a good thing that it is being brought to light. But her article contains a weird section in which a researcher at the University of Florida explains why she hadn’t published the results of one of her studies: … “It was a small study and our hypothesis was not proven,” Dr. Cooper-DeHoff said. “That’s like three strikes against me for publication.” Her only option, she reasoned, would be to turn to an open-access journal that charges Read More ›

For two hours. Maybe they should all go to relationships counselling twice a week. Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Bobby Conway, of One Minute Apologist, asks Jonathan McLatchie about the concept of irreducible complexity: Note: The term was not coined by Michael Behe, as often supposed or in creationist literature. Rather, here is where it originated: — Some say, of course, that the idea of irreducible complexity (IR) arose from creationist literature (also here.) Seriously, the term has so far been traced to Templets and the explanation of complex patterns (Cambridge U Press, 1986) by theoretical biologist Michael J. Katz. “Irreducible complexity” appears as an index entry in Katz’s book, and set forth as follows: In the natural world, there are many pattern-assembly systems for which there is no simple explanation. There are useful scientific explanations for these complex systems, but Read More ›