From U Buenos Aires molecular biologist Alberto Kornblihtt at Nature: To complete the landscape of nonsense, the chief of the cabinet of ministers, Marcos Peña, attacked one of the fundamentals of science by saying that “critical thinking has done too much damage to our country”. He continued: “Some people in Argentina think that being critical is being smart. Our government believes that being smart is being enthusiastic and optimistic.” This is gobbledygook, yet it neatly fits the New Age concept of the “revolution of happiness” proclaimed by Macri as a lubricant for social conflicts. Colleagues around the world should know that, in this new Argentina, science and technology could become dispensable. More demonstrations are sure to follow. We will not Read More ›

FromDaily Galaxy, a revisit of cosmologist Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (2010): The relativity of time depended upon a new theory, and if we stand back, we discover that all views of time are human constructs. If time seems linear, that’s because we humans have modeled it that way in accord with our nervous system. It is just as viable to construct other models of time. For example, your body obeys natural rhythms in accord with the planetary, lunar, and solar cycles. The very notion of “time passing” fits with the firing of neurons in the brain, which have a beginning, middle, and end. If you drop every model, something surprising Read More ›

From Josh Gabbatiss at BBC: In their experiments, Appel and Cocroft found that recordings of the munching noises produced by caterpillars caused plants to flood their leaves with chemical defences designed to ward off attackers. “We showed that plants responded to an ecologically-relevant ‘sound’ with an ecologically-relevant response,” says Cocroft. … For example, despite lacking eyes, plants such as Arabidopsis possess at least 11 types of photoreceptor, compared to our measly four. This means that, in a way, their vision is more complex than ours. Plants have different priorities, and their sensory systems reflect this. As Chamovitz points out in his book: “light for a plant is much more than a signal; light is food.” More. The article cautions, refreshingly, Read More ›

From Keith Cooper at Space.com: Venus has long been a focus of Russian planetary science, which has the proud legacy of the record-breaking Venera space probes that landed on the Venusian surface in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [Mysterious Venus: 10 Weird Facts] Time to bone up on Venus; probes are under developent. With many questions remaining unanswered, the joint mission of Roscosmos and NASA, if approved, would see an orbiter launch toward Venus in 2025 with the aim to make remote-sensing observations of the planet and its atmosphere; deploy a lander on the surface; and search for future landing sites. Now, the “life” hope is dark streaks in Venus’s clouds. Finding life at high altitude in the atmosphere Read More ›

New Republic intern Eric Armstrong thinks that no U.S. party deserves the crown, at any rate: The time has come for Democrats to remove the beam from their own eyes, so to speak. Taking up the mantle of scientific liberalism—that is, adopting an evidence-based view of reality in pursuit of progressive policy—would serve both the strategic purposes of the Democratic Party in the menacing face of Trumpism, as well as the existential interests of humanity.* More. Oh, wait. No political party is likely to survive just taking an evidence-based view of matters. That’s supposed to be the role of science as such. You know what they say about party policy and strategy: It’s like sausage; if you are going to Read More ›

Friends note, from Biology & Philosophy (Springer): Biological regulation is what allows an organism to handle the effects of a perturbation, modulating its own constitutive dynamics in response to particular changes in internal and external conditions. With the central focus of analysis on the case of minimal living systems, we argue that regulation consists in a specific form of second-order control, exerted over the core (constitutive) regime of production and maintenance of the components that actually put together the organism. The main argument is that regulation requires a distinctive architecture of functional relationships, and specifically the action of a dedicated subsystem whose activity is dynamically decoupled from that of the constitutive regime. We distinguish between two major ways in which Read More ›

From Hanneke Weitering at LiveScience: Earth’s moon may be the product of many small moonlets that merged after multiple objects as big as Mars collided with Earth, leaving disks of planetary debris orbiting the planet, a new study suggests. This idea that multiple impacts led to the moon’s birth challenges the most prevalent theory of lunar formation, which suggests that one giant impact led to the formation of the moon. More. See also: Space.com: Scientists finally know how old Moon is What’s surprising, really, is how little we know about the moon in general. And various current theories: Another moon origin theory: Epic crash How the Moon Formed: 5 Wild Lunar Theories (Mike Wall at Space.com, 2014) Our moon formed in Read More ›

From Joshua Howgego at New Scientist: On 11 November last year, a small birthday party was held in an apparently unremarkable hangar onthe outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. Nothing too fancy, just a few people gathered around a cake. The honourees were there. Well, sort of – they were still locked in the cage where they had spent their first year. But then again, there is no other way to treat a brood of antimatter particles. The antimatter realm is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable: a mirror world of particles that destroy themselves and normal matter whenever the two come into contact. But it’s real enough. Cosmic rays containing antiparticles constantly bombard Earth. A banana blurts out an anti-electron Read More ›

From philosopher Hans Halvorson at Nautilus blog: This new fine-tuning design argument claims the imprimatur of physics, and is presented in quantitatively precise terms: among the set of all possible universes, the percentage that could sustain life is so small that the human mind cannot imagine it. By all rights, our universe shouldn’t have existed. What wonder that our universe has given birth to life, especially intelligent life. It seems the only explanation for this wildly improbable outcome is the supposition that there is a Designer. … There’s a deep problem lurking in the background of the fine-tuning argument, which rests on two factual claims. One is that a life-conducive universe exists. And the second is that this kind of Read More ›

And gets anything, everything, and nothing as a result. From Moshe Averick, rabbi and author of Nonsense of a High Order – The Confused World of Modern Atheism at Algemeiner: For the non-believer, the statement “murder is immoral” does not reflect some underlying existent reality or truth about our universe. It is simply a statement about the way people in our society feel about things today. … The realization that the term “moral values” is interchangeable and synonymous with personal preference, societal conditioning and the latest public opinion poll, is not very uplifting. As atheist philosopher Michael Ruse put it: “Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothaches and marking student papers…Now Read More ›

Interesting point from a response by mathematician Sheldon Glashow to Daniel Kleitman’s review of Max Tegmark’s 2015 book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality,  again in Inference: Chapter 9 is devoted to what can only be called mathematical epistemology. Tegmark alleges the plausible hypothesis that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans to imply a rather more startling Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.8 The Level IV multiverse, it turns out, is nothing other than the set of all mathematical structures, each of them constituting a universe unto itself. According to Tegmark, our universe is (rather than merely “is described by”) the long sought Theory Read More ›

 In a review of Max Tegmark’s 2015 book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, mathematician Daniel Kleitman observes at Inference: Tegmark’s chief argument now follows. Our local universe arose through the process of inflation; since this inflation happened, it had a finite non-zero probability of happening. In an infinite universe, inflation must have taken place infinitely often. There must therefore be an infinite number of local universes. Tegmark then claims that, since you also have a finite non-zero probability of existing in the infinite universe, there must be infinitely many copies of you in the other local universes. He then weakens his claim, though he does not acknowledge this, by pointing out that the physical Read More ›

From philosopher Catarina Dutilh Novaes at Aeon: In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant stated that no progress in logic had been made since Aristotle. He therefore concludes that the logic of his time had reached the point of completion. There was no more work to be done. Two hundred years later, after the astonishing developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the mathematisation of logic at the hands of thinkers such as George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski and Kurt Gödel, it’s clear that Kant was dead wrong. But he was also wrong in thinking that there had been no progress since Aristotle up to his time. According to A History of Formal Logic Read More ›

From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: In a study published last week (January 3) in eLife, Burchard and colleagues showed that about 75 percent of methylation signatures could be explained by the children’s genetic ancestry. The other 25 percent, however, is likely due to social or environmental factors that co-vary with self-identified race/ethnicity. The study is among the first to probe how the epigenome is influenced by genetic ancestry. Additional investigations are needed to better understand to what extent race and ethnicity are interchangeable with genetic ancestry, experts say. … It is challenging to draw conclusions from methylation analyses like this one because “a lot of the variation can be explained by background genetic variation of individuals,” noted Conley. In Read More ›

Taking issue wth paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes at Air and Space Smithsonian: Since we doubtlessly did originate from animal ancestors, the gap between us and them must have been bridged at some point in time. Perhaps it was not a jump, but a continuous evolution. Were the mental abilities of the cavewoman or caveman really as advanced as today’s humans? How much ability for abstraction and appreciation of complex numbers did they have? Since modern humans are the evidence that bridging the gap is possible, we might ask why it wasn’t bridged earlier, perhaps by an intelligent octopus, a smart dinosaur, a dolphin, or another ape? They’ve had millions more years to evolve than we have, Read More ›