The “Fellow Revocation Policy” was announced by president, Margaret A. Hamburg: The governing body of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded 1848, voted Saturday to enact a policy under which an elected AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor can be revoked for proven scientific misconduct or serious breaches of professional ethics. The AAAS Council adopted and approved the new policy that includes procedures AAAS will follow in considering the revocation of an elected AAAS Fellow’s status. The action came during a special meeting of the AAAS Council, a member-elected body that includes the AAAS board of directors, at AAAS’ Washington, D.C. headquarters. The new policy will go into effect on October 15, 2018. AAAS issued a related statement on Read More ›

Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers a comment on whether simple probabilities can outweigh “deep learning” (as noted earlier here. ) When neural nets [computer programs that mimic the human brain] were all the rage in physics, some 25 years ago, I spoke with the author of a paper who was using neural nets to predict space weather. After a year of playing with predictive abilities of various 1-level, 2-level and higher node nets, he confided that they reached a certain level of ability and then failed to improve. What made them better, he told me, was having more physics inserted into the model. That is, the nets couldn’t recreate Newton’s Laws, and if presented with just raw data, Read More ›

Because silicon can’t, says chemist: WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer. Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Cronin leads a research team of more than 50 people, but his childhood obsessions remain. He is constructing chemical brains, and has ambitions to create artificial life – using a radical new approach. Rowan Hooper, “Why creating a chemical brain will be how we understand consciousness” at New Scientist (paywall) The problem with consciousness is not that we don’t understand how it originates but that Read More ›

This group somehow links it to natural selection: A new USC Dornsife study indicates that aging may have originated at the very beginning of the evolution of life, at the same time as the evolution of the first genes. … This could be a game changer for research on longevity and aging. It may also be relevant to the scientific discussions surrounding CRISPR9 gene editing,” said John Tower, biologist at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “We found that when it comes to genes, aging may not always be a negative trait. It may help an organism survive.” To test this, Tower and a team of researchers developed a scenario with molecules can replicate themselves. Such molecules Read More ›

That’s being suggested in Britain: Humanists UK welcomed the recommendation that humanist beliefs and values be taught. In general, the commission’s conclusions were a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the academically serious teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews in our schools”, said Andrew Copson. But the Catholic Education Service said the report was “not so much an attempt to improve RE as to fundamentally change its character … The quality of religious education is not improved by teaching less religion.”Harriet Sherwood, “Call for atheism to be included in religious education” at The Guardian Surely the Catholic Education Service is missing the point. Atheism is a religious stance and an important one, given that many prominent people are atheists. Teaching beliefs other than Read More ›

J. R. Miller offers a reasonable discussion of varieties of Biblical creationism: Maybe you have heard the accusation that biblical creationists are blinded by their ancient theology which forces them to reject the modern “scientific fact” of evolution. But what do people mean by this accusation? What is evolution? Is biblical creation a de facto rejection of evolution science itself or just a rejection of how some scientists interpret the data? The answer, it turns out, depends on how one defines evolution. Therefore, to properly address this supposed conflict between biblical creation and evolution theory let me start with some simple definitions. For example, So, if the Bible teaches the cosmos had a beginning, does that mean all Christian must Read More ›

Not if you go by results from the gravitational waves collision. While last year’s discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won’t add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on the gravitational wave data. Their research, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is one of many papers in the wake of the extraordinary announcement last year that LIGO had detected a neutron star collision. It appears for now that the universe has the same familiar dimensions—three in space and one of time—even on scales of a hundred million light-years. But this is Read More ›

 Or here. Note: Behe has a new book coming out. See New book from Michael Behe on how today’s DNA findings “devolve” Darwin See also: The bombardier beetle, the toad, and – after all these years – Mike Behe

Yes, everything is going high tech now, it seems. Intro of topic For around half a century, the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis has provided a unique way of understanding how life has persisted on Earth. It champions the idea that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings evolved together as a single, self-regulating system that has kept the planet habitable for life – despite threats such as a brightening Sun, volcanoes and meteorite strikes. However, Professor Tim Lenton from the University of Exeter and famed French sociologist of science Professor Bruno Latour are now arguing that humans have the potential to ‘upgrade’ this planetary operating system to create “Gaia 2.0”. They believe that the evolution of both humans and their technology could add Read More ›

Earlier this year, over 150 experts in AI, robotics, ethics, and supporting disciplines signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to make intelligent machines persons. According to Canadian futurist George Dvorsky, the Parliament’s purpose is to hold the machines liable for damages, as a corporation might be: “The EU is understandably worried that the actions of these machines will be increasingly incomprehensible to the puny humans who manufacture and use them.” AI experts acknowledge that no such robots currently exist. But many argue, as does Seth Baum of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, “Now is the time to debate these issues, not to make final decisions.” AI philosopher Michael LaBossiere likewise wants to “try to avoid our usual Read More ›

Neutrons can be used to probe living tissues without damaging them (neutron scattering). Suzan Mazur interviews biophysicist John Katsaras, whose specialty is cell membranes, at Oscillations on their implications for studying the origin and development of life forms. Among the fascinating details, Suzan Mazur: Your membranes research revealed that lipids gathered with others of their type. John Katsaras: Right. The cell makes thousands of different types of lipids. In the plasma membrane, which is the outer membrane of the cell, there are hundreds or, maybe thousands of different lipids. The question is, why does the cell expend so much energy to make all of these different lipids. You could say, well, maybe they have all different physical properties.. As a Read More ›

It is very interesting to study a technology that doesn’t rely on trust. However, in the end, the most interesting thing it tells us is not how we should build a network but rather the social value of trust in society. More than economic power, more than scientific advances, trust is really what builds wealth in a society. When you can trust your neighbor not to steal, not to lie, not to try to ruin you, the increases in efficiency are gigantic. In the comparison between Bitcoin and the Visa network, the performance gain in efficiency of trust vs. lack of trust is 400,000x. My hat is off to Bitcoin. Not only for developing an interesting technology, but also for Read More ›

But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; and the idea we can be categorised into left-brain and right-brain learners. Belief in such myths is rife among teachers around the world, according to several surveys published over the last ten years. But does this matter? Are the myths actually harmful to teaching? The researchers who conducted the surveys believe so… But now this view has been challenged by a team at the University Read More ›

Haebichan Jung tells us that he built an original pop music-making machine “that could rival deep learning but with simpler solutions.” Deep learning “is a subfield of machine learning concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.” (Jason Brownlee, Machine Learning Mastery) Jung tells us that he went to considerable trouble to develop deep learning methods for generating machine pop music but in the end… I made a simple probabilistic model that generates pop music… Eric Holloway notes that this is an expected outcome based on the fact that computers cannot generate mutual information, where two variables are dependent on each other. Can simple probabilities outperform deep learning?” at Mind Matters Today Read More ›

Science writer David Appell suggests this, in all seriousness, in his review of Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, at Physics World: Hossenfelder confronts physicists to ask them why their ideas aren’t working. Michael Krämer, who heads the new-physics group at the LHC and works on supersymmetry, tells her that he is “honestly confused”. He adds, “I thought something must happen. But now? I’m confused.” She travels to the US to show up at the offices of luminaries including Nobel laureates Frank Wilzcek and Steven Weinberg. She considers Weinberg the greatest living physicist – his office in Austin, Texas is half the size of hers, she notes, “an observation that vaporizes what little ambition I ever had to Read More ›