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From ScienceDaily: The researchers conclude that already the least common ancestor of caseids and mammals had a diaphragm more than 300 million years ago — that is about 50 million years earlier than previously assumed. An efficient respiratory system is intertwined with the evolution of warmbloodedness, which in turn molded our entire behavior. This assumed early origin of the diaphragm now demands a reevaluation of these developments.A fossil diaphragm probably will never be found, simply due to its bad chances to become preserved. Science, according to Prof. Perry, therefore depends on functional approximations to trace the origin of this important evolutionary novelty. Dr. Lambertz: “We still don’t know that much about these animals. It has been a long way towards Read More ›

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: From 1989 to 2000, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) operated an atom smasher called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), in which particles were sent crashing into one another at near light speed. A restudy of the data from the now-dismantled LEP collider could prove a hint or just a fluke. When the original LEP experiments were done, the muons were produced in particle collisions (also called “events”) that occurred at certain energies. A graph of particle mass (expressed as energy, per Einstein’s famous E = mc^2) against the number of events per billion electron volts, or GeV, shows a peak at about 10 to 15 GeV and a long “tail” that trails off Read More ›

From John Hands at Science Focus: At a landmark international conference recently [7-9 November] organised by the Royal Society and the British Academy, several speakers called for a revision of the theory of biological evolution that has been largely unquestioned in the UK and the USA for around 70 years. This paradigm – a combination of Darwinism, population genetics, and what Francis Crick called the central dogma of evolutionary biology – is known as NeoDarwinism, or the Modern Synthesis. Popularised by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling 1976 book The Selfish Gene, it is a statistical model validated not by observation or experiment, but by simplistic games models borrowed from 1940s economics. Those speakers drew attention to several empirically supported mechanisms, Read More ›

By 2076. From Michael Brooks at New Scientist: Will we still love technology when robots have taken our jobs, or when insurance companies demand huge premiums because humans are the most dangerous drivers on the roads? Will people smash up self-driving taxis, just as Luddites attacked automated looms? In some small, angry pockets, the backlash is already in full swing. Former mathematician Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, has just published a book called The Anti-Tech Revolution. (paywall) More. It’s helpful that the Unabomber is an entirely average American (“Kaczynski killed three and injured 23 people over the course of an 18-year bombing campaign that often targeted universities and airlines.”) Like all the other rubes, boobs, bubbas, hicks, and hillbillies… Note Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: This vertically exaggerated view shows scalloped depressions in a part of Mars where such textures prompted researchers to check for buried ice, using ground-penetrating radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The ice layer, which spans a greater area than the state of New Mexico, lies in Mars’ mid-northern latitudes and is covered by just 3 feet to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) of soil. It therefore represents a vast possible resource for future astronauts exploring the Red Planet, study team members said. More. One suspects we’ll have to go there to really find out. There are volunteers. See also: Researchers: Life could only exist on Mars far beneath surface Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Jennifer Ouellette at Quanta: The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain — which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer. … isher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. Read More ›

From astrophysicist Paul Sutter at Space.com: An unusually strong signal from a sun-like star. A repeated pattern that seems too precise to be natural. Bleeps and bloops from unknown sources with head-scratching signatures. Sure, there’s a ton of stuff in space that could potentially maybe kind-of-sort-of create those signals, but could this … be it? Could this be the key piece of evidence that answers one of the ultimate existential questions? Are we alone? No serious astronomer ever wants to rush out and blurt, “Hey, everyone! I’ve found aliens!” But at the same time, there’s a strong desire to get your name in the history books. So when these signals pop up, you get lots of shrugging and hemming and Read More ›

From math and computer science writer Kevin Hartnett at Quanta: Over the last decade physicists and mathematicians have been exploring a surprising correspondence that has the potential to breathe new life into the venerable Feynman diagram and generate far-reaching insights in both fields. It has to do with the strange fact that the values calculated from Feynman diagrams seem to exactly match some of the most important numbers that crop up in a branch of mathematics known as algebraic geometry. These values are called “periods of motives,” and there’s no obvious reason why the same numbers should appear in both settings. Indeed, it’s as strange as it would be if every time you measured a cup of rice, you observed Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Those with both rare and common types of autism spectrum disorder share a similar set of epigenetic modifications in the brain, according to a study. More than 68% of individuals with different types of autism spectrum disorder show evidence of the same pattern of a chemical modification of the protein scaffold around which DNA wraps. The findings suggest that a single global epigenetic pattern affecting shared molecular pathways in the brain could underlie diverse manifestations of this psychiatric disease. “We find epigenetic changes that are present in most patients with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD,” says co-senior study author Shyam Prabhakar of the Genome Institute of Singapore. “This suggests that, despite tremendous heterogeneity in the primary causes of Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post on the rethinking evolution meeting earlier this month: The event would have benefited from someone in the wings with a hook restraining speakers who insisted on relying on the mantra of natural selection to fill in the blanks of their science. Repeated references to the term became almost comical. Sir Patrick Bateson finally came to the rescue, cautioning against overuse of the “metaphor,” saying further that “natural selection is not an agent.” In his defense of the meeting, principal organizer Denis Noble told me it was amazing the event happened at all because the Royal Society wanted to cancel it. Ten of the 26 presenters were part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Extended Synthesis Read More ›

Researcher: With cell densities of over 1,000 per square millimeter and a diversity of producers and consumers, these microfossils represent a functioning terrestrial ecosystem, not just a few stray cells. From ScienceDaily: “Life was not only present but thriving in soils of the early Earth about two thirds of the way back to its formation from the solar nebula,” Retallack said. The origin of the solar system — and Earth — occurred some 4.6 billion years ago. The study outlines a microbiome of at least five different kinds of microfossils recognized from their size, shape and isotopic compositions. The largest and most distinctive microfossils are spindle-shaped hollow structures of mold-like actinobacteria, still a mainly terrestrial group of decomposers that are Read More ›

Despite being an ID advocate for several years now (and having an authors account on this forum), I haven’t really taken the time to put pen to paper and write about it, apart from a few lengthy exchanges I had with a close friend and critic of ID. He has since stepped away from the online world, and so the exchange has ended. You can still view my responses to him here, here, here, here, and here. I also published one article where I highlighted various atheists and agnostics who are critical of neo-Darwinism and supportive of ID here. The last thing I wrote on the subject was two years ago now, however this last year I’ve been wishing to start up a Read More ›

Comprehensive for now. From ScienceDaily: One of the great mysteries in biology is how the many different cell types that make up our bodies are derived from a single cell and from one DNA sequence, or genome. We have learned a lot from studying the human genome, but have only partially unveiled the processes underlying cell determination. The identity of each cell type is largely defined by an instructive layer of molecular annotations on top of the genome — the epigenome — which acts as a blueprint unique to each cell type and developmental stage. Unlike the genome the epigenome changes as cells develop and in response to changes in the environment. Defects in the factors that read, write, and Read More ›

FromScienceDaily: Scientists studying the Chicxulub crater have shown how large asteroid impacts deform rocks in a way that may produce habitats for early life. Around 65 million years ago a massive asteroid crashed into the Gulf of Mexico causing an impact so huge that the blast and subsequent knock-on effects wiped out around 75 per cent of all life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs. … Porous rocks provide niches for simple organisms to take hold, and there would also be nutrients available in the pores, from circulating water that would have been heated inside the Earth’s crust. Early Earth was constantly bombarded by asteroids, and the team have inferred that this bombardment must have also created other rocks Read More ›

From Nick Allen at Telegraph: US President-elect Donald Trump is set to slash Nasa’s budget for monitoring climate change and instead set a goal of sending humans to the edge of the solar system by the end of the century, and possibly back to the moon. … According to Bob Walker, who has advised Mr Trump on space policy, Nasa has been reduced to “a logistics agency concentrating on space station resupply and politically correct environmental monitoring”. … Its funding has gone up 50 per cent under President Barack Obama. At the same time Mr Obama proposed cutting support for deep space exploration by $840 million next year. More. Well, if They’re out there, We’ll find them. See also: Rob Read More ›