From Lauren Griffin at The Conversation, we learn: Having a more complete understanding of when and why liberals and conservatives trust science helps avoid oversimplifications. It’s an important stopgap using oversimplified assumptions to denigrate those who disagree with us politically. None of this is to suggest that the anti-science viewpoints exhibited by Republican politicians on issues such as climate change should be ignored. Nor is it an argument that since “both sides” can fall for anti-science rhetoric, it can be waved away. Rather, these findings indicate that, in theory, it’s possible liberals and conservatives could work together to encourage politicians to base policy recommendations on sound science, at least on some issues. Maybe even more importantly, understanding the social and Read More ›

— Official: Crash land photos — Update: Europe’s Mars lander likely lost From BBC: There have been about 15 attempts to get down to the surface of Mars, and they are split fairly evenly between success and failure. The US space agency has been the most successful with seven successful landings on the Red Planet. The Soviet Mars 3 probe landed softly but only transmitted data for 15 seconds. The European Space Agency’s last attempt to land on Mars was in 2003, with Beagle 2. But it never sent a signal from the surface. More. Drawing board. — Here, doubtless updated This, updated, does not sound like good news: After a suspenseful night waiting for a signal from the ExoMars Read More ›

From Joshua Sokol at New Scientist: The problem was that the Boötes void was just too big. Voids grow because their dense edges have a much stronger gravitational pull than anything at their centres. But the universe wasn’t yet old enough to have inflated such a big bubble. For an explanation, we had to wait until the 1998 discovery of dark energy: a cosmic pressure that forces empty regions of space to expand as if someone was blowing air into each of the universe’s soap bubbles all at once. Many astronomers, now in a boom of cataloging and mapping voids, think these spooky regions that expose the naked fabric of the universe could point to the next big discovery. More. But Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: University of Oxford. “Monkeys are seen making stone flakes so humans are ‘not unique’ after all: Wild-bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil deliberately break stones, unintentionally creating flakes that share many of the characteristics of those produced by early Stone Age hominins.” ScienceDaily, 19 October 2016. Researchers have observed wild-bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil deliberately break stones, unintentionally creating flakes that share many of the characteristics of those produced by early Stone Age hominins. The difference is that the capuchins’ flakes are not intentional tools for cutting and scraping, but seem to be the by-product of hammering or ‘percussive behaviour’ that the monkeys engage in to extract minerals or lichen from the stones. In a paper, published in Nature, Read More ›

He kindly writes to say, — Some days ago I was watching a TV documentary movie where a team of archeologists were investigating the ruins of a Roman villa, unearthed in England. At one point, one of them unearthed a small, colored cubic rock. The archeologists knew that crystals would not form naturally in that soil. So he enthusiastically shouted: “Wow, here is a piece of the villa’s floor!”. In archeology, a cubic rock is sufficient to infer design, without hesitation, with no need of probabilistic calculations, rather in a somewhat direct intuitive way! Compare the archeology scenario to what happens in biology: here evolutionists — before systems far more complex, specified and organized than cubic stones — work hard Read More ›

One must register for the download. of the National Academy of Sciences’ free book on science literacy. A friend notes that on pages 40–41 of the book, Science Literacy: Concepts, Contexts, and Consequences,” which discusses the meaning of “scientific literacy” … they discuss whether questions measuring your agreement with evolution should be included in a metric of “science literacy.” They that understanding what evolution says is enough to demarcate science literacy. “One important change to the items that Miller popularized occurred in the 2010 version of Indicators when the National Science Board decided to reduce the battery of knowledge questions used to track factual knowledge from 11 to 9 items, removing the questions on evolution and the big bang. The Read More ›

A friend notes that Doug Futuyma’s abstract for the upcoming Royal Society Public Evolution Summit is now available. Based on the predictable and disappointing verbiage, the friend fears that the meeting will fizzle: Abstract: The evolutionary synthesis today: extend or amend? Evolutionary theory has been extended almost continually since the Evolutionary Synthesis, but the principal tenets of the Synthesis have been strongly supported, the single most important exception being the greater importance accorded genetic drift, especially in molecular evolution. The calls for an extended synthesis today are largely a continuation of this process. Some elements of the EES movement, such as the role of niche construction, are welcome emphases on long recognised but perhaps under-studied processes. The union of population genetic theory Read More ›

From Truth Will Set You Free (18) in response to Pindi (16) — Pindi @ 16: Saying that the theory of Darwinian evolution is in free fall has nothing to do with the state of ID, or whether William Dembski is breaking ranks from the ID movement. News: Dembski isn’t “breaking ranks from the ID movement” and has never said he was. He just wanted to do something with his life for a while other than scrap with tax- or Templeton-funded Darwin trolls. You bought ‘em, you pay for ‘em. Darwinian evolution is in free fall because it is not supported by empirical science. Lots of speculation and philosophizing, but no empirical evidence to prove that natural selection working on Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Scientific discoveries often arise from noticing the unexpected. Such was the case when researchers, studying a tiny device that has become increasingly important in disease diagnostics and drug discovery, observed the surprising way it funneled thousands of water droplets into an orderly single file, squeezing them drop by drop, out the tip of the device. Instead of occurring randomly, the droplets followed a predictable pattern. These observations led the researchers to deduce mathematical rules and understand why such rules exist. … “Beyond the immediate relevance to microfluidics, we believe our findings could one day be applied to forming nanocrystals into precise shapes,” Tang said. Researchers do not yet have a way to exert the sort of steady Read More ›

From Edwin Cartlidge at Physics World: Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people’s brains varies according to individuals’ conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain’s “entropy”. Statistical mechanics is very good at explaining the macroscopic thermodynamic properties of physical systems in terms of the behaviour of those systems’ microscopic constituent particles. Emboldened by this success, physicists have increasingly been trying to do a similar thing with the brain: namely, using statistical mechanics to model networks of neurons. Key to this Read More ›

Well, that’s how Bob Grant puts it at Scientist: Researchers studying an amoeba species have determined that some of its proteins bear a striking similarity to proteins in multicellular animals, suggesting that the leap from unicellularity to multicellularity may have been easier than previously suspected. The protist, Capsaspora owczarzaki, undergoes life-cycle transitions with the aid of phosphosignaling and proteome regulation in much the same way that multicellular animals direct the differentiation and role of cells performing different functions within an individual organism, the scientists reported last week (October 13) in Developmental Cell. “Animals are regarded as this very special branch, as in, there had to be so many innovations to be an animal,” David Booth, a biologist at the University Read More ›

From Bruce Bower at Science: Even more surprising, H. sapiens’ Stone Age dalliances outside their own kind weren’t limited to Neandertals. Ancient DNA shows signs of interbreeding between now-extinct Neandertal relatives known as Denisovans and ancient humans. Denisovans’ DNA legacy still runs through native populations in Asia and the Oceanic islands. Between 1.9 and 3.4 percent of present-day Melanesians’ genes can be traced to Denisovans (SN Online: 3/17/16). Other DNA studies finger unknown, distant relatives of Denisovans as having interbred with ancestors of native Australians and Papuans (see “Single exodus from Africa gave rise to today’s non-Africans”). Genetic clues also suggest that Denisovans mated with European Neanderthals. These findings have renewed decades-old debates about the evolutionary relationship between humans and Read More ›

Source: Biologists first to observe direct inheritance of gene-silencing RNA This is a really remarkable discovery, which throws all of population genetics into question. It will have to be rethought. Here’s part of the author’s own surprise: “It’s shocking that we can see dsRNA cross generational boundaries. Our results provide a concrete mechanism for how the environment in one generation could affect the next generation,” Jose said. “But it’s doubly surprising to see that a parent can transmit the information to silence a gene it doesn’t have.” Oh, my. Another day, and another bad day for Darwinism. From the abstract: These results demonstrate the transport of extracellular RNA from one generation to the next to regulate gene expression in an Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study is the first to demonstrate beneficial placebo effect for lower back pain sufferers who knew they were taking ‘fake pills.’ Patients who knowingly took placebos reported 30 percent less pain and 29 percent reduction in disability compared to control group. ‘Open-labeling’ addresses longtime ethical dilemma, allowing patients to choose placebo treatments with informed consent. … “These findings turn our understanding of the placebo effect on its head,” said joint senior author Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This new research demonstrates that the placebo effect is not necessarily elicited by patients’ conscious Read More ›

Further to: Bonobos can crack nuts with stones: Nothing science story of the year? we learn from Eurekalert: But male and female chimpanzees achieve social status in dramatically different ways, says a new study by primatologists at Duke University. While males actively challenge their superiors to win higher rank, females accept their position in the social pecking order, waiting until more senior group members die before moving up the ladder. The study, which appeared online Oct. 14 in the journal Scientific Reports, provides the first detailed look at how social status among wild chimpanzees changes throughout their lifetimes. “We found that, after entering the adult hierarchy, there was a complete absence of successful challenges for rank increases among females,” said Read More ›