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If the experience of watching a FIFA World Cup soccer final is intense, spare a thought for the players, who are competing at an ever increasing intensity, according to a new study.

Engineers have reported a significant advancement in engineering biology and clean energy. A team of researchers has developed an innovative light-driven hybrid nanoreactor that merges natural efficiency with cutting-edge synthetic precision to produce hydrogen -- a clean and sustainable energy source.

New research suggests that the making of string figures, a globally documented practice, may point to shared cultural heritage stretching back millennia. The research offers a new way to investigate the evolution and distribution of cultural phenomena using mathematical methods.

Researchers have demonstrated the high accuracy of their newly developed typhoon observation device that can be dropped from an aircraft into the eye of a typhoon. This kind of device, called a dropsonde, measures storm's atmospheric conditions as it falls from altitude to the ocean surface. The new dropsonde is lightweight and is made mainly of a biodegradable material. It can descend without a parachute unlike conventional dropsondes.

The quantum Hall effect, a fundamental effect in quantum mechanics, not only generates an electric but also a magnetic current. It arises from the motion of electrons on an orbit around the nuclei of atoms. These results can potentially be used to develop new types of inexpensive and energy-efficient devices.

The quantum Hall effect, a fundamental effect in quantum mechanics, not only generates an electric but also a magnetic current. It arises from the motion of electrons on an orbit around the nuclei of atoms. These results can potentially be used to develop new types of inexpensive and energy-efficient devices.

Pile up blocks until the tower collapses. But why does the tower always end up collapsing? Is it possible that it can be built ad infinitum? A new study explores the fascinating and complex dynamics of the stacking of blocks subjected to hazards.

After taking the first images of black holes, the groundbreaking Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is poised to reveal how black holes launch powerful jets into space. Now, a research team has shown that the EHT will be able to make exciting images of a supermassive black hole and its jets in the galaxy NGC 1052. The measurements, made with interconnected radio telescopes, also confirm strong magnetic fields close to the black hole's edge.

The holidays are in full swing and people are shopping, wrapping and packing to visit loved ones. Along with the extra fees for checked baggage and seat upgrades, some airlines are also considering weight-based pricing. A recent study looked at how people felt about weighing their baggage and themselves to help reduce emissions and found while over half of travelers are not keen about hopping on the scale, some would be open to the idea -- especially if it aligns with their own interests in the environment.

Step into a world so tiny, it defies imagination -- the nanoscale. Picture a single strand of hair, now shrink it a million times. You've arrived. Here, atoms and molecules are the architects of reality, building properties and phenomena that challenge everything we thought we knew -- until now. Researchers have now unlocked a stunning discovery on this invisible frontier: a brand-new type of quasiparticle in all magnetic materials, no matter their strength or temperature. This groundbreaking find flips the script on magnetism, revealing it to be more dynamic than scientists once believed.

New technology could remotely identify various types of plastics, offering a valuable tool for future monitoring and analysis of oceanic plastic pollution. A new hyperspectral Raman imaging lidar system can remotely detect and identify various types of plastics, which could help address the critical issue of plastic pollution in the ocean by providing better tools for monitoring and analysis.

A new study has shown that employees are experiencing mental and physical techno-strain due to being 'hyperconnected' to digital technology making it difficult for people to switch off from work.

An international team of researchers has detected a binary star orbiting close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It is the first time a stellar pair has been found in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. The discovery helps us understand how stars survive in environments with extreme gravity, and could pave the way for the detection of planets close to Sagittarius A*.

Researchers propose a unique numerical decision-making framework for solar panel protection against extreme weather conditions. The framework combines advanced wind simulations with machine learning to optimize individual solar panel angles under strong winds. Unlike previous methods, this new method treats panels as independent decision-makers and identifies creative, data-driven solutions to reduce stress, significantly outperforming current safeguards.

Digital health tools, such as patient portals, treatment apps and online appointment schedulers, are increasingly common. But not everyone is equally at home using them.

Engineers have modified lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) -- the revolutionary technology behind the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines -- to not only cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) but also to target specific types of cells, including neurons. This breakthrough marks a significant step toward potential next-generation treatments for neurological diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Infertility affects an estimated 186 million people worldwide, with fallopian tube obstruction contributing to 11%-67% of female infertility cases. Researchers have developed an innovative solution using a magnetically driven robotic microscrew to treat fallopian tube blockages. The microrobot is made from nonmagnetic photosensitive resin, coated with a thin iron layer to give it magnetic properties. By applying an external magnetic field, the robot rotates, generating translational motion that enables it to navigate through a glass channel simulating a fallopian tube.

Infertility affects an estimated 186 million people worldwide, with fallopian tube obstruction contributing to 11%-67% of female infertility cases. Researchers have developed an innovative solution using a magnetically driven robotic microscrew to treat fallopian tube blockages. The microrobot is made from nonmagnetic photosensitive resin, coated with a thin iron layer to give it magnetic properties. By applying an external magnetic field, the robot rotates, generating translational motion that enables it to navigate through a glass channel simulating a fallopian tube.

I wanted to like this paper because its thesis—that the prevalence and dogmatism of religion impedes scientific progress—is one on which I’ve written a book. This paper purports to demonstrate such an incompatibility between science and religion using data, but the data are correlative without any indication of causation, and the data have some problems.  To be sure, the data are provocative, and author Matías Cabello may be on to something, but right now the paper is at SSRN (Social Science Research Network) and doesn’t appear to have been published or peer-reviewed. You can see it by clicking the title below or download paper here. If you’re interested, read it and form your own opinion.

For a long time historians of science, the most prominent of which was the late Ronald Numbers, maintained that the “conflict hypothesis”—that religion and science were in historical conflict—was dead wrong. I never found their arguments convincing, one reason being that they would weasel and wiggle around clear cases of conflict, like that of Galileo versus the Catholic Church. Sure, there were other things beyond a Bible/science conflict involved in that dispute, but you’d have to be blind not to see that the heliocentric solar system, and Galileo’s writings promoting it, deeply irked the Catholic Church. One philosopher who also sided with these “no-conflict” folks was the late Michael Ruse, who, though an atheist, devoted a lot of time and writings to showing the science and religion are compatible. I found him tendentious and unedifying. Finally, Francis Collins, former head of the NIH and of the Human Genome Project, has come out with a new book, The Road to Wisdom, which goes to great lengths to show that one can be a scientist and a believer, too (he’s an Evangelical Christian).

My book Faith Versus Fact makes a case that in fact the two areas are incompatible, since they both involve empirical assertions about the universe, but only science has a way to test and verify them. (Read the book.) And in the beginning I dispel the idea that there is no conflict between science and religion, supporting the “conflict” hypothesis. But I won’t go on, as you can read it for yourself.

At any rate, Cabello’s manuscript uses historical and present-day data to make two points:

a.) The conflict between religion and science can be seen because science began to grow up until 1520, but then stagnated between 1520 and 1720.  This 200-year period, says Cabello, coincided with a growing religious dogmatism, imposed largely by the Catholic Church. At the same time, science itself stagnated. After 1720, when the Counter-Reformation ended and Catholic dogma waned, science began to grow rapidly again. This correlation, says Cabello, is some evidence that religious (mainly Catholic) dogma was repressing the growth of science.

b.) Analysing Wikidata on nearly 125,000 scientists, Cabello found (and equations are involved) that scientists who were less religious over the entire period (yes, he controls for some extraneous variables)—scientists including deists, pantheists, agnostics, and atheists— tended to be more accomplished than scientists who were clearly religious. (Quakers, who are in the middle, tended to be more scientifically accomplished than religious people but not as much as freethinkers.)

Now readers who scrutinize the paper will probably find a lot to beef about, and since I read it only twice, and not very carefully, I’m not going to come out in strong support of its results. But I do want to call attention to it because it’s one of the few papers to support the “conflict” hypothesis with data.

a.) The temporal correlations.

Here are some plots showing the change in religiosity over time and the change in science activity over time. The first plot gauges religiosity by looking at the frequency of “God-referring words”—”God”, “Jesus,” and “Christ”—in Google books published in five different European languages.

You can see that religion increased around 1520, and stayed fairly constant (in terms of word density) until about 1720, when it began a more rapid decline that seems to have asymptoted at a low level around 1900.

(From paper): (a) shows that God-referring words (God, Jesus, and Christ, in vernacular and Latin) appear with greater frequency in the period 1520–1720 than before and after, suggesting a rise-and-fall pattern of religiosity Source: Own work based on Google’s ngram service (https://books.google.com/ngrams/, accessed in August, 2024).

Here is the corresponding temporal change in science activity, using as a proxy the density of words in books associated with science or protoscience (see caption for words counted). The stagnation between 1520 and 1720 is clearer here, followed by a rise in science word density up to the present time. One sees an inverse correlation between the lines in (a) and (b), a mirroring that Caballo considers evidence for his thesis.

(from paper) (b) shows that the post-1720 decline of God-referring words coincides with the increased use of words that were strongly associated with (proto)science already in the 1500s (medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, philosophy, hypothesis, logic, and experiment, in vernacular and Latin). Source: Own work based on Google’s ngramservice (https://books.google.com/ngrams/, accessed in August, 2024).

Further evidence is adduced in the following two graphs of the “pace of science,” based on word counts of scientists and discoverers per capita during different periods (top graph) compared to per capita words in Wikipedia about scientists and discoverers. Both graphs show the same stagnation during the 200 years after 1520, with, in this case, an increase before 1520 and again after 1720. The notes on the graphs are indented below both:

Notes: (a) shows that the per capita number of famous scientists and discoverers aged 20 to40 stagnated between 1520 and 1720, while it had been growing before and grew thereafter; (b) shows that the impact of these scientists, proxied by the number of words written in their biographies, declined during that same period, while it had been growing before and thereafter. Overall, these figures suggest that Europe’s scientific output per capita stagnated during the age of religious fever that spans roughly between 1520 and 1720. Source: Wikipedia’s scientists and discoverers are from Laouenan et al. (2022). Population data is from the Maddison Project Database 2020 (Bolt and Van Zanden, 2020), Prados de la Escosura, ÅLAlvarez-Nogal, and Santiago-Caballero (2021), Malanima (2011).

Finally, here’s a graph of the degree of “secularization” of science, taken as “the percentage of all scientists who were clergy.  This is not so convincing to me because before the 18th century only clergy had the luxury of doing science, as it was an avocation. And the proportion of clergy doing science isn’t, to me, a strong index of how much science itself was impeded by the beliefs of clergymen. After 1720, one could begin to make a living doing science, and thus didn’t need a clergyman’s stipend to do science. Nevertheless, one can’t dismiss these data completely.

From paper: Notes: The figure depicts the share of famous scientists and proto-scientists who were part of the clergy according to Wikidata’s person description or occupation. It shows that the share remained stable at around 20% during the religious revival of 1520–1700, while it had been declining before and continued to decline thereafter, with 1720 marking the sharp beginning of a quick secularization of science.

And one thing is for sure: scientists began losing their religion after the turn of the 18th century, to the point now that, in America and Britain, scientists are far less religious than the average person. The proportion of believers in America’s National Academy of Sciences, for instance, is about 8%—just about exactly the proportion of atheists among the general population! As I point out in my book, as one rises higher in science, going from employment at a university to employment in an elite university to membership in the National Academy, the proportion of believers drop steadily, something that’s also true in the UK. This could mean that the more atheistic you are, the higher you’re likely to rise in science, OR that the better scientist you become, the more you lose your faith. OR, it could reflect both factors.

b. The religiosity versus the achievements of scientists.

Finally, the author did a multivariate calculation on the “fame” of scientists related to their religiosity, dividing scientists into three classes: least dogmatic (atheists, deists, agnostics, and pantheists), “moderately dogmatic” (Unitarians and Quakers), and “strictly dogmatic” (Puritans and Jesuits, religious groups who did the most science). He found that accomplishment, as reflected in words in Wikipedia, was highly, significantly, and positively associated with membership in the “least dogmatic” group, and not nearly as correlated with membership in the other two groups (Quakers born after the 17th century are an exception; they are scientifically accomplished.) Cabello thinks that freedom from religious belief “opened up a whole path of ideas disconnected from the prevailing thought system”, allowing scientists to become more accomplished.

Again, one could pick nits with these data, and I’m not going to answer potential criticisms, as the author deals with some of them. I’ll just give his conclusion:

This article presents quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival and zeal associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.

There are two further points. First, as the author notes, we don’t know why lack of religiosity is correlated with  greater scientific accomplishment, something that I discuss above. He says this:

All these results are silent about the direction of causality. Did high-impact thinking lead to abandon dogmas? Or did less dogmatic minds produce high-impact science? Or both? The correlation can be interpreted either way. Charles Darwin, for example, became agnostic late in life, what suggests that science may have eroded his beliefs. Newton, by contrast, was young (“very early in life”) when he “abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity” (Keynes, 2010); this suggests that his unorthodox beliefs may have opened the way for his science. Such bidirectional causality is consistent with the aggregate and regional trends and propositions discussed in previous sections.

Finally, Caballo ponders why opposition to the “conflict hypothesis” (which, by the way, is embraced by a majority of Americans) is so strong among academics.  His theory is that academics see a lot of religious scientists, and from that conclude that there can be no conflict. To that I’d respond, “those people demonstrate compartmentalization, not compatibility.”

Instead, I’d say that people like Numbers and Ruse adopt the “no conflict” hypothesis because it is more or less a “woke” point of view: it goes along with the virtue-flaunting idea that you can have your Jesus and Darwin, too.  You don’t get popular by touting a conflict, as I’ve learned, but people love to hear that you can be religious and also embrace modern science. Even if those people are atheists, they can be “atheist butters” or promoters of the “little people” hypothesis that society needs religion to act as a social glue. If you tell people that it’s a form of cognitive dissonance to be both religious and a supporter of science, one might think that the glue would dissolve. (It won’t.) And, of course, “sophisticated” believers don’t like to hear that their faith is at odds with science.

But it is.

h/t: Bruce

Biological nanopore technology revolutionised DNA sequencing – now it has been adapted for analysing alcoholic drinks, providing a quick test for quality and safety