News

From Dennis Overbye at New York Times: There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say. Recent measurements of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with a hard-won “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. The latest result shows a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. But in a measure of how precise cosmologists think their science has become, this small mismatch has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. “If it is real, Read More ›

“Prebiotic” chemistry means the development and demonstration of theories about how chemicals washed together and somehow formed the immensely complex structures of life. There is no shortage of single-event scenarios. A hairpin loop is “an unpaired loop of messenger RNA (mRNA) that is created when an mRNA strand folds and forms base pairs with another section of the same strand. The resulting structure looks like a loop or a U-shape. (Suitable)” In DNA too. From ScienceDaily: The evolution of cells and organisms is thought to have been preceded by a phase in which informational molecules like DNA could be replicated selectively. New work shows that hairpin structures make particularly effective DNA replicator. In the metabolism of all living organisms there Read More ›

Says Eric Scerri at Los Angeles Times: Detailed case studies on the history of chemistry and physics show that the role of genius in advancing those fields — and even the role of rationality — is overstated. Rather than a hyper-intellectual, alien activity practiced by a remote priesthood, science is hit and miss, the ever-changing product of less-than-brilliant people, just like every other human activity. … In the 1910s, the English mathematical physicist John Nicholson published a number of articles in which he proposed that several proto-elements (his term) existed in outer space and were the basis of our familiar terrestrial elements. Their presence in a number of celestial bodies, he claimed, enabled him for the first time to do Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post, a chat with molecular biologist Jeffrey Errington about L-form bacteria, which lack a strong cell wall: Jeffery Errington: I became interested in the problem because I was aware of L-forms from the scientific literature of the 1950s and 60s. Curiously, however, right around the end of the 1970s or so, publishing on L-forms just sort of petered out. I haven’t really been able to get to the bottom of exactly why that happened. … Suzan Mazur: How pervasive are L-forms in nature now and earlier in evolution? Jeffery Errington: There are a few bacteria that are naturally cell wall-deficient, like Mycoplasma, which is a pathogen, and Phytoplasma, which inhabits plants. They’re both cell-wall deficient, Read More ›

From Tom Feilden at at BBC: From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies. … After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings. … Writing in the latest edition of Nature, [Edinburgh neuroscientist Prof Malcolm Macleod] outlines a new approach to animal studies that calls for independent, statistically rigorous confirmation of a paper’s central hypothesis before publication. “Without efforts to reproduce the findings of others, we don’t know if the facts out there actually Read More ›

Yesterday, NASA reported a record-breaking discovery of seven new Earth-size planets around a single star, three in the habitable zone: The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system [TRAPPIST-1]. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone. “This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: We’re looking forward to the March for Science this coming April 22, planned for Washington, DC, and with satellite marches across the country. If you’ve read about it, it promises to be a screechy and politicized protest against questioning orthodox scientific views or criticizing scientists. Scientists, as you know, are now held by many to enjoy a status granting them permanent immunity from criticism (much like the media, judges, and intelligence officials). In this way, scientific authority transmutes into scientific authoritarianism. Meanwhile we’re told it’s the skeptics on Darwinism and other scientific ideas, perpetually dodging threats to their careers and reputations, that we are supposed to fear and revile. More. It’s increasingly Read More ›

Of course. What other motive could there be? Re the South Dakota academic freedom bill, David Klinghoffer offers at Evolution News & Views : In a surreal move, a group called the National Coalition Against Censorship has plunged into the South Dakota situation to demand continued restraints on teachers and their academic freedom — in other words, censorship. They complain that SB 55 would “remov[e] accountability in science education.” “Accountability” there would seem to mean instructors being vulnerable to career retaliation for teaching critical thinking skills to science students. These “anti-censorship” proponents advocate retaining the option of punishing biology teachers for going off message on Darwinism. They go on: “Essentially, [the bill] removes the restraints on teachers that prevents them Read More ›

The original Nature article is here. From Sarah Lewin at LiveScience: Winston Churchill was known for his leadership during World War II, but a newfound essay on alien life reveals another side of him, one that was deeply curious about the universe. “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures,” he wrote in the newly uncovered essay, “or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.” More. Churchill’s opinions sound cogent, though not a history-making Read More ›

Further to “Atheist cosmologist warns “deeply religious” people not to put their faith in “apparent” fine-tuning” (Nature), Columbia mathematician and string theory skeptic Peter Woit (of Not Even Wrong) offers a review at Wall Street Journal of the same book, A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, “Searching for God at the Centre of the Big Bang,” in which h notes, … Mr. Guth was initially fascinated by the idea of baby universes getting produced and making up a multiverse, though he imagined these other universes would all have the same physics as ours. Ms. Merali relates that he quickly lost interest: Why care much about cosmological models producing not just Read More ›

From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: New Evidence for the Strange Idea that the Universe Is a Hologram One of the great mysteries of modern cosmology is how our universe can be so thermally uniform—the vast cosmos is filled with the lingering heat of the Big Bang. Over time, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, but it can still be seen in the faint glow of microwave radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background. In any direction we look, the temperature of this cosmic background is basically the same, varying by only tiny amounts. But according to the standard “cold dark matter” model of cosmology, there wasn’t enough time for hotter and cooler regions of the Read More ›

From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, on a March for Science event: On Sunday, thousands scientists and supporters gathered in Boston’s Copley Square to “stand up for science” under the Trump administration. … Many rally-goers were in Boston for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. … Hari, the science educator, said he is organizing more than 260 satellite events to coincide with the main March for Science in Washington this spring. More. The satellite events are probably going to be the important ones. Curiously, I O’Leary for News happened to be talking to two political operatives recently, one mature and one pretty young. (I don’t usually run into Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus: Colbert, an idiosyncratic but sincere Catholic, was not really playing devil’s advocate when he challenged Gervais to an argument about the existence of God on his show. Gervais is outspoken about his disbelief and is fond of tweeting the reductio ad absurdum of various religious arguments, yet initially he seemed at a loss for how to deflect Colbert’s skepticism of the Big Bang. … Stephen Colbert: “You’re just believing Stephen Hawking, and that’s a matter of faith in his abilities. You don’t know it yourself—you’re just accepting that because someone told you.” Ricky Gervais: “Well but science is constantly being proved all the time,” Gervais said. “If we take something like any holy book and Read More ›

From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: Scrawled with the image of an aurochs (an extinct species of cattle) and dozens of small dots, the slab was created by the Aurignacians, the first Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe. Radiocarbon tests showed that the engraving dates back to about 38,000 years ago, according to a Jan. 24 report in the journal Quaternary International. … The discovery of the slab fits into the patterns researchers usually see in the earliest European art: There are broad shared features, with some regional quirks that stand out, White said in a statement. “This pattern fits well with social geography models that see art and personal ornamentation as markers of social identity at regional, group and individual Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington: Can science ground morality?, looking at James Davison Hunter’s and Paul Nedelisky’s  Where the New Science of Morality Goes Wrong: Indeed, some believe that we are at the start of a new age, when the power of science will dispel myths surrounding morality and moral difference and establish a truly rational foundation for ethical truth.1 If so, this age will be based on a new moral synthesis that derives from the conceptual architecture of three main schools of Enlightenment thinking on this matter. The first is the psychologized sentimentalism of David Hume: the idea that the basis of moral judgment lies in human psychology, which can be studied empirically, like any other aspect of the physical Read More ›