True, the rumors distract from real science. From Elizabeth Howell at AirSpaceMag: The attention given to such stories has some scientists worried, especially as social media amplifies claims of alien contact over other, more prosaic explanations. “Currently, most SETI-related news seems to be interfering with conventional scientific discoveries, stealing the limelight—without following basic rules of science,” wrote Dutch exoplanet researcher Ignas Snellen of Leiden Observatory, on a Facebook exoplanets discussion group for professional astronomers. Although he has “great respect for SETI scientists,” Leiden wrote, “there is no place for alien civilizations in a scientific discussion on new astrophysical phenomena, in the same way as there is no place for divine intervention as a possible solution. One may view it as Read More ›

From Jeanne Lenzer at Undark: In another case of cure as cause, a landmark study of Prozac to treat adolescent depression found that it increased overall suicidality — the very outcome it is intended to prevent. In the study, 15 percent of depressed adolescents treated with Prozac became suicidal, versus 6 percent treated with psychotherapy, and 11 percent treated with placebo. These numbers were not made obvious by Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, or the lead researcher who claimed that Prozac was “the big winner” in the treatment of depressed teens. Doctors, unaware that the drug could increase suicidality, often increased the dosage when teens became more depressed in treatment, thinking the underlying depression — not the drug — was at Read More ›

From Alice Klein at NewScientist: An Australian boy missing the visual processing centre of his brain has baffled doctors by seeming to have near-normal sight. … However, BI has remarkably well-preserved vision, says Iñaki-Carril Mundiñano at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “You wouldn’t think he is blind,” he says. “He navigates his way around without any problems and plays soccer and video games,” (paywall) More. But then, as per David Robson at BBC, there’s also blindsight, Clearly, despite his blindness, Daniel’s healthy eyes were still watching the world and passing the information to his unconscious, which was guiding his behaviour. Publishing a report in 1974, Weiskrantz coined the term “blindsight” to describe this fractured conscious state. “Some were sceptical, of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: They call their theory the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis.” The basic idea is that, for much of human history, living and sleeping in mixed-age groups of people with different sleep habits helped our ancestors keep a watchful eye and make it through the night. “Any time you have a mixed-age group population, some go to bed early, some later,” Nunn said. “If you’re older you’re more of a morning lark. If you’re younger you’re more of a night owl.” The researchers hope the findings will shift our understanding of age-related sleep disorders. “A lot of older people go to doctors complaining that they wake up early and can’t get back to sleep,” Nunn said. “But maybe there’s nothing Read More ›

Read the following and then read why it matters to you: From Ed Morrisey at HotAir: The video shows top Planned Parenthood staffers attending meetings of the National Abortion Federation in 2014 and 2015 and it is the latest in a series of over a dozen videos from the organization showing the Planned Parenthood abortion business and others engaging in potentially illegal sale of body parts of aborted babies. The new undercover video shows Planned Parenthood executives and other top abortion advocates making shocking comments about abortions. Several attendees made jokes about eyeballs from aborted babies and other aborted baby body parts “rolling down into their laps.”More. Look, it is probably true. It was true forty years ago but traditional Read More ›

Hmmm. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable: The researchers said they can’t really explain what happened. Perhaps there was a human or equipment error that falsely simulated brain activity at the time of recording — though there’s no sign that either a person or machine messed up. “It is difficult to posit a physiological basis for this EEG [electroencephalographic] activity, given that it occurs after a prolonged loss of circulation,” Norton and her team wrote. The study is the latest effort by doctors to better understand what happens to our bodies after life support is withdrawn, which is an important question for organ donation. Without a firm explanation, and given the tiny sample size — one patient — the doctors couldn’t Read More ›

To hear lobbyists and pop science mags tell it. Except, that is, for a lot of insiders over the years. A friend started making a list of books that doubt all or most of modern Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, the slightly elastic Extended Synthesis, and came up with a three-tiered, hardly exhaustive, shelf: St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (1871) Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism (1874) Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New (1879) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907/tr. 1911) Svante Arrhenius Worlds in the Making (1908) Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (1940) Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (1941) Lecomte du Nouy, Human Destiny (1947) Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) Norman Macbeth, Read More ›

. . . and of course, the long subversive march through the institutions that dominate culture. As in, we need to understand some of why a self-falsifying and inherently amoral ideology of evolutionary materialistic scientism has so much traction in our day, and why so many bizarre agendas are being pushed so hard by the narrative shapers, manipulators and spin doctors working in the information battle-space, to what effect. Let us never forget that if we are led to judge the true and straight by the false and crooked, we will unavoidably end up in conflict with reality; to our detriment. (And yes, this follows up on the current Wikileaks revelations about the long term manipulation of the public through Read More ›

From Gareth Cook at Scientific American, reviewing Alan Schwarz’s ADHD Nation: According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of American children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), yet the diagnosis is given to some 15 percent of American children, many of whom are placed on powerful drugs with lifelong consequences. This is the central fact of the journalist Alan Schwarz’s new book, ADHD Nation. Explaining this fact—how it is that perhaps two thirds of the children diagnosed with ADHD do not actually suffer from the disorder—is the book’s central mystery. The result is a damning indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, and an alarming portrait of what is being done to children in the name of mental health. Read More ›

From at CTV: Researchers are coming forward with examples of junk science distributed by an international company that now has ties to respectable Canadian journals. OMICS Group Inc., an online publishing firm headquartered in India, has been accused of duping academics and publishing bogus research with little to no vetting by experts in the field. A CTV News/Toronto Star investigation found that OMICS purchased two Canadian companies, Andrew John Publishing and Pulsus Group, which have been publishing a number of respected medical journals in fields like cardiology, pathology and optometry. OMICS purchased two Canadian companies, Andrew John Publishing and Pulsus Group. Many scientists, doctors and editors said they were outraged and concerned that a company like OMICS can now essentially Read More ›

  For a materialist the term “ethics” is empty of objective meaning, and in a post from a couple of years ago I pointed out the absurdity of materialist “bioethics.” After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.  I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” Read More ›

The philosopher Plato wrote in his work, Phaedrus, that successful theories should “carve nature at its joints.” Scientists have a special obligation to abide by this maxim, since the stated aim of science is to systematically describe Nature, as she really is. The worst kind of intellectual crime I can conceive of would be the imposition on the populace of a conceptual system which fails to carve Nature at its joints. When people are deceived into believing a false proposition, their error can be corrected by simply pointing out the truth; but when people are forced to adopt a totally wrong way of slicing and dicing reality, the very fabric of their thinking is warped, and intellectual progress is retarded. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A gene that scientific dogma insists is inactive in adults actually plays a vital role in preventing the underlying cause of most heart attacks and strokes, researchers have determined. The discovery opens a new avenue for battling those deadly conditions, and it raises the tantalizing prospect that doctors could use the gene to prevent or delay at least some of the effects of aging. … The gene, Oct4, plays a key role in the development of all living organisms, but scientists have, until now, thought it was permanently inactivated after embryonic development. Some controversial studies have suggested it might have another function later in life, but the UVA researchers are the first to provide conclusive evidence of that: Read More ›

From Aeon: I had just finished giving a talk about severe brain injury, and told the story of Terry Wallis, a man in Arkansas who’d had a car accident in 1984. He survived but was left in a vegetative state, and his doctors and family thought he would be unconscious forever. Then in 2003 he began to speak. Tentatively at first, he said ‘Mom’ and then ‘Pepsi’. It was a stunning development almost two decades after he was injured. Terry’s words became the stuff of international headlines, baffling commentators who thought that recovery from the vegetative state was impossible. Why? Because the vegetative state had gained an almost iconic status in the United States, in law and in medicine, following Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding will allow them to cut off the microbes’ ability to survive what doctors and nature can throw at them. It’ll be interesting to see who wins this one, man or bug. HGT gives bacteria a vast library of existing solutions. Earlier studies of competence had pointed to more than 300 active genes. The new study identifies only 83 genes in 29 regions of the strep Read More ›