News

From Robert Tracinski at the Federalist: I am a Carl Sagan fan from way back. His 1980 TV miniseries “Cosmos” hit me at just the right age and inflamed a lifelong love of science. But we’ve had nearly 40 years to assess the long-term effects and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that muddled public understanding of science. This weekend’s so-called “March for Science” is a perfect example of what went wrong. Fact morphed into narrative: If you don’t really need science so much as the narrative, then what you get is our own era’s official replacement for Sagan: Neil deGrasse Tyson. As the decades pass, Sagan’s imitators become less thoughtful and more propagandistic, less interested in conveying Read More ›

From Kacey Deamer at LiveScience: The wild-born, pure Australian desert dingo recently took first place in the World’s Most Interesting Genome competition, and will have her DNA decoded thanks to the Pacific Biosciences SMRT Grant Program. The grant provides genome sequencing for “a particularly fascinating plant or animal.” … “Sandy is truly a gift to science. As a rare, wild-born pure dingo, she provides a unique case study,” Ballard, who submitted the bid to sequence Sandy’s DNA, said in a statement. “Pure dingoes are intermediate between wild wolves and domestic dogs, with a range of non-domesticated traits. So sequencing Sandy’s genome will help pinpoint some of the genes for temperament and behavior that underlie the transition from wild animals to Read More ›

The recent capture of a live giant shipworm highlights devolution. One form of devolution is allowing complex body systems to become vestigial, relying on microorganisms instead. From BBC: The giant shipworm is unique not just for its size, but also for feeding on nutrients in mud and marine sediment instead, using a type of bacteria. It therefore has a much smaller digestive system compared to other shipworms. And while the discovery of the animal itself is exciting, the team’s research has revealed there is an entire hidden ecosystem at play. The giant shipworm has bacteria that live inside its shell, converting chemicals from the nearby rotting wood into energy and nutrients, similar to what plants do with sunlight.More. Devolution poses Read More ›

The Uncommon Descent News AI team came across this golden oldie, the Purpose of Purpose talk on YouTube, datelined Omaha, Nebraska (2009). While our Dawkinsbot was very lifelike even back then, the rant, let’s face it, is pretty dated. Which just shows how far we have come. To recap, concerns have been raised recently that scientists are bored with and annoyed by the bot, which is bad for our strategy to discredit Darwinism. They have to actually be paying attention first! Plus, not too long ago, the bot started melting down over nonsense retailed in the Twitterverse and we had to do an emergency rework of the politics module. But on the whole, this old footage does show that we are Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New research by scientists at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA overturns a long-standing paradigm about how axons — thread-like projections that connect cells in the nervous system — grow during embryonic development. The findings of the study, led by Samantha Butler, associate professor of neurobiology, could help scientists replicate or control the way axons grow, which may be applicable for diseases that affect the nervous system, such as diabetes, as well as injuries that sever nerves. … They found that neural progenitors organize axon growth by producing a pathway of netrin1 that directs axons only in their local environment and not over long distances. This pathway of netrin1 Read More ›

From Harvard sociologist Andrew Jowett at the Atlantic: The movement’s rhetoric suggests that if governments simply fund and heed scientific research, the world will march steadily toward peace and prosperity. Applying science to politics will create “an unbroken chain of inquiry, knowledge, and public benefit for all.” This is, dare I say, an unscientific conception of human action. A huge body of social-scientific literature—or just a good, hard look at the political scene—shows that conflict, uncertainty, and collective self-interest would remain central features of democratic politics even if all of the disputants took scientific findings as their starting point for policy recommendations. In a 2004 essay, Daniel Sarewitz, a professor at Arizona State University, challenged the longstanding expectation that bringing Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The impact of environmental change can be passed on in the genes of tiny nematode worms for at least 14 generations — the most that has ever been seen in animals — scientists have discovered. … “We discovered this phenomenon by chance, but it shows that it’s certainly possible to transmit information about the environment down the generations,” says Lehner. “We don’t know exactly why this happens, but it might be a form of biological forward-planning,” adds the first author of the study and CRG Alumnus, Adam Klosin. “Worms are very short-lived, so perhaps they are transmitting memories of past conditions to help their descendants predict what their environment might be like in the future,” adds Vavouri. … Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now, the first genetic study of the diversity of clinging jellyfish populations around the globe has discovered some surprising links among distant communities of jellies and also revealed there may be more than one species of the infamous stinger. … The new study shows that the story is much more complex than previously thought. The researchers uncovered a genetic match between populations of clinging jellyfish in the Vladivostok, Russia-area — specifically the area well known to cause severe sting reactions — and those found along the U.S. East Coast in the Northwest Atlantic. “We know the two regions share one genetic variant or haplotype,” Govindarajan says. “In the Northwest Atlantic, this variant was actually most frequently found in Read More ›

From Ari N. Schulman at New Atlantis: The question then is how mere mechanisms could be in the business of interpreting anything. To say that concepts can reside in physical things in the way we encounter them is only to raise more urgently the question of how concepts can reside in physical things as they actually are — of how matter can be such that certain bits of it come to know about each other. To say that experience inherently bears meaning, that perception already interprets the world to us before we ever reflect on it, is not to find a curious circumstance in which nature and reason are reconciled but to challenge how we find them set apart to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The University of Virginia School of Medicine has again shown that a part of the body thought to be disconnected from the immune system actually interacts with it, and that discovery helps explain cases of male infertility, certain autoimmune diseases and even the failure of cancer vaccines. Scientists developing such vaccines may need to reconsider their work in light of the new findings or risk unintentionally sabotaging their own efforts. UVA’s Kenneth Tung, MD, said that many vaccines likely are failing simply because researchers are picking the wrong targets — targets that aren’t actually foreign to the immune system and thus won’t provoke the desired immune responses. Overturning Orthodoxy Tung, of UVA’s Beirne B. Carter Center for Immunology Read More ›

From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: Archaeologists unearthed the skeletal remains of a person who lived about 13,000 years ago at Riparo Fredian, near Lucca in northern Italy. The person’s two front teeth (or upper central incisors) both had big holes in the surface that reach down to the tooth’s pulp chamber. Not only was the infection cleaned with a handheld stone tool but it was disinfected. But the dental work didn’t end there. Inside the tooth cavities, there were traces of bitumen, a tar-like substance that might have been used as an antiseptic or a filling to protect the tooth from getting infected, the researchers said. More. Our ancestors are getting smarter with each passing decade. A reverse Flynn effect? Read More ›

From Leah Crane at New Scientist: NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Emission) spacecraft found layers of atmospheric metal ions that defy models based loosely on Earth’s atmosphere. … The space between planets is full of metallic dust and rocks. As they are drawn into a planet’s atmosphere, they burn up, leaving behind metal particles like iron and magnesium. On Earth, the behaviour of those particles is mostly controlled by the planet’s strong magnetic field. They use magnetic fields as a sort of highway, and stream along the magnetic field lines to form thin layers throughout the atmosphere. But Mars has no such field. The planet does have small regions with weak magnetic fields in its southern hemisphere, but without Read More ›

From PhilSci Archive: Abstract: Despite numerous and increasing attempts to define what life is, there is no consensus on necessary and sufficient conditions for life. Accordingly, some scholars have questioned the value of definitions of life and encouraged scientists and philosophers alike to discard the project. As an alternative to this pessimistic conclusion, we argue that critically rethinking the nature and uses of definitions can provide new insights into the epistemic roles of definitions of life for different research practices. This paper examines the possible contributions of definitions of life in scientific domains where such definitions are used most (e.g., Synthetic Biology, Origins of Life, Alife, and Astrobiology). Rather than as classificatory tools for demarcation of natural kinds, we highlight Read More ›

From William Thomas at Physics Today: A major study on scientific integrity in the US advocates stricter policies for scientific authorship attribution, increased openness in scientific work, the reporting of negative findings, and establishment of an independent, nonprofit Research Integrity Advisory Board. “Fostering Integrity in Research,” released 11 April by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, is an update to their landmark 1992 study, “Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process.” In the intervening 25 years, the scientific research enterprise has become larger, more globalized, and increasingly driven by information technology, which has led to major changes in how the integrity of research can be eroded or protected. More. Unfortunately, I (O’Leary for News) have been Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Changes in a single color-vision gene demonstrate convergent evolutionary adaptations in widely separated species and across vastly different time scales, according to a study publishing on April 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by David Marques of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and colleagues. The study, which combined genetic analysis with a 19-year-long selection experiment, supports the idea that the mechanisms of adaptive evolution may be more predictable than previously suspected. … “These data support the emerging view in evolutionary biology that mechanisms underlying adaptive evolution are often highly repeatable and thus may be predictable,” said Marques. “They show that evolutionary ‘tinkering’ with a limited set of tools can lead to convergent ‘solutions’ to common Read More ›