Science & Technology

Non-crackpot physicist wins Templeton prize - Darwinist Jerry Coyne isn't happy

Uncommon Descent
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 18:16 UTC

Marcelo Gleiser sounds as though he thinks that the great mysteries of physics are about this universe, not space aliens, computer sim universes, cyborgs, and so forth (on that score, see 2011 Templeton winner Sir Martin Rees).

More on Gleiser:

"There is all this stuff that science has discovered, but there are so many questions we still have no clue about. Because nature is so much smarter than we are, we're always playing this game of catch-up," he says. "So I look at science as this kind of flirt with the unknown, and what motivates this spirit of discovery is awe and the joy of being part of this process." --Colin Dwyer, "Marcelo Gleiser Wins Templeton Prize For Quest To Confront 'Mystery Of Who We Are'" at NPR

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is not pleased:

Well, once again the canny John Templeton Foundation has awarded its million-pound Templeton Prize to someone who's not a religious figure but a scientist who enables religion and criticizes materialism and atheism. This time the Big Dosh went to Marcelo Gleiser, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He's a theoretical physicist and also a prolific popular writer, having produced six books, some of which seem to emphasize the limits of science. And that's apparently what he got he Prize for: for adhering to Sir John Templeton's program that science and spirituality (aka religion) were both required to apprehend the "ultimate truths" about the Universe and answer the "Big Questions." --Jerry Coyne, March 19, 2019, "Templeton Prize awarded to physicist for blending science and woo" at Why Evolution Is True

But then, in Jerry's books, Templeton can do wrong just doing its job.

Comment: How dare a scientist criticize materialism and atheism, which are philosophical belief systems. The true orthodoxy must uphold and maintain the dogmas of materialism and atheism, and not allow any criticism. Because criticism shows them to be dogmas, and nothing more. What is it about Gleiser that rubs Coyne the wrong way? Something like this perhaps:

A physics and astronomy professor whose specializations include cosmology, 60-year-old Gleiser was born in Rio de Janeiro, and has been in the United States since 1986.

An agnostic, he doesn't believe in God - but refuses to write off the possibility of God's existence completely.

"Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method," Gleiser told AFP Monday from Dartmouth College, the New Hampshire university where he has taught since 1991.

"Atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against."

"I'll keep an open mind because I understand that human knowledge is limited," he added. --AFP, "Physicist Marcelo Gleiser: 'Science does not kill God'" at Phys.org

Sounds like a sane approach, which is precisely why true believers like Coyne are upset.

Algal 'mutant' library lends insights into genes for photosynthesis

Catherine Zandonella
Princeton University
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 12:40 UTC

To build the library, researchers grew tens of thousands of strains of algae in plastic plates. The project, which took nine years, allows researchers to explore genes involved in photosynthesis and other aspects of plant biology. Photo courtesy of the researchers

It isn't easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don't know exactly how these genes work.

Now a team led by Princeton University researchers has constructed a public "library" to help researchers to find out what each gene does. Using the library, the team identified 303 genes associated with photosynthesis including 21 newly discovered genes with high potential to provide new insights into this life-sustaining biological process. The study was published this week in Nature Genetics.

"The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, and we want to understand what each part does," said Martin Jonikas, assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton. "This library, we hope, will be one of the foundations that people will build on to make the next generation of discoveries."

Unlocking the role of each gene could allow researchers to engineer plants to grow more quickly, potentially meeting future world food needs. Plants could also potentially be altered to absorb more carbon dioxide, helping to address climate challenges.

Comment: Like the flagellum, it appears that a plant's mechanism for photosynthesis is also composed of many parts so crucial to its function that one could say that it is irreducibly complex. If that's the case, this lends even more weight to the theory of intelligent design and not 'happenstance by random chance', aka the Darwinian theory of evolution. See also:

CNN spawns more faux news - neglects to fact-check report on meteor explosion over Bering Sea

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC

You may have heard that NASA announced over the weekend at a conference that a large meteor exploded in the upper atmosphere over the Bering Sea on December 18th, 2018, which had gone unnoticed due to the location of entry. Quick to capitalize on that story, CNN rushed to report it, and like the meteor, bombed in the process.

Here's the headline:

And here is the text of the report, note the highlight:

CNN report Bering Sea meteor December 2018

Comment: The Guardian managed to get it right the first time: HUGE meteor exploded over Russia's Far East in December last year - Blast was 10 times more powerful than Hiroshima

New AI turns crappy sketches into photorealistic masterworks

K.S. Anthony
Digital Journal
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 09:39 UTC

No matter how much time some people spend lulled into quiet artistic contemplation by syndicated episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, their efforts will never be better than an acrylic on canvas nightmare you might find in a thrift shop hidden under a soiled rug. The ability to transfer onto a paper what one sees either in one's mind or with one's eyes is, after all, a skill that seems to require equal parts diligence, discipline, and DNA. Some people just take to it. Others... not so much.

As with so many other first world problems, however, technology has leveled the playing field. NVIDIA Research has developed GauGAN (yes, that's an intentional reference to the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin): a deep learning model that allows you to turn the most basic of sketches into photorealistic masterpieces that Ansel Adams would envy. We're talking WAY beyond Bob Ross (Rest In Paint, sir) here.

People are able to sense Earth's magnetic field, brain waves suggest

Martha Temming
Science News
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 01:05 UTC

© VCHAL/Shutterstock
ANIMAL MAGNETISM Like birds, bacteria and other creatures with an ability known as magnetoreception, humans can sense Earth’s magnetic field (illustrated), a new study suggests.

A new analysis of people's brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a "sixth sense" for magnetism.

Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation. Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.

These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth's magnetic field - although it's not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.

Russia-US ready to search for life traces on Venus

RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 09:18 UTC

There is a good chance that simple bacteria populate the atmosphere of Venus, a Russian scientist told local media. A joint US-Russian space mission planned for 2026 is expected to look for life traces in the planet's clouds.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system as temperatures on its surface can reach a staggering 465 degrees Celsius (870 degrees Fahrenheit). However, simple forms of life may still have survived in the atmosphere, according to Ludmila Zasova, co-chair of the joint Russian-US 'Venera-D' ("Venus-D") project.

Clouds on Venus are mostly made of sulfuric acid but there's also 15-20 percent of water in them, the scientist said, adding that temperature and atmospheric pressure in the lower layer of the cloud cover is similar to those on Earth.

Russia's Roscosmos says 'ready to help' NASA if construction of Soyuz alternative is delayed

RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 03:59 UTC

Soyuz rockets stand ready to deliver astronauts to space if US manned spacecraft development is delayed, Roscosmos said, after NASA announced plans to purchase additional seats onboard the Russian spacecraft.

"We are ready to help American partners in case trials of their new manned spacecraft are delayed," chief of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said on Twitter. "We agree with NASA's proposal to use both US and Russian spacecraft for delivering mixed international crews to the [International Space Station] ISS in the future."

Guess who Earth's closest neighbor is? Hint: It's not Venus

Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe and Samuel Cordner
Physics Today
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 15:29 UTC

Calculations and simulations confirm that on average, Mercury is the nearest planet to Earth-and to every other planet in the solar system.

Quick: Which planet is closest to Earth? Ask an astronomer or a search engine, and you'll probably hear that though the situation changes frequently, Venus is the closest when averaged over time. Several educational websites, such as The Planets and Space Dictionary, publish the distance between each pair of planets, and they all show that Venus is nearest to Earth on average. They're all wrong. NASA literature even tells us Venus is "our closest planetary neighbor," which is true if we are talking about which planet has the closest approach to Earth but not if we want to know which planet is closest on average.

As it turns out, by some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets. Using a mathematical method that we devised, we determine that when averaged over time, Earth's nearest neighbor is in fact Mercury.

Debris from increased asteroids and comets? Dust ring discovered 'where it should not be' - in Mercury's orbit

Mike Wall
Space.com
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 00:15 UTC

© Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Artist's illustration showing several dust rings circling the sun, formed by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. Recently, scientists discovered a dust ring at Mercury's orbit and concluded that Venus' ring likely originates from a group of as-yet-undiscovered co-orbital asteroids.

Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system.

Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus' neighborhood, another new paper concludes.

"It's not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system," Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the Venus study and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "This is right in our neighborhood."

Comment: Do you see what they did there?

They discovered something that 'shouldn't' have been there.

So they 'made up a source for it', and backdated it to the 'beginning of time'.

Why?

To remove all 'shock' from the discovery of a freaking ring of asteroid/comet debris around the innermost planet in the solar system, thus maintaining the illusion that 'everything is as it is supposed to be, and all is fine.'

Repeat after us:

"We live in a stable universe where nothing ever changes..."

Heat can act like a sound wave when moving through graphite

Jennifer Ouellette
Ars Technica
Sat, 16 Mar 2019 20:41 UTC

© Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/Getty Images
Graphite rods ready to be encased in wood to make pencils. MIT scientists have shown that heat behaves like sound when moving through graphite.

A boiling tea kettle diffuses its heat to gradually warm surrounding air, yet it will still be the warmest region even as it, too, slowly cools. But what if the kettle cooled down to room temperature almost instantly, losing its heat in a wave traveling through the material close to the speed of sound? MIT researchers have observed this rare, counterintuitive phenomenon-known as "second sound"-in graphite, the stuff of pencil lead. They described their results in a paper published earlier this week in Science.

Chances are you've never heard of the concept of "second sound," even though the phenomenon has been known for decades. "It's been confined to only a handful of materials that are really very low temperature," said co-author Keith Nelson, severely limiting its potential usefulness. There might be a paragraph or two on the topic in your average solid-state textbook, but the field "has been kind of a backwater."

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Science & Technology

Non-crackpot physicist wins Templeton prize - Darwinist Jerry Coyne isn't happy

Algal 'mutant' library lends insights into genes for photosynthesis

CNN spawns more faux news - neglects to fact-check report on meteor explosion over Bering Sea

New AI turns crappy sketches into photorealistic masterworks

People are able to sense Earth's magnetic field, brain waves suggest

Russia-US ready to search for life traces on Venus

Russia's Roscosmos says 'ready to help' NASA if construction of Soyuz alternative is delayed

Guess who Earth's closest neighbor is? Hint: It's not Venus

Debris from increased asteroids and comets? Dust ring discovered 'where it should not be' - in Mercury's orbit

Heat can act like a sound wave when moving through graphite

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