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From Reuters: If confirmed as fossilized communities of bacteria known as stromatolites – rather than a freak natural formation – the lumps would pre-date fossils found in Australia as the earliest evidence of life on Earth by 220 million years. “This indicates the Earth was no longer some sort of hell 3.7 billion years ago,” lead author Allen Nutman, of the University of Wollongong, told Reuters of the findings that were published in the journal Nature. More. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, “This potentially pushes back our understanding of the antiquity of life on Earth, which is really quite astounding,” Abigail Allwood, a research scientist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Mashable. If it is true that Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From Dwight Garner at New York Times on Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists. … Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms Read More ›

Pos-Darwinista writes to say, I came across this rather strange report: Abstract The European Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA) guidelines for health economic evaluations represent a consolidated view of non-binding recommendations for assessments of the relative effectiveness of pharmaceuticals or other health technologies. EUnetHTA views itself as the scientific and technological backbone of the development of health technology assessment in the European Union and among its member states and other partners. Unfortunately, the standards for health technology assessment proposed by EUnetHTA do not meet the standards of normal science. They do not support credible claims for the clinical and comparative cost-effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. In rejecting thestandards of normal science the guidelines put to one side the opportunity not only to Read More ›

From Steven Novella at Neurologica blog, in response to science writer Katie L. Burke, who argues that the term is counterproductive: Burke concludes that, rather than labeling something pseudoscience, we should describe exactly what it is and how it fails. This is a false choice, however. We can do both. I completely agree that we should not substitute a label for an actual description or analysis of something. This is good advice in any intellectual arena. This is just not what good skeptics and science communicators do. We do give a detailed analysis of exactly why a claim is wrong, and exactly what brand of pseudoscience it is. Suggesting we don’t betrays an unfamiliarity with the vast majority of popular Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech In “Piecing together a celebrity scientist,” Tom Bartlett writes re Tom Wolfe’s recent book, The Kingdom of Speech might seem an unlikely project for a white-suited literary legend who hung out with Ken Kesey back in the day and later wrote best-selling novels in the social-realist vein. But it actually fits nicely alongside two other books in the Wolfe ouevre: The Painted Word, and From Bauhaus to Our House, both extended essays that send up pretension in the worlds of art and architecture, respectively. My paperback copy of The Painted Word bears the following cover blurb: “Another Blast at the Phonies!” Wolfe is on the hunt for phonies here, too. In the first half of the Read More ›

From Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica: The classic model of scientific progress is that the field advances when new findings contradict or supersede old ones. But a new study reveals that this process isn’t working today—at least, not in scientific journals, where most data is shared with colleagues. Indeed, the researchers found that “rebuttals scarcely alter scientific perceptions about the original papers.” More. That’s bad news. It’s the Gossip Model of news dissemination. The gossip that flew around town building is recollected far more sharply and frequently than any clarification. See also: Most science findings wrong or useless? The replication crisis (few studies are done to replicate cool new findings) had been noted for decades but no one did anything Read More ›

From biologist Katie L. Burke at American Scientist: The word pseudoscience is also used to claim a certain value system: scientism, or valuing and trusting science exclusively. Relatively few people ascribe to scientism, even if they like science. Many if not most people, at least in the United States, value science and see it as an important decision-making tool. But most people—even many scientists—are religious or simply not doggedly empirical, and believe in truths other than those derived from science. In such views, science is a tool with limits, and outside those limits lie beliefs, ideas, and knowledge gathered through art, philosophy, intuition, metaphysics, or culture. When science-affiliated factions use a term that inherently implies that people are ignorant or Read More ›

From Steven Hayward at Powerline: … this article actually appears in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychological Science: Duration of Cunnilingus Predicts Estimated Ejaculate Volume in Humans: a Content Analysis of Pornography Abstract Humans perform copulatory behaviors that do not contribute directly to reproduction (e.g., cunnilingus, prolonged copulation). We conducted a content analysis of pornography to investigate whether such behaviors might contribute indirectly to reproduction by influencing ejaculate volume—an indicator of ejaculate quality. We coded 100 professional pornography scenes depicting the same male actor copulating with 100 different females, affording control for between-male differences in estimated ejaculate volume. … (public access) Hayward: A few observations. First, it sounds like a fancy excuse for a bunch of pervs to watch a lot Read More ›

From science writer Miriam Kramer at Mashable: Yes, it’s amazing that this possibly rocky planet is orbiting a star just 4 light-years away, possibly close enough to one day launch a mission to, but there is still so much we don’t know about this brave new world. Plus, Proxima b is far from being a twin of our planet. Scientists aren’t sure what kind of atmosphere it has or even if it’s able to support a magnetic field, two things that it would need to sustain habitability in orbit around its active, flaring star. We simply don’t know if it can support water, life or much of anything on its surface at all. Beyond the inaccuracy in this particular case, Read More ›

From Rachel Feltman at Washington Post: But now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy’s star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many. The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the first direct detection of dark matter. More. See also: Dark matter skeptics wanted These people should really talk. Follow UD News Read More ›

From Ronald Bailey at Reason: “Science, the pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble.” So begins “Saving Science,” an incisive and deeply disturbing essay by Daniel Sarewitz at The New Atlantis. … And then there is the huge problem of epidemiology, which manufactures false positives by the hundreds of thousands. In the last decade of the 20th century, some 80,000 observational studies were published, but the numbers more than tripled to nearly 264,000 between 2001 and 2011. S. Stanley Young of the U.S. National Institute of Statistical Sciences has estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of those observational studies can be replicated. “Within a culture that pressures scientists to produce rather than discover, Read More ›

Again: From Science 2.0: Redefining Homo — Does Our Family Tree Need More Branches? … Is it brain size; limb, hand and foot proportions; the ability to communicate or use tools? How do the added complexities of new Homo species found in Asia further rewrite the history of the genus and other hominins? In the September issue, EARTH Magazine delves into the challenges that have arisen as scientists still ask, “What makes a human, human?” Read at: http://bit.ly/2bC63Yf.More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: Only a very few research scientists have the opportunity to work against that disjoined view by openly studying life as something clearly and cleverly designed. I am one, and I can count the others on my fingers. There are more who would like to have ths opportunity, as shown every now and then by a paper th at gets past the policing system of an establishment science journal. A recent example is a description oft the architecture of the human hand as being “the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.” Infractions like this almost always bring out the whistle-blowers, which almost always brings reprimand. Everyone must Read More ›

From Brit tax TV: All the other chimps feared Frodo, which helped his rise to the top. He even pushed himself on his own mother, and fathered a sickly infant with her, who would not survive for long. “He was aggressive towards all of the other chimps,” says anthropologist Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who first met Frodo in 2001. “A lot of the other males had a bare patch of fur on their lower back side from where Frodo would bite them.” Many other primates show similar behaviour to Frodo’s. His actions hint at something rather dark about our shared ancestry with chimpanzees. They suggest that bullying your way to the top has a long Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at his blog, Not Even Wrong: The “SUSY Bet” event in Copenhagen took place today, with video available for a while at this site. It appears to be gone for the moment, will put up a better link if it becomes available. An expensive bottle of cognac was presented by Nima Arkani-Hamed to Poul Damgaard, conceding loss of the bet. On the larger question of the significance of the negative LHC results, a recorded statement by Gerard ‘t Hooft (who had bet against SUSY), and a statement by Stephen Hawking (not in on the bet, but in the audience) claimed that if arguments for SUSY were correct, the LHC should have seen something, so they Read More ›