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From ScienceDaily: Researchers at the University of Oslo (UiO) keep discovering surprises in the Atlantic cod genome. The most recent study has revealed an unusual amount of short and identical DNA sequences, which might give cod an evolutionary advantage. Or else it is something the cod could live with or else it makes no difference at present. If we don’t have any very definite information, why talk about “evolutionary advantage” at all? Interesting: “We have already found a fish species that has even more tandem repeats than cod, namely the related haddock. Both cod (Latin name: Gadus morhua) and haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) are members of the cod family (Gadidae). This may indicate that the whole group has an increased proportion Read More ›

Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt. Your time here. To join, go here.

To him it’s all  real simple: It happens because some people reject expert information when it goes against their personal values … For its part, the American public is in the grip of a sullen, almost paranoid, narcissism about science and experts. This is not a function of education; the anti-vaccine movement, for example, is actually concentrated among parents with more education than their poorer counterparts. Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication. (Consider the number of otherwise intelligent people who advocate consuming raw milk, for example, against the advice of a horrified medical community.) Instead, the public rejection of science is an extension of our Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Five neuroscientists argue that fancy new technologies have led the field astray. John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.” He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they Read More ›

Asks Anil Ananthaswamy at Nautilus: For his theory of emergent gravity, Verlinde takes the bold leap that the entropy of spacetime has an additional component that scales with volume. His thinking is that our universe, which approximates a spatiotemporal geometry called de Sitter space, is expanding at an accelerated rate, and so has a cosmological horizon—a distance beyond which we cannot see, because galaxies are receding faster than their light can reach us. Such a horizon is very similar to the boundary of a black hole and, by Bekenstein’s and Hawking’s arguments, implies an entropy. This entropy must be counted in addition to the entropy that physicists already ascribe to spacetime, and—crucially, according to Verlinde—it is not localized at the Read More ›

From Charles Q. Quoi at LiveScience: Fossils unearthed in China appeared to be strange patchworks of extinct and modern human lineages, with the large brains of modern humans; the low, broad skulls of earlier humans; and the inner ears of Neanderthals, a new study reported. These new fossils suggest that far-flung groups of ancient humans were more genetically linked across Eurasia than often previously thought, researchers in the new study said. “I don’t like to think of these fossils as those of hybrids,” said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Hybridization implies that all of these groups were separate and discrete, only occasionally interacting. What these fossils show is that these groups were basically Read More ›

Well, there are some limitations: From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Nothing about DNA is 100 percent accurate or even as close to the accuracy we’ve come to expect from our electronic bit storage media. Simply synthesizing DNA of a desired sequence will sometimes result in an error, as will amplifying it or decoding it again. And some specific sequences are especially error prone, like long runs of a single base (like TTTTTTTTTT) or stretches that are a mix of Gs and Cs. So any encoding method has to be robust to these issues. Fortunately, we’ve already developed encoding algorithms that stand up to data loss. The authors went with Fountain codes, which allow packet-based data to be transmitted over Read More ›

From 2015, but curiously relevant, at his blog Scientia Salon: The Harris-Chomsky exchange, in my mind, summarizes a lot of what I find unpleasant about SAM (skeptic and atheist movements): a community who worships celebrities who are often intellectual dilettantes, or at the very least have a tendency to talk about things of which they manifestly know very little; an ugly undertone of in-your-face confrontation and I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-agree-with [insert your favorite New Atheist or equivalent]; loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead, accompanied by a degree of groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists; and, lately, a willingness to engage in public shaming and other vicious social networking practices any Read More ›

Debate rages about whether scientists should get political. This story crossed the desk, and it might be food for thought: From Ian Goodwin and Yuri Trusov at the Conversation: By the late 1920s, as director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov soon amassed the largest seed collection on the planet. He worked hard, he enjoyed himself, and drove other eager young scientists to work just as hard to make more food for the people of the Soviet Union. However, things did not go well for Vavilov politically. How did this visionary geneticist, who aimed to find the means for food security, end up starving to death in a Soviet gulag in 1943? nter the villain, Trofim Lysenko, Read More ›

From Stuart Clark at New Scientist: The universe’s ultimate speed limit seems set in stone. But there’s good reason to believe it might once have been faster – and may still be changing now Light’s constant, finite speed is a brake on our ambitions of interstellar colonisation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and it is more than four years’ light travelling time even to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun and home, possibly, to a habitable planet rather like Earth. More. Oddly, such a position was once widely derided as a young Earth creationist one. It’s getting harder to be a respectable bigot these days. Just pounding the lectern in favor of a rock hard position Read More ›

From Sarah Kaplan at Washington Post on a recent find in northern Canada: The straw-shaped “microfossils,” narrower than the width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye, are believed to come from ancient microbes, according to a new study in the journal Nature. Scientists debate the age of the specimens, but the authors’ youngest estimate — 3.77 billion years — would make these fossils the oldest ever found. Some apparent finds in recent years have not been found to be the residue of life, but in this case: But the scientists behind the new finding believe their analysis should hold up to scrutiny. In addition to structures that look like fossil microbes, the rocks contain a cocktail of Read More ›

Well, that’s what some cosmologists fear. Call it a futurist’s dystopia if you like. Sci-tech writer Geoff Manaugh explains at BLDGBLOG: As the universe expands over hundreds of billions of years, Reynolds explained, there will be a point, in the very far future, at which all galaxies will be so far apart that they will no longer be visible from one another. Upon reaching that moment, it will no longer be possible to understand the universe’s history—or perhaps even that it had one—as all evidence of a broader cosmos outside of one’s own galaxy will have forever disappeared. Cosmology itself will be impossible. … There would be no reason to theorize that other galaxies had ever existed in the first Read More ›

Locally, we refer to people who review books without reading them as noviewers. Mostly, they want to encourage others to follow their example and not read the book either. The usual low-tech technique for spotting noviewers in the review stream is that they engage with the text only via canned talking points at best. They show little interest in the ideas as such. But how to prove that? From Dave Lee at BBC we learn, So imagine my delight today when, via the excellent Nieman Lab, I read about Norwegian broadcaster NRK. The tech section of its site, NRKBeta, is trying a simple experiment. You can’t leave a comment unless you’ve read the story. How will they know? There’s a test! Read More ›

Vs. tailoring science news while claiming to be a neutral arbiter. From Jon Entine at Genetic Literacy Project, on the New York Times’ Oscar-worthy protestations that it presents “the truth: Whether a journalist presents a story in good faith but wrongly can be a matter of healthy debate. But increasingly, a more troubling ethical line is being crossed: some writers choose to arrange facts, or even invent them, in ways that grey out nuances to advance a storyline arrived at before independent reporting even commences. … Two recent Times articles on the swirling farm controversy about bee health and food—one two years ago and another last week—raise serious questions about whether the paper’s editors are still wearing ideological blinders on Read More ›

From Journal of Molecular Evolution: ABSTRACT: A general framework for conventional models of the origin of life (OOL) is the specification of a ‘privileged function.’ A privileged function is an extant biological function that is excised from its biological context, elevated in importance over other functions, and transported back in time to a primitive chemical or geological environment. In RNA or Clay Worlds, the privileged function is replication. In Metabolism-First Worlds, the privileged function is metabolism. In Thermal Vent Worlds, the privileged function is energy harvesting from chemical gradients. In Membrane Worlds, the privileged function is compartmentalization. In evaluating these models, we consider the contents and properties of the Universal Gene Set of life, which is the set of orthologous Read More ›