From Caroline Mortimer at Independent: Founder insists believers are welcome as well as long as they don’t have religious symbols on their headstones Apparently, the Church of Sweden will maintain the graveyard. Josef Erdem, a teacher from Borlänge in central Sweden, first proposed the idea because he wanted people to “decide for themselves what their graves should look like”. More. If one can’t be buried in the cemetery with the symbols of any “religion,” that suggests that atheism is itself functioning as a religion. Obviously, the atheists will be in charge of what they will allow, just as the Catholic Archdiocese is in charge of what is permitted at the Hope Cemetery in Ottawa. But anyway, the Americans are way Read More ›

For eleven months. From Stoyan Zaimov at Christian Post: The atheist criticism against the movie reached such intensity that the film’s trailer was blocked on YouTube for 11 months because it was flagged by members of the community who were seemingly upset with its representation of what happened. The issue was allegedly the claim that a key conversation, in which Rachel dies for affirming her Christian faith, never took place. The filmmakers are standing by the story, however, and say the conversation in question is found in later statements made by witness Richard Costaldo, who says he was near Scott when the killers opened fire. More. So many people worldwide die for affirming their Christian faith, one wonders to whom it Read More ›

In new book on the Royal Society’s Public Evolution Summit, Oxford’s Denis Noble explains, The reasons I think we are talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics being inherited was a central feature of the modern synthesis. In other words, to exclude any form of inheritance that was non-Mendelian, that was Lamarckian-like, was an essential part of the modern synthesis. What we are now discovering is that there are mechanisms by which some acquired characteristics can be inherited, and inherited robustly. So it’s a bit odd to describe adding something like to the synthesis ( i.e., extending the synthesis). A more honest statement is that the synthesis Read More ›

(To get chocolate cereal) From Agata Blaszczak-Boxe at New Scientist: Rats have been filmed for the first time using hooked tools to get chocolate cereal – a manifestation of their critter intelligence. Akane Nagano and Kenjiro Aoyama, of Doshisha University in Kyotanabe, Japan, placed eight brown rats in a transparent box and trained them to pull small hooked tools to obtain the cereal that was otherwise beyond their reach. In one experiment they gave them two similar hooked tools, one of which worked well for the food retrieval task, and the other did not. The rats quickly learned to choose the correct tool for the job, selecting it 95 per cent of the time. More. Good find! But what was Read More ›

But rivals feared the system would hog the stage? From Elle Hunt at Guardian: A nonsensical academic paper on nuclear physics written only by iOS autocomplete has been accepted for a scientific conference. Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, received an email inviting him to submit a paper to the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics in the US in November. “Since I have practically no knowledge of nuclear physics I resorted to iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions. “The Read More ›

From Nathaniel Sharping at Discover blogs: Every time astronomers discover another exoplanet, the first question is,”Does it look like Earth?” Finding an Earth-like exoplanet would certainly increase our chances of finding life, as we know it, on that distant world. We could finally prove that we’re not all alone in this big, cold universe. But, when we see planets described as Earth-like, we should be skeptical. With our current instruments, it’s hard for us to even find other planets out there (although it’s gotten much easier), much less see if there are oceans, atmospheres, plants or animals. Furthermore, what does it even mean to be “Earth-like?” Does it just need to be in the habitable zone? Or does it need Read More ›

From Anna Nowogrodzki at Nature: The 423-million-year-old specimen, dubbed Qilinyu rostrata, is part of an ancient group of armoured fish called placoderms. The fossil is the oldest ever found with a modern three-part jaw, which includes two bones in the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw. Researchers reported their find on 20 October in Science. Scientists had thought that placoderm jaws were only very distantly related to the three-part jaw found in modern bony fish and land vertebrates, including people. … “You know that old thing where you have a picture of a vase and you suddenly realize that it’s two human profiles facing each other? It was like that,” Ahlberg recalls. “You realize that what everybody else Read More ›

From Ronald Bailey at Reason: When environmental activists could no longer maintain with a straight face that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is a significant cause for cancer in people, the endocrine disruption hypothesis was ginned up. The idea is that chemicals that mimic estrogen are causing epidemics of deformed penises, lower sperm counts, premature development of breasts in girls, shorter anogenital distances in men, diabetes, ADHD, and reduced cognitive function. Today, Time magazine is reporting a correlational study that claims to have sufficiently tortured the data, ah, quantified the economic harm that these estrogen-fueled epidemics is causing. … As I report in The End of Doom, the toxicologists note that during the past twenty years hundreds of Read More ›

Wow. How that one got past “All suits on board for PC over fact” is anyone’s guess. From Alex Murashko at World News Daily: Although producers of “I’m Not Ashamed,” which releases Friday, use the 1999 Columbine High School massacre as a backdrop to the feature story of martyred Rachel Joy Scott, the film doesn’t shy away from the underreported fact that killer Eric Harris was most likely motivated by Darwinism and natural selection. Based on Harris’ own journal, and as depicted in movie clips given exclusively to WND, Harris, along with Dylan Klebold, found justification for their diabolical plans in Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theology. More. Our Barry Arrington was the lawyer for some of the families Read More ›

From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes: So could our Universe not have originated from a true singularity, but rather as the three-dimensional wrapping of a collapsing, growing four-dimensional black hole? Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo researchers Niayesh Afshordi, Razieh Pourhasan and Robert Mann proposed this idea back in 2014, and despite their best attempts, scientists have been unable to rule out this scenario. While higher dimensions may be well outside our experience, they could very well be responsible for our cosmic origins. Does that mean that every time a supermassive star collapses in a type II supernova and creates a central black hole, a new, two-dimensional Universe is created? As crazy as it sounds, the answer appears to be Read More ›

O’Leary for News: Yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t be putting this story up; I should pay attention to real news, but: From North Korea we learn about a chimp who smokes a pack a day. Okay, back to work soon. But is this cruelty to chimps? See also: Are apes entering the Stone Age? Follow UD News at Twitter!

The Kingdom of Speech Here: When The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe’s new book-length essay, was published in late summer, it received generally respectful reviews in the popular press, fitting for the Grand Old Man of Letters that Wolfe, through no fault of his own, has become. … This time around the notable exception was found in a ferociously negative review in the Washington Post. The reviewer was Jerry Coyne, a biologist from the University of Chicago and a volunteer border cop who patrols the perimeter where science and popular culture meet, making sure that scientists are accorded the proper deference. The Kingdom of Speech is deeply transgressive in this way. Wolfe makes sport of scientific pretensions generally and neo-Darwinian Read More ›

From Astronomical Journal: In order to search for evidence of hydration on M-type asteroid (16) Psyche, we observed this object in the 3 micron spectral region using the long-wavelength cross-dispersed (LXD: 1.9-4.2 micron) mode of the SpeX spectrograph/imager at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). Our observations show that Psyche exhibits a 3 micron absorption feature, attributed to water or hydroxyl. The 3 micron absorption feature is consistent with the hydration features found on the surfaces of water-rich asteroids, attributed to OH- and/or H2O-bearing phases (phyllosilicates). The detection of a 3 micron hydration absorption band on Psyche suggests that this asteroid may not be metallic core, or it could be a metallic core that has been impacted by carbonaceous material Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Millions of years ago, one species of frog diverged into two species. Millions of years later, the two frogs became one again, but with a few extra chromosomes due to whole genome duplication. Such is the curious case of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, a frog whose genome contains nearly double the number of chromosomes as the related Western clawed frog, Xenopus tropical is. In the evolution of species, different events have occurred over millions of years that have increased the number of chromosomes in some organisms. Polyploidy describes an event that increases the number of copies of each chromosome. Vertebrates have undergone at least two different polyploidy events since their original divergence. While it is relatively Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Bacteria are immortal as long as they keep dividing. For decades it has been assumed that a continuous, proteinaceous ring is necessary to drive the division of most microorganisms. An international team of researchers has revealed that the symbiont of the marine roundworm breaks the ring dogma and divides without. … The division of the R. hypermnestra symbiont leaves the dazzled scientists at a loss to know which kind of evolutionary advantage this quirky division might bring. One possible explanation is that this would allow the symbiont to remain faithful to its worm host. “Longitudinal division might have evolved to transmit host attachment to both daughter cells. In other words, to avoid that one daughter cell is lost Read More ›