From ScienceDaily: Bacteria possess the ability to take up DNA from their environment, a skill that enables them to acquire new genes for antibiotic resistance or to escape the immune response. Scientists have now mapped the core set of genes that are consistently controlled during DNA uptake in strep bacteria, and they hope the finding will allow them to cut off the microbes’ ability to survive what doctors and nature can throw at them. It’ll be interesting to see who wins this one, man or bug. HGT gives bacteria a vast library of existing solutions. Earlier studies of competence had pointed to more than 300 active genes. The new study identifies only 83 genes in 29 regions of the strep Read More ›

Possibly because naturalists will be there ahead of it: At CNBC, futurist Michio Kaku explains that we are still the cavemen of 100,000 years ago (his “caveman principle”), so we just aren’t comfortable with brain implants and machines as persons. He goes on to say, “I think the ‘Terminator’ idea is a reasonable one — that is that one day the internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way,” he said. “After all, if you meet an ant hill and you’re making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It’s not that you don’t like the ants, it’s not that you hate ants, they are just in the way.” More. Kaku’s conflicting pronouncements, Read More ›

From UK Independent: Insects have a form of consciousness, according to a new paper that might show us how our own began. Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentric behaviour, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience. … Clearly, the specific make-up of the insect brain means that their experience of consciousness is going to be different from that of a human. “Their experience of the world is not as rich or as detailed as our experience – our big neocortex adds something to life!” the scientists wrote recently. “But it still feels like something to be a bee.” More. Modern evolutionary theory has reached Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Long-snouted crocodylians in South America, India evolved separately to adopt river-dwelling lifestyle, protruding eyes The 13-million-year-old fossils of an extinct crocodylian, named ‘the storyteller,’ suggest that South American and Indian species evolved separately to acquire protruding, ‘telescoped’ eyes for river-dwelling, according to a study published April 20, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi from the University de Montpellier, France, and colleagues. Paper. (public access) More. Parallel evolution from ScienceDaily: One of the most spectacular examples of parallel evolution is provided by the two main branches of the mammals, the placentals and marsupials, which have followed independent evolutionary pathways following the break-up of land-masses such as Gondwanaland roughly 100 million years ago. … While some Read More ›

Scientists have discovered that the tiny, single cells show the hallmarks of intelligence. At Phys.Org they report on a study conducted by a Belgian and French team. Here’s a snippet from Phys.Org: A slime made up of independent, single cells, they found, can “learn” to avoid irritants despite having no central nervous system. “Tantalizing results suggest that the hallmarks for learning can occur at the level of single cells,” the team wrote in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Further: The team wanted to see whether an organism without a nervous system could similarly “learn” from experience and change its behaviour accordingly. They chose a very humble life form indeed—Physarum polycephalum, also known as Read More ›

Via Jonathan McLatchie, ID theorist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box and Edge of Evolution is going to be presenting an interactive online webinar on May 7th (8pm GMT / 3pm Eastern / 2pm Central / 12noon Pacific) to my group, the Apologetics Academy (http://www.apologetics-academy.org). Behe will present on the biochemical evidence for design for approximately 1 hour and then field questions from the floor. YouTube to be posted later. More info here. Your time? Global clock face. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: A new study suggests that ravens can be as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds’ brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence. … The large-scale study concluded that great apes performed the best, and that absolute brain size appeared to be key when it comes to intelligence. However, they didn’t conduct the cylinder test on corvid birds. (For some reason, humans were not tested for the ability to get food out of the end of a tube instead of striking at the middle… ) Can Kabadayi, together with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK Read More ›

The response to Barry’s recent post, How Did Mathematics Come to be Woven Into the Fabric of Reality? pretty much lays bare the issues: “Why is the universe we live in connected by an unreasonably beautiful, elegant and effective mathematical structure?” The naturalist says we just evolved to see the world as making sense, but don’t really know. Defending Darwin means that much to him … At 73, I noted, Aleta at 81: Sorry, that won’t work. Either man is observing something that underlies the universe and working within those given results or mathematics is an adaptation for survival (it could be completely irrational and is only tangentially related to how the universe works). The second position saves naturalism (and Read More ›

From Joseph Bottum, a review of David Wootton’s The Invention of Science at Weekly Standard, David Wootton has written a long book to save science from something, even if he’s not quite sure what that something is. The demystification, deconstruction, and doubt of post-modernity, maybe. Or revitalized religious faith, from Radical Islam to Protestant Fundamentalism. Certainly, Wootton wants to rescue modern science from its historians. He calls this a new history, and he means it: The text would be a third shorter if Wootton could keep himself from diatribe, from savaging nearly every author who has had the temerity to write about the history of science before David Wootton came along to save the day. … Wootton knows the wonder-working Read More ›

From Deborah Berry at The Conversation: In 2012, the biopharmaceutical company Amgen reported that it had been unable to reproduce 47 of 53 “landmark” cancer papers. For confidentiality reasons, however, the company did not release which papers it could not replicate and thus did not provide details about how it repeated the experiments. As with the psychology studies, this leaves the possibility that Amgen got different results because the experiments were not performed the same way as the original study. It opens the door to doubt about which result – the first or the repeat test – was correct. Several initiatives are addressing this problem in multiple disciplines. Science Exchange; the Center for Open Science, a group dedicated to “openness, integrity Read More ›

Further to “Men probably evolved beards for intimidation … ”* at Real Clear Science philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze fills us in on the breakiest story in evo psych: The Cornull University “Evolution in Action” study group headed by Dr. Davidson Petney has just released an abstract of their latest results. They have discovered a gene-linked trait in certain men of Eastern European descent which causes them to prefer cuff links over cuff buttons. This trait has been demonstrated to result in a reproductive advantage because women of wealth and discernment are more attracted to cuff link wearing men than those who rely upon buttons. The typical woman who is drawn to cuff link men is described as “a Bette Davis/Greta Garbo Read More ›

Pay no attention to the coffee room logo. It really happened, as follows, related in New Statesman: The story of the search for gravitational waves is ostensibly a grandiose tale, involving billions of light-years of space, decades of preparation, and multimillion-dollar instruments: interferometers that stretch for kilometres but must be sensitive to billionths of a billionth of one metre. In Levin’s hands, however, the story shrinks to a human scale. She has delivered a compelling and haunting account of the flawed and flailing souls who were pulled together by the hope of finding gravitational waves but who, like the black holes they were trying to detect, destroyed each other in the process. The first casualty is Joseph Weber, the pioneer of Read More ›

Sarah Scoles at the Smithsonian Magazine on the multiverse: Astronomers are arguing about whether they can trust this untested—and potentially untestable—idea Detailing the objections of those who want evidence, she then explains, Other scientists say that the definitions of “evidence” and “proof” need an upgrade. Richard Dawid of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy believes scientists could support their hypotheses, like the multiverse—without actually finding physical support. He laid out his ideas in a book called String Theory and the Scientific Method. Inside is a kind of rubric, called “Non-Empirical Theory Assessment,” that is like a science-fair judging sheet for professional physicists. If a theory fulfills three criteria, it is probably true. First, if scientists have tried, and failed, to Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The researchers discovered a traveling spike generator that appears to move across the hippocampus — a part of the brain mainly associated with memory — and change direction, while generating brain waves. The generator itself, however, produces no electrical signal. “In epilepsy, we’ve thought the focus of seizures is fixed and, in severe cases, that part of the brain is surgically removed,” said Dominique Durand, Elmer Lincoln Lindseth Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Case School of Engineering and leader of the study. “But if the focus, or source, of seizures moves — as we’ve described — that’s problematic.” … The team is also trying to understand what these non-synaptic events do and whether they are relevant to processing Read More ›

We all learned pi in school in the context of circles.  Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  It is an irrational number approximated by 3.14. It turns out that pi shows up all over the place, not just in circles.  Here is just one instance.  Take a piece of paper and a stick.  Draw several lines along the paper so that the lines are the length of the stick from each other.  Then randomly drop the stick on the paper.  The probability that the stick will land so that it cuts a line is exactly 2/pi, or about 64%.  If one were to perform millions of trials, one could use the results to perform a Read More ›