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Neither will salt But for now, ScienceDaily: Butter consumption was only weakly associated with total mortality, not associated with cardiovascular disease, and slightly inversely associated (protective) with diabetes, according to a new epidemiological study which analyzed the association of butter consumption with chronic disease and all-cause mortality. This systematic review and meta-analysis, published in PLOS ONE, was led by Tufts scientists including Laura Pimpin, Ph.D., former postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston, and senior author Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., Dr.P.H., dean of the School. Paper. (public access) – Pimpin L, Wu JHY, Haskelberg H, Del Gobbo L, Mozaffarian D. Is Butter Back? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Butter Consumption and Risk Read More ›

From academic librarian Jeffrey Beall here: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here. We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus. We emphasize that journal publishers and journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best Read More ›

From Twitter: Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016 But the whole point of the theory he espouses (the universe is a computer sim) is to escape the weight of the demand for evidence. See also the war on falsifiability and non-evidence-based science. People who need publicity to stay afloat can say what they like. We might have predicted Rationalia – but we were busy. It’s just more progressivism infesting science. See also: Neil deGrasse Tyson on why he thinks ID must be wrong Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Nathaniel Comfort at Nautilus: Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones.11 Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. A lizard, for example, requires more energy to make than a lizard’s-worth of E. coli, but it consumes more energy at a greater rate. A world that contains both lizards Read More ›

From Symmetry (Fermilab/SLAC): According to the Standard Model, the most common decay of the Higgs boson should be a transformation into a pair of bottom quarks. This should happen about 60 percent of the time. The strange thing is, scientists have yet to discover it happening (though they have seen evidence). According to Harvard researcher John Huth, a member of the ATLAS experiment, seeing the Higgs turning into bottom quarks is priority No. 1 for Higgs boson research. “It would behoove us to find the Higgs decaying to bottom quarks because this is the largest interaction,” Huth says, “and it darn well better be there.”More. Good thing no one is trying to stop anyone from doing or publishing research on Read More ›

From rhampton7: I’m willing to bet that all of the talks/papers will refer to processes that are material in origin. Not sure why ID proponents would be excited by this. See Royal Society announces guest list for Extended Synthesis meet. It must be difficult to miss the point to the extent that rhampton7 does. Darwinism has been a stupidifier of evolutionary biology for so long that almost everyone just wants to call 1 800 GOTJUNK, the way one would for a flea-bitten sofa. People may differ widely as to what type of sofa should replace it but almost everyone agrees on its fate. See also: What the fossils told us in their own words Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Third Way: Below, you will find a list of researchers and authors who have, in one way or another, expressed their concerns regarding natural selection’s scope and who believe that other mechanisms are essential for a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes. More. A lot of scientists are listed. In the context, the putdowns by Darwinists in previous years are, um, interesting: The Third Way of Evolution announced, but fails to cohere (2015), written by someone at Panda’s Thumb. Arrogance always sounds far more pronounced in retrospect. Will they try getting some US court to rule against the Royal Society or the Third Way? Note: The Third Way site was created by Raju Pookottil, profiled in The Paradigm Shifters, a Read More ›

From Eurekalert: A research team under Dr. Bo Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing (China) worked together with paleontologists from the University of Bonn and other scientists from China, USA, France, and England to examine a total of 35 insects preserved in amber. With the aid of grains of sand, plant residue, wood fibers, dust, or even the lifeless shells of their victims, the larvae achieved camouflage to perfection. Some larvae fashioned a kind of “knight’s armor” from grains of sand, perhaps to protect against spider bites. In order to custom-tailor their “camo”, they have even adapted their limbs for the purpose. The larvae were able to turn their legs about 180 degrees, in Read More ›

From Mary Bates at National Geographic: Scientists have recently described the world’s first known amphibious centipede. It belongs to a group of giant centipedes called Scolopendra and grows up to 20 centimeters (7.9 inches) long. Like all centipedes, it is venomous and carnivorous. … With some difficulty, Beccaloni captured the centipede and later put it in a large container of water. He says it immediately dove to the bottom and swam powerfully like an eel, with horizontal undulations of its body. When he took the centipede out of the container, the water rolled off its body, leaving it totally dry. More. All centipedes, even tiny land-based ones, are horrific. But they eat millipedes (plant pests), so it’s best not to Read More ›

String theory is hotter than tabasco in the pop science media. It interests us because it is probably unfalsifiable—and therefore generates worrying demands for an exemption from falsifiability and for non-evidence-based science. From mathematician Peter Woit, a string theory skeptic at Not Even Wrong: If you’re interested in the various sorts of internal divisions these days among people doing what gets called “string theory”, you might want to take a look at this blog entry and the discussion there with string phenomenologist Joseph Conlon. Back in 2002 or so when I started writing my popular book, it was a lot clearer what the term “string theory” meant and who counted as a “string theorist”. If I were writing about this Read More ›

An anti-ID commenter who goes by MatSpirit has been active in these pages for well over a year, during which time he has posted scores of comments in the comboxes of dozens of OPs.  This particular statement in one of his comments caught my eye: If I understand correctly, the ID story is that some unidentified, undetectable supernatural agent acting at a time and place unknown arranged matter into patterns that are living creatures. *palm forehead* It is just staggering to me that someone can spend so much time and effort debating ID and still not have the first idea about the fundamentals of the theory. I understand what is going on here, of course.  Like many of our opponents Read More ›

From Nanette Byrnes at Technology Review: We seem to be idolizing algorithms, imagining they are more objective than their creators. The dustup over Facebook’s “trending topics” list and its possible liberal bias hit such a nerve that the U.S. Senate called on the company to come up with an official explanation, and this week COO Sheryl Sandberg said the company will begin training employees to identify and control their political leanings. This is just one result, however, of a broader trend that Fred Benenson, Kickstarter’s former data chief, calls “mathwashing”: our tendency to idolize programs like Facebook’s as entirely objective because they have mathematics at their core.More. Grasshopper, who is the “we” who thought they weren’t biased? See also: Darwin’s Read More ›

Better than great apes, some say. From Marianne Freiberger at PlusMaths: It’s a question that has recently received a partial answer in a (refreshingly simple) experiment conducted by scientists in Japan. The study showed that cats know what it means when a container rattles when shaken, and that they expect something to fall out when the container is turned over. This may not appear hugely impressive, but our relatives, the great apes, have failed similar tests. Cats themselves haven’t fared well in other tasks testing their causal understanding (for example tests involving the pulling of strings) and were therefore thought a little unsophisticated in that respect. The new study appears to vindicate them.More. The cat is not in fact abstracting Read More ›

From Paul Greenberg at Jewish World Review: It was back in 1928, just after another five-year plan had proven a five-year bust, that Trofim Lysenko first came to the grateful attention of the Party by borrowing an old trick of the simplest Russian peasants: Make winter wheat sprout in the spring by exposing its seeds to the cold. They’d been doing it for centuries, but Comrade Lysenko gave that traditional technique a new and scientific-sounding name, vernalization, and made it sound like a scientific breakthrough. He backed it all up with charts, graphs and illustrations as neat as those double hockey sticks the climate-changers used to impress the gullible in our own time. But like them, Lysenko was just practicing Read More ›

From Michael Denton, author of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis As with other taxa-defining novelities, three is no evidence that any fundamental changes have occurred in the basic design of the cell system since its origination. The cell membrane, the basic metabolic paths, the ribosome, the genetic code, etc., are essentially invariant in all life forms on earth. And absolutely no plausible well-developed hypothetical evolutionary sequence has ever been presented showing how the cell night have evolved via a series of simpler cell-like systems. (p. 121) Follow UD News at Twitter!