Well, the Canadian Science Writers’ Association conference at Science North in Sudbury wrapped up yesterday, and today I got a chance to tour SNOLAB, the underground neutrino detector in the active Creighton Mine, which is currently retooling for SNO Plus, the hunt for dark matter. Just for now: The Solar Neutrino Observatory (SNO) Lab is 2 kilometres underground, and then about two kilometres walk through an active nickel mine, followed by a serious shower and change into clean room gear. SNO’s main recent experiment is now finished, and the lab is being retooled. But 16 science writers were allowed to tour Sno Plus, Canada’s entry in the race to find a dark matter particle. More on all this great stuff Read More ›

Particle physicist Lawrence M. Krauss* addressed the gathering at the Canadian Science Writers’ Association conference at Science North in Sudbury, May 24, 2009.

I made some notes of his remarks in a darkened cave, the Inco Cave at Science North, though I do not have a transcript.

His talk was billed Star Trek Physics, and the PowerPoint revealed physics bloopers spotted in Star Trek, the X-files, and other film resources.

It was certainly entertaining, but not riveting, at least for me. Anyone who gets their physics from sources clearly labelled science fiction or UFOlogy, well …

But Dr. Krauss had advice for science communicators:

1. Don’t assume your audience is interested. “Don’t expect interest, create it.”

2. Science is dull, hard, and unrelated to the real world. Communicators must work against that. (“Remember how boring science can seem.”)

3. “Most people perceive themselves as fundamentally uninterested in science.”

4. Confront misconceptions: it’s the only way people remember.

Now, I have reservations about career academic scientists advising journalists how to communicate, or high school science teachers how to teach. They tend to emit platitudes that are too general to be put into practice, and therefore too general to fail.

Take the advice offered above, for example:

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Sometimes we seek to infer from a design what its requirements might have been, and in ID thought this question comes up. As a practitioner in the architecture of large scale computer environments (the composite set of applications, databases, and communications networks) in major enterprises, I wonder if some of the principles my profession uses in design could be useful in understanding what is going on in biology. First a little background. What I am describing applies, in my opinion, to architecture and I would submit there is a rather considerable tension between architecture and design. But I am not going to get into that now, so let’s assume they are the same and call them “architecture”. Next, in my Read More ›

The  winner of the # 2 Question: “Why does Earth’s unique situation for science discovery threaten many?” is  Bruce David. For a free copy of The Privileged Planet DVD, Bruce David needs to send a snail address to me at oleary@sympatico.ca. He will not be added to a mailing list. I do not have a mailing list. Sorry I am a bit late judging; I was rushing off to a conference. Here is his entry: To vastly over simplify the actual state of affairs, there are two kinds of people in the world: those whose highest value is truth, and those for whom being right is more important than anything else. <!–more–> Imagine that you have grown up into a Read More ›

Darwinian “Scientists have called it “junk DNA.” They have long been perplexed by these extensive strands of genetic material that dominate the genome but seem to lack specific functions. Why would nature (or an Intelligent Designer) force the genome to carry so much excess baggage?” As predicted by Intelligent Design theorists “researchers from Princeton and Indiana University have found that junk DNA may not be so junky after all. They have discovered that DNA sequences from regions of what had been viewed as the “dispensable genome” are actually performing functions that are central for the organism. They have concluded that Darwinian theory was incorrect the genes spur an almost acrobatic rearrangement of the entire genome that is necessary for the Read More ›

Best news I’ve heard all year, actually. Also the worst.

Bear with me.

A friend writes to tell me that

Jared Diamond, geography prof at UCLA, ornithologist and popular science writer, is in hot water for writing a story in the New Yorker last year that described “vengeance wars” among tribes in Papua New Guinea that apparently has angered the tribes. The convoluted episode has resulted in his being vilified by anthropologists and by Stephen Jay Gould’s widow, who runs Art Science Research Laboratory.

He is being sued for defamation by his New Guinea subjects. Read More ›

 Time’s verdict regarding Ida:  “Most paleontologists will roll their eyes at that sort of overhyped nonsense, especially given that there’s real science lurking underneath. After wading through the false advertising, though, most people might have a hard time finding it.”Full story here. Then there is this gem:  “‘Most of what we understand about primate evolution is pieced together from bits of teeth and jaws,’ says Michael Novacek, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.” Teeth and jaws.  Seems to me that leaves an awful lot of room for interpretation, which, of course, is influenced by worldview (or “metaphysical prejudices if you like) as much as anything else.  

Ida the Lemur-like creature, has had some high praise from leading Darwinists. David Attenborough announced with confidence that the missing link ‘is no longer missing,’ but the way the evidence has been presented and handled has raised questions about media manipulation, especially from the London Times science correspondent Mark Henderson; he seems quite miffed. 

More on Ida: overblown claims and a worrying precedent

Mark Henderson reports that doubts have arisen now that others have finally been given access to the fossil and suggests that Ida is related to ‘nothing that exists today.’ Although Ida is an important fossil, he writes that ‘she isn’t all that’ and complains that the researchers haven’t provided sufficient evidence to justify their claims. He argues that this is… 

‘…especially serious given the publicity blitz behind Ida…a popular book, a documentary, a website and an exhibition have been launched on the back of this find, before it has received full scientific scrutiny.’  Read More ›

Here is my review of Alva Noe’s Out of Our Heads Out of Our Heads at MercatorNet: He raises vital issues but, unfortunately, he fails to offer a convincing solution. Arguing that consciousness must be understood as involving the body and the environment as well as the brain, he offers platitudes such as, “Where do you stop and where does the rest of the world begin?” An interesting question, but if consciousness is real — and not well described by materialist theory — we are no closer to an answer even if our brains, bodies, and environment are all one world. He offers only a different description of the problem. Noë seems to want to move away from reductive explanations, Read More ›

Robert Shapiro, noted Darwinist and professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, says this of the recent Sutherland RNA world experiments: “‘Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever,’ he says.   According to Shapiro, it is hard to imagine RNA forming in a prebiotic world along the lines of Sutherland’s synthesis.   ‘The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely,’ argues Shapiro. Instead, he advocates the metabolism-first argument: that early self-sustaining autocatalytic chemosynthetic systems associated with amino acids predated RNA.” My question Read More ›

I’m just posting this to give people an update on what researchers are finding. More and more, so-called “junk DNA” is proving to be essential for life. Here, transposons, considered, generally, to be the “junkiest” of the “junk”, is found to have a rather central role in the development of a pond critter. Here is the write-up on PhysOrg. com.
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A Nature review that begins with the pronouncement that an experiment “has quashed” major objections to the RNA world of prebiotic origins (Ref 1) is bound to raise a few eye-brows.  It is a bold pronouncement indeed and one that must be accompanied by a water-tight set of evidences.  In his review of the work of John Sutherland and others at the University of Manchester, science writer Richard Van Noorden promised just that by declaring to his readers that these same scientists had achieved the ‘never-before-performed’ feat of making a ribonucleotide- one of the components of RNA- in the lab (Ref 1).  Key to the success of the experiment was the presence of a phosphate group that, in addition to serving as one of the final reactants in the ribonucleotide synthesis process, also functioned as a catalyst earlier on in the reaction (Refs 1-3).  This result was the culmination of twelve long years of laboratory-based research during which simple molecules had been shown to be the “unwitting choreographers” of ribonucleotide synthesis (Ref 1).

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There is a fascinating post about Snow Rollers: Roll ‘em Roll ‘em Roll ‘em…keep that snow a rollin! at WattsUpWithThat.com See: Are there ways to distinguish between a “SnowMan” and a “Snow Roller”?

This contest was posted 6 May 2009, and closed today.

The Uncommon Descent Contest Question 1 winner is #27:

To claim the prize, a free copy of Expelled, #27 John A Designer must send me a snail address at dodesignorchance@gmail.com Here is the entry: Read More ›

Michael D. Thomas, Ph.D. is a Professor and Director of the Division of Spanish and Portuguese at Baylor and is an ordained pastor.  On his BLOG,  he has a dialog between God and Evolution I found fun.  There are some other ID posts on his site that are worth perusing.