Science & TechnologyS


Birthday Cake

Happy Darwin day! Meet the 1000+ scientists who challenge his theory

David Klinghoffer
Evolution News
Tue, 12 Feb 2019 17:35 UTC
dissenting darwin
What do you give a great scientist for his birthday when he's already got everything? He's got absolutely all the scientists behind his theory. All the media. All the Officially Smart People, as Jay Richards calls them. Well, today is Darwin's Day, the birthday of the venerated Charles Darwin, whose theory is a fact beyond question. Right? The journal Nature assures its readers, "Scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact." Or as philosopher Michael Ruse wonderfully put it, "Evolution is a fact, fact, FACT!"

Cause for Skepticism

The insistence on this point encourages a certain skepticism, though. As others have commented, evolution is supposed to be as certain as gravity, yet nobody goes around saying, "Gravity is a fact, fact, FACT!" and nobody says gravity is as certain as evolution.

Against this backdrop, Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture noted last week that the Scientific Dissent from Darwinism has topped 1,000+ names. Today, over at the Dissent from Darwinism website, we've added a birthday present for Charles Darwin, a video introduction to some of the signers. Check it out!

As I've also pointed out, while that number surely represents a scientific minority, it also no doubt vastly understates the number of Darwin-doubting PhD scientists. When it comes to evolution, persecution is an all too well known fact of academic life. Endorsing Darwinian evolution is the safe careerist move, while questioning it can easily mean the end of your career. So for every signer of the Dissent list, there is some multiplier's worth of private skeptics in science, acting self-protectively. That is beyond reasonable doubt. The multiplier could 2, or 10, or 100. Who knows?

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Sun

Researchers find evidence for a new fundamental constant of the sun


Eureka Alert
Tue, 12 Feb 2019 17:17 UTC
The corona of the sun
© Dr. Richard Morton, Northumbria University, NewcastleThe corona of the sun – its utmost atmosphere.
New research undertaken at Northumbria University, Newcastle shows that the Sun's magnetic waves behave differently than currently believed.

Their findings have been reported in the latest edition of the prominent journal, Nature Astronomy.

After examining data gathered over a 10-year period, the team from Northumbria's Department of Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering found that magnetic waves in the Sun's corona - its outermost layer of atmosphere - react to sound waves escaping from the inside of the Sun.
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Fireball 5

NASA finds possible second impact crater under Greenland ice

Maria-José Viñas
Phys.org
Tue, 12 Feb 2019 10:26 UTC
Greenland crater 2
© NASA GoddardA NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland.
A NASA glaciologist has discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice in northwest Greenland.

This follows the finding, announced in November 2018, of a 19-mile-wide crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier-the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth's ice sheets. Though the newly found impact sites in northwest Greenland are only 114 miles apart, at present they do not appear to have formed at the same time.

If the second crater, which has a width of over 22 miles, is ultimately confirmed as the result of a meteorite impact, it will be the 22nd largest impact crater found on Earth.

"We've surveyed the Earth in many different ways, from land, air and space-it's exciting that discoveries like these are still possible," said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who participated in both findings.

Comment: For more on the evidence that has been unearthed for cosmic catastrophes and the effect they've had on our planet, check out:

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Satellite

NASA baffled by Ultima Thule, the most distant world ever visited


RT
Mon, 11 Feb 2019 18:01 UTC
A still from a Nasa animation that depicts a shape model of Ultima Thule
© NasaA still from a Nasa animation that depicts a shape model of Ultima Thule created by the New Horizons science team based on its analysis of all the pre-flyby images sent to Earth so far.
NASA has just gotten another view of Ultima Thule, the most distant object ever visited, and it's surprisingly unlike what they'd previously expected it would appear - and like nothing they've seen before.

The space agency got a brief, final glance at the mysterious object as their New Horizons spacecraft sped away from it at 31,000 miles per hour (50,000 kmh) during its groundbreaking flyby on January 1.


The sequence of images was taken nearly 10 minutes after the spacecraft's closest point of approach with the distant world (four billion miles away from our planet), and are just the latest in a trove of images New Horizons will send back to Earth.

However these latest images have given a different perspective and show the larger segment, "Ultima", is actually flat and resembles a giant pancake, while the smaller portion "Thule" is shaped like a "dented walnut", said NASA.

Comment: Some other recent revelations from NASA's New Horizons mission include:

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Robot

Rise of the machines: Meet Ai-Da the robot artist

Matthew Stock
Reuters
Sun, 10 Feb 2019 05:07 UTC
Can robots be creative? British gallery owner Aidan Meller hopes to go some way towards answering that question with Ai-Da, who her makers say will be able to draw people from sight with a pencil in her bionic hand.

Ai-Da
© UnknownAi-Da (Ada Lovelace)
Meller is overseeing the final stages of her construction by engineers at Cornwall-based Engineered Arts.

He calls Ai-Da - named after British mathematician and computer pioneer Ada Lovelace - the world's first "AI ultra-realistic robot artist", and his ambition is for her to perform like her human equivalents.


Comment: The first computer programmer was a woman - Ada Lovelace

Comment: Humanity's planned obsolescence? The robot revolution got real in 2015

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Apple Red

Swamidass, Lenski, and Lents' review of Darwin Devolves borders on fraud

John G. West
Evolution News
Mon, 11 Feb 2019 21:35 UTC
Joshua Swamidass
© J. Nathan Matias / FlickrJoshua Swamidass
Joshua Swamidass, Richard Lenski, and Nathan Lents have published a review in the journal Science critiquing biochemist Michael Behe's forthcoming book Darwin Devolves. I found their review utterly convincing - although probably not in the way they might hope.

Some background: When I became involved in the intelligent design (ID) movement more than two decades ago, a key reason was because I was intrigued by the scientists who thought they were finding discernible evidence throughout nature of intelligent design. I didn't know whether these scientists were correct. But I definitely wanted them to have the freedom to articulate their views in the public square without retribution. And I wanted to see how the debate played out.

Learning from ID's Critics

In the ensuing years, I learned a lot more about the scientific arguments for and against intelligent design, leading me to conclude that the arguments for ID are pretty strong. I came to this conclusion partly because of my interactions with the leading proponents of intelligent design. But there was another reason: What I discovered reading and interacting with ID's critics. I'm grateful to scientists like Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Ken Miller, Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, and a host of others who have critiqued and denounced ID over the years. I'm grateful to them for showing me just how convincing the case for ID really is. Reading their writings, I came across nearly endless examples of question begging, ad hominem attacks, and hand-waving. What I didn't find were serious refutations. In my experience, the critiques offered of ID were so uniformly bad that it began to dawn on me that the scientists who supported ID must be right. If even ID's harshest critics couldn't come up with serious criticisms, I concluded that the case made by Behe, Dembski, Meyer, et al. must be sound after all.

Comment: There's a reason Darwinists can't stand Behe: because he's right. And because he's right, they have no good arguments to make against his case. Darwinism is already dead; scientists like Swamidass et al. just haven't allowed themselves to admit it.

See also:

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Info

Male Y chromosomes not 'genetic wastelands' say researchers


University of Rochester
Wed, 06 Feb 2019 21:03 UTC
X 7 Y Chromosome
© Getty ImagesRochester biologists are finding new insights into processes that shape the Y chromosome, a notoriously difficult piece of the genetic puzzle to sequence.
When researchers say they have sequenced the human genome, there is a caveat to this statement: a lot of the human genome is sequenced and assembled, but there are regions that are full of repetitive elements, making them difficult to map. One piece that is notoriously difficult to sequence is the Y chromosome.

Now, researchers from the University of Rochester have found a way to sequence a large portion of the Y chromosome in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster-the most that the Y chromosome has been assembled in fruit flies. The research, published in the journal GENETICS, provides new insights into the processes that shape the Y chromosome, "and adds to the evidence that, far from a genetic wasteland, Y chromosomes are highly dynamic and have mechanisms to acquire and maintain genes," says Amanda Larracuente, an assistant professor of biology at Rochester.

The notorious Y chromosome

Y chromosomes are sex chromosomes in males that are transmitted from father to son; they can be important for male fertility and sex determination in many species. Even though fruit fly and mammalian Y chromosomes have different evolutionary origins, they have parallel genome structures, says Larracuente, who co-authored the paper with her PhD student Ching-Ho Chang. "Drosophila melanogaster is a premier model organism for genetics and genomics, and has perhaps the best genome assembly of any animal. Despite these resources, we know very little about the organization of the Drosophila Y chromosome because most of it is missing from the genome assembly."

That's in part because most Y chromosomes do not undergo standard recombination. Typically, genes from the mother and father are shuffled-or, "cross over"-to produce a genetic combination unique to each offspring. But the Y chromosome does not undergo crossing over, and, as a result, its genes tend to degenerate, while repetitive DNA sequences accumulate.
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Cloud Lightning

Lightning's electromagnetic fields may have protective properties say researchers from Tel Aviv university


American Friends of Tel Aviv University
Fri, 08 Feb 2019 09:00 UTC
Lightning Strikes
© The Independent
Extremely low frequency fields may have played an evolutionary role in living organisms, say TAU researchers

Lightning was the main electromagnetic presence in the Earth's atmosphere long before the invention of electricity. There are some 2,000 thunderstorms active at any given time, so humans and other organisms have been bathed in extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic fields for billions of years.

These electromagnetic fields - the result of global lightning activity known as Schumann Resonances - are weak and difficult to detect. Scientists never suspected that they had any tangible impact on life on Earth. But a new Tel Aviv University study finds that these fields may have protective properties for organisms living under stress conditions.

Research for the study was led by Prof. Colin Price of TAU's Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and conducted by his doctoral student Gal Elhalel in collaboration with Profs. Asher Shainberg and Dror Fixler of Bar Ilan University. It was published in Nature Scientific Reports on February 7.
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Galaxy

Astronomers recalculate when Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way


Sputnik
Sat, 09 Feb 2019 21:21 UTC
Andromeda Galaxy
© Pixabay/Skeeze
Earlier calculations suggested that even if humanity still inhabits the solar system at that time, it would be unlikely to survive it. However, more recent estimations offer a brighter outlook for humankind.

A group of astronomers has managed to calculate a more precise timing for the expected collision between our Milky Way galaxy and Andromeda - our closest galactic neighbour. Previously, scientists believed that it was bound to happen in 3.9 billion years, but the authors of the research, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal, tracked the movement of stars using the ESA's Gaia telescope and determined that in fact, the great collision will only take place in 4.5 billion years.

What is more, the authors of the paper predict that it will not be a "head-on" collision, but rather a "sideswipe", meaning it will not be too disruptive and devastating. And because the distance between stars in galaxies is still astronomically huge, our solar system has all the chances to remain untouched by the event.

However, prior to the collision with Andromeda, the Milky Way has to withstand something similar with the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) which is expected to happen in 2.5 billion years. While Andromeda is a bit larger than our galaxy, the LMC only has 1/80 the mass of the Milky Way. Still, the collision with the LMC will affect our galaxy, purportedly increasing the mass of the supermassive black hole at its centre and reshaping the Milky Way into a standard spiral galaxy.
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2 + 2 = 4

Study finds bees have brains for basic maths

Gosia Kaszubska
RMIT University
Thu, 07 Feb 2019 14:30 UTC
honeybee sunflower
Researchers have found bees can do basic mathematics, in a discovery that expands our understanding of the relationship between brain size and brain power.

Building on their finding that honeybees can understand the concept of zero, Australian and French researchers set out to test whether bees could perform arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction.

Solving maths problems requires a sophisticated level of cognition, involving the complex mental management of numbers, long-term rules and short term working memory.

The revelation that even the miniature brain of a honeybee can grasp basic mathematical operations has implications for the future development of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in improving rapid learning.
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