Over at his Website, Debunking Christianity, John Loftus has put up a very brief post titled, What About the Origins of Life Itself? It reads as follows:

We know that we descended from a common ancestor. We know this. Evolution is a fact. Many believers agree about this, even a growing number of evangelicals. But what about the origins of life itself? The answer is simple. Ready? Since the evolution of life has a natural explanation then so also does the origins of life, we just don't know how yet. Give science time. Don't punt to a god explanation just as believers shouldn't have done before Darwin. Comprende?

A commenter named formerlutheran responded:

Science has yet to figure out exactly how the first little spark of "life" began, so the honest answer is "don't know, but we are working on it." The apologists trumpet "You don't know, therefore God." The inevitable question is then, "Okay then, where did your God come from?" The apologist answer is, "It is a mystery." (Translation) the apologist is "don't know, but if we can shout loud enough and use really, really big words people won't notice."

Loftus then posted a follow-up reply, praising science at the expense of theism:

The difference between the mysterious answer the theist offers and science is that theists have no way to solve that mystery, which has remained a mystery from the beginning and will always remain a mystery. Science however, has a method and just might figure it out.

Another commenter named Luiz Fernando Zandra posed another objection to the theory of Intelligent Design:

Let's not forget that we can't argue for the fine-tuning argument and for a miraculous origin of life. If we need a miracle for life to start in this universe, then the universe is not fine tuned for life. Period. If the desire of the believer is to support the idea that the universe is fine tuned for life in order to produce evidence for a designer, then he must abandon the idea that life can't occur naturally.

In this short post, I'd like to set the record straight.

The evidence for the primordial gravitational waves that caused a sensation when it was announced in March could be less strong than previously thought, according to a cosmologist, adding to reports of existing rumours that questioned the work.

The observation recorded by the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole in March would confirm a weird but popular theory that the Universe ballooned from subatomic to macroscopic size during its first tiny fraction of a second.

Gravitational waves originated in this cosmic 'inflation' would make their presence known by polarizing the thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang - the cosmic microwave background - in a particular swirling pattern known as b-modes. But dust in the Milky Way galaxy scatters microwaves with this same pattern, and this galactic microwave radiation must be carefully identified and subtracted to see the primordial fingerprint.

Raphael Flauger of New York University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton suggested in a lecture presented on 15 May at Princeton University in New Jersey that one of six methods used by the BICEP2 astronomers to distinguish primordial b-modes from the foreground was not applied correctly.

A senior German official has warned that Google may have such a dominant market position that a breakup of the company "must be seriously considered."

Such a move - which would be difficult to enforce because Google is based in the United States - could be a last resort for countries seeking to prevent the Internet search giant from systematically crowding out competitors, said Sigmar Gabriel, who is Germany's economy minister and vice chancellor.

"A breakup, of the kind that has been carried out for electricity and gas grids, must be seriously considered here," Gabriel wrote in an op-ed published Friday by German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "But it can only be a last resort. That's why we are focusing on anti-trust style regulation of Internet platforms."

Google has for years faced criticism over its dominant position in Europe, where no serious local rival has emerged to challenge its search business. But Gabriel's comments reflect a new sense of urgency among European governments and businesses that the continent's home-grown Internet industry risks being smothered by American rivals.

On Thursday, some 400 companies - including major German and French publishers - announced they were submitting a new anti-trust complaint against Google. The grouping, calling itself Open Internet Project, alleges that Google promotes its own products in search results at the expense of rivals.

Cbet nr. 3868, issued on 2014, May 16, announces the discovery of an apparently asteroidal object (~ magnitude 18.2) on CCD images taken on 2014, May 09.3 by R. J. Sanders with the Catalina Sky Survey's 0.68-m Schmidt telescope. This object has been found to show cometary appearance by observers elsewhere. The new comet has been designated C/2014 J1 (CATALINA).

We performed follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 50 unfiltered exposures, 15-sec each, obtained remotely on 2014, May 16.4 from Q62 (iTelescope network, Siding Spring) through a 0.70-m f/6.6 CDK astrograph + CCD, shows that this object is slightly diffused. The FWHM of this object was measured about 20% wider than that of nearby field stars of similar brightness (at the moment of our imaging session the Moon - 0.98 phase - was just about 40 degree away from the comet).

Our confirmation image (click on it for a bigger version)
M.P.E.C. 2014-K04 assigns the following parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2014 J1: T 2014 June 13.44; e= 1.0; Peri. = 191.98; q = 1.74; Incl.= 160.18.

It's no secret that the sun has wide ranging impacts on our planet - it is, after all, the primary energy source for our biosphere. But when it comes to how the sun impacts climate variations and weather phenomena, scientists can have a hard job teasing out the sun-Earth connections.

One connection, however, is no secret. When the solar wind impacts the Earth's magnetosphere - the global magnetic field that deflects the sun's ionizing particles to the poles - high latitudes can be treated to a beautiful light display called the aurora. But can the solar wind have other, more "everyday" impacts on our atmosphere? Yes, says a new study published today (May 14) in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

What if nuclear bombs could reproduce? Get your hands on one today, and in a week's time you've got a few dozen.

Of course, nukes don't double on their own. But contagious, one-celled pathogens do. Properly packaged as a bioweapon, they could kill as many people as a hydrogen bomb would, or more.

Milana Trounce, MD, a clinical associate professor of emergency medicine, wants to get people to worry about this possibility. For the fourth year in a row, she is presiding over a course called Biosecurity and Bioterrorism Response, which aims to get students thinking about how to prevent bioterror and, in the event of a biological attack, what to do about it. More than 100 Stanford undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral and professional students, representing disciplines ranging from public policy to biological science to engineering and bioengineering, have enrolled.

The course, which Trounce considers more of a forum or workshop, brings students together with guest lecturers from Stanford and other universities, as well as with biotech-company executives, think-tank denizens and current and former public-health and other government officials.

"I'm hoping to continue to grow this forum to figure out real-world solutions," she said.

Authorities on bioterrorism and biosecurity say that more thinking about how to handle this threat is desperately needed. Steven Block, PhD, professor of biological sciences and of applied physics at Stanford, is a member of a scientific advisory group that meets several times a year to report to the federal government on national-security issues, including bioterrorism. "The advent of modern molecular genetic technologies is making it increasingly feasible to engineer bioweapons," said Block, who is also the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Sciences and a guest lecturer in Trounce's class. "It's making people with even moderate skills able to create threats they couldn't before."

A natural anthrax strain mailed to public officials in a series of homegrown terrorist incidents in late 2001 - while deadly - was treatable, Block said. But the technology for making drug-resistant anthrax - or, for that matter, creating all manner of novel "designer diseases" - is becoming increasingly available worldwide, not to mention cheaper and more sophisticated.

Trounce agrees. "We are undergoing a biotechnology revolution," she said. "Even in the last 10 years, science has advanced so much that you can engineer some of the scariest organisms, for example smallpox."

In laboratory experiments, scientists have mutated H5N1 - a deadly influenza strain that so far has been transmitted to humans only by birds - to become transmissible by other humans. They have synthesized the Spanish flu virus, a naturally occurring strain that swept the globe in a 1918 pandemic, killing far more people than died in all the battles of World War I. What if any of those were to get out of the lab?

"Unfortunately, it's a real possibility, because with advances in technology it's now much easier to create these weapons than ever before," Trounce said. "A few people with modern resources can create a bioweapon. This is something we don't typically think about."

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken new photos of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, showing the massive storm is smaller than ever before.

For decades, the feature has become less noticeable. Beginning in 2012, observers around the world noticed an increase in the rate at which the storm was shrinking. However, this new Hubble image shows exactly how dramatic the changes have become.

"Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s gauged the storm to be as large as 25,500 miles on its long axis. NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flybys of Jupiter in 1979 measured it to be 14,500 miles across. In 1995, a Hubble photo showed the long axis of the spot at an estimated 13,020 miles across. And in a 2009 photo, it was measured at 11,130 miles across," NASA researchers wrote in a press release about the finding.

Today, the storm is shrinking at a rate of 580 miles per year, now measuring just 10,250 miles in length. In the last few years, the storm has also started to change shape, from an oval to a circle.

The U.S. Air Force gave official notice to Congress Wednesday that it intends to dismantle the $300 million High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Gakona this summer.

The shutdown of HAARP, a project created by the late Sen. Ted Stevens when he wielded great control over the U.S. defense budget, will start after a final research experiment takes place in mid-June, the Air Force said in a letter to Congress Tuesday.

The University of Alaska has expressed interest in taking over the research site, which is off the Tok Cutoff in an area where black spruce was cleared a quarter-century ago for the Air Force backscatter radar project that was never completed. But the school has not volunteered to pay $5 million a year to run HAARP.

A Russian Proton-M rocket with an advanced satellite on board crashed outside of Kazakhstan's territory on Friday, about nine minutes after lift-off. The Express-AM4R would have been Russia's most advanced and powerful satellite.

The crash was likely caused by a failure in one of the third stage's steering engines, reported Oleg Ostapenko, the head of the Russian national space agency Roscosmos.

"The exact cause is hard to establish immediately, we will be studying the telemetry. Preliminary information points to an emergency pressure drop in a steering engine of the third stage of the rocket," he said.

Fragments of the rocket and its cargo have apparently burned in the atmosphere, he added, which means they could not cause any damage on the ground.

The launch went abnormal on the 540th second of the flight, when an emergency engines shutdown kicked in in response to the rocket deviating from its intended trajectory, the Russian Federal Space Agency reported after the crash. The third stage, which is called Briz-M, was approximately 150km above the ground at that moment and had some 40 seconds to go before deploying its payload into the orbit.

Wow! This image shows the target comet for the Rosetta mission starting to develop a tail. This bodes well for the European Space Agency spacecraft, which is on its way to study Comet 67P/Churyumov - Gerasimenko later this year to learn more about the origins of the solar system.

"It's beginning to look like a real comet," stated Holger Sierks, principal investigator for OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System.)

"It's hard to believe that only a few months from now, Rosetta will be deep inside this cloud of dust and en route to the origin of the comet's activity," added Sierks, who is with the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

The picture was one of a series taken over six weeks, between March 27 and May 4, as the spacecraft zoomed to within 1.24 million miles (two million kilometers) of the target. You can see the full animation by clicking here.