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Which means the war on falsifiability has totally infiltrated popular culture Further to Wait till it hits the school system, our favourite NON-creationist mathematician Peter Woit notes, I know I should be coming up with material on different topics here, but the multiverse stuff sometimes is just too hard to ignore. Next week’s Comicpalooza in Houston will feature string theorist Gerald Cleaver. His blurb tells us that: His EUCOS team conducts long-term systematic computer-based studies of global phenomenology of parameter spaces of the string landscape of around 10,500 possible string-derived universes and its theorized multiverse realization. A local paper has a news story: Physicist to discuss multiverse theory at comic convention. According to the article: … See also: The multiverse  Read More ›

So the editors actually noticed?: Duarte et al provide evidence suggesting that social psychology is not a welcoming environment for conservatives. Papers are reviewed differently depending on whether they are considered to support liberal vs. conservative positions, and anonymous surveys reveal a considerable percentage of social psychologists willing to explicitly report negative attitudes towards conservatives. This shouldn’t surprise us. Everything social psychologists know about group behavior tells us that overwhelming homogeneity, especially when defined through an important component of one’s identity like political ideology, will lead to negativity towards an outgroup. We also know a thing or two about confirmation bias and all the ways in which it can affect our decision-making, and it is odd to suggest it might Read More ›

At Scientific American, courtesy of Dan Falk and Quanta Magazine: we learn that in his latest book, Science’s Path from Myth to Multiverse, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg explores how science made the modern world, and where it might take us from here: Myth to multiverse? Wasn’t a long haul, was it?: But at least we can see some of those other planets. That’s not the case with the universes that are said to make up the multiverse. It’s not part of the requirement of a successful physical theory that everything it describes be observable, or that all possible predictions of the theory be verifiable. For example, we have a very successful theory of the strong nuclear forces, called quantum chromodynamics Read More ›

Stuff we mustn’t tell Bill Nye (if anyone still cares where he is or what he is doing) PubMed link for one e coli genome from Liberty University here. Darwin followers free to call police. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Here: The multitude of planetary systems seems to be yet another fact of our cosmic inconsequence, in which our corner of the universe is just like any other. But while planetary systems abound, astronomers are finding that in some respects, the solar system stands out. “It’s increasingly seeming that the solar system is something of an oddball,” says Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the US. It’s still too soon to know for sure how odd the solar system is (odd like your quirky uncle, or odd like a leprechaun riding a unicorn?), but scientists are already trying to explain why it might be so. If it turns out to be a cosmological Read More ›

Yeah, from Newsweek (still exists): To those who grew up in the 1990s, Bill Nye the Science Guy was a television staple and its star a fount of scientific discovery. Today, Nye continues working in a similar vein, albeit offscreen, as CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that … What’s the one thing you thought scientists would have figured out by now that hasn’t been yet? I certainly thought we would make a lot more progress with respect to climate change. I wrote about climate change in 1993 in a book for kids and hardly anything’s been done about it. And I’m also surprised that we still have such a large population of science deniers in the United States. Read More ›

From Nature: When Joseph Dwyer’s aeroplane took a wrong turn into a thundercloud, the mistake paid off: the atmospheric physicist flew not only through a frightening storm but also into an unexpected — and mysterious — haze of antimatter. Although powerful storms have been known to produce positrons — the antimatter versions of electrons — the antimatter observed by Dwyer and his team cannot be explained by any known processes, they say. “This was so strange that we sat on this observation for several years,” says Dwyer, who is at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

He writes to say, I have just posted the first in a series of blogs dealing with evolution and Christianity in which I will examine two models, the neo-darwinian model and the intelligent design model, in terms of mutually incompatible, testable, and falsifiable predictions. I hope to post one every week or two and keep each one very short, but meaty. Here is the link to the first one. I still can’t believe that, apart from US politics, we are still having this conversation about Darwin. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Cause unknown. From Britain’s Daily Telegraph last year: It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism. But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted. One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room. One issue worth considering is that clinical death today is a defined state. A medic told News some years ago that Read More ›

We wondered: I’d like to focus on a small part of the dispute, as it nicely summarizes the New Atheist’s ability to deal with atheism’s morality problem. Coyne provides the following quote from Robbins: Nietzsche’s atheism is far from exultant—he is not crowing about the death of God, much as he despises Christianity. He understands how much has been lost, how much there is to lose. . . . Nietzsche realized that the Enlightenment project to reconstruct morality from rational principles simply retained the character of Christian ethics without providing the foundational authority if the latter. Dispensing with his fantasy of the Übermensch, we are left with his dark diagnosis. To paraphrase the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, our moral vocabulary Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The silvery fish, roughly the size of a large automobile tire, is known from oceans around the world and dwells hundreds of feet beneath the surface in chilly, dimly lit waters. It swims by rapidly flapping its large, red pectoral fins like wings through the water. Fish that typically inhabit such cold depths tend to be slow and sluggish, conserving energy by ambushing prey instead of chasing it. But the opah’s constant flapping of its fins heats its body, speeding its metabolism, movement and reaction times, scientists report in the journal Science. That warm-blooded advantage turns the opah into a high-performance predator that swims faster, reacts more quickly and sees more sharply, said fisheries biologist Nicholas Wegner of Read More ›

Suzan Mazur interviews Corrado Spadafora: Corrado Spadafora’s laboratory originally discovered that mature sperm cells from a variety of species share the ability to spontaneously take up exogenous DNA molecules and deliver them to oocytes at fertilization: they called that phenomenon cell-mediated sperm-mediated gene transfer (SMGT). That feature was subsequently exploited, in theirs and other laboratories, to generate genetically modified animals in different species. More. Corrado Spadafora: Three aspects need to be seriously recognized. First, epigenetics heavily affects inheritance. Second, there is transgenerational inheritance, that is, information that can be inherited from one generation to the next unlinked from chromosomes, because extrachromosomal DNA or RNA structures can get through the germline to the next generation and cause phenotypic variations in the offspring. Transgenerational Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The discovery of a ‘left-handed’ magnetic field that pervades the universe could help explain a long standing mystery — the absence of cosmic antimatter. A group of scientists, led by Prof Tanmay Vachaspati from Arizona State University in the United States, with collaborators at Washington University and Nagoya University, announce their result in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Readers? Follow UD News at Twitter!

The local tax funded cult, it turns out, is safe. Here: Why Close Relatives Make Bad Neighbors Abstract The number of exotic plant species that have been introducedinto the United States far exceeds that of other groups of organisms, and many of these have become invasive. As in many regions of the globe, invasive members of the thistle tribe, Cardueae, are highly problematic in the California Floristic Province, an established biodiversity hotspot. While Darwin’s Naturalization Hypothesis posits that plantinvaders closely related to native species would be at a disadvantage, evidence has been found that introduced thistles more closely related to native species are more likely to become invasive. In order to elucidate the mechanisms behind this pattern, we modeled the Read More ›

From Real Clear Science: When biologists get together to discuss the nagging mysteries in their diverse field, there’s always that elephant in the room: How did life spring up from non-life? But, according to highly regarded cancer researcher Robert Weinberg, it’s an elephant that most biologists ignore, or at least discreetly avoid. “Origin of life is not something people work on that much because it’s so far away from resolution.” Instead, biologists turn their attention to other problems, fruits that hang a bit lower on the tree. Though these queries may not be of existential interest, they’re no less fascinating. Your Nobel? Here’s one: It is a beautiful irony that the smallest of creatures is at the center of one Read More ›