Category: Science

Wrongthink

nannystate Safe and Effective Science Unsettled Science 14 Comments

I can think of a couple of issues besides plate tectonics where scientists have not lived up to the ideals mentioned. Can you?

One aspect of science, however, is a good model for our behavior, especially in times like these, when so many people seem to be sure that they are right and their opponents are wrong. It is the ability to say, “Wait—hold on. I might have been wrong.”

Not all scientists live up to this ideal, of course. But history offers admirable examples of scientists admitting they were wrong and changing their views in the face of new evidence and arguments. My favorite comes from the history of plate tectonics.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 47 Comments

Mysterious ‘Dark Oxygen’ Discovered at Bottom of Ocean Stuns Scientists

Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth’s ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life.

This unexpected discovery upends the long-standing consensus that it takes photosynthesizing organisms to produce the oxygen we need to breathe.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Climate Cult Science Unsettled Science 19 Comments

Roger Pielke Jr;

Everyone knows that in recent years climate change has fueled floods, storms, and drought, making them much more common and intense. For instance, a 2023 Pew Research poll found that 84% of Americans believed that climate change had contributed to worsening floods, storms, or drought in their local communities.

The widespread public belief in climate change as a cause of the weather events that we experience and see on social media is nowadays conventional wisdom. It is a fact so obvious that it barely needs to be supported at all.

As renowned climate scientist Michael Mann explains, the detection of climate change is as simple as “turn on the television, read the newspaper or look out the window to see what is increasingly obvious to many.”

Given these apparently undeniable realities we might wonder why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spends so much time and effort on assessing the science of the detection and attribution of changes in climate. Well, for the IPCC at least, science still matters.

Given widespread popular beliefs and media-friendly experts willing to cater to those beliefs, many are surprised, shocked even, to learn that the IPCC has arrived at conclusions on extreme events and climate change that are completely at odds with conventional wisdom and popular opinion.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Science Unsettled Science 1 Comment

Intelligent Design: Michael Levin on Consciousness, Cognition, Biology, Emergence

…what she had discovered was that if you look at the nascent ectoderm that later will regionalize to become face and mouth, you know, eyes and mouth and all of that, that, um, uh, that, uh, early, early on before all the genes turn on that, um, uh, determine where all those things will go.

The bioelectric pattern within that ectoderm looks like the face. It, it shows you where all this stuff is going to go.

Fascinating stuff.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Unsettled Science 56 Comments

A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe challenge established ideas about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

Led by researchers from Penn State and utilizing the NIRSpec instrument on JWST as part of the RUBIES survey, the international team identified three enigmatic objects dating back to 600-800 million years after the Big Bang, a time when the universe was just 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery on June 27 in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The scientists analyzed spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.

The Sound Of Settled Science

AI Tech Unsettled Science 4 Comments

When I was about 12, I read a book on “forensic science”, and for a time considered it as one of my career options. Little did I know, the field is more credentialist guesswork than it is solid science.

New research highlights the importance of careful application of high-tech forensic science to avoid wrongful convictions. The study was published on June 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, which has implications for a wide range of forensic examinations that rely on “vast databases and efficient algorithms,” researchers discovered that the odds of a false match significantly increase when examiners make millions of comparisons in a quest to match wires found at a crime scene with the tools allegedly used to cut them.

The rate of mistaken identifications could be as high as one in 10 or more, concluded the researchers, who are affiliated with the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), based in Ames, Iowa.

Flashback: Bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, and hair, fiber and handwriting analysis sound compelling in the courtroom, but much of the “science” behind forensic science rests on surprisingly shaky foundations.

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