From ScienceDaily: Lead author Dr Massimo Bernardi, Curator at MUSE and Research associate at Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, said: “We were excited to see that the footprints and skeletons told the same story. We had been studying the footprints in the Dolomites for some time, and it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.” The point of explosion of dinosaurs matches the end of the Carnian Pluvial Episode, a time when climates shuttled from dry to humid and back to dry again. It was long suspected that this event had caused upheavals among life on land and in the sea, but the details were not clear. Then, in 2015, dating of rock sections Read More ›

From Cornelius Hunter at ENST: Who is the author of the following statement? In contrast [to trait loss], the gain of genetically complex traits appears harder, in that it requires the deployment of multiple gene products in a coordinated spatial and temporal manner. Obviously, this is unlikely to happen in a single step, because it requires potentially numerous changes at multiple loci. If you guessed this was written by an advocate of intelligent design, such as Michael Behe describing irreducibly complex structures, you were wrong. It was evolutionist Sean Carroll and co-workers in a 2007 PNAS paper. When a design person says it, it is heresy. When an evolutionist says it, it is the stuff of good solid scientific research. Read More ›

From Dan Garisto at Science News: New genetic evidence instead suggests that wild precursors to sweet potatoes reached Polynesia at least 100,000 years ago — long before humans inhabited the South Pacific islands, researchers report April 12 in Current Biology. If true, it could also challenge the idea that Polynesian seafarers reached the Americas around the 12th century. … The researchers calculated the average rate of genetic change for the plant, determining that the Polynesian sweet potato diverged from its South American cousin at least 100,000 years ago. That suggests the plants, or their seeds, somehow migrated across the ocean on their own, possibly via wind, water or birds. Precedent exists, the authors note. Two other Ipomoea species crossed the Read More ›

From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: A trio of dogs buried at two ancient human sites in Illinois lived around 10,000 years ago, making them the oldest known domesticated canines in the Americas. Radiocarbon dating of the dogs’ bones shows they were 1,500 years older than thought, zooarchaeologist Angela Perri said April 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. … An absence of stone tool incisions on the three ancient dogs’ skeletons indicates that they were not killed by people, but died of natural causes before being buried, Perri said. More. Burial of dogs who died from natural causes implies, of course, a level of affection and esteem. See also: A top anthropology finding of year show Read More ›

One thing to be said for granting personhood to intelligent machines is that we could then blame them for things that go wrong. From Sarah Jeong at The Verge: Over the course of an accumulated 10 hours spread out over two days of hearings, Mark Zuckerberg dodged question after question by citing the power of artificial intelligence. Moderating hate speech? AI will fix it. Terrorist content and recruitment? AI again. Fake accounts? AI. Russian misinformation? AI. Racially discriminatory ads? AI. Security? AI. It’s not even entirely clear what Zuckerberg means by “AI” here. He repeatedly brought up how Facebook’s detection systems automatically take down 99 percent of “terrorist content” before any kind of flagging. In 2017, Facebook announced that it Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: One of the oldest and biggest experiments hunting for dark matter particles, DAMA is alone in claiming to see them. It purports to pick up on rare interactions between the hypothesized particles and ordinary atoms. But if these dalliances between the visible and invisible worlds really do produce DAMA’s data, several other experiments would probably also have detected dark matter by now. They have not. Late last month, Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, DAMA’s longtime leader, presented the results of an additional six years of measurements. She reported that DAMA’s signal looks as strong as ever. But researchers not involved with the experiment have since raised serious arguments against dark matter Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In a study published this week in Science Advances, an international team of researchers from Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, New York University, University of Kent, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found that a simple, straightforward developmental rule — the “patterning cascade” — is powerful enough to explain the massive variability in molar crown configuration over the past 15 million years of ape and human evolution. “Instead of invoking large, complicated scenarios to explain the majors shifts in molar evolution during the course of hominin origins, we found that simple adjustments and alterations to this one developmental rule can account for most of those changes,” Read More ›

John Horgan asks at Scientific American if science is hitting a wall: Economists show increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns The economists are concerned primarily with what I would call applied science, the kind that fuels economic growth and increases wealth, health and living standards. Advances in medicine, transportation, agriculture, communication, manufacturing and so on. But their findings resonate with my claim in The End of Science that “pure” science—the effort simply to understand rather than manipulate nature–is bumping into limits. And in fact I was invited to The Session because an organizer had read my gloomy tract, which was recently republished. I had lots of reactions to The Session. Here are a few: … In the realm of Read More ›

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: Over 150 experts in AI, robotics, commerce, law, and ethics from 14 countries have signed an open letter denouncing the European Parliament’s proposal to grant personhood status to intelligent machines. The EU says the measure will make it easier to figure out who’s liable when robots screw up or go rogue, but critics say it’s too early to consider robots as persons—and that the law will let manufacturers off the liability hook. This all started last year when the European Parliament proposed the creation of a specific legal status for robots … More. See also: Should chimpanzees be considered legal persons or things? Chimpanzees being considered legal persons is a step on the road to Read More ›

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: Though still technically human and featuring very human-like characteristics, they were shorter, more robust, and physically stronger. But they also featured distinctive faces, with heavy brows, weak chins, a large, forward-projecting face, and a wide nose. Some of these characteristics, such as the brow and chin, were likely acquired from their ancestors, but the other features are so distinctive that paleontologists figure they must’ve evolved for a special reason. New research published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests this is very much the case, and that Neanderthals acquired a facial structure that made life during the Ice Age more bearable. More. Paper. (paywall) Faces really different from “ours”? One gets the impression Read More ›

From James Gallagher at BBC: Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.” Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. “That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says.More. Well, if that’s true, human life is not at all what the lectern splinterers claim. See also: If viruses can evolve in parallel in related species… ? and Science fictions series 4: Naturalism and the human mind

From retired nuclear engineer Regis Nicoll at Salvo 44: We know from experience that when an object, like a car, absorbs energy by crashing into another object, it suffers damage. If I want my car repaired, I don’t just let it sit and expect it to return to its original condition by itself. Rather, I take it to a body shop, where it will be restored by the skillful hands of trained technicians. And yet, when one of my desk’s atoms gets damaged from bumping into one of its neighbors, it quickly returns to its original condition, all on its own. This is very strange. Equally strange is the phenomenon of the electrons’ “orbit.” Unlike the Earth, whose orbit is Read More ›

From Ratio Christi: Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic. is also the author of The Death of Humanity., From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic.

From ScienceDaily: Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge compared viruses that evolved in different species and found “parallel genetic changes” were more likely if two host species were closely related. … “This may explain in part why host shifts tend to occur between related species. However, we sometimes see the same mutations occurring in distantly related host species, and this may help explain why viruses may sometimes jump between distantly related host species. “At present we know very little about how viruses shift from one host species to another, so research like this is important if we want to understand and ultimately predict emerging viral diseases.” Paper. (public access) – Ben Longdon, Jonathan P Day, Joel M Alves, Read More ›

From Rush D. Holt, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), at Scientific American: In the past few years, we have engaged in more forceful and frequent advocacy, rephrasing our motto from “the voice for science” to “the force for science,” and after decades of slow decline in membership, our rolls have turned around dramatically. Our new members, who like our longtime members clearly value Science magazine, now say that they value even more our public advocacy and efforts to fully integrate science and engineering into society and government. In short, we are seeing around the world—in marches, in scientific society membership, in civic participation—scientists joining with each other and turning outward. More and Read More ›