Can a Scientist Define “Life”? By Carl Zimmer

Published on January 23, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From TXCHNOLOGIST

In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a “sky crane,” the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any previous Martian rover, will perform an unprecedented battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to “assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life.”

For all the spectacular engineering that’s gone into Curiosity, however, its goal is actually quite modest. When NASA says it wants to find out if Mars was ever suitable for life, they use a very circumscribed version of the word. They are looking for signs of liquid water, which all living things on Earth need. They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive. In other words, they’re looking on Mars for the sorts of conditions that support life on Earth.

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Unnatural Selection: Is Evolving Reproductive Technology Ushering in a New Age of Eugenics?

Published on January 20, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Carolyn Abraham from The Globe and Mail

Humanity has long dreamed of perfection, striving to be faster, stronger and brighter, pushing nature to the limit. Four centuries before people were conceived in a petri dish, Swiss alchemist Paracelsus claimed flawless little beings could be grown in pumpkins filled with urine and horse dung, but there is no record he produced a crop.

With the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the test tube finally succeeded where the pumpkin had failed, and the year she turned 11, scientists moved beyond making life in a lab: They found a way to peer into an embryo’s genes and predict what that life might be like.

That ability is now morphing into a whole new approach to baby-making, one that gives people an unprecedented power to preview, and pick, the genetic traits of their prospective children.

On Neutrinos and Angels

Published on January 16, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Photo of Pervez Hoodbhoy

By Pervez Hoodbhoy from The Tribune

The news from CERN was stunning: the European nuclear science laboratory had just discovered (September 2011) that particles known as neutrinos — called so because they are neutral and carry no charge — habitually travel a little bit faster than light. This threatened to shake the very foundations of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had laid the basis for the atomic bomb, nuclear energy, and most of modern day physics. Relativity theory starts from the postulate that the speed of light is the absolute maximum that anything can travel at.

Pakistanis are generally unmoved by developments in the world of science. But this time the excitement was palpable. A TV channel called me up, requesting an interview. Fine, I said, specifying the time when I would be available. The producer was profoundly apologetic: this was exactly when they would be interviewing Dr Zakir Naik, an Islamic scholar who frequently pontificates on issues of science and religion. Would I therefore please give another time? Since the good doctor’s claim to fame is his understanding of religious texts rather than of physics, I declined and do not know what transpired subsequently.

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Darwin in Chile

Published on January 13, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Mountain In Glow of Sunrise Beagle Channel

From Edge.org

Edge was invited by Alvaro Fischer, the Director of Fundacion Ciencia Y Evolucion in Chile to attend the Foundation’s Darwin Seminar in Santiago, entitled “Darwin’s Intellectual Legacy To The 21st Century” and join the eight speakers (all Edge contributors) on a trip to the “extreme south” including a trip along “The Beagle Channel”, named after the ship HMS Beagle which surveyed the coasts of the southern part of South America from 1826 to 1830.

The Seminar, which ran for two days, attracted an audience of 2,200 people on each day…

“Our intention is to illuminate and discuss how Darwinian thought influenced the disciplines that focus on the study the individuals (biology, neuroscience, psychology); the individual within their social interactions (anthropology, sociology, economy, political science); and how these concepts pertain, in general, to a moral philosophy.”

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Journal Axes Gene Research on Jews and Palestinians

Published on January 10, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

By Robin McKie from theguardian

A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal.

Academics who have already received copies of Human Immunology have been urged to rip out the offending pages and throw them away.

Such a drastic act of self-censorship is unprecedented in research publishing and has created widespread disquiet, generating fears that it may involve the suppression of scientific work that questions Biblical dogma.

‘I have authored several hundred scientific papers, some for Nature and Science, and this has never happened to me before,’ said the article’s lead author, Spanish geneticist Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena, of Complutense University in Madrid. ‘I am stunned.’

British geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer added: ‘If the journal didn’t like the paper, they shouldn’t have published it in the first place. Why wait until it has appeared before acting like this?’

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Latest issue of Science and Society Journal

Published on January 9, 2012 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The latest issue of  The International Journal of Science in Society includes:

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking

Published on January 8, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo of Stephan Hawking

By Sean Carroll from Discover Magazine

Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can.

Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, and 60th birthdays, as well as every other day he’s lived and thrived with a debilitating neuron disease. The extra fact that he continues to make contributions to science pushes beyond amazing to practically unbelievable.

Everyone likes to tell Hawking stories, and this blog is no exception. So here is mine, meagre as it is. I’ve gotten more than enough mileage out of this one in person, I might as well put it on the blog so I won’t be tempted to tell it any more.

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The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith

Published on January 3, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

By Alan P. Lightman from Harpers Magazine

 In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic particles that orbit its nucleus. And we now know that all atoms heavier than helium were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.

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Stormy Sun Could Knock Out Power Grids: Report

Published on December 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Ethan Bilby from NewsDaily

An upcoming cycle of stormy solar activity risks causing damage to electrical transformers and threatening vulnerable energy infrastructure around the globe, a report by an insurance group says.

The sun follows a predictable 11 year activity cycle, with the next period of stormy activity expected to begin in 2012-13.

The report by German insurance group Allianz said a high impact solar storm, not easily predicted due to its recorded rarity, could cause blackouts and economic losses of over $1 trillion and that the worst case scenario would be even worse.

“What we’re coming into at the moment is the bad (space)weather period,” Jim Wild of Britain’s Lancaster University, an expert in solar plasma physics, told Reuters.

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Waiting for Sputnik

Published on December 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Quinn O’Neil from 3 Quarks Daily

There’s been a lot of talk about reforming American K-12 science education and it’s getting difficult to take it seriously. Educators, scientists, and politicians have been sounding alarm bells over the state of American science education for decades. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education revealed the US to be trailing most other industrialized nations in science performance. The commission’s report began: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. [...] What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.” It almost sounds as if the level of educational attainment isn’t as important as the rest of the world being below it.

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