And we learn some other things as well. From Suzan Mazur at Oscillations, an interview with Craig James Hogan, affiliated with Fermilab: Suzan Mazur: Thank you. There is criticism that the holographic investigation has been going on for almost 20 years, kicked off by Juan Maldacena and that there’s very little evidence so far, despite the bold headlines. That at some point in scientific investigations if the data doesn’t correlate with the experiment as modeled, it’s time to move on. I gather you don’t share that perspective. You’ve said you’re only at the beginning of the investigation. Do you see this as an emerging field like origin of life, spawning an increasing number of virtual research hubs in various parts Read More ›

From Mante Nieuwland at Retraction Watch: On April 10th 2018, eLife published the first large-scale direct replication study in the field of cognitive neuroscience, co-authored by 22 colleagues and myself. This publication detailed a replication effort that spanned 9 laboratories and attempted to replicate a high-impact 2005 publication in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience from DeLong, Urbach and Kutas (from hereon referred to as DUK05). People often ask why our replication study was not published in Nature Neuroscience, especially in light of its recent public commitments to replication research (here and here). It certainly wasn’t for our lack of trying. In this post, I offer a behind-the-scenes account of what happened when we tried to replicate DUK05 and submitted our Read More ›

From Marina Koren at the Atlantic: As recently as January of this year, Tarter suggested a rebranding for seti. “Seti is not the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We can’t define intelligence, and we sure as hell don’t know how to detect it remotely,” she said. Seti “is searching for evidence of someone else’s technology. We use technology as a proxy for intelligence.” Call it sett instead, she said. NASA does not, we are told, recognize SETI as part of astrobiology. Call that prejudice if you like, or call it an unwillingness to be seen spending tax money on a search for little green men when attested phenomena out there await exploration. … With the House bill on the table, Tarter says Read More ›

From science historian James Gleick at the New York Times, reviewing astrophysicist Adam Becker’s What Is Real?: So quantum physics — quite unlike any other realm of science — has acquired its own metaphysics, a shadow discipline tagging along like the tail of a comet. You can think of it as an “ideological superstructure” (Heisenberg’s phrase). This field is called quantum foundations, which is inadvertently ironic, because the point is that precisely where you would expect foundations you instead find quicksand. … The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics When scientists search for meaning in quantum physics, they may be straying into a no-man’s-land between philosophy and religion. But they can’t help themselves. They’re only human. “If you Read More ›

Here’s a recent paper dealing with the deadly and devastating hurricane Harvey which hit the Gulf last year. I haven’t looked at very much of the paper; however, their basic take on it is that the ferocious effects of Harvey can be explained by the OHC (Ocean Heat Content) of the Gulf’s surface waters. And, of course, they want to blame ‘global warming’ (oh heavens, I should have said “climate change”). You know, more CO2 in the upper atmosphere reflects escaping heat energy back onto the ocean’s surface, causing more water vapor–the real culprit in ‘global warming.’ So, I simply invite you to look at Figure 1 (p 36). You will notice that the OHC calculated for ocean depths between Read More ›

At Phys.Org there’s a press release that talks about how “information” can be “hidden” in plain text. They use some kind of ‘perturbation’ method, which, I suspect is linked to some kind of set of statistics. Here’s what they say: Computer scientists at Columbia Engineering have invented FontCode, a new way to embed hidden information in ordinary text by imperceptibly changing, or perturbing, the shapes of fonts in text. FontCode creates font perturbations, using them to encode a message that can later be decoded to recover the message. . . . “While there are obvious applications for espionage, we think FontCode has even more practical uses for companies wanting to prevent document tampering or protect copyrights, and for retailers and Read More ›

From Nathan H. Lents at Skeptic: Even if ID offered intellectual gains over creationism through the principle of irreducible complexity, and a focus on observations rather than biblical scripture, it did little to explain how poor design could be so rampant in creatures that were specifically designed by an intelligent force. Therefore, glitches in nature, particularly in the human body, call out for an explanation. Evolution usually provides elegant and deeply informative explanations. What are the explanations provided by ID? My book documents scores of these “human errors,” but I would love to know what intelligent design supporters say about these five in particular. His book is Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes: Read More ›

From Emily Conover at ScienceNews, describing the work of physicist Nicholas Gisin: Gisin — known for his work on the foundations and applications of quantum mechanics — takes issue with real numbers that consist of a never-ending string of digits with no discernable pattern and that can’t be calculated by a computer. Such numbers (for example, 1.9801545341073… and so on) contain an infinite amount of information: You could imagine encoding in those digits the answers to every fathomable question in the English language — and more. But to represent the world, real numbers shouldn’t contain unlimited information, Gisin says, because, “in a finite volume of space you will never have an infinite amount of information.” Instead, Gisin argues March 19 Read More ›

From Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic: As you read this article, the cells in your body are dividing and the DNA in them is being copied, letter by letter. So long is the human genome—more than 3 billion letters—that even an astonishingly low error rate of one in many million letters could amount to 10 new mutations every time a cell divides. Oh, perhaps you’re also catching some sun (ultraviolet rays) while you read this, or enjoying a beer (alcohol), or have recently been high in the atmosphere on an airplane (cosmic rays). Congratulations, you’ve given yourself even more mutations. In a typical day, scientists estimate, the 37 trillion cells in your body will accumulate trillions of new mutations.More. We Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: See also: Why do science journalists promote “fake physics” to the public? and Distinguishing between causation and correlation: Microwaves and cancer edition, with David Nguyen.

From Tyler Krueger at Astronomy: Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity is just over 100 years old, and so far it has predicted the interaction between celestial objects and the space-time field very well. There are a few troublesome spots, however, in which the theory of general relativity doesn’t agree with quantum mechanics. These gaps have confounded researchers for decades, and have sprouted a handful of hypotheses attempting to explain the dissonance. Dark matter and dark energy are the prevailing stand-in answers for this problem, but they are, as of yet, merely stand-ins. And there are some physicists that do not buy into these explanations. Erik Verlinde, a professor of science mathematics, and informatics at the University of Amsterdam, is Read More ›

From cognitive scientist Alan Jasanoff, author of The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are, at Aeon: But lost in the public’s romance with the brain is the most fundamental lesson neuroscience has to teach us: that the organ of our minds is a purely physical entity, conceptually and causally embedded in the natural world. Although the brain is required for almost everything we do, it never works alone. Instead, its function is inextricably linked to the body and to the environment around it. The interdependence of these factors is masked however by a cultural phenomenon I call the ‘cerebral mystique’ – a pervasive idealisation of the brain and its singular importance, which Read More ›

From Eugene Koonin at Immunoconcept: Abstract: The CRISPR-Cas systems of bacterial and archaeal adaptive immunity have become a household name among biologists and even the general public thanks to the unprecedented success of the new generation of genome editing tools utilizing Cas proteins. However, the fundamental biological features of CRISPR-Cas are of no lesser interest and have major impacts on our understanding of the evolution of antivirus defense, host-parasite coevolution, self vs non-self discrimination and mechanisms of adaptation. CRISPR-Cas systems present the best known case in point for Lamarckian evolution, i.e. generation of heritable, adaptive genomic changes in response to encounters with external factors, in this case, foreign nucleic acids. CRISPR-Cas systems employ multiple mechanisms of self vs non-self discrimination Read More ›

From Jeremy P. Shapiro, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, at Raw Story: Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways. … As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder. … This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists. They seem to misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of Read More ›

From David Nguyen at Think Tank Learning: See also: Distinguishing between causation and correlation: Global warming edition