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From Climate Audit: n 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II. However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is Read More ›

From his blog: I just noticed a few interesting stories about an announcement from Tanzania that a second set of australopith tracks has been discovered about 60 meters from the original Laetoli footprint trails. The Laetoli tracks were discovered in 1978 by a team led by Mary Leakey. The trackways are about 90 feet long with about 70 prints. The feet are small and the stride is short, and they are typically attributed to an australopith. The prints were made in volcanic ash, and have been dated to 3.6 million radiometric years. More. He adds, “I’m not so sure we can tell the difference between human and australopith just from their footprints.” Autralopiths: Australopithecus (genus Australopithecus), ( Latin: “southern ape”) Read More ›

As New Scientist tells it, “Red wolf may lose endangered status because it’s just a hybrid”: The red wolf, a critically endangered species living in the south-eastern US, may be nothing more than a hybrid between coyotes and the grey wolf, a new study suggests. If so, it may lose its conservation status and protection, given that US legislation does not protect hybrids. This could lead to loss of an important evolutionary lineage, because the red wolf is the only living repository of genes from the grey wolves that were driven near extinction in the south-eastern states by trapping and agricultural development. More. Shocka: Everyone knew that about the red wolf. There is usually  no critical reason to protect hybrids except Read More ›

Must be BBC. Must be summer. Last summer, chimpanzees were entering the stone age. This summer, from BBC: An orangutan copying sounds made by researchers offers new clues to how human speech evolved, scientists say. Rocky mimicked more than 500 vowel-like noises, suggesting an ability to control his voice and make new sounds. It had been thought these great apes were unable to do this and, since human speech is a learned behaviour, it could not have originated from them. Study lead Dr Adriano Lameira said this “notion” could now be thrown “into the trash can”. More. The reporter must have got something wrong somewhere. Who says humans learned speech from orangutans? It’s not reported that the orangutan started a Read More ›

From Nature: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, astronomer Sara Seager has begun to examine 14,000 compounds that are stable enough to exist in a planetary atmosphere. She and her colleagues are winnowing down their initial list of molecules using criteria such as whether there are geophysical ways to send the compound into the atmosphere. “We’re doing a triage process,” says Seager. “We don’t want to miss anything.” The Seattle meeting aims to compile a working list of biosignature gases and their chemical properties. The information will feed into how astronomers analyse data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2018. The telescope will be able to look at only a handful of habitable planets, Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a new paper that could prove explosive, Australian neuropathologists C. V. Dennis and colleagues report that they found very little evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans. … … Dennis et al. don’t quite rule out all neurogenesis in adults. However, the authors say that if human adult neurogenesis takes place, it does so at an extremely low rate: relatively speaking, it’s about 10 times lower than the rate seen in adult rodents.More. In that case, old neurons must be learning new functions because rehabilitation happens all the time. See also: Birds have more neurons than primates do. It’s unclear how neurons relate to intelligence, exactly. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Science News: By carefully crushing rock salt, researchers have measured the chemical makeup of air pockets embedded inside the rock. This new technique reveals that oxygen made up 10.9 percent of Earth’s atmosphere around 815 million years ago. Scientists have thought that oxygen levels would not be that high until 100 million to 200 million years later. The measurements place elevated oxygen levels well before the appearance of animals in the fossil record around 650 million years ago, the researchers report in the August issue of Geology. “I think our results will take people by surprise,” says study coauthor Nigel Blamey, a geochemist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. “We came out of left field, and I think Read More ›

At “Animals and abstraction: Reflections on Vincent Torley’s thoughts,” commenter Charles Do cats explore for the sake of exploring (curioisity)? Or are they just reconnoitering for food, danger, shelter, sex, and if so, is that a form of learning? asks. Good questions. My impression is that cats are not generally lifelong learners. They are very curious when young, and learn almost everything they need to know in the first year or two. Once they have learned a way of life, they stick to it. There can be a comical aspect to that. A vet once told me that it is wise to neuter a tomcat as young as he can safely sustain the operation. If one waits a few years Read More ›

The “hard problem” of life From Arxiv: Chalmer’s famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the “hard problem of consciousness”. He argued that subjective experience constitutes a “hard problem” in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding “hard problem of life” as the problem of how `information’ can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard – that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately Read More ›

  Readers will remember that Tom Wolfe’s book, the Kingdom of Speech, is coming out amid summer fanfare. From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: Great minds, as you know. As I’ve said before, it’s the Thomas Nagel/Stephen King/Tom Stoppard Principle: When you reach a certain rare level of achievement and acclaim, you earn the right to speak your mind plainly in defiance of the bullies and censors. We look forward to reading Wolfe. More. In the past, it has been agreed that there are only 20 chairs. 19 chairs must be occupied by Darwin followers. The 20th chair is permitted to someone they can ricochet off. Suppose we added more chairs? Does it matter if some of the Read More ›

Dan Falk here: Last month, about 60 physicists, along with a handful of philosophers and researchers from other branches of science, gathered at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, to debate this question at the Time in Cosmology conference. The conference was co-organized by the physicist Lee Smolin, an outspoken critic of the block-universe idea (among other topics). His position is spelled out for a lay audience in Time Reborn and in a more technical work, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, co-authored with the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who was also a co-organizer of the conference. In the latter work, mirroring Elitzur’s sentiments about the future’s lack of concreteness, Smolin wrote: “The future is Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters: Suzan Mazur: Do you have a definition for life? Mae-Wan Ho: I would define it as a quantum coherent system. It is a circular thermodynamic system that can reproduce. Suzan Mazur: How do you think about origin of life? Mae-Wan Ho: I think there was an origin of lifel If you look at water, which has been the subject of my research for a number of years – the physic o life depends on wter in a very fundamental way. Water has all the characteristics of consciousness. It’s very sensitive, it’s flexible. It responds to light. Electromagnetic fields, etc. Suzan Mazur: Have you commented about electrons and consciousness? Mae-Wan Ho: It was Alfred North Whitehead’s Read More ›

In an article on the question of bias in policing, from Slate: In practice, though, “peer review” refers to a bewildering array of methods and procedures. At least 1 million peer-reviewed articles are published every year, in at least 25,000 journals. At the narrow, top tier of this ecosystem, where prestigious journals filter out all but the best and most important papers, peer review screens for breakthrough work with airtight methodology and well-founded conclusions. At the bulbous bottom, peer review is less discerning. It’s also amenable to all sorts of chicanery—like rings of scientists who rubber-stamp each other’s work or researchers who invent reviews. The use of peer review varies from one publication to another and between different fields of Read More ›

From Emily Conover at Science: A puzzling mismatch is plaguing two methods for measuring how fast the universe is expanding. When the discrepancy arose a few years ago, scientists suspected it would fade away, a symptom of measurement errors. But the latest, more precise measurements of the expansion rate — a number known as the Hubble constant — have only deepened the mystery.“There’s nothing obvious in the measurements or analyses that have been done that can easily explain this away, which is why I think we are paying attention,” says theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University. If the mismatch persists, it could reveal the existence of stealthy new subatomic particles or illuminate details of the mysterious dark energy Read More ›

Possibly struggling to survive, New Scientist claims there is a 2500 year struggle between God and the multiverse: Modern physics has also wrestled with this “fine-tuning problem”, and supplies its own answer. If only one universe exists, then it is strange to find it so hospitable to life, when nearly any other value for the gravitational or cosmological constants would have produced nothing at all. But if there is a “multiverse” of many universes, all with different constants, the problem vanishes: we’re here because we happen to be in one of the universes that works.More. The rest is an avoidable paywall. Put simply, the multiverse idea only ever got started because New Scientist types needed a universe that originated randomly. Read More ›