PaV

This will go down as my shortest post ever: What’s wrong with this equation for the burning of octane? 2 C8H18+ 25 O2⟶ 16 CO2+ 18 H2O Let’s see who’s astute out there.

Two days ago a press release came out about an article indicating that 5,600 years ago (BP=Before the Present Age [you see, BP avoids the word “Christian”–something that is de rigeur these days]) global temperatures in Antarctica were warmer than they are today. Think about that. How old is the Chinese dynasties? What about Egypt? They lived through these times. Did THEY cause “global warming.” Well, today, there’s another press release. This one, too, is about Antarctica and tells us that in the mid-to-late Holocene (our present age)–which is around the same 5,600 years ago as mentioned above, sea ice in Antarctica was in retreat more than it is today. Their results are based on southern elephant seal occupation sites. Read More ›

Two days ago a press release came out about an article indicating that 5,600 years ago (BP=Before the Present Age [you see, BP avoids the word “Christian”–something that is de rigeur these days]) global temperatures in Antarctica were warmer than they are today. Think about that. How old is the Chinese dynasties? What about Egypt? They lived through these times. Did THEY cause “global warming.” Well, today, there’s another press release. This one, too, is about Antarctica and tells us that in the mid-to-late Holocene (our present age)–which is around the same 5,600 years ago as mentioned above, sea ice in Antarctica was in retreat more than it is today. Their results are based on southern elephant seal occupation sites. Read More ›

In today’s Phys.Org, we find an article giving the latest results from Deep Ocean temperature measurements of the North Atlantic. These measurements feature a new method of obtaining both temperature and CO2 levels. What is the long term trend telling us about our future? What about the dramatic shifts in deep ocean temperatures? Were they man-made? Just look at it and then you’ll know just how hysterical global warming–now known as “climate change,” really is. A picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.

I suspect that almost every week there’s at least one article published somewhere that undermines Darwinian theory. Now using the term, ‘Darwinian theory’, might ruffle some people’s feathers. Yet, without Darwinian theory, neo-Darwinism makes no sense; it lacks any intellectual foundation. And, so, here we are inching towards the 200th anniversary of Origin of Species and 21st-Century evolutionary biologists remain saddled with 19th-Century thinking. With that said, this “week’s” article comes from Phys.Org and it offers a newer understanding of rice domestication. We find out that the results of an international collaboration “suggest that the emergence of cultivated rice from wild rice plants is the result of three gene mutations that make the seeds (i.e. the grains of rice) fall Read More ›

In today’s Nature, we find this article: “Synonymous mutations in representative yeast genes are mostly strongly non-neutral.” They investigated what effect “synonymous, nonsynonymous and nonsense” mutations involving “21 endogenous genes” would have on yeast. The fitness levels of synonymous and nonsynonymous fell in equal (though not ‘identical’) measure–around 75%. I don’t have access to the article itself, only the abstract. The abstract begins thusly: Synonymous mutations in protein-coding genes do not alter protein sequences and are thus generally presumed to be neutral or nearly neutral[1,2,3,4,5] 1 through 5 are citations. Who are they: Kimura, King and Jukes, Nei and Kumar, Li and Dan Graur. The heavyweights of neutral theory. The abstract ends: The strong non-neutrality of most synonymous mutations, if Read More ›

This Phys.Org press release isn’t about a particularly interesting scientific paper. However, what the authors tells us about how this paper came to be is very interesting. And, I may add, very revealing. Listen to what they have to say about their “aha” moment: Inside some of the data that a standard mapping algorithm normally clips out, Zhang and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Chen, Ph.D., recognized that the clipped pattern in the DNA looked like an L1 inside of the FOXR2 gene. In a moment of serendipity, Diane Flasch, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who previously worked with L1s, recognized the signs of an L1 regulatory element. The researchers performed a special technique that sequences longer regions of DNA to decode the Read More ›

Today at Phys.Org, this press release and linked paper can be found. Now, listen to this: A research team led by Bristol’s Professor Paolo Madeddu exposed human heart pericytes, which are cells that wrap small blood vessels in the heart, to SARS-CoV-2 Alpha and Delta variants, along with the original Wuhan virus. Surprisingly, they found the heart pericytes were not infected. Intrigued by this finding, in a second test-tube experiment, the researchers challenged the cardiac pericytes with the spike protein alone, without the virus. The spike protein made pericytes unable to interact with their companion endothelial cells and induced them to secrete inflammatory cytokines, suggesting the spike protein is harmful to human cardiac cells. Interestingly, the team found that antibodies Read More ›

On January 12, 2022, Phys.Org had a PR on an article documenting “non-random” mutations found in wild tobacco plants, published by a team from UC Davis. Now, three weeks later (Feb 1, 2022), we have another paper, working with human populations in Africa, and which, according to a team from the University of Haifa, “surprisingly” turns up “non-random” mutations. From the PR on the first paper: The scientists found that the way DNA was wrapped around different types of proteins was a good predictor of whether a gene would mutate or not. “It means we can predict which genes are more likely to mutate than others and it gives us a good idea of what’s going on,” Weigel said. The Read More ›

At Evolution and News, there’s a link to a 2017 article tackling the problems of inflationary theory in the field of cosmology. What I find so interesting is the second to last paragraph in this six page article. Here’s how it reads: A common misconception is that experiments can be used to falsify a theory. In practice, a failing theory gets increasingly immunized against experiment by attempts to patch it. The theory becomes more highly tuned and arcane to fit new observations until it reaches a state where its explanatory power diminishes to the point that it is no longer pursued. The explanatory power of a theory is measured by the set of possibilities it excludes. More immunization means less Read More ›

A new paper can be found at Phys.Org undermining the idea that what drives evolution is the “decoupling” of DNA with phylogenic structures. This idea is implicit in the twin ideas of pseudogenes and gene duplication: both allow the DNA to become “uncoupled” from the structures they code for and so RM becomes permissible. Well, this paper shuts down this idea. Given the success of cichlids, understanding the evolution of these two jaws has become an important line of inquiry for biologists. “We’re trying to gain a better understanding of the origins and maintenance of biodiversity,” says Albertson. Researchers have long thought that the two sets of jaws are evolutionarily decoupled and can evolve independently of one another, pushing the Read More ›

At Phys.Org today, a press release indicates that scientists have fashioned a type of stand-in for natural cells which can ‘mimic’ some of their functions/properties. The title of the PR is: “Scientists create artificial cells that mimic living cells’ ability to capture, process, and expel material.” Should we add this to the Miller-Urey experiment as a new piece of the puzzle as to how life started? Well, first of all, the limitations of the Miller-Urey experiment have been spelled out elsewhere, but should be well-known by now. Second, here’s what we read at Phys.Org: To design the cell mimics, the researchers created a spherical membrane the size of a red blood cell using a polymer, a stand-in for the cellular Read More ›

For about a year now, from reading various news items on newly published science articles, I’ve begun to consider not DNA, but RNA, the real driver of life. I think that DNA’s essential role is that of information storage–a hard drive, while RNA is like the BIOS system–it tells the “system” what it should be doing. I’ve been waiting for the right article to come along to present this newer view of genomic life. Well, it appears that the ‘right article’ has come along. This is from Phys.Org and this is the pdf online version of the article. From the Press Release via Phys.Org: Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed Read More ›

We’ve all heard about the fine-tuning of physical constants–just change them ever so slightly and a different kind of universe emerges. Then, there’s simply our location in our galaxy that allows us to see outwards to the galaxy itself, and beyond. Now, even the radioactivity in the earth’s core seems to be conducive to life. At Phys.Org there is a press release on this paper (behind paywall). “What they found is that if the radiogenic heating is more than the Earth’s, the planet can’t permanently sustain a dynamo, as Earth has done. That happens because most of the thorium and uranium end up in the mantle, and too much heat in the mantle acts as an insulator, preventing the molten Read More ›

There’s a new study reported on at Phys.Org. This was a few weeks back. It seems that a “cousin” of a shark had a bony structure. And it appears that sharks FIRST had a bony structure and only subsequently developed a cartilagineous structure. The lead researcher Dr. Martin Brazeau, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, had this to say: “It was a very unexpected discovery. Conventional wisdom says that a bony inner skeleton was a unique innovation of the lineage that split from the ancestor of sharks more than 400 million years ago, but here is clear evidence of bony inner skeleton in a cousin of both sharks and, ultimately, us.” Dr. Brazeau goes on to further say: Read More ›