News

From Martha Henriques at BBC Earth: Chemist Graham Cairns-Smith has spent his entire scientific career pushing a simple, radical idea: life did not begin with fiddly organic molecules like DNA, but with simple crystals It is now 50 years since Cairns-Smith [1931–2016] first put forward his ideas about the origin of life. Some scientists have ridiculed them; others have, cautiously or wholeheartedly, embraced them. They have never become mainstream orthodoxy, but they have never quite gone away either. Was there any truth to Cairns-Smith’s daring proposal? Did life really come from crystals? More. Life is information in motion. Looking for something uninformative that life “comes from” is a guarantee that we will still be in this rut in fifty years. Read More ›

From Jonathan Freedland, commenting at Britain’s Guardian: Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable Hush. Someone is finally being honest about that. They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same Read More ›

Here: Perhaps the most striking trend in American religion in recent years has been the growing percentage of adults who do not identify with a religious group. And the vast majority of these religious “nones” (78%) say they were raised as a member of a particular religion before shedding their religious identity in adulthood. … About half of current religious “nones” who were raised in a religion (49%) indicate that a lack of belief led them to move away from religion. This includes many respondents who mention “science” as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said “I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.” Others reference “common sense,” “logic” or a “lack Read More ›

From Matthew Mackinnon at Psychology Today: Illusion of Choice: The Myth of Free Will … It is at this point that you have the conscious experience of, “I chose to wink with my right eye.” The human brain is a logical machine and it seeks to establish linear causation regardless of the temporal reality. The fact that your prediction aligned with the actual action is interpreted by your brain to mean that your conscious thought caused the action. In reality, your thought, “I chose to wink my right eye,” is nothing more than a retroactive inference generated in an attempt to transmute a largely unconscious process into a conscious one. More. These claims come in many varieties but their outcome, Read More ›

A restaurant owner decided not to boil a rare golden lobster. From Kirschner’s Korner (“Let’s make the world a more humane place”): What do decisions like this tell us about the human race? Even though people will often teach children not to judge others based on their religion, appearance, sexual orientation, race, or other distinguishing factors, these rules don’t apply to animals. This thought process is known as speciesism. … Sending a yellow lobster to an aquarium while killing the rest isn’t praiseworthy except in a society that fails to grasp the concept that all animals matter equally. More. Here’s how to blow off most people who talk this way. Ask him what he thinks of this, Methods of abortion Read More ›

From Lee Billings at Scientific American: Whatever dark matter is, it is not accounted for in the Standard Model of particle physics, a thoroughly-tested “theory of almost everything” forged in the 1970s that explains all known particles and all known forces other than gravity. Find the identity of dark matter and you illuminate a new path forward to a deeper understanding of the universe—at least, that is what physicists hope … “The desire is for dark matter to not only exist but also to solve other outstanding problems of the Standard Model,” says Jesse Thaler, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Not every new discovery can be a revelation like the Higgs, where afterward theories suddenly fit together much Read More ›

From Stuart Clark at New Scientist: Although the scope of our definition determines the complexity of the puzzle, physics should still supply the solution, says philosopher Tim Maudlin of New York University. Physics is about just two questions, he says: “what exists?” and “what does it do?”. “If you answer both of those questions, then I think you have answered the question ‘what is reality?’.” More. (paywall) Reality isn’t “made of” anything. What is the number 2 “made of”? What is the political idea of proportional representation “made of”? What is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam “made of”? Almost certainly, they will get nowhere, but at least they will be able to reaffirm their basic vision of life. Not bad Read More ›

From Ekin Karasin at Daily Mail: David Buss, Cari Goetz and their team told the Sunday Times: ‘Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating pattern of humans. ‘Breaking up with one partner and re-mating with another – mate switching – may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans.’ For our ancestors, disease, poor diet and poor medical care meant few lived past 30 – meaning experimenting to find the most suitable partner may have been key to survival. More. Reality check: These people aren’t “scientists”; they are evolutionary psychologists. Their discipline is without a live subject (a human who lived 100kya) so they are forever emptying Darwin’s wastebasket and trying to combine it with Read More ›

From NASA: As Juno approached Jupiter on August 27, 2016, it’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument captured the planet’s glow in infrared light. The full story and more images from Juno’s first pass of Jupiter with all instruments on is here.

From Ben Andrew Henry at Science: “Earth’s surface 3.7 billion years ago was a tumultuous place, bombarded by asteroids and still in its formative stages,” Allwood writes. “If life could find a foothold here, and leave such an imprint that vestiges exist even though only a minuscule sliver of metamorphic rock is all that remains from that time, then life is not a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing. Give life half an opportunity and it’ll run with it.”More. Really? Just half a chance? But then why isn’t spontaneous generation happening now, when conditions are more favorable? See also: Oldest fossils found in Greenland shrink time for origin of life: If it is true that life existed by ~3.7 billion years Read More ›

From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies … Hawking’s discovery of black-hole evaporation has presented theoretical physicists with a huge conundrum: general relativity says that black holes must destroy information; quantum mechanics says it cannot happen because information must live on eternally. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics are extremely well-tested theories, and yet they refuse to combine. The clash reveals something much more fundamental than a seemingly exotic quirk about black holes: the information paradox makes it aptly clear that physicists still do not understand the fundamental laws of nature. But Gia Dvali, professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, believes he’s Read More ›

Re Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. From Jerry Coyne at Washington Post: Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks. Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” Read More ›

From Donald S. Kornfeld & Sandra L. Titus at Nature: Only 10–12 individuals are found guilty by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) each year. That number, which the NIH used to dismiss the role of research misconduct1, is misleadingly low, as numerous studies show. For instance, a review2 of 2,047 life-science papers retracted from 1973 to 2012 found that around 43% were attributed to fraud or suspected fraud. A compilation of anonymous surveys3 suggests that 2% of scientists and trainees admit that they have fabricated, falsified or modified data. And a 1996 study4 of more than 1,000 postdocs found that more than one-quarter would select or omit data to improve their chances of receiving grant funding. … Nonetheless, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers used fMRI to analyze the dogs’ brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain. Of course. Otherwise, how would they distinguish between Bad dog, bad! And Good dog, good! Also like humans, the researchers found that dogs process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right hemisphere of the brain. Lastly, and also like humans, the team found that the dogs relied on both word meaning and intonation when processing the reward value of utterances. Thought experiment: If we whispered Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as “junk” DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease. A new study shows that variation in these overlooked repetitive regions may also affect human health. These regions can affect the stability of the genome and the proper function of the chromosomes that package genetic material, leading to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects and infertility. The results appear online in the journal Genome Research. … “What we found in this study is probably the tip of the iceberg,” Sullivan said. “There could be all sorts of functional consequences to having variation within Read More ›