The latest in science!

SCIENCE! Every once in a while, I'm reminded that I don't read New Scientist magazine often enough. These articles have fascinated me lately:


Reality might be a hologram
When good science questions fundamental ideas about reality is when I really love science. There's no easy summary pullquote from this article, but try this on:

GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in.

 New strategy: Let the wookiee win.


From questioning reality, we move to questions of humanity:


Why you're only half-human
Your other half probably isn't what you thought it was.

The ability of viruses to unite, genome-to-genome, with their hosts has clear evolutionary significance. For the host, it means new material for evolution. If a virus happens to introduce a useful gene, natural selection will act on it and, like a beneficial new mutation, it may spread through the population.

 And as long as we're evoking "natural selection", please see:


Darwinism's limits
As much as I love science, I hate the sloppy equivocation of "Darwinism" with "science." Modern thinkers scrawl Darwin's name on their notebooks inside bubbly hearts. The lack of critical thinking -- and the schoolyard taunt of "ID-iot" for anyone who tries -- undermines the formidable utility of scientific methodology. We need more people criticizing and testing Darwinism and evolution without fear of ridicule or professional reprisal.


From the article:

Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin's account of evolution is hardly considered. Such dissent as there is often relies on theistic premises which Darwinists rightly say have no place in the evaluation of scientific theories. So onlookers are left with the impression that there is little or nothing about Darwin's theory to which a scientific naturalist could reasonably object. The methodological scepticism that characterises most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.

While I'm on the topic, there's an article I've saved for years from the Philadelphia Daily News entitled Darwinism: Right, But Beside the Point? The full online text is in a pay archive, but since I've got the paper copy in front of me, here's the money shot:

Darwinian evolution -- whatever its other virtues -- isn't the cause for experimental breakthroughs in biology. ...For students aspiring to benefit society through experimental biology, Darwinism is simply beside the point.

Time's up for Darwinism fetishism. Let's move on, Internet.


Finally, for the apocalypse lover in you:


Digital Doomsday: the end of knowledge
This is the monster in my closet, the reason I keep a copy of the US Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76 on my bookshelf.

Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

None of that helps if my glasses get smashed in the apocalypse though.


Happy science everyone!