From ScienceDaily: With individuals weighing in at more than 140 pounds, the critically endangered Chinese giant salamander is well known as the world’s largest amphibian. But researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 21 now find that those giant salamanders aren’t one species, but five, and possibly as many as eight. The bad news as highlighted by another report appearing in the same issue is that all of the salamanders — once thought to occur widely across China — now face the imminent threat of extinction in the wild, due in no small part to demand for the amphibians as luxury food. … “We were not surprised to discover more than one species, as an earlier study suggested, Read More ›

In Adrian Cho’s interpretation at Science: When Stephen Hawking died on 14 March, the famed theoretical physicist had a few papers still in the works. Today, the Journal of High Energy Physics published his last work in cosmology—the science of how the universe sprang into being and evolved. (Other papers on black holes are still being prepared.) In the new paper, Hawking and Thomas Hertog, a theoretical physicist at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU) in Belgium, attempt to stick a pin in a bizarre concept called eternal inflation, which implies—unavoidably, according to some physicists—that our universe is just one of infinitely many in a multiverse. Borrowing a concept from string theory, Hawking and Hertog argue that there is no Read More ›

From Mollie Cahillane at the Daily Mail: Chimps have midwives too: Incredible footage shows female bonobos protecting mothers during labor and assisting in the delivery – Scientists saw three captive bonobos give birth in France and the Netherlands – The mother did not isolate herself from the group and other females helped her – Bonobos are humans’ closest living relative and the behavior shows that assistance during birth is not unique to people, as previously thought More. Photos here. The Daily Mail is right. The behavior is not unique to humans. Elephants do it too. So, doubtless, do some other mammal species. As we have noted earlier, there is no tree of intelligence and suddenly discovering a behavior trait among Read More ›

In response to our recent item on the mainstreaming of epigenetics, physicist Rob Sheldon writes to say, in connection with the recent studies of the generational epigenetic effects following mass starvation, — It is, of course, refreshing to see epigenetics now making the mainstream publications. What has me in stitches, however, is all the things that are not said: a) that Darwin hated Lamarck because it reintroduced teleology into evolution. Darwin’s whole purpose was to remove teleology and purpose from a discussion of life, thereby destroying theism. Now the reintroduction of epigenetics leaves the Darwinist program in tatters. b) that the Dutch hunger winter of 1944 wasn’t just Germany blockading Holland, it was the Nazi party. That acme of Darwinian Read More ›

From Nathan H. Lents at Skeptic: From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at ENST: Lents writes: One of the important drainage-collection pipes is installed near the top of the largest pair of cavities, the maxillary sinuses, located underneath the upper cheeks… Putting the drainage-collection point high within these sinuses is not a good idea because of this pesky thing called gravity. Egnor replies: Lents misunderstands the physiology of sinus drainage. The visible opening (ostium) in the maxillary sinus is not the only, or even the main, route of drainage. There is a complex system of interconnection, often at the microscopic level, between the paranasal sinuses, and Lents betrays an ignorance of sinus physiology in asserting that the large visible opening out of Read More ›

 Berlinski, an agnostic mathematician, is author of The Devil’s Delusion, a riposte to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. See also: Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne takes on skeptical mathematician David Berlinski

From Kevin Hartnett at the Atlantic, interviewing, for Quanta Magazine, Judea Pearl, author (along with Dana Mackenzie) of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect In his new book, Pearl, now 81, elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this kind of causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions—to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention—which Pearl views as the cornerstone of scientific thought. Pearl also proposes Read More ›

From Bill Andrews at Discover: In particular, according to a study released Monday in Nature Chemistry, an international team of scientists showed that molecules involved in photosynthesis display quantum mechanical behavior. Even though we’d suspected as much before, this is the first time we’ve seen quantum effects in living systems. … With a technique called two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, researchers saw molecules in simultaneous excited states — quantum weirdness akin to a cat being alive and dead at the same time. What’s more, the effect lasted exactly as long as theories predicted it, suggesting this evidence of quantum biology will last. As the authors succinctly put it, “Thus, our measurements provide an unambiguous experimental observation of excited-state vibronic coherence in the Read More ›

A philosophical question to wake you up. A reader directs our attention to a 2015 piece by cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Inference Review (2015): THE ANSWER to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed. More. He offers the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem by way of evidence: Loosely speaking, our theorem states that if the universe is, on average, expanding, then its history cannot be indefinitely continued into the past. More precisely, if the average expansion rate is positive along a given world line, or geodesic, then this geodesic must terminate after a Read More ›

Discussing the current push to give animals human-like rights, Maggie Koerth-Baker tells us at Five Thirty Eight: Animals don’t stack up the way you’d expect. “[Pigeons have] knocked our socks off in our own lab and other people’s labs in terms of what they can do,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Iowa. “Pigeons can blow the doors off monkeys in some tasks.” Experts who study animal intelligence across species say we can’t rank animals by their smarts — scientists don’t even try anymore — which means there’s no objective way to determine which animals would deserve more human-like rights. A little more than 100 years ago, scientists started to amass the data necessary Read More ›

From Harry Pettit at the Daily Mail: The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is one of the most significant events in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history and ultimately led to the arrival of complex animals like humans. New research shows the event – which took place between 500 and 540 million years ago – was a much more gradual process than first thought. More. Via Eurekalert: A team based at Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the University of Lausanne carried out the most comprehensive analysis ever made of early fossil euarthropods from every different possible type of fossil preservation. In an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences they show that, taken together, the total fossil record Read More ›

From Sophie Hebden at FQXI: A radical theory replaces the cosmic crunchers with fuzzy quantum spheres, potentially solving the black-hole information paradox and explaining away the Big Bang and the origin of time. … If the core of a black hole isn’t confusing enough, things get worse when you consider its surface—or “event horizon”—which marks an imaginary boundary surrounding the black hole. Anything that crosses the event horizon, even light, will be sucked in towards the black hole’s core and crushed into the singularity. At first it was thought that nothing that falls in to a black hole can ever escape. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that, thanks to quantum effects, black holes can slowly radiate energy from their Read More ›

The other day, I ran across the Wiki article on Laws of Science. While there is much good there, such as: The laws of science, scientific laws, or scientific principles are statements that describe or predict a range of phenomena as they appear in nature.[1] The term “law” has diverse usage in many cases: approximate, accurate, broad or narrow theories, in all natural scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy etc.). Scientific laws summarize and explain a large collection of facts determined by experiment, and are tested based on their ability to predict the results of future experiments. They are developed either from facts or through mathematics, and are strongly supported by empirical evidence. It is generally understood that they Read More ›

It is clearly time to hammer selective hyperskepticism again. Here is AK at 49 in the Answering thread: A/Mats are skeptical of extraordinary claims. And I don’t apologize for that. BA, UD President (and a lawyer familiar with correcting fallacies) duly hammered the fallacy: BA, 50 – 53 : >>50: . . . Like the extraordinary claim that a bag of chemicals configured in just the right way suddenly becomes subjectively self-aware? Funny, I’ve never met an A/Mat who was skeptical of that extraordinary claim. Can you point me to one? 51: . . . Like the extraordinary claim that non-living chemicals spontaneously combined in just the right way to become living things? Funny, I’ve never met an A/Mat who was Read More ›

David Nguyen outlines the history of the Warburg effect at Think Tank Learning: See also: Science News Fact Check: Did Craig Venter create life? With David Nguyen