News

Long suspected: SA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search for life, as we know it. “This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” said John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life Read More ›

Here: Science is the use of observation to guide thinking about the world to understand it. This grand, idealistic, with-a-big-S Science is not broken. However, much of the actual, concrete with-a-small-s science, i.e. the activity of scientists today, is not good Science. Some aspects of how modern science works go against the principles of Science. For instance, one of the key theories of how Science ought to work is Karl Popper‘s notion of falsifiability. Popper argued that for a theory to be considered scientific, it had to be falsifiable. That is, a theory should make predictions that could be tested and, potentially, proven wrong. An unfalsifiable theory is just not science. A falsifiable theory might be right or wrong – Read More ›

A friend sends info re this National Geographic edition, reinforcing the essential message: Fund us, you twits We are science! For example: “Those of us in the science-communication business are as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully accept evolution, he said, “Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.” Look, anyone who “believes in” evolution is either a twit or a ripoff artist looking for funding from public service unions (or some similar group). Evolution isn’t something we Read More ›

Further to: First, the blow-dried TV crowd don’t know anything about evolution, if you don’t count the Inherit the Wind productions they took in at school. All nonsense and falsehood. All nonsense and falsehood, actually, about the neighbours the TV crowd sneered at and left behind, and felt themselves superior for doing so—while they invested their lives in their losing media industries. And distanced the people who would have cared about them. Who really thinks Scott Walker’s opinions about “evolution” are good TV?  Isn’t it just TV’s own losers who care? Anyway, friend says,   Tom Bethell: I watch the PBS NewsHour, but less and less. It was much better when Jim Lehrer was still on board. Today I feel confident Read More ›

… people who are hired to say the opposite. Reader Douglas Ell writes, responding to the elite worry that recent ENCODE findings don’t support Darwinism to say, ENCODE is only one of many recent scientific rejections of the Atheist argument from ignorance — the argument that, when we find something we don’t immediately understand, we should conclude the organism was not designed. Other examples include whale hips, the appendix, and the reverse-wired photoreceptors in our eyes. In each of these cases, but most strikingly in human DNA, as we learn more, we uncover evidence of design. Sure. Except when we uncover some slender reasons to say the opposite.

When writing this story, there were two traps I started falling into: The first one is, act like there is something really great about the person who notices that the universe shows evidence of design. No, that’s just normal. The Darwinists and the Christian Darwinists, paid off by Templeton for example, are earning their keep by casting doubt. But some people don’t depend on such sources. So they report facts. Lennox is one. Good to hear. But we need to get past being grateful for someone who tells the truth. Second, the event happened in Canada. I made a point of not mentioning that at first. So you won’t fall asleep behind the wheel, okay?: For the info of no Read More ›

Christians around the world would say: If only. The current exponent of that view is Steve Pinker: The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing Read More ›

The best attested effect in medicine. Here: One common explanation for the efficacy of some alternative medicine is the ‘placebo effect’. If there is a placebo effect, it still has the healing effect. So why not go with that? It doesn’t really matter what’s in the black box: the mechanism of healing isn’t the crucial thing, all that matters is that when you take this particular tablet, it relieves your headache. Yes, a placebo can be very useful, and it may be that some of the effect of conventional medicine is achieved through placebo. But, of course, we know that it’s not just placebo when we’ve done the science. We know that, in fact, these drugs really do have medicinal Read More ›

Probably. Some guy actually asks questions we have all been wondering about: reflecting on the current cover story in National Geographic, “The War on Science”: : Anyone who expresses any doubt in what National Geographic calls “the consensus of experts” is a crank or a nut. From the magazine’s perspective, no other explanations are even worth consideration. And the article featured a reproduction of an 1893 map of the “Stationary and Square Earth” drawn up by a South Dakota businessman who insisted that the Earth was flat. It was an illustration, National Geo says, of how “we subconsciously cling to our intuitions” about the world even when experts tell us we are wrong. Among the many things missing from the Read More ›

Otherwise, how to explain this?: There are a few university administrations that still seem committed to making academic freedom a leading value, even though it is a distinctly difficult value to monetize (and is indeed one that may be a consistent money-loser). For instance, the University of Chicago recently issued a strong statement on academic freedom. But that effort, headed by University of Chicago law professor and former provost Geoffrey Stone, seems increasingly to be the exception rather than the rule. What are we to do? Well, I believe we as university-based researchers should at least be quite concerned when academics have to worry about being “off-brand.” We should, I think, be pretty agitated when a university professor has to Read More ›

We are still assessing the significance of the fact that hardly anyone takes TV seriously any more (which is what we were trying to say in “Time Magazine quizzes Scott Walker’s high school science teacher on his evolution views). Unfortunately, seniors, the people who do still take TV seriously are the group most likely to vote, and least likely to understand the new media issues. That said, it is encouraging to hear from another dying medium that Americans are moving faster than ever away from traditional TV Adults watched an average of four hours and 51 minutes of live TV each day in the fourth quarter of 2014, down 13 minutes from the same quarter of 2013, according to Nielsen’s Read More ›

On Saturdays (not the usual day science news is broken), the News desk sometimes focuses on public trends that impact our issues, including the ongoing campus war on freedom of speech—in the United States, it typically surfaces as the war of the First Amendment to the Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. It’s no secret that the governing classes today don’t like the First Amendment and want to chip away at it. One recent new tool has been “trigger warnings”—the Read More ›

People got unseasonably lucky  (Texas lottery div). Questions were raised here.  Someone good with numbers tried studying it a couple years back. But now this: Abstract:  Some people have all the luck. We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the “plausibly lucky” from the “implausibly lucky” by solving optimization problems that take into account the particular games each gambler won, where plausibility is determined by finding the minimum expenditure so that if every Florida resident spent that much, the chance that any of them would win as often as the gambler did would still be less than one in a Read More ›

Choc biscuits this way please. Government to reincarnate Dalai Lama? From an atheist people’s republic: Get this: Atheistic China Claims ‘Right to Reincarnate’ Dalai Lama Look, we dunno except local EMS worldwide should help anyone screaming and fainting: China’s Communist Party is officially atheist, but that has not stopped it from making some impassioned claims on the afterlife. Some of the strongest language at this week’s annual national congress has been reserved for the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. The fury is over his claim in recent interviews that he may not be reincarnated, ending the Dalai Lama’s seven-century lineage. His comments undercut Beijing’s plans to pick a China-friendly successor to the Dalai Lama after he dies. Can Read More ›

That’s, like, weird. From Wired: As she gathered more and more data on different populations of the birds around the island, Langin had a revelation: The birds, members of one single species, had split into two varieties in different habitats. Island scrub jays living in oak forests have shorter bills, good for cracking acorns. Their counterparts in pine forests have longer bills, which seem better adapted to prying open pine cones. That may not appear to be something you’d consider a “revelation,” but it really is—if you believe in evolution. Ever since Darwin and his famous finches, biologists have thought that in order for a species to diverge into two new species, the two populations had to be physically isolated. Read More ›