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Physicist Rob Sheldon attended the 17th SPIE Astrobiology Conference (San Diego, 9 – 13 August 2015, and kindly writes to report, The conference was begun in 1996 when the late David McKay, a meteoriticist from NASA Johnson SFC in Houston, examined a meteorite collected from an expedition to the Allen Hills of Antarctica. The Japanese had discovered that meteorites that land in Antarctica are carried by the ice flow to the foot of mountains where the ice evaporates and meteorites collect. The harvest from annual expeditions are catalogued and stored in Houston, and ALH84001 was the first one collected on this trip.   =============================================== So this conference was initiated by then SPIE president Richard Hoover, as a forum to present Read More ›

Origin of life researcher Nick Lane, author of The Vital Question asks at The Scientist: Did endosymbiosis-and the innovations in membrane bioenergetics it engendered-make it possible for eukaryotic life to evolve? There’s a black hole at the heart of biology. Why is it that complex eukaryotic cells share so many fundamental traits, from the nucleus to meiotic sex, which are essentially absent from prokaryotes? Most people would be hard pressed to distinguish a human cell from those of a mushroom, a plant, or a zoospore. Yet those cells diverged a billion years ago, and have utterly different ways of life. He argues at The Scientist for membrane bioenergetics: Genes point to an answer, but don’t explain the whole story. All Read More ›

Further to BBC announces: Chimps have entered the Stone Age (Nonsense. Apes smash things with stones the way birds do. They will go on doing that indefinitely. If their cognition permitted more, they would be further along today), over at Evolution News & Views, Ann Gauger has provides a reality-based perspective on chimp intelligence: Chimps as Incipient Humans? Darwinists Debate Some of the reports of stone use appear valid. Capuchins and chimpanzees are all known to use stones to crack open food, and the technique appears to go back thousands of years. But then, no one is disputing that some animals use simple tools. Even otters use stones to break open clam shells. It’s a question worth asking: Does the Read More ›

Megan Fox at PJMedia writes, Anyone who questions the great religion of Darwinism, specifically that all living things come from one common ancestor and more specifically, that people evolved from apes, is violently and quickly attacked, silenced, and treated like they’re a heretic. … I have personally been threatened by people who say they want to call the state and report me for child abuse because I made a video questioning the validity of some of the evolutionists’ claims at the Field Museum in Chicago. These threats are not to be taken lightly, considering that children have been taken from their parents over idiotic circumstances like a homeschooling father who takes a natural supplement that the FDA doesn’t approve of Read More ›

Well, first, the BBC asks: What makes a planet habitable? Here: Water in liquid form is thought to be a necessity for life on Earth. Based on this, let’s look at the classical definition for the habitable zone as the region around a star, such as our own Sun, where the temperature of any orbiting planet permits water in liquid form. But, as it happens, there are difficulties. What if the planet sports a blanket of white clouds? Clouds are reflective and therefore will cool the planet, acting to push the habitable zone closer to the star. Amusingly, if we calculate this “equilibrium temperature” for the Earth, taking into account its beautifully reflective clouds, then it turns out that we Read More ›

Further to Psychiatry: The trouble with being mad in North America… is that, at times, you’re saner than many pundits: We learn from the BBC Chimpanzees and monkeys have entered the Stone Age We think of the Stone Age as something that early humans lived through. But we are not the only species that has invented it In the rainforests of west Africa, the woodlands of Brazil and the beaches of Thailand, archaeologists have unearthed some truly remarkable stone tools. It’s not the workmanship that makes them special. If anything, a casual observer might struggle to even identify them as ancient tools. It’s not their antiquity that’s exceptional either: they’re only about the same age as the Egyptian pyramids. What Read More ›

… is that, at times, you’re saner than many pundits. Further to Terms to retire from psychological science (Perry: Many terms commonly used in psychology, psychiatry and related fields “should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats”): A new book by Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove, Psychiatry Under the Influence, investigates how the influence of pharmaceutical money and guild interests has corrupted the behavior of the American Psychiatric Association and academic psychiatry during the past 35 years. The book documents how the psychiatric establishment regularly misled the American public about what was known about the biology of mental disorders, the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, and the safety and efficacy of its drugs. It also looks at Read More ›

O’Leary for News’s night job, on the impact of new media: Old media doesn’t get new media. It is called the internet, not the innernet for a reason. Serious argument: The right to marry a robot This is an argument for the right to marry something that is not human and not a self. Forcing others to recognize one’s machine as a spouse would be a social triumph, of sorts. Had to happen. Internet addiction treatment centre Most of what we see on the internet has a better chance of being false than what we see on our street. Tweet this!: Twitter’s value is way down Facebook, perhaps more human, is doing very well indeed. E-mail spam filters force Nigerian Read More ›

Purposeful Darwinism? From Mercatornet, The retail giant is conducting an experiment to see how far it can push white-collar employees. After reading the quotes and claims by former and current employees, both named and anonymous, “purposeful Darwinism” doesn’t quite capture what is being described, rather English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ abbreviated view of the state of nature is more fitting: “And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk” said Bo Olson, a former books marketing employee. “Raising children would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level because of the long hours required,” is what Michelle Williamson explained regarding what her boss, Shahrul Ladue, Read More ›

From Nature: A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000. Study author Veronica Irvin, a health scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, says this suggests that registering clinical studies is leading to more rigorous research. Writing on his NeuroLogica Blog, neurologist Steven Novella of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, called the study “encouraging” but also “a bit frightening” because it casts doubt on Read More ›

As in National Geographic: Bonobo peeps point to human language origin (The pop science mind tends to lack practical intelligence. No one even thinks of asking why, if baby bonobo peeping tells us about the roots of human language, it never did anything for the bonobos) and Apes close to speaking? No. (In the middle ages, it was implausible miracle stories but today, it is implausible ape achievement stories. ) And further to Bonobos prefigure language?: Agenda so obvious, it stinks like the garbage on a hot summer night before the pickup. (if bonobos “peep,” that shows they are on the verge of speaking. But if Neanderthals did speak (of course they did), that shows it isn’t a big achievement.) In response Read More ›

From Science: Why water worlds won’t host life New research published online before print in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society shows that Earth-sized water worlds are habitable only in a very limited range of temperatures—from about 0̊C to 127̊C. Anything outside that range, which tends to occur on planets that are in a “Goldilocks zone” of 102 million to 140 million miles away from their stars (Earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun), could be devastating for life as we know it. More. Here’s the abstract: The unstable CO2 feedback cycle on ocean planets Ocean planets are volatile-rich planets, not present in our Solar system, which are thought to be dominated by deep, global Read More ›

From MinnPost: Many common psychology terms are ‘inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous or logically confused,’ experts claim Many terms commonly used in psychology, psychiatry and related fields — such as chemical imbalance, love molecule, and autism epidemic — “should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats,” according to a recent paper in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology. Although the article is aimed at health-care professionals, it’s a fascinating and helpful read for the rest of us as well. For it provides detailed explanations of why each of the 50 listed words and phrases is either “inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, [or] logically confused.” And those explanations will probably surprise many readers. Example are offered, including: Love molecule. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Analysis supports a previous finding, that the best match for the marks is butchery by stone tools Not trampling. The paper supports the original interpretation that the damage to the two bones is characteristic of stone tool butchery, published in Nature in 2010. That finding was sensational, since it potentially pushed back evidence for the use of stone tools, as well as the butchering of large animals, by about 800,000 years. The Nature paper was followed in 2011 by a rebuttal in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggesting that the bones were marked by incidental trampling in abrasive sediments. That sparked a series of debates about the significance of the discovery and whether the Read More ›

Like humans take rap for killing off mammoths. Yes, August. Hot weather. Stories. From ScienceDaily: Competition from cats drove extinction of many species of ancient dogs Competition played a more important role in the evolution of the dog family (wolves, foxes, and their relatives) than climate change, shows a new international study published in PNAS. An international team including scientists from the Universities of Gothenburg (Sweden), São Paulo (Brazil) and Lausanne (Switzerland) analyzed over 2000 fossils and revealed that the arrival of felids to North America from Asia had a deadly impact on the diversity of the dog family, contributing to the extinction of as many as 40 of their species. “We usually expect climate changes to play an overwhelming Read More ›