Intelligent Design

The 2015 find may have been an illusion: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory collaboration, better known as LIGO, switched on its upgraded detectors on 12 September 2015. Within 48 hours, it had made its first detection. It took a few months before the researchers were confident enough in the signal to announce a discovery. Headlines around the world soon heralded one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the past century. In 2017, a Nobel prize followed. Five other waves have since been spotted. Or have they? That’s the question asked by a group of physicists who have done their own analysis of the data. “We believe that LIGO has failed to make a convincing case for the detection of any Read More ›

Whose triumph would create “catastrophic genomic instability”: Since Carnegie Institution’s Barbara McClintock received her Nobel Prize on her discovery of jumping genes in 1983, we have learned that almost half of our DNA is made up of jumping genes—called transposons. Given their ability of jumping around the genome in developing sperm and egg cells, their invasion triggers DNA damage and mutations. This often leads to animal sterility or even death, threatening species survival. The high abundance of jumping genes implies that organisms have survived millions, if not billions, of transposon invasions. However, little is known about where this adaptability comes from. Now, a team of Carnegie researchers has discovered that, upon jumping gene invasion, reproductive stem cells boost production of Read More ›

Belgian priest Lemaitre apparently got the idea, which “underpins modern cosmology,” two years before Edwin Hubble: The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recommends that the law now be known as the Hubble–Lemaître law. In the 1920s, the Belgian described in French how the expansion of the Universe would cause galaxies to move away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. He did this two years earlier than US astronomer Edwin Hubble used his own data to establish the same relationship. Of the 4,060 astronomers who cast votes (out of around 11,072 eligible members) 78% were in favour of the change.Elizabeth GIbney, “Belgian priest recognized in Hubble law name change” at Nature These name changes, like the downgrading of Pluto to Read More ›

Not in principle, according to Ann Gauger, of the Biologic Institute. A reader wrote to ask, “I was just wondering why some fellows at Discovery believe in ID but still hold to common descent. Science knows that the genetic code is not universal.” From her reply: I first need to make clear that living things can be the product both of intelligent design and of common descent. If the designer chose to guide the process of gradual change from species to species, that would be both common descent and intelligent design. In other words, intelligent design theory does not require that common descent is false. Neither does intelligent design require that common descent is true. All that intelligent design theory Read More ›

Dark matter was first theorized a century ago and yet “ super-sensitive underground labs that can detect a particle just one-trillionth of one-trillionth of a square centimeter” haven’t found it. Some now think that the problem is that two different approaches to the search are in conflict: There are two methods that physicists use to discover dark matter, and they differ greatly. Particle physics focuses on the small-scale world — the subatomic properties of matter — whereas astronomy focuses on the large-scale world — faraway areas of the universe that we can probe with telescopes and signal detectors. Naturally, they use different approaches. “The language and tools we [physicists and astronomers] use tend to be quite different,” Peter, an assistant Read More ›

A tenfold increase in retractions around the turn of the millennium prompted action and study, including the project by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, founders of Retraction Watch, to list and study retractions. Overall, improved vigilance has slowed the trend, but key problems remain, including: A disturbingly large portion of papers—about 2%—contain “problematic” scientific images that experts readily identified as deliberately manipulated, according to a study of 20,000 papers published in mBio in 2016 by Elisabeth Bik of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues. What’s more, our analysis showed that most of the 12,000 journals recorded in Clarivate’s widely used Web of Science database of scientific articles have not reported a single retraction since 2003. Jeffrey Brainard, Jia Read More ›

The researchers claim it is a first: … a new paper from a group at the University of Oxford is now raising some eyebrows for its claims of the successful entanglement of bacteria with photons—particles of light. Led by the quantum physicist Chiara Marletto and published in October in the Journal of Physics Communications, the study is an analysis of an experiment conducted in 2016 by David Coles from the University of Sheffield and his colleagues. In that experiment Coles and company sequestered several hundred photosynthetic green sulfur bacteria between two mirrors, progressively shrinking the gap between the mirrors down to a few hundred nanometers—less than the width of a human hair. By bouncing white light between the mirrors, the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A kill code is embedded in every cell in the body whose function may be to cause the self-destruction of cells that become cancerous, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. As soon as the cell’s inner bodyguards sense it is mutating into cancer, they punch in the kill code to extinguish the mutating cell. The code is embedded in large protein-coding ribonucleic acids (RNAs) and in small RNAs, called microRNAs, which scientists estimate evolved more than 800 million years ago in part to protect the body from cancer. The toxic small RNA molecules also are triggered by chemotherapy, Northwestern scientists report. Cancer can’t adapt or become resistant to the toxic RNAs, making it a potentially bulletproof treatment if Read More ›

“Tested and verified with ever increasing precision,” the Standard Model is a a remarkably elegant way of understanding the relationships between particles and their interactions.” But then there are the neutrinos: In the Standard Model, neutrinos come in three kinds, or flavors: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. This mirrors the other matter particles in the Standard Model, which each can be organized into three groups. But some experiments have shown hints for a new type of neutrino, one that doesn’t fit neatly into this simple picture. … This extra neutrino—suggested by results from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector and the MiniBooNE experiment—wouldn’t match up with the generations of particles in the Standard Model. It would be “sterile,” meaning Read More ›

At the time, Saudi Arabia was a grassy plain with many lakes: Archaeologist Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and his colleagues recently discovered a handful of stone tools in a sandy layer of soil beneath the dry traces of a shallow Pleistocene lake at Ti’s al Ghadah, in the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia. The soil layer dated to between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago, and it also contained fossilized remains of grazing animals, water birds, and predators like hyena and jaguar. Many of the bones seem to bear the marks of butchering by tool-wielding hominins. Kiona N. Smith, “Archaeologists find 300, 000-year-old stone tools in Saudi Arabia” at Ars Technica On Read More ›

Artifacts have been found from a group that may have contributed to the later and better known Clovis culture: “We have discovered two previously unknown spearpoint styles that predate Clovis,” says study coauthor and archaeologist Michael Waters of Texas A&M University in College Station. Finding these artifacts in sediment showing a clear progression from stemmed points to a triangular point to Clovis points over a roughly 2,000-year period raises the likelihood that one spearpoint style led to the next, Waters holds. Similar stemmed spearpoints dating to as early as around 14,000 years ago have been found in parts of the western United States (SN: 8/11/12, p. 15). Several spearpoints found at the Gault site in Central Texas, dating to 16,700 Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus and The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing ‘the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin’, links to some vintage films of origin of life conferences funded by chemist Harry Lonsdale (1932–2014): Before he died Harry Lonsdale sent me a package with his book on politics—Running: Politics, Power, and the Press—and a flashdrive of his 2013 meeting with the origin of life research teams he funded. I assume he wanted me to share. Following in four parts is Lonsdale’s 2013 origin of life video conference with John Sutherland, Matt Powner, Dave Deamer, et al. The original link to the meeting seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Of particular interest—John Sutherland’s presentation and Nick Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Fruit fly research challenges neutral theory of molecular evolution and suggests one day we may be prescribed diets according to our genes. Fruit fly larvae with a noted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutation showed a pronounced increase in development when eating high carbohydrate diet of banana, but stagnated on a high protein diet of passionfruit. Conversely, fruit fly larvae without the mtDNA mutation thrived on the high protein diet, but dropped in frequency when put on carbohydrates. UNSW School of Biotechnology & Biomolecular Sciences Professor Bill Ballard, who led the study, says the research is a rare demonstration of positive selection at work in evolution. “What is unique about this study is we’ve identified one mutation in the mitochondrial Read More ›

Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do point out the problems with Paul Zak’s claims about a “moral molecule.”) This is likely for the sake of argument. However, their critique would have been stronger if they had asked more questions about the scientific evidence. Instead, for the most part they accept the descriptive claims. However, they still point out a glaring problem. Many of these “moral scientists” overreach by making prescriptive claims. Read More ›

Physicist S. Fred Singer offers some suggestions pertaining to the hunt for life on Mars: 1. Super-rotation of the core Seismic data, taken over a period of several years (Zhang, et al., Science 2005), suggest that the (innermost, solid iron) core is rotating slightly faster than the rest of the Earth, at 0.3-0.5 degrees/yr. We don’t know if this super-rotation is constant or varies over time. The analysts did not suggest a cause, hence relatively little attention has been devoted to the phenomenon. Most scientists I talked to had never heard of it. 2. Possible explanation of super-rotation If I invert the question and ask, “Why is the Earth rotating slower than its core?,” then the answer becomes clear to Read More ›