From Giorgia Guglielmi, Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, T. V. Padma, Holly Else, Quirin Schiermeier & Barbara Casassus at Nature: More than 250 cities around the world — from Mexico City to London to Mumbai — are hosting events. That’s fewer than last year, when marches in more than 600 cities drew about 1 million people. Still, this year’s overall turnout should be close to that of 2017, because many cities will host related events over the entire weekend, says Valerie Grover, satellite director of the main March for Science organization, who is based in Madison, Wisconsin. This year’s events range from rallies to festivals, and include musical performances, teach-in sessions and expos hosted by March for Science’s partner organizations. That should Read More ›

From Shawna Williams at The Scientist: TS: Do you think last year’s march, or other activism associated with it, have yielded results? RH: Some. The biggest effect was that scientists reminded themselves and each other that this is appropriate to do, that it’s important to do. I think many of the marchers last year were pleasantly surprised at the buoyant effect of being with thousands of other like-minded people to talk about the beauty of science, the relevance of science, the important place of science in society. . . . Maybe scientists shouldn’t need a reminder that it’s appropriate to go public, and in fact there’s an obligation to go public, but I think scientists do need that reminder, and Read More ›

The aim of this OP is to discuss in some order and with some completeness a few related objections to ID theory which are in a way connected to the argument that goes under the name of Texas Sharp Shooter Fallacy, sometimes used as a criticism of ID. The argument that the TSS fallacy is a valid objection against ID has been many times presented by DNA_Jock, a very good discussant from the other side. So, I will refer in some detail to his arguments, as I understand them and remember them. Of course, if DNA_Jock thinks that I am misrepresenting his ideas, I am ready to ackowledge any correction about that. He can post here, if he can or likes, Read More ›

From Liqun Luo at Nautilus: Over the past decades, engineers have taken inspiration from the brain to improve computer design. The principles of parallel processing and use-dependent modification of connection strength have both been incorporated into modern computers. For example, increased parallelism, such as the use of multiple processors (cores) in a single computer, is a current trend in computer design. As another example, “deep learning” in the discipline of machine learning and artificial intelligence, which has enjoyed great success in recent years and accounts for rapid advances in object and speech recognition in computers and mobile devices, was inspired by findings of the mammalian visual system.8 As in the mammalian visual system, deep learning employs multiple layers to represent Read More ›

We told you so! Four horsemen. No waiting. From Brian Miller at ENST: One of the most significant projects for the intelligent design movement was Douglas Axe’s research testing the rarity of protein folds. Axe’s method represented the most accurate approach for addressing the problem to date, but his was actually one in a line of studies which concluded that amino acid sequences forming the stable proteins found in nature are exceedingly uncommon. As a consequence, most proteins seen in life could never have originated via random mutations and selection. One of the early online critics of Axe’s work was Arthur Hunt, who wrote a lengthy critique at the Darwinian advocacy site Panda’s Thumb. His area of expertise is not Read More ›

It is with a heavy heart that I let you all know that Terry Mirll, who was one of the first to write ID-oriented fiction, has passed.
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From ScienceDaily: In the past decade, scientists have watched protein and RNA molecules condensing into droplets, or membrane-free condensates, in many kinds of cells, from bacterial to human. They have also noted that the same proteins that form liquid droplets in healthy cells can “solidfy” in the context of disease, such as neurodegenerative disorders. But what makes certain molecules come together in the same droplet, while others are excluded, has been unexplained. This week in Science, a team shows for the first time that RNA molecules recognize one another to condense into the same droplet due to specific 3D shapes that the molecules assume. The study’s senior author, Amy S. Gladfelter of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, began this Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Do you see yourself as a worthless cockroach contributing to the collapse of human civilization? Probably not, but Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich thinks precisely that about you. Fifty years ago, he published arguably the worst book ever written, The Population Bomb, which declared that human overpopulation would cause mass starvation. Instead, the Green Revolution (led in part by ACSH co-founder Norman Borlaug) caused global food production to explode, and the world population more than doubled from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 7.6 billion today. … Now, at the age of 85, Dr. Ehrlich still hasn’t let reality change his mind. In fact, he’s doubled down on his apocalyptic prognostications. In an interview with The Guardian, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The lengths that some males go to attract a mate can pay off in the short-term. But according to a new study from scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), extravagant investments in reproduction also have their costs. By analyzing the fossils of thousands of ancient crustaceans, a team of scientists led by NMNH paleontologist Gene Hunt has found that devoting a lot of energy to the competition for mates may compromise species’ resilience to change and increase their risk of extinction. Hunt, NMNH postdoctoral fellow M. João Fernandes Martins, and collaborators at the College of William and Mary and the University of Southern Mississippi reported their findings April 11, 2018, in the journal Nature. Read More ›

From Sarah Wild at Physics Today: Irreproducibility and the black box nature of machine learning plague many fields of science, from Earth observation to drug discovery. But astronomy represents a notable case study because the quantity of data is burgeoning at an unprecedented rate. The installation of new data-churning telescopes, combined with marked improvements in pattern-finding algorithms, has led astronomers to turn to sophisticated software to do the data-crunching they can’t do manually. And with more powerful analyses comes less transparency as to how they were performed. More. It could be a symptom of a much bigger problem. See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

From Laurel Hamers at Science News: Tiny light-scattering structures that give today’s butterflies and moths their brilliant hues date back to the days of the dinosaurs. Fossilized mothlike insects from the Jurassic Period bear textured scales on their forewings that could display iridescent colors, researchers report April 11 in Science Advances. The fossils are the earliest known examples of insects displaying structural color — that is, color produced by light bending around microscopic structures, rather than light being absorbed and reflected as with a pigment or a dye. Structural color is common in bird feathers and butterfly wings today, but finding such features in the fossil record can be tricky.More. Anyone want to bet against finding color displays meant to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Their findings, published recently in the journal eLife, indicate that this genetic “junk” performs the vital function of ensuring that chromosomes bundle correctly inside the cell’s nucleus, which is necessary for cell survival. And this function appears to be conserved across many species. This pericentromeric satellite DNA consists of a very simple, highly repetitive sequence of genetic code. Although it accounts for a substantial portion of our genome, satellite DNA does not contain instructions for making any specific proteins. What’s more, its repetitive nature is thought to make the genome less stable and more susceptible to damage or disease. Until fairly recently, scientists believed this so-called “junk” or “selfish” DNA did not serve any real purpose. “But we Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: One of the problems that have long intrigued experts in cosmology is how to detect possible extraterrestrial signals. Are we really looking in the right direction? Maybe not, according to the study that the neuropsychologists Gabriel de la Torre and Manuel García, from the University of Cádiz, publish in the journal Acta Astronautica. “When we think of other intelligent beings, we tend to see them from our perceptive and conscience sieve; however we are limited by our sui generis vision of the world, and it’s hard for us to admit it,” says De la Torre, who prefers to avoid the terms ‘extraterrestrial’ or aliens by its Hollywood connotations and use another more generic, as ‘non-terrestrial’. “What we are Read More ›

From John Stossel at Townhall: We’ve been told conservatives don’t believe in science and that there’s a “Republican war on science.” But John Tierney, who’s written about science for The New York Times for 25 years and now writes for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, told me in my latest online video, “The real war on science is the one from the left.” Really? Conservatives are more likely to be creationists — denying evolution. “Right,” says Tierney. “But creationism doesn’t affect the way science is done.” More. If we are dealing in the present day (as opposed to a pretend past about how the human ability to raise the eyebrow leads to the human mind), creationism can indeed have no Read More ›

From Jeremiah Poff at The College Fix: Two veteran academics who have diagnosed different plagues in modern higher education have little optimism for young people entering college for the foreseeable future, judging by their presentations to a conference this past weekend at Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic institution. College students have no passions today and “aren’t trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to,” former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz told the gathering on the “crisis” in American higher education at the Veritas Center for Public Ethics. In fact, higher education has become “profoundly unintellectual” and student life has become about “accumulating gold stars,” said Deresiewicz, who publicly disavowed Ivy League education several years after Read More ›