From Yahoo News: In unexpected discovery, comet contains alcohol, sugar Scientists on Friday identified two complex organic molecules, or building blocks of life, on a comet for the first time, shedding new light on the cosmic origins of planets like Earth. Ethyl alcohol and a simple sugar known as glycolaldehyde were detected in Comet Lovejoy, said the study in the journal Science Advances. But while the latest study does not end the debate over whether falling comets indeed seeded Earth with the components necessary for life, it does add something to our knowledge, said study co-author Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research. More. The story doesn’t offer information as to why those elements might Read More ›

(O’Leary for News’s regular night job) Edward Snowden: “When you collect everything, you understand nothing.” Mass spying on citizens “fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state.” (On the eve of the new Snowden-themed Bond film, Spectre. ) Writing for the internet is like writing on water The internet may be forever; our pages are not. Is our e-mail private? No. What protects most of us is that our words are lost among the trillions no one is looking for. Does new media make us value democracy less? Maybe, and facing elections and upheavals around North America and Europe, it’s bad news. Whoa, Rosie! Twitter is not a family conference! We all have family problems, and let’s Read More ›

Computer programmer Glenn Williamson now claims that ICR geneticist Jeff Tomkins made an elementary error when using the nucmer program to show that human and chimp DNA are only 88% similar. Williamson also asserts that 60 de novo protein coding genes said to be unique to human beings have very similar counterparts in apes, contrary to claims made last year by Dr. Cornelius Hunter, who is an adjunct professor of biophysics at Biola University. What Dr. Tomkins allegedly got wrong As readers of my recent post, Human and chimp DNA: They really are about 98% similar, will recall, Glenn Williamson demolished Dr. Tomkins’s original claim, made back in 2013, that human and chimp DNA are only about 70% similar. Williamson’s Read More ›

Einstein’s hidden variables tests two ways, closing both loopholes. From the Economist: To save physics from the spooky, Einstein invoked what he called hidden variables (though others might describe them as fiddle factors) that would convey information without breaking the universal speed limit. … By now, most physicists reckon the hidden-variable idea is flawed. But no test had closed both loopholes simultaneously—until this week, that is. Ronald Hanson of the University of Delft and his colleagues, writing in Nature, describe an experiment that starts with two electrons in laboratories separated by more than a kilometre. Each emits a photon that travels down a fibre to a third lab, where the two photons are entangled. That, in turn, entangles the electrons that Read More ›

From Popular Science: It’s thought that our hands are what make us human. Combined with our big brains, our fully opposable thumbs enabled our ancestors to make complex tools to conquer the world. But according to biologist David Carrier of Utah State University, that’s not all they were good for. He thinks the human hand’s uniqueness was shaped, in part, so we could punch each other in the face. Carrier introduced this off-beat hypothesis a few years ago, to much controversy. Now he and his colleagues have come out with a study that sort of supports but doesn’t confirm the idea. How could it? The fact that we are the only animals with fists is hardly decisive. There are a Read More ›

Today I ran across one of my favorite Francis Schaeffer aphorisms: “Truth demands confrontation” I was thinking about this later today when I read that Caitlyn Jenner has been proclaimed “woman of the year” by Glamour magazine. Now Bruce Jenner can certainly change his name to Caitlyn Jenner.  But he cannot change himself into a woman.  He can no more be woman of the year than my left shoe can. Well, that’s just narrow minded and bigoted, Barry.  Nope.  If you say 2+2=5,203, you have erred.  And when I say “Nope, it’s 4,” I am confronting your error with the truth, but I am not being narrow minded and bigoted.  No matter how much you sincerely wish that 2+2 equaled 5,203, Read More ›

From Nautilus: Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare? For centuries, we human beings have speculated on the possible existence and prevalence of life elsewhere in the universe. For the first time in history, we can begin to answer that profound question. At this point, the results of the Kepler mission can be extrapolated to suggest that something like 10 percent of all stars have a habitable planet in orbit. That fraction is large. With 100 billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies out there, it is highly probable that there are many, many other solar systems with life. From this perspective, life in the cosmos is common. However, there’s another, grander perspective from which Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to mention that University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran is hot on the trail again, this time in response to McLatchie’s vid (below) “Is ID a science?” I agree that many ID proponents try to use the science way of knowing to prove that creator gods must have built some complex molecular structures inside modern cells. They try to use evidence and they try to use rational thinking to arrive at logical conclusions. That qualifies as science, in my opinion, even though ID proponents fail to make their case. They don’t have the evidence and their logic is faulty. It’s science but it’s bad science. Lot’s of genuine scientists also publish bad science. Unclear what Dr. Moran Read More ›

Someone reminds us of Lawrence Krauss’ claims that quantum mechanics makes it inevitable that something comes out of nothing just by random processes and that our existence is random and inevitable because of quantum mechanics. See here at BBC News (2014): Their admittedly controversial answer is that the entire universe, from the fireball of the Big Bang to the star-studded cosmos we now inhabit, popped into existence from nothing at all. It had to happen, they say, because “nothing” is inherently unstable. This idea may sound bizarre, or just another fanciful creation story. But the physicists argue that it follows naturally from science’s two most powerful and successful theories: quantum mechanics and general relativity. Here, then, is how everything could have come Read More ›

Erez Aiden’s team of Baylor researchers discover a CTCF protein controlling 3D formation of 10,000 loops. Only 1 of 4 orientations is found. Challenges for evolution:
1) How did this essential CTCF protein develop to loop DNA when the DNA is essential for its production.
2) How was the 1 orientation in 4 selected?
See: There’s a Mystery Machine That Sculpts the Human Genome Read More ›

Despite showing no behavioral signs that they are aware of anything, some patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are able to remain conscious because the thalamus in their brain is still intact, even though its connection to the motor cortex (which controls our voluntary movements) is severely damaged, according to a University of Birmingham report (19 October 2015): Dr Davinia Fernández-Espejo, from the University of Birmingham, explained, “A number of patients who appear to be in a vegetative state are actually aware of themselves and their surroundings, able to comprehend the world around them, create memories and imagine events as with any other person.”… “In highlighting damage to the pathways that physically connect the thalamus, one of the Read More ›

A few days ago, scientist and young-earth creationist Dr. Jay Wile wrote a post on his Proslogion blog, in which he reported that Dr. Jeff Tomkins had abandoned his claim that human and chimpanzee DNA are only about 70% similar, in favor of a revised figure of 88%. But even that figure is too low, according to the man who spotted the original flaw in Dr. Tomkins’s work. Dr. Wile reports: More than two years ago, Dr. Jeffrey P. Tomkins, a former director of the Clemson University Genomics Institute, performed a detailed, chromosome-by-chromosome comparison of human and chimpanzee DNA using a widely-recognized computer program known as BLAST. His analysis indicated that, on average, human and chimpanzee DNA are only about Read More ›

From Digg: Will we recognize alien life when we see it? However, one of his most interesting works is a slim book from 1944, based on a set of lectures Schrödinger gave in Dublin. It poses a single question: What is life? Good question. As it happens, we noted earlier, The definition of life has reached the point where science historian George Dyson tells us, “Life is whatever you define it to be.” Richard Dawkins has suggested it is “anything highly statistically improbable, but in a particular direction.” And at a year 2000 international “What is life?” conference, no two definitions were the same. Biochemist Edward Trifonov noted that there are 123 definitions available and, undeterred, promptly proposed his own: Read More ›

Courtesy Christian Scientific Society, here. Friday night: Doug Axe, Biologic Institute Intelligible Design Although technical work in mathematics and experimental biology has been crucial for establishing the academic legitimacy of intelligent design, the downside of emphasizing technical arguments is that it promotes a perception of elitism. My impression is that the vast majority of people who favor design over Darwinism feel unqualified to offer a robust defense of design, which means everyone is looking to the experts to resolve this controversy. Contrary to this, I argue in my forthcoming book that the key insights for resolving the controversy come from common-sense reasoning and experience-based intuitions shared by all people. This makes everyone qualified to participate in the debate. … Saturday Morning: Read More ›

Maybe. This vid on intelligent design vs creationism has brought up PZ Myers, as well as Larry Moran, Darwin’s tenure tag team. McLatchie keeps this up and we could organize a Darwin beauty pageant. O’Leary for News will serve coffee and iced cupcakes. Vid: One minute apologist: What is the difference between ID and creationism? See also: Vince Torley’s Larry Moran commits the genetic fallacy Follow UD News at Twitter!