News

Interesting discussion from NOVA: Zeno’s paradox is solved, but the question of whether there is a smallest unit of length hasn’t gone away. Today, some physicists think that the existence of an absolute minimum length could help avoid another kind of logical nonsense; the infinities that arise when physicists make attempts at a quantum version of Einstein’s General Relativity, that is, a theory of “quantum gravity.” When physicists attempted to calculate probabilities in the new theory, the integrals just returned infinity, a result that couldn’t be more useless. In this case, the infinities were not mistakes but demonstrably a consequence of applying the rules of quantum theory to gravity. But by positing a smallest unit of length, just like Zeno Read More ›

Interesting new book by scientist/filmmaker Randy Olson from U Chicago Press: Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That’s a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story—and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as Read More ›

So then Hawking’s attack on philosophy was misguided? From Nautilus: Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything. … Even the greatest scientists have seen that the intelligibility of the world is a mystery. Actually, it is generally the greatest scientists who do get that. It’s the talk show poseurs who don’t. The logical independence of physical reality from mind and understanding gives science its point. The problem, as philosophers over the centuries have pointed out, is that this can open wide the gate to skepticism. If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may Read More ›

Here: “Yes, fitness is the central concept of biology, but it is an elusive concept. Almost everyone who looks at it seriously comes out in a different place. There are literally dozens of genuinely different definitions, which I won’t review here. At least two people have called fitness indefinable, a biological primitive. (A primitive is an undefined initial term in logic.) I don’t think that helps. Stearns (1976) once described it as ‘something everyone understands but no one can define precisely.’ Or is it that we can’t define it because we don’t understand it?” – L. Van Valen, “Three Paradigms of Evolution,” Evolutionary Theory 9 (1989):1-17. See also: Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented? and Read More ›

Here: Dawkins worries about the way US university campuses are becoming places for unlearning liberty. Well yes, but neither Dawkins nor Maher seems able or willing to understand that progressivism is not about liberty; it is about control of an increasingly subject and dependent population. They congratulate themselves on being “liberals,” but might find out the hard way that progressives are not liberals in any classical sense. Note:  I was originally alerted to this item by a friend who noted, in what may have been an earlier version of the clip (I saw it), that they started by focusing on how wrong the idea of design in nature is.  Can’t currently find that version at Mediaite.  

From New Scientist: Living fossil nautilus re-emerges after 30 years of hiding Ward, who is a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleague Bruce Saunders first described A. scrobiculatus in 1984. Its shell shape looks unwieldy compared with the more streamlined shells of other animals in the Nautilidae family, but it appears to have evolved that way relatively recently. “It turned on its head what we thought of as primitive,” says Ward. Stop using the term “primitive.” What does it mean anyway? See also: Species assumed to be extinct sometimes turn up again. In part, this is probably due in part to the relatively shorter time today before extinction fears arise. For example, “They swim just Read More ›

Here: Perhaps his silliest statements have to do with our own solar system. Carson claims that our solar system is perfectly ordered—but, in fact, the motion of the planets is chaotic in the long term, and, although we can predict the motion of comets over the seventy-year period he discusses, for longer time horizons, such as millions or billions of years, the complexity of our solar system makes that practically impossible.More. If it isn’t perfectly ordered, why is there so much life here, but we are forever hearing about endless other habitable planets that turn out probably not to be. Anyway, fine words from a crackpot cosmologist who thinks all scientists should be militant atheists . Election season brings ‘em Read More ›

Where you write, Later in the story we learn that no one believes the shooter was motivated by religious rage. Rather, he was motivated by anti-religious rage and singled out Christians for death. MSN’s writers and editors are shameless, utterly shameless. I’ve tried to get cred to say this in Canada on the eve of an election, but apparently can’t, so must say it here*: Briefly, I suspect, MSN personnel are simply responding to the desires of their present and probable future viewers: – No party wants the votes of serious Christians or observant Jews any more. Or thoughtful atheists. No one cares what we think. Our rights can be so easily stripped and our property taken or taxed away. Read More ›

Here. But now this: It is most likely that we are the only living beings in our galaxy, according to an esteemed former Nasa scientist. William Borucki, who played a large part in finding other potentially hospitable planets during his role as chief investigator for the US space agency’s Kepler mission until his retirement in 2015, said that the evidence points to us being alone, in our galaxy at least. Definitely don’t blast off just yet. See also: Don’t let Mars fool you. Those exoplanets teem with life! and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?

The first clue for caution is this should be the title: Theoretical astrophysicists have discovered that millions of planets are more habitable than we realized The authors, led by Jérémy Leconte, a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, built a three-dimensional climate model and found that a thin atmosphere would allow a planet to break free of rotational lockup and spin as it rotates around the star. Scientists previously thought that only a large atmosphere could create a significant spin but, according to Leconte, thin atmospheres may have a larger rotational effect, because they allow more light from the star to reach the planet’s surface. This solar heat drives wind to create Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Our brain cells have different genomes from one another. The study shows for the first time that mutations in somatic cells — that is, any cell in the body except sperm and eggs — are present in significant numbers in the brains of healthy people. These mutations appear to occur more often in the genes a neuron uses most. Patterns of mutation allow researchers to trace brain cell lineages. … The study, published Oct. 2 in Science, shows for the first time that mutations in somatic cells–that is, any cell in the body except sperm and eggs–are present in significant numbers in the brains of healthy people. This finding lays the foundation for exploring the role of these Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Study adds to evidence that viruses are alive Until now, viruses have been difficult to classify, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, who led the new analysis with graduate student Arshan Nasir. In its latest report, the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses recognized seven orders of viruses, based on their shapes and sizes, genetic structure and means of reproducing. B21″Under this classification, viral families belonging to the same order have likely diverged from a common ancestral virus,” the authors wrote. “However, only 26 (of 104) viral families have been assigned to an order, and the evolutionary relationships of most of them remain unclear.” Part of Read More ›

From Business Insider: We’re all made of heavy atoms forged in the explosions of supermassive stars. This not only connects us to the universe, but highlights the possibility of alien life, explains famed astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson: “These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems — stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.” More. If you believe this, put your affairs in the hands of a trustee.

From BBC News: Rewind to 30,000 years ago. As well as modern humans, three other hominin species were around: the Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia, the Denisovans in Asia, and the “hobbits” from the Indonesian island of Flores. The hobbits could have survived until as recently as 18,000 years ago. They may have been wiped out by a large volcanic eruption, according to geological evidence from the area. Living on one small island will also leave a species more vulnerable to extinction when disaster strikes. We do not know enough about the Denisovans to even ask why they died out. All we have from them is a small finger bone and two teeth. Notice how the BBC story is Read More ›

Part of O’Leary for News ongoing series here. Then there is Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, with its famous exemplar: the peacock’s tail. An illustration may help us see why reasonable persons continue to doubt. Picture a triplex: Tom, a world class cribbage addict in Apartment A, does no work and has no money (apart from social assistance and charity). Dick, in Apartment B, works eight shifts a week in trucking, so has no trouble paying his bills. Harry, formerly in Apartment C, went off and became a multimillionaire (legally) in packaging and shipping for the software industry. Does work alone explain Harry’s success? Did he work a thousand times harder and more often than Dick? Is that even possible? Read More ›