More measurements to come, but so far…

Recent wars, terrorist acts, and cartel beheadings notwithstanding, the overall trend is that peace is breaking out everywhere.

“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”

It bears noting that, for a long time, a subset of heretical scientists have been arguing for a physics with no cosmic speed limit. Van Flandern:

For example, increasing the temperature slows a pendulum clock and increases its length, yet this does not mean that something happens to time or space. Only the attempted measures of time and space using the pendulum clock, but not time and space themselves, are affected by temperature. In a similar way, in Lorentzian relativity, only the attempted measures of the dimensions time, space, and mass are affected by speed, but not the dimensions themselves. …Time and space themselves are simply dimensions (concepts), and cannot be changed by motion, by potential, or by any material entity.

And that, in brief, is why there is no universal speed limit in LR – nothing ever happens to time itself, just to certain types of clocks attempting to keep time. Such clocks might malfunction or stop operating altogether at speeds at or above the speed of light. But there is no slowing of time to prevent reaching such speeds. And other types of clocks exist for measuring time unaffected by speed or potential, just as many types of clocks are unaffected by temperature.

Just sayin.’

WDYFK.

Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA’s measurements were correct.

“I just don’t want to think of the implications,” he told Reuters.

Could be a game-changer, or could get seamlessly absorbed into the dominant paradigm. But hopefully SOMEBODY wants to think of the implications.

Tall about “friends with benefits”.

Wasn’t too long ago that scientists dismissed the notion of human-Neanderthal mating as absolutely ludicrous - as if humans won’t screw anything that moves and a few things that don’t.

More than previously thought, epic example of scientists trying to save their moon origin theory in the wake of this water that their theory utterly failed to predict.

Hell - who’s in, who’s out? Bitter fights breaking out among Evangelicals and others:

Those traditions often disagree, even internally, on what awaits souls after death. The Catholic Church, which has a formal process for identifying souls in heaven through canonization, pointedly refrains from saying that anyone is without a doubt in hell. Protestants reject the concept of purgatory, in which sins can be atoned for after death, but disagree on other questions. The lack of consensus is enabled partly by ambiguities in the Bible.

Ya think??

Physicist Nick Herbert revels in refutation-

Outside of my best-selling physics book Quantum Reality, my main contribution to the advancement of human knowledge seems to be to invent things that are wrong. But wrong in ways that lead to important new discoveries.

More and more evidence that she died as a castaway on a desert island.

“This site tells the story of how someone or some people attempted to live as castaways,” Gillespie said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. “These fish weren’t eaten like Pacific Islanders” eat fish.

Millions of dollars have been spent in failed attempts to learn what happened to Earhart, a Kansas native declared dead by a California court in early 1939.

The official version says Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed at sea while flying from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel.

Gillespie’s book “Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance,” and “Amelia Earhart’s Shoes,” written by four volunteers from the aircraft group, suggest the pair landed on the reef and survived, perhaps for months, on scant food and rainwater.

Gillespie, a pilot, said the aviator would have needed only about 700 feet of unobstructed space to land because her plane would have been traveling only about 55 mph at touchdown.

“It looks like she could have landed successfully on the reef surrounding the island. It’s very flat and smooth,” Gillespie said. “At low tide, it looks like this place is surrounded by a parking lot.”

However, Gillespie said, the plane, even if it landed safely, would have been slowly dragged into the sea by the tides. The waters off the reef are 1,000 to 2,000 feet deep. His group needs $3 million to $5 million for a deep-sea dive.

A couple/few months ago, I called Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office and said she should be more like Al Franken. By that I meant, among other things, do more visible pushback against the right, and freaking tear it up a little. The nice man I spoke to there assured me it was all about the fact that Sen. Franken was in fact a celebrity before joining the Senate, and that Sen. Klobuchar was working on other important, but less sexy, stuff. That was all good with me; I just wanted to apply a little pressure in that direction, because I think it’s valuable. Well she finally delivered, and went on a fatal rampage against some GOP idiot in the Kagan hearings who was on about how we were “more free” in 1980 or some shit. Thank you, Senator Klobuchar, for sticking it to that weasel.

Analysis here. We’ve been saying this since at least 1998, so our patience with reductionism/mechanism is wearing thin.

The verdict is in and: humans and Neanderthals interbred.

The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool.

“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.

This has long been the Gonzo Science position.

This quote from media analyst blog Atrios’ Eschaton is a good one:

…we live in the accountability-free era, where nobody could have predicted except those who did and were right for the wrong reasons. Those who didn’t were wrong for the right reasons and are therefore still Very Serious People in good standing.

It is intended as a sarcastic comment about how the cheerleaders of the Iraq War and the financial crisis still have jobs in many cases, and in many other cases they have actually failed upward - while those who predicted the crisis somehow still remain outsiders.

That’s how politics in science works too. For instance, Fred Hoyle’s ideas are being appropriated under different guises, while his name is still mud. He was right for the wrong reasons, but once his stuff is rebranded, it can safely be used by establishment figures who were wrong for the right reasons. And so it goes.

Identified via two-million-year-old fossils, a new human ancestor dubbed Australopithecus sediba may be the “key transitional species” between the apelike australopithecines—and the first Homo, or human, species, according to a new study.

Dude has this to say-

…that [Australopithecus sediba] may very well be the Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

New discoveries just keep barreling in. Is this earth-shattering or ho-hum? I’m not sure any more.

the therapeutically active components in marijuana - the cannabinoids - appear to be remarkably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs. This notable lack of toxicity is arguably because cannabinoids mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce - so-called endocannabinoids - that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis.

In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions.

Just how important is this system in maintaining our health? Here’s a clue: In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Armed with these findings, a handful of scientists have speculated that the root cause of certain disease conditions - including migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other functional conditions alleviated by clinical cannabis - may be an underlying endocannabinoid deficiency.

Now THAT’S scientific heresy! Whoo!

In honor of Homo erectus, recently accepted as the first seafarer in the human lineage of hominids and other assorted cavemen.

National Geographic brings the science in this episode of NatGeo Explorer. 

We are published regularly on dead trees in Duluth’s own Zenith City Weekly. This issue: “Cavemen of the Sea”. I’m on a boat, bitch!

An exploration of the late Robert Anton Wilson’s work.

The flavor-

A Non Euclidean Rumination On Subliminal Rationalists and Recalling Robert Anton Wilson

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

“Positivists decline to acknowledge any a priori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience. … They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is”
-Kurt Godel

Kudos to The Anomalist.

The earthquake was followed by a boom in UFO sightings, but sixteen cases occurred on the night of the tragedy alone (some of them accompanied by significant visual material) which have been subjected to study by UFO researchers.

This would seem to lend more credence to the tectonic strain theory of UFOs and the paranormal.

Timeline of habitation on the island of Flores just got pushed back 120,000 years, leading to contention:

Many scientists believe the creature evolved from a much larger-bodied species, Homo erectus, that became isolated and shrunk over time. Others point to features in the hobbit’s body - such as the length its feet to the shape of its shoulder girdle - that are very primitive and not what one would expect in dwarfed H. erectus.

These researchers have put forward the idea that H. floresiensis may have evolved from more archaic creatures that left Africa to colonise Asia even before erectus.

“Our discovery at Wolo Sege will certainly open the door to this contentious theory,” said Dr Brumm.

Time to put on the popcorn.

Let me add that all this was total, total heresy just a couple of years ago, and now the archaeology of human origins has basically exploded in a new direction.

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

 

That’s why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

… it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic
below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?

I love any story involving surprised scientists.

The limits of green/renewable energy have been overstated, almost as if its opponents had a vested interest in the status quo.

More in this book.

Now things are getting interesting:

“We think the ev­i­dence is fi­nally show­ing that these [rap­tors] which are usu­ally con­sid­ered di­no­saurs were ac­tu­ally de­scended from birds, not the oth­er way around,” Ruben added.

…University of Kansas sci­en­tists ex­am­ined a fos­sil that showed feath­ers on all four limbs, some­what re­sem­bling a bi-plane. Glide tests based on its struc­ture con­clud­ed it would not have been prac­ti­cal for it to have flown from the ground up, but it could have glid­ed from the trees down, some­what like a mod­ern-day fly­ing squir­rel. Many re­search­ers have long be­lieved that glid­ers such as this were the an­ces­tors of mod­ern birds.

“This mod­el was not con­sist­ent with suc­cess­ful flight from the ground up, and that makes it pret­ty dif­fi­cult to make a case for a ground-dwelling the­ro­pod di­no­saur to have de­vel­oped wings and flown away,” Ruben said. “On the oth­er hand, it would have been quite pos­si­ble for birds to have evolved and then, at some point, have var­i­ous spe­cies lose their flight ca­pa­bil­i­ties and be­come ground-dwelling, flight­less an­i­mals – the rap­tors. This may be hugely up­set­ting to a lot of peo­ple, but it makes per­fect sense.”

I like this guy.

What do you effing know. Well i guess we get a new theory then, right?

“The level is somewhat higher than the most popular models had predicted, and it looks like it is going to increase with energy a little bit more steeply than we expected,” said Roland Gunter, a CMS collaboration scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“I think it’s not going to be a problem, but it is one of the many things that we need to know as we move toward searches for the most rare particles and new physics,” he told BBC News.

Didn’t think so.

Theory demonstrably wrong = “something we need to know as we move toward … new physics”.

I should say so. GOD FORBID they find the less “popular” theory that predicted the results they actually got, and start using it.

He’ll be amazed to read this science article that attributes the creation of the “holographic universe” theory to these dudes in 1990s. That’s funny to me because Bohm published a vigorous scientific case for the holographic universe, the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980.

Basically, the 1990s dudes published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, as an offshoot of well-accepted black hole work. So they get official credit. Meanwhile, although Bohm was a giant among quantum mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order was a “popular” book and so doesn’t count, if you can call a book with tons of equations in it “popular.”
Seems like you would give the guy a mention is all.

Happens a lot where the heretical theories become accepted just a few years later, with the heretic not allowed a shred of acknowledgment - certainly not from the scientific press, who really are just mouthpieces for the establishment.

When Bohm said it, it was heretical and involved some “challenges to prevailing views”. Now that we know he was right about the whole holographic universe thing, maybe those challenges should get a second look too.

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Trying to iron out all the ways animals sense the earth’s magnetic field, researchers have managed to overturn a “widely held view” about the functioning of certain photoreceptor molecules:

…states Dr. Reppert, “the finding provides the first genetic evidence that a vertebrate-like (photoreceptor molecule) can function as a magnetoreceptor.”

An interesting feature of the team’s work disproved a widely held view about how these proteins can chemically sense a magnetic field.

In your face!!

“These findings suggest that there is an unknown photochemical mechanism that the (photoreceptor molecules) use instead,” says Dr. Gegear, lead author on the paper, “one that we are hotly pursuing.”

Mission: tag and bag all unknown photochemical mechanisms.

Holy crap - they’ve reconstructed the colors of the feathers running down a dinosaur’s back:

Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin.

…
“There’s a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of its head like a Mohican, all the way along its back,” Professor Benton described.

Bands of dark and light along the tail can be seen in the fossils. This close examination has shown that the dinosaur’s “Mohican” was russet or ginger-coloured, and that these bands were in fact ginger and white stripes.

“This is the first time anyone has ever had evidence of original colour of feathers in dinosaurs,” said Professor Benton.

…

“This discovery suggests that with more work we may be able to accurately reconstruct colour patterns in some dinosaur species, and begin to understand how those colour patterns may have functioned for camouflage or display.”

This is something like a holy dinosaur grail being discovered.

The Drake Equation’s variables continue their maddening variability:

Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth – which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation – has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television – which uses a far weaker signal – and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.”

Didn’t think of that in 1960.

Also, just let me say that the absence of Fred Hoyle’s name in this panspermia-heavy article is deplorable.

For decades, scientists have scanned the heavens in search of extraterrestrial life. Perhaps they should have looked closer to home. Variant life forms – most likely tiny microbes – could still be hanging around “right under or noses – or even in our noses,” Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist, told a group of scientists Tuesday.

“How do we know all life on earth descended from a single origin?” he said, speaking at London’s Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”

Here we’ve got Paul fucking Davies saying what Fred Hoyle got ridiculed for saying 30 years ago. At least give the guy a mention. The fact that Hoyle was wrong about chemical evolution doesn’t make him wrong about evolution from space. At least, when Paul Davies says there’s alien microbes in your nose, it sounds great. But Fred Hoyle, not so much.

Source of much amusement here at Gonzo HQ.