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In a review of Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing by James Owen Weatherall, Steven Poole writes at Spectator (UK): In an action-packed epilogue, the author describes how the contested field of string theory posits a bogglingly large number of possible kinds of nothingness, and impresses upon the reader how much of physics still depends on intuition and battling ‘interpretations’. The book is not an exhaustive typology of scientific nothings: not directly addressed, for example, is the nothingness that supposedly obtained before the Big Bang. But to regret this is just to emphasise the success of this stylishly written and admirably concise book, at the end of which you will be inclined to agree, along with the author and Freddie Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: One of the two El Sidrón individuals – a teenage boy – is known to have had a large dental abscess. The new DNA analysis shows he had a diarrhoea-causing gut parasite in his system, too. “It’s likely he wasn’t a very happy individual,” says Weyrich. Previous studies have suggested the teenager was eating plants with anti-inflammatory properties. The new study also finds DNA sequences of poplar plants, which are known to contain the natural pain killer salicylic acid (closely related to the active ingredient in aspirin). That may not have been the only medication or self-medication he did: there was DNA from Penicillium fungus – the source of penicillin – in his dental Read More ›

From Aatif Sulleyman at Independent: “Since civilisation began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told The Times. “It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.” He suggests that “some form of world government” could be ideal for the job, but would itself create more problems. “But that might become a tyranny,” he added. “All this may sound a bit doom-laden but I am an optimist. I think the human race will rise to meet these challenges.” More. We didn’t realize Read More ›

From computer science prof Noson S. Yanofsky at Nautilus: Rather than jumping headfirst into the limitations of reason, let us start by just getting our toes wet and examining the limitations of language. Language is a tool used to describe the world in which we live. However, don’t confuse the map with the territory! There is one major difference between the world we live in and language: Whereas the real world is free of contradictions, the man-made linguistic descriptions of that world can have contradictions. More. And yet, despite the paradoxes, language has enabled us to make sense of the world, more or less. See also: Can we talk? Language as the business end of consciousness and Evolution bred a Read More ›

From Stuart Clark at : Particles can become entangled when they interact, and once they do, no matter how far apart they are, measuring the properties of one automatically fixes the properties of the other – changes its socks, as it were. Einstein decried this “spooky action at a distance”, yet many experiments have shown it is an essential ingredient of our world. “Without quantum entanglement, we could not have quantum theory as we know it, and quantum theory is the basis of chemistry, our semiconductor industry, even life,” says Caslav Brukner of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna, Austria. But here’s the really weird thing. There’s nothing stopping the quantum world having different levels of Read More ›

Including our own? From Darren Curnoe at the Conversation: It’s well known among biologists that commercial fishing has had a profound impact on wild fish species. By targeting large animals, as commercial fisheries have typically done, some species have become smaller and an increasing proportion have reached maturity at a younger age and smaller size. In urban areas, where human impact is most obvious, many studies have shown that plants and animals, native and introduced, are evolving in response to human transformation of the environment. A famous example is so-called ‘industrial melanism’. It led to a dramatic drop in the numbers of light-coloured peppered moths in England during the 1800s when industrialisation led to pollution covering tree trunks, camouflaging dark-coloured Read More ›

From University of Plymouth at Eurekalert: Funders need to take more responsibility for the efficiency of the research they fund It has been estimated that up to 85% of medical research is wasted because it asks the wrong question, is badly designed, not published or poorly reported. Health research around the world depends heavily on funding from agencies which distribute public funds. But a new study has found that these agencies are not as open as they could be about what they are doing to prevent this waste and that governments responsible for the public money they distribute are not holding them to account. The findings come in response to a question posed by a letter published on-line today, 9th Read More ›

From Eric Berger at Ars Technica: Thanks to the ominous warning in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, 2010: Odyssey Two, much of the science and technical community shares Culberson’s fascination with Europa. But for the general public, the icy moon remains largely an unknown. Eight billion dollars to peck at the ice on some moon around Jupiter? What is the sense of that? As he works on his peers in Congress, Culberson will eventually have to convince Joe the Plumber, Ken Bone, and the rest of America about the relevance of Europa, too. For this mission, he has a secret weapon. During the briefings at JPL, Culberson brought a friend with him, the famed Director James Cameron. The two men share Read More ›

From Brian Switek at Nature: A study1 published 2 March in PLOS Genetics gives a rare insight into how genomes change as a species dies out. Towards the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago, woolly mammoths ranged through Siberia and into the colder stretches of North America. But by about 4,000 years ago, mainland mammoths had died out and only 300 remained on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. In order to examine this disappearance at the genetic level, biologists Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin at the University of California, Berkeley, compared the complete genome of a mainland mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) that lived about 45,000 years ago with that of a Wrangel Island mammoth from about Read More ›

Well, how could they lose? Just recently, they turned up again with documents. From Gaia Vince at Digg: But by 39,000 years ago, Neanderthals were struggling. Genetically they had low diversity because of inbreeding and they were reduced to very low numbers, partly because an extreme and rapid change of climate was pushing them out of many of their former habitats. A lot of the forested areas they depended on were disappearing and, while they were intelligent enough to adapt their tools and technology, their bodies were unable to adapt to the hunting techniques required for the new climate and landscapes. … “It could’ve gone the other way – if instead the climate had got wetter and warmer, we might Read More ›

But what are they? From Charles Cockell at Physics Today: Look at the menagerie of life—for example, as depicted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in the painting to the left. The casual viewer could easily conclude that life is limitless in its scope, that its forms and shapes are constrained only by the imagination. But however trite the observation may be, life must conform to the laws of physics. Science still does not know how many possible solutions there are to building a self-replicating system within those laws, however, or to what extent physics constrains the products of the evolutionary process. At the scale of organisms, physical laws certainly do limit the engineering solutions to life’s problems. For example, consider locomotion. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Gene transfers are particularly common in the antibiotic-resistance genes of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. When mammals breed, the genome of the offspring is a combination of the parents’ genomes. Bacteria, by contrast, reproduce through cell division. In theory, this means that the genomes of the offspring are copies of the parent genome. However, the process is not quite as straightforward as this due to horizontal gene transfer through which bacteria can transfer fragments of their genome to each other. As a result of this phenomenon, the genome of an individual bacterium can be a combination of genes from several different donors. Some of the genome fragments may even originate from completely different species. In a recent study combining machine Read More ›

From Nature: (paywall) Although it is not known when or where life on Earth began, some of the earliest habitable environments may have been submarine-hydrothermal vents. Here we describe putative fossilized microorganisms that are at least 3,770 million and possibly 4,280 million years old in ferruginous sedimentary rocks, interpreted as seafloor-hydrothermal vent-related precipitates, from the Nuvvuagittuq belt in Quebec, Canada. These structures occur as micrometre-scale haematite tubes and filaments with morphologies and mineral assemblages similar to those of filamentous microorganisms from modern hydrothermal vent precipitates and analogous microfossils in younger rocks. The Nuvvuagittuq rocks contain isotopically light carbon in carbonate and carbonaceous material, which occurs as graphitic inclusions in diagenetic carbonate rosettes, apatite blades intergrown among carbonate rosettes and magnetite–haematite Read More ›

From Jonathan McLatchie, who writes, Saturday’s webinar with Scott Minnich (U Idaho) was really excellent. He talked about his recent work on long-term evolution experiments with *E. coli *and responded to the various criticisms from Lenski & Blount. See also: Why microbiologist Scott Minnich acknowledges design in nature and Iowa State did it to Gonzalez, Now U of Idaho is doing it to Minnich  Note: That was in 2005. Someone must have forgotten to change the batteries in the local Darwinbots. Follow UD News at Twitter! In this webinar, pro-ID bacterial geneticist Dr. Scott Minnich (University of Idaho) talks to the Apologetics Academy about his recent research published in the Journal of Bacteriology, in regards to the long-term E. coli evolution experiments of Dr. Read More ›

As recently reported. Worse luck, most of us probably didn’t even know about the Tully Monster. Well, … from ScienceDaily: Last year, news headlines declared that a decades-old paleontological mystery had been solved. The ‘Tully monster,’ an ancient animal that had long defied classification, was in fact a vertebrate, two groups of scientists claimed. Specifically, it seemed to be a type of fish called a lamprey. The problem with this resolution? According to a group of paleobiologists, it’s plain wrong. “This animal doesn’t fit easy classification because it’s so weird,” said Sallan, an assistant professor in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Science. “It has these eyes that are on stalks and it has this Read More ›