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From Diana Kwon at The Scientist: While analyzing genetic material found in a wastewater treatment plant, scientists uncovered the genomes of four new species of related giant viruses. These newly discovered specimens, dubbed Klosneuviruses, challenge the notion that giant viruses evolved from a fourth domain of life, researchers wrote in a study published today (April 6) in Science. … Some scientists believe that rather than having a common ancestor, these giant viruses began as small viruses and gradually accumulated host genes over time. Analysis of the Klosneuvirus genome reveals evidence supporting the latter theory, according to the authors of the present study. More. These viruses have up to 1.57 million base pairs, with many genes encoded for components of translation Read More ›

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0: Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn’t had a scientific foundation. … Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore predictable, as solar cycles and California droughts. From the time that records of bees were formally kept, there were reports of mass die-offs without explanation, a thousand years before pesticides even existed. More. Indeed. There are even superstitions connected with the humanly unpredictable ways of bees, including sudden departures and mass die-offs. One problem is that extinction and serious declines feel like Armageddon and many Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s The Materialist “Extraordinary Claims” Double Standard: From geologist David Deming at Philosophia: Abstract In 1979 astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE). But Sagan never defined the term “extraordinary.” Ambiguity in what constitutes “extraordinary” has led to misuse of the aphorism. ECREE is commonly invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies, and has even been rhetorically employed in attempts to raise doubts concerning mainstream scientific hypotheses that have substantive empirical support. The origin of ECREE lies in eighteenth-century Enlightenment criticisms of miracles. The most important of these was Hume’s essay On Miracles. Hume precisely defined an extraordinary claim as one that is directly contradicted by a massive amount of existing Read More ›

A review of Richard F. Harris Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Marcus Munafò at Nature: Harris introduces us to the growing field of metascience — the scientific study of science itself — and some of those working in it. These reproducibility firefighters are providing answers to such empirical questions, and identifying interventions. Robert Kaplan and Veronica Irvin at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that when the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute required preregistration of primary outcomes (the main outcome against which success should be judged) in clinical trials, the proportion of studies reporting a benefit fell from 57% to 8%. That’s the good news. The bad news Read More ›

A more honest appraisal can be had from Douglas Allchin at Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science: Abstract: In standard characterizations, science is self-correcting. Scientists examine each other’s work skeptically, try to replicate important discoveries, and thereby expose latent errors. Thus, while science is tentative, it also seems to have a system for correcting whatever mistakes arise. It powerfully explains and justifies the authority of science. Self-correction thus often serves emblematically in promoting science as a superior form of knowledge. But errors can and do occur. Some errors remain uncorrected for long periods. I present five sets of historical observations that indicate a need to rethink the widespread mythos of self-correction. First, some errors persist for decades, wholly undetected. Second, Read More ›

Over at Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer predicts that the March for Science (April 22) will be a hell of a mess, and thinks maybe that’s okay: But judging from the coverage we’ve seen up till now, it looks like the march is set to be an exercise in self-congratulation and virtue signaling, political axe-grinding, a veiled grab by ideological partisans for power and funding. We venture to predict that most marchers won’t even be scientists but, instead, people looking to seize hold of the prestige of science for their own ends. There’s been much talk of diversity, as organizers have revised the diversity statement on their website multiple times, so that nobody — no possible sexuality, ethnicity, or Read More ›

Are they growing up over there? From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: But what is this information? Is it “ontological” – a real thing from which space, time and matter emerge, just as an atom emerges from fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks and gluons? Or is it “epistemic” – something that just represents our state of knowledge about reality? Here opinions are divided. Cosmologist Paul Davies argues in the book Information and the Nature of Reality that information “occupies the ontological basement”. In other words, it is not about something, it is itself something. Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena disagrees. Even if all of reality emerges from information, he says, this information is Read More ›

From Anna Buckley at BBC: Consciousness is real. Of course it is. We experience it every day. But for Daniel Dennett, consciousness is no more real than the screen on your laptop or your phone. The geeks who make electronic devices call what we see on our screens the “user illusion”. It’s a bit patronising, perhaps, but they’ve got a point. … Our brains, like our bodies, have evolved over hundreds of millions of years. They are the result of millions and millions of years of haphazard trial and error evolutionary experiments. From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to think is no different from our ability to digest, says Dennett. Both these biological activities can be explained by Darwin’s Theory Read More ›

Dark energy might be an illusion say some researchers. From Adrian Cho at Science: For the past 20 years, physicists have known that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as if some bizarre “dark energy” is blowing up space like a balloon. In fact, cosmologists’ well-tested standard model assumes that 69% of the content of the universe is dark energy. However, there may be no need for the mysterious stuff, a team of theorists claims. Instead, the researchers argue, the universe’s acceleration could be driven by variations, or inhomogeneities, in its density. If so, then one of the biggest mysteries in physics could be explained away with nothing other than Albert Einstein’s familiar general theory of relativity. Other researchers Read More ›

Maybe not. From ScienceDaily: Dr. Jordan Mallon, a dinosaur specialist at the museum, argues instead that the fossil evidence for these distinctions is inconclusive and, as a result, it might be time to “rewrite the textbooks.” His report, published today in the online journal Paleobiology, focusses on the biological principle of sexual dimorphism, where males and females of a species can be distinguished based on physical characteristics other than sexual organs. “I’m not saying that dinosaurs were not dimorphic, but I am saying that there’s no existing fossil evidence to suggest that they were. The jury is still out,” says Mallon. Mallon made his assessment by revisiting previous studies attributing sexual dimorphism to dinosaurs. The problem, he explains, is that Read More ›

Just how lamprey sex is determined is unclear. From Erin Ross at Nature: A team led by biologist Nick Johnson, at the US Geological Survey in Millersburg, Michigan, identified lamprey habitats in and near streams leading to the Great Lakes. Some areas were productive, with lots of food, whereas others were unproductive sites with little food. After taking measures to ensure no wild lamprey were present, they released between 1,500 and 3,000 wire-tagged larval lamprey into each of the study sites. The researchers recaptured the tagged lamprey and checked their sex after the larvae had metamorphosed into adults and migrated upstream. They found that lamprey in productive streams with lots of food were larger, reached maturity earlier and were more Read More ›

The way thing are going, they might even succeed. From Rod Dreher at American Conservative: Having all but ruined humanities education, the Social Justice Warriors now turn to the STEM fields. Purdue University has hired Donna Riley as its new head of its School of Engineering Education. Here’s an excerpt from Prof. Riley’s biography page at Smith College, where she taught for 13 years: My scholarship currently focuses on applying liberative pedagogies in engineering education, leveraging best practices from women’s studies and ethnic studies to engage students in creating a democratic classroom that encourages all voices. In 2005 I received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to support this work, which includes developing, implementing, and assessing curricular and Read More ›

Here’s Richard Webb interviewing Peter (“Higgs boson”) Higgs on the occasion of his receiving the “1851 Royal Commission medal for outstanding influence on science” at New Scientist: What would your advice be to someone who has your sort of esoteric interests? Go undercover. I wasn’t productive in an obvious way; I didn’t churn out papers. I think these days the University of Edinburgh would have sacked me long ago, there’s just too much competition. So now I would say, do it in your spare time, and get yourself a solid publication record in the sort of thing that gets you recognition more readily. More. Higgs has noted this before: Higgs boson discoverer wouldn’t get a job today? “He doubts a similar breakthrough Read More ›

From Mike Macrae at ScienceAlert: New Simulations Suggest Dark Energy Might Not Exist 68 percent of the Universe might not exist. Physicists from Loránd University in Hungary and the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii are now questioning if approximations in Einstein’s equations introduced “serious side effects” that gave the illusion of a vast, unknown force pushing space apart. … The thing is, right now it’s little more than an empty box without any other properties to describe the nature of its existence. More. Empty box? That’s what the hamburger poll in the lunchroom here said too. Apart from that, we can’t keep up. Is it possible that the sheer ability to make up theories without consequence is Read More ›

From Sally Adee at New Scientist: For people like Cerf and many American companies, who view online speech through the lens of the US First Amendment, Germany’s approach may look like a heavy-handed suppression of the right of free expression. However, it may be a necessary first step in re-establishing a shared moral reality. In the age of bots, misinformation, and anonymity, free speech itself may be used to enact a kind of censorship. … There are many good reasons to be wary of outsourcing the policing of moral beliefs to private corporations, even if they are only tasked with implementing a country’s national laws, as would be the case with the draft German proposal. But we should focus on Read More ›