News

Remember when neurohype was supposed to replace thinking about thinking? Neuroskeptic offers a spring cleaning tip: … take this sentence about stress and the benefits of meditation. “Stress activates your amygdala, creates a red alert, activates your flight-or-fight symptoms, and heats up your system. Your thinking brain gets totally frozen and completely hijacked by your emotional brain.” Impressive – but what happens if we take out the word “brain”, and the other neuroscientific terms like “amygdala”? Then we’re left with “Stress creates a red alert, activates your flight-or-fight symptoms, and heats up your system. Your thoughts get totally frozen and completely hijacked by your emotions.” More. A normal sentence in English. If technical terms don’t tell us anything new, they’re Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Key gene in development of celiac disease has been found in ‘junk’ DNA 40% of the population carry the main risk factor for celiac disease but only 1% develop the disease. A newly found gene that influences its development has been found in what until recently has been known as ‘junk’ DNA. Celiac disease is a chronic, immunological disease that is manifested as intolerance to gluten proteins present in wheats to an inflammatory reaction in the small intestine that hampers the absorption of nutrients. The only treatment is a strict, life-long, gluten-free diet. … This study confirms the importance of the regions of the genome previously regarded as ‘junk’ in the development of common complaints such as celiac Read More ›

From ScienceNordic: There may be a whole invisible galaxy in the middle of the Milky Way, with dark suns and planets, and maybe even dark life. … Perhaps galaxies are full of a substance that is invisible, but that still has gravity? This, in fact, is what the majority of today’s physicists believe. They believe 80 per cent of the fabric of the universe is made of dark matter. If galaxies are located inside spherical clouds of invisible dark matter, this explains why they can spin as fast as they do without sending all their stars flying off into the universe. And in recent years, observations have confirmed the existence of dark matter. For example, we can see traces of Read More ›

Random Darwinian processes originate a variety of different programs for getting rid of cells no longer needed. From ScienceDaily: Some cells are meant to live, and some are meant to die. The linker cell of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm that is a favored model organism for biologists, is among those destined for termination. This cell helps determine the shape of the gonad in male worms–and then it dies, after two days, just as the worms are transitioning from larvae into adults. This programmed cell death is a normal part of the animal’s development, yet the genetic and molecular mechanisms underpinning it have not been worked out. Scientists in Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Developmental Genetics, headed by Shai Shaham, had Read More ›

Time Magazine, December 4, 1995 “Evolution’s Big Bang”: What I like to ask my biologist friends is, How fast can evolution get before they start feeling uncomfortable?” – Samuel Bowring [Geologist], M.I.T (p. 74) Over 20 years now. So long ago, one had forgotten… Too many “just keep moving, folks, nothing to see here,” moments have intervened. And then there were the Ediacaran jellyfish, who are much older but not precursors and the sophisticated Cambrian eyes. Keep moving, folks, keep moving… Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #13,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution > Organic #3 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism #3 in Books > Science Read More ›

Biophysicist Kirk Durston of Contemplations writes, re Tree of life morphs into … leaf?: I studied that new tree of life for a while. It leaves me wondering how much is empirical observation and how much is conjecture. I would much rather see the imaginary parts removed and only the dots plotted. As one involved in bioinformatics, I know that one must be very careful to avoid ‘fitting’ the dots into a pre-conceived pattern. Would could just as easily (perhaps even more easily) fit the dots into clusters representing the various ‘kinds’ of life. My own perspective is that life should be mapped out in clusters of dots; leave out everything else for which there is no empirical evidence for. Read More ›

From Ansel Payne at Nautilus: Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries? The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights. Well, “speciation” has been a mess forever. No one can define it but it is the basis of Darwinian evolution. On the other hand, maybe that works. Still, one wouldn’t have expected this, necessarily: For starters, there’s the problem of classification itself. Ever since Darwin gave us a framework for understanding common descent, the search has been on for a natural classification, an arrangement of nested groups, or taxa, that accurately reflects evolutionary relationships. In this scheme, a classification functions as an explicit evolutionary hypothesis—to say that five species form a genus is also to say that Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have dramatically expanded the tree of life, which depicts the variety and evolution of life on Earth, to account for thousands of new microscopic life forms discovered over the past 15 years. The expanded view finally gives bacteria and Archaea their due, showing that about two-thirds of all diversity on Earth is bacterial — half bacteria that cannot be isolated and grown in the lab — while nearly one-third is Archaeal. This is great but no way is it a tree. Readers, what would you call it? One striking aspect of the new tree of life is that a group of bacteria described as the “candidate phyla radiation” forms a very major branch. Only recognized recently, and Read More ›

DNA samples show that outer Hebrides deer are not likely tro have come from the mainland, and it’s suggested that Neolithic peoples imported them. From Jonathan Webb at BBC News: Red deer, the largest of modern British land animals, were banished from most of western Europe and restricted to southern Spain during the last Ice Age. When the ice retreated about 10,000 years ago, these and other beasts – including humans – gradually repopulated northern regions. But red deer didn’t make it to these outer Scottish isles until about 5,000 years ago. Humans, which were increasingly adopting domestication during this period, are thought to be responsible for the deer’s arrival – but the new study casts doubt on the obvious idea Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have for the first time shown that ribose, a sugar that is one of the building blocks of genetic material in living organisms, may have formed in cometary ices. Origin of life is a somewhat unusual field for a science in that “may have” is equivalent to a discovery. Maybe that’s why James Tour has no time for it. As a first step, an artificial comet was produced at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale. By placing a representative mixture of water (H2O), methanol (CH3OH) and ammonia (NH3) in a high vacuum chamber at — 200 ̊C, the astrophysicists simulated the formation of dust grains coated with ice, the raw material of comets. … Several sugars were detected, including Read More ›

Asks Jon Tennant at Paleo Community: Further to the dinosaur document dump (a fair bit of news and views recently, about the late and the great): Why are there so many bird species around today, when we have relatively so few dinosaurs in the fossil record? This disparity is even more extreme when you consider that while non-avian dinosaurs were around for about 170 million years, there were only ever about 800 or so species of dinosaur, based on current records. The actual number fluctuates through time, as new species are discovered, and others are shown to be invalid through research broadly known as ‘taxonomy’. One problem is with the difference between what existed and what gets preserved and another Read More ›

The largest dinosaurs who ever lived became increasingly front-heavy over time: The team found that these linked trends in size, body shape and weight distribution did not end with the evolution of fully quadrupedal sauropods. In the Cretaceous period — the last of the three ages of the dinosaurs — many earlier sauropod groups dwindled. In their place, a new and extremely large type of sauropod known as titanosaurs evolved, including the truly massive Argentinosaurus and Dreadnoughtus, among the largest known animals ever to have lived. The team’s computer models suggest that in addition to their size, the titanosaurs evolved the most extreme ‘front heavy’ body shape of all sauropods, as a result of their extremely long necks. … Dr Read More ›

From Nature News: Much of what scientists know about the relative contributions of dark matter and dark energy comes from the relic radiation left behind from the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background. The most exhaustive study of it — essentially a portrait of the young Universe at about 400,000 years of age — was done in recent years by the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory. Based on Planck’s measurements, cosmologists can predict how that young Universe will evolve, including how fast it expands at any point in its history. For years, those predictions have disagreed with direct measurements of the current rate of cosmic expansion — also known as the Hubble constant. But until now the error margins Read More ›

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds (Instapundit) at USA Today: This [government goes to Muscle Beach] all takes place in the context of an unprecedented meeting by 20 state attorneys general aimed, environmental news site EcoWatch reports, at targeting entities that have “stymied attempts to combat global warming.” You don’t have to be paranoid to see a conspiracy here. Not everyone believes that the planet is warming; not everyone who thinks that it is warming agrees on how much; not everyone who thinks that it is warming even believes that laws or regulation can make a difference. Yet the goal of these state attorneys general seems to be to treat disagreement as something more or less criminal. That’s wrong. As the Supreme Read More ›

Following on James Tour on the hypocrisy of origin of life conjectures –  updated: From James Tour, T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, as well as Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University, with over 590 research publications and over 100 patents: (beginning at 3:05) in his March 3, 2016 lecture titled “The Origin of Life: An Inside Story,” here: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled into Read More ›