Evolution vs. intelligent design; scientism vs. science; the accidental-universe worldview vs. the information-system worldview - these are the battle lines for what is perhaps one the most essential scientific/religious and philosophical debates in the world today. Are we the product of a series of accidental mutations, built on top of accidental chemistry, accidental particle physics, and accidental quantum theory? Or were we - and the cosmos - designed? In his book Modern Science Proves Intelligent Design: The Information System Worldview, author and electrical engineer Ken Pedersen asks this question and uses his extensive knowledge of multi-layered information processing systems to provide the answer.

Subatomic particles, biological cells, and whole planetary and cosmic environments could only have been the product of incredibly complex design, all built on the mysteriously non-physical bases of energy and information. Armed with his background in mathematics, and contemporary research about DNA (among other things), Pedersen gives us to understand why the Neo-Darwinists are no longer able to credibly argue their position. At a time when the world is bereft of meaning, when the nihilistic, materialist, relativist and atheist worldview is plaguing the hearts, minds and souls of people everywhere - the profound implications for how we view life, the universe, and ourselves may be revitalized with a true understanding of what science is actually telling us.


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The study demonstrates how cells navigate the human body to provide immunity or carry messages

The United Kingdom's oldest surviving hedge maze, the Hampton Court maze, was planted for William III near the end of the 17th century. While other hedge labyrinths were designed with a single winding path, allowing courtiers to comfortably stroll to the center, the Hampton Court maze presents a puzzle. Garden-goers can take wrong turns and hit dead ends, and it takes an average of 30 to 45 minutes for visitors to find the right path.

Amoebas took closer to two hours to find their way through a miniature version of the maze, Brandon Specktor reports for Live Science. In a paper published last week in the journal Science, researchers used the hedge maze as one obstacle course for the study of amoebas' navigational tactics. It was one of the most complicated mazes they pitted the single-celled microbes up against.

Their press releases surely won't admit it, but NOAA's PREDICTED SUNSPOT NUMBER AND RADIO FLUX data appears to show a 'full-blown' Grand Solar Minimum running from the late-2020s to at least the 2040s.

NOAA (who's solar forecasts generally come out higher than NASA's) say it won't be until mid-2025 before we see the peak of the next Solar Cycle (25), with the maximum topping out at 114.6 sunspots:

Researchers have developed electronic artificial skin that reacts to pain just like real skin, opening the way to better prosthetics, smarter robotics and non-invasive alternatives to skin grafts.

The prototype device developed by a team at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, can electronically replicate the way human skin senses pain.

The device mimics the body's near-instant feedback response and can react to painful sensations with the same lighting speed that nerve signals travel to the brain.

Lead researcher Professor Madhu Bhaskaran said the pain-sensing prototype was a significant advance towards next-generation biomedical technologies and intelligent robotics.

"Skin is our body's largest sensory organ, with complex features designed to send rapid-fire warning signals when anything hurts," Bhaskaran said.

"We're sensing things all the time through the skin but our pain response only kicks in at a certain point, like when we touch something too hot or too sharp.

"No electronic technologies have been able to realistically mimic that very human feeling of pain - until now.

"Our artificial skin reacts instantly when pressure, heat or cold reach a painful threshold.

"It's a critical step forward in the future development of the sophisticated feedback systems that we need to deliver truly smart prosthetics and intelligent robotics."

Hacked documents suggest that the FBI is concerned some people may be using Ring or other smart doorbells to watch the police.

The papers describe a 2017 incident where someone remotely watched live footage of police preparing to serve a search warrant.

The information was found online by The Intercept among hacked documents.

When searching for signs of life in the Universe, we tend to look for very specific things, based on what we know: a planet like Earth, in orbit around a star, and at a distance that allows liquid surface water. But there could, conceivably, be other forms of life out there that look like nothing that we have ever imagined before.

Just as we have extremophiles here on Earth - organisms that live in the most extreme and seemingly inhospitable environments the planet has to offer - so too could there be extremophiles out there in the wider Universe.

For instance, species that can form, evolve, and thrive in the interiors of stars. According to new research by physicists Luis Anchordoqui and Eugene Chudnovsky of The City University of New York, such a thing is indeed - hypothetically, at least - possible.

It all depends on how you define life. If the key criteria are the ability to encode information, and the ability for those information carriers to self-replicate faster than they disintegrate, then hypothetical monopole particles threaded on cosmic strings - cosmic necklaces - could form the basis of life inside stars, much like DNA and RNA form the basis of life on Earth.

Our sense of who we are is thought to be influenced by things like our childhood experiences, our interactions with others, and now, researchers say, our bodies. A study appearing August 26 in the journal iScience shows that, when pairs of friends swapped bodies in a perceptual illusion, their beliefs about their own personalities became more similar to their beliefs about their friends' personalities. The findings suggest that this close tie between our psychological and physical sense of self is also involved in functions like memory: when our mental self-concept doesn't match our physical self, our memory can become impaired.

"As a child, I liked to imagine what it would be like to one day wake up in someone else's body," says first author Pawel Tacikowski, a postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. "Many kids probably have those fantasies, and I guess I've never grown out of it -- I just turned it into my job."

The team from the Brain, Body, and Self Laboratory led by Henrik Ehrsson outfitted pairs of friends with goggles showing live feeds of the other person's body from a first-person perspective. To further the illusion, they applied simultaneous touches to both participants on corresponding body parts so they could also feel what they saw in the goggles. After just a few moments, the illusion generally worked; to show that it did, the researchers threatened the friend's body with a prop knife and found that the participant broke out into a sweat as if they were the one being threatened. "Body swapping is not a domain reserved for science fiction movies anymore," Tacikowski says.

Welcome to Soundhenge. Better known as Stonehenge, this ancient monument in southern England created an acoustic space that amplified voices and improved the sound of any music being played for people standing within the massive circle of stones, a new study suggests.

Because of how stones were placed, that speech or music would not have projected beyond Stonehenge into the surrounding countryside, or even to people standing near the stone circle, scientists report in the October Journal of Archaeological Science.

To explore Stonehenge's sound dynamics, acoustical engineer Trevor Cox and colleagues used laser scans of the site and archaeological evidence to construct a physical model one-twelfth the size of the actual monument. That was the largest possible scale replica that could fit inside an acoustic chamber at the University of Salford in England, where Cox works. This room simulated the acoustic effects of the open landscape surrounding Stonehenge and compacted ground inside the monument.

Alarmins have a positive post-natal impact on the development of intestinal flora and the immune system

Breast milk strengthens a child's immune system, supporting the intestinal flora. These facts are common knowledge. But how does this work? What are the molecular mechanisms behind this phenomenon? And why is this not possible the same way with bottle feeding? The reasons were unknown until a team from the RESIST Cluster of Excellence at Hannover Medical School (MHH) recently discovered how alarmins are that mechanism in a project involving the University of Bonn. The results have been pre-published online in the medical journal Gastroenterology. The paper will soon be appearing in print.

"Alarmins are the 'gold' in breast milk. These proteins prevent dangerous intestinal colonization disorders that can lead to blood poisoning and intestinal inflammation," relates Team Leader Prof. Dr. Dorothee Viemann of the Hannover Medical School (MHH) Clinic for Pediatric Pneumology, Allergology and Neonatology.

The post-natal intestinal immune system, i.e. intestinal flora and mucosa, mature through interaction with bacteria in the environment. This gives rise to optimal bacteria diversity which lasts a lifetime, affording protection against many diseases. "Alarmins control this adaptation process," explains Professor Viemann, whose research has revealed that these peptides and proteins both derive from breast milk and arise in the child's intestinal tract. The process of labor plays a role in this, as infants born via planned C-section exhibit lower levels of alarmins than vaginally-born infants. Additionally, premature infants are less capable of producing alarmins themselves than full-term infants. Such individuals are thus more prone to suffering from chronic inflammatory diseases.

The asteroid early warning system monitored by NASA has posted advance notice of a number of space rocks inbound in the coming days, with one set to travel within just 120,000km of our planet.

On September 1, a 25-meter (three London buses end-to-end) and a 28-meter (one and a half times the length of a bowling lane) asteroid are charted to fly past at a distance of 2.9 million and 121,000 km respectively.
While the US space agency assured its Twitter followers over the weekend that there's probably nothing to worry about, for perspective the Moon is 384,400 km away, so it will be quite a close call indeed - astronomically speaking - especially given the risk posed by an object which is estimated to be traveling at a speed of 8.16 km per second.

According to one Twitter commentator's calculations, the flyby distance will be roughly the equivalent of twice the round trip distance between Santiago, Chile and Beijing, China.