News Feeds

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform. That’s the upshot of Musk's announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI.

Arp 220 is a well-known pair of galaxies that are merging. New ALMA observations of polarized light reveal the complex and powerful magnetic fields that shape the process.

Ants rely on scent to recognise their comrades, and when they are exposed to common air pollutants, other members of their colony react as if they are enemies

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This “lens-shaped” galaxy sits in between more familiar spiral alaxies and elliptical galaxies in the galaxy classification scheme. The dark, dramatic dust lanes are the fingerprints of an ancient galaxy merger.

For the first time, researchers have found what seems to be a cloud of dark matter about 60 million times the mass of the sun in our galactic neighbourhood

Yes, the author of the new Quillette article, a critique of sociologist Charles Murray‘s “proof” of Christianity, really is an atheist, though he says he’s not a proselytizing one. Daseler is identified as “a film editor and writer living in LA. And Daseler says in the article below that’s he’s not an ardent atheist, though he’d like to believe in God. But he sure thinks like an atheist as he takes apart Murray’s “scientific” arguments for God.

Like Ross Douthat, Murray has a new book about why we should be religious; Murray’s is called Taking Religion Seriously.  And many of Murray’s arguments for God, which we’ve encountered before, overlap with Douthat’s: they are arguments for God from ignorance, posting not just God but a Christian god—based on things we don’t understand.  Here’s what I said in an earlier piece on this site:

Here’s a quote from the publisher’s page:

Taking Religion Seriously is Murray’s autobiographical account of the decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity in particular.

Murray, then, has a harder task than just convincing us that there’s a supreme being: he has to convince us that it’s the supreme being touted by Christianity. To do that he must, as Daseler shows, support the literal truth of the New Testament, and even Bart Ehrman doesn’t do that.

But I digress; click below to read Daseler’s review, which is also archived here.

I’ll summarize Murray’s arguments for God in bold; indented headings are mine while Daseler’s test itself is indented and my own comments flush left.

a.) There is something rather than nothing.

b.) Physics is often mathematically simple, like equations for motion and gravitation. 

I’ve discussed these two before, and also provided links to others who find them unconvincing arguments for God. (Why do I keep capitalizing “God” as if he exists? I don’t know.)

c.) Some people show “terminal lucidity” (“TL”). That is, some people in a vegetative state, or with profound dementia, suddenly become very lucid before they die. 

In another post I pointed out Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer’s arguments against taking TL as evidence for God  Daseler adds further evidence:

Terminal lucidity is no better at propping up Murray’s case for an immortal soul, as he tacitly admitted during a recent back-and-forth with the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. To date, only one very small study has been conducted on terminal lucidity, indicating that it occurs in approximately six percent of dementia patients. No EEGs, brain imaging, or blood samples were taken during these episodes, so any explanations of the phenomenon must be speculative. The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston has hypothesised that terminal lucidity may result, at least in some instances, from a reduction in brain swelling. “In their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely,” he explains. “The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues.” Nonetheless, Zeleznikow-Johnston is quick to acknowledge that this is merely an educated guess. Murray, by contrast, jumps straight to the conclusion that corroborates his priors: episodes of terminal lucidity reveal the fingerprints of the soul.

I should add that Murray also accepts “near-death experiences” (“NDE”s) as evidence for God, as do recent books like Heaven is for Real and Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Both of these books have been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, and some Googling will turn up ample critiques.

d.) The universe is “fine-tuned” for life. That is, it is more than a coincidence that the physical parameters obtaining in the Universe allow life on at least one planet. Ergo, say people like Murray

This argument seems to convince many people, but not physicists. Indeed, even Daseler finds it hard to refute. But there are many alternative explanations save Murray’s view that the parameters of physics were chosen by God to allow his favorite species to evolve. There could be multiple universes with different physical parameters; most of the Universe is not conducive to life; or there could be a reason we don’t understand why the physical parameters are what they are, and are somehow interlinked. The best answer is “we don’t know,” but Murray thinks that one alternative—the Christian God—is the most parsimonious answer.  But of course he wants to believe in God, and since we have no other evidence for a supreme being, it’s not so parsimonious after all.

e.) There is evidence that the Gospels are factually true.

Anyone who’s studied religious history with an open mind knows this is bogus, for the canonical gospels were written well after Jesus’s death, and by people who had never met the purported Savior.  Murray does some mental gymnastics to obviate this, but he isn’t successful. And, as Daseler points out, the New Testament is full of mistakes (so is the Old Testament: there was, for example, no exodus of the Jews from Egypt).  Here’s a handy list provided by Daseler:

• There was no census during the reign of Caesar Augustus for which citizens had to return to their ancestral homes, as the Gospel of Luke maintains.
• Cyrenius was not the governor of Syria at the time of Jesus’s birth.
• There’s no record, outside the Gospel of Matthew, of Herod the Great slaughtering hundreds of newborn babies.
• When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in the Sermon on the Mount, he quotes from the Septuagint, which was written in Greek, a language neither he nor his listeners spoke.
• The Romans didn’t allow the Jewish Council to meet at night.
• By law, capital trials of the kind Jesus underwent had to be conducted over two days, and never on a Sabbath or holy day.
• There was no tradition of releasing a prisoner to the Jewish people before Passover. The notion that Pontius Pilate, a notoriously ruthless governor, would have released Barabbas, a murderous insurrectionist, is highly unlikely.
• Crucified criminals were commonly left on their crosses for days, as a warning to would-be malefactors, then dumped in mass graves, not promptly taken down and buried in rich men’s tombs.

And this is to say nothing of the supernatural events described in the gospels, such as Matthew’s report that, after the crucifixion, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many,” an incident that, had it actually occurred, would certainly have been recorded by additional sources. Likewise, there are scenes that, logically, must have been invented. If Jesus and Pilate had a private conversation together just before Jesus died, how does the author of the Gospel of John know what they said? And if Matthew and Luke actually witnessed the events they describe, why did they feel the need to plagiarise so many passages word-for-word from Mark?

Still, Murray thinks that the gospels are statements of witnesses, which simply cannot be true based on both historical and internal evidence.

Murray also has a weakness for nonreligious woo, which speaks to his credulity. Daseler:

Like Douthat, Murray has a capacious definition of the word religion that encompasses a fair amount of woo as well as Christian orthodoxy. “I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,” he writes, discarding his commitment to fact-based assertions. Murray devotes an entire chapter to discussing near-death experiences—or NDEs, as they’re popularly known—and terminal lucidity, the rare but documented phenomenon of brain-damaged patients regaining some cognitive abilities just before they die. “In my judgment [NDEs and terminal lucidity] add up to proof that the materialist explanation of consciousness is incomplete,” he writes. “I had to acknowledge the possibility that I have a soul.”

The only credit Daseler gives Murray is that the sociologist isn’t “preachy”, and hedges his assertions with words like “I think.”

In the end, Murray offers the same tired old arguments advanced against God during the last few decades: all arguments based on ignorance, ignorance equated to a Christian God. And although Daseler says he wants to believe, he simply can’t because, unlike Murray (who claims to proffer evidence in the book The Bell Curve for group difference in intelligence), Daseler is wedded to evidence. And so the reviewer fights his own wishes in favor of evidence—or the lack thereof:

I’m not nearly as ardent an atheist as this review might lead some to think. I wasn’t raised with any religion, so I don’t have a childhood grudge against any particular creed. And unlike Christopher Hitchens, who liked to say that he was glad that God does not exist, I can’t say I’m overjoyed to think that the universe is cold and conscienceless. I’d be delighted to discover that there is a supreme being, so long as He/She/It is compassionate and merciful. I am, in short, exactly the type of person Murray is trying to reach—someone much like himself before he started reading Christian apologetics. Every time I open a book like his, some part of me yearns to be persuaded, and to be given an argument or a piece of evidence that I’ve yet to consider. But Murray fails to deliver. After reading his book, I’m less, not more, inclined to take religion seriously. It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.

I guess I’m like Hitchens here: why wish for something that doesn’t exist? Why not face up to reality and make the best of it?  Apparently Murray doesn’t share those sentiments.

If you want a decent but flawed explanation of “God of the gaps” arguments, click on the screenshot below. You can have fun mentally arguing with the author’s claim that some “gaps” arguments from theism are better than related arguments from naturalism, though the piece as a whole is anti-supernatural. Personally (and self-aggrandizingly), I think the discussion in Faith Versus Fact is better.  But I like the picture (it’s uncredited), and the author does quote theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

 “. . . how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

But in the 80 years since Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, we still haven’t found God in what we know.

The most robust evidence to date shows that people with a type of lung cancer lived longer if they received immunotherapy before 3pm

Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Tapping into these communication networks is opening up radical new ways to boost health

Over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, they dragged out a groggy groundhog (Marmota monax), Punxsutawney Phil, from his wooden-box den, and determined whether he could see his shadow.

He did, and that means that we have six more weeks of winter weather to come.  Is that any surprise?

Below is a short video in which Phil is forced to look at a piece of paper. Who knows if he actually saw his shadown, but the top-hatted flacks, members of the so-called “Inner Circle” who interpret Phil’s predictions, did.

But looking at Phil’s history, the rodent is not accurate at predicting the long-term weather:

The Inner Circle claims a 100% accuracy rate, and an approximately 80% accuracy rate in recorded predictions. If a prediction is wrong, they claim that the person in charge of translating the message must have made a mistake in their interpretation. Empirical estimates place the groundhog’s accuracy between 35% and 41%.

So it goes.  It’s a groundhog, for crying out loud, not a weatherman. And the Inner Circle is a religion. . . .

 

My long-stated position (although certainly modifiable in the face of any new evidence, technological advance, or good arguments) is that the optimal pathway to most rapidly decarbonize our electrical infrastructure is to pursue all low-carbon options. I have not heard anything to dissuade me so far from this position. A couple of SGU listeners, however, pointed me to this video making the case for a renewable + battery energy infrastructure.

The channel, Technology Connections, does a good job at putting all the relevant data into context, and I like the big-picture approach that the host, Alec Watson, takes. I largely agree with the points he makes. Also, at no point does he say we should not also build nuclear, geothermal, or more hydroelectric. He does, perhaps, imply that we don’t need nuclear at several points, but he did not address it directly.

So what are the big-picture points I agree with? He correctly points out that fossil fuels are disposable – they are fuel that you burn. They do not, in themselves, create any energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, a solar panel or wind turbine, once you have invested in building them, can produce energy essentially for free for 20 years. He argues that we should be investing in infrastructure, not just pulling fuel out of the ground that we will burn and it’s gone. I get this point, however, what about hydrogen? It is not certain, but let’s hypothetically say we find large reserves of underground hydrogen that we can tap into. I would not be against extracting this resource and burning it for energy, since it is clean (produces only water, and does not release carbon). Although, we might find better uses for such hydrogen other than burning it, such as feedstock for certain hard-to-decarbonize industries.

But his point remains valid – we should be looking for ways to develop our technology to be reusable, circular, and sustainable, rather than extractive. Extracting and burning a resource is one way and limited. At most this should be a stepping stone to more sustainable technology, and I think we can reasonably argue that fossil fuels was that stepping stone and it is beyond time to move beyond fossil fuel to better technology.

Also, building wind or solar plus batteries is the cheapest new energy to add to the grid. He feels the economics will simply win out. I agree – with caveats. At times I get the feeling he is arguing for what will happen in the long run, but he also says “we are here now”. We are sort-of here now, but not fully, which I will get to below. Solar panels are relatively cheap and efficient. Wind turbines are getting more efficient and cost-effective as well, although are more sensitive to market fluctuations and any delays. And he correctly points out that these technologies are still rapidly improving, while there is not much room for improvement with burning fossil fuel.

He also nicely addresses some of the common misunderstandings about renewable energy (a lot of “whatabout” questions). What about the land-use issue with solar panels? He points out that if we just converted the land currently used to grow corn for ethanol (which is a massively inefficient use of land and way to create fuel), and instead put solar panels on that same land, we could generate more than enough energy to run the entire country and charge all our EVs. Solar panels simply create much more energy per acre than corn for ethanol. That’s a solid point.

Whatabout all the lithium and rare-earths we need to build all those panels and batteries? His answer is – well, yes, we do need to extract all those minerals to build all the panels and batteries we need. However, he argues, once we do that, the panels and batteries can theoretically be infinitely recycled. Those atoms don’t go away. This is one of his “eventually” arguments, in my opinion. Yes, one day we might theoretically have an energy infrastructure built entirely on recycled material that has already been extracted. I agree, and I agree that we should be building toward that day (rather than just burning fuel).  But we are nowhere near that day.

Further, technological advancements, like sodium ion batteries and newer lithium chemistry, removes many of the conflict elements and rare elements. Also true. Sodium batteries are actually already in production.

Does any of this change my position? No. I have already endorsed many of these arguments in favor of renewables. I also think we should be building and researching to develop an all-renewable future based on an entirely circular technology cycle. If we are playing the “eventually” game, however, I also think we need to add fusion to the mix, once we tackle that herculean technology challenge. This is especially true if we want to venture out into our solar system.

What he does not explicitly address, however, is the optimal path to that future. A path, I believe, that should take into consideration the amount of carbon we release into the atmosphere between now and our zero-carbon future. My position has always been, not that renewables are not great and should be a big part (if not totality) of our energy future – but that we are still in a stepping-stone era of history.

The way I see it, we need to be transitioning from the fossil fuel stepping stone to the nuclear-geothermal-hydroelectric stepping stone before we get to entirely renewable. What does this mean?

It means we should be shutting down coal-fired plants as fast as we possible can. Coal is the dirtiest form of energy and is increasingly becoming one of the most expensive (even without counting the cost of carbon, which I think we should). It also costs the most lives, all along the chain. To do this (again, as quickly as possible) means not only building lots of solar and wind, but also nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric. The latter two, however, are location limited. Sure, we are developing technology to expand geothermal, but there is an inherent limit – if it costs more energy to pump the fluid down to the hot layers than we get out of the exchange, the process simply does not work. It’s unclear how much of a role geothermal can play. And hydroelectric requires the proper water features, and it harmful to local environments.

We can, however, build nuclear almost anywhere. We can swap them in, one-for-one, for retiring coal plants. We can have them on ships, and can place them relatively close to where the energy is used. We have plenty of fissile material, and the newer designs are safer, more efficient, and more dispatchable. The big downside to nuclear is that it is expensive – but it’s way less expensive than global warming.

Nuclear can potentially give us the 30-50 years it will take to advance our technology and build all that renewable infrastructure. And yes – we do need this time. Simply building all those panels and batteries will take time. Updating and expanding the grid will take time. All these projects need minerals, and it will take time to develop the mines necessary (yes – decades).

The question is – while we take the next 30-50 years go transition to renewables, do we want to be burning fossil fuels or uranium? That is really the big question.

I also think that Alec does not pay enough attention to the energy storage issue. Building enough battery storage for an all-renewable energy infrastructure is no small task. Again, it will take decades. Perhaps more importantly – as he correctly says, batteries get you through the night. However, they do not get you through the winter. An all-renewable future requires long-term energy storage as well. Batteries will not work for this. As far as I know, the only really viable solution right now is pumped hydro. But this too will take decades to develop, and it remains to be seen how much pumped hydro we can develop without too much harm to the environment.

The bottom line is this. If we are talking about the future of our energy and also transportation sectors, then I completely agree – we should be aiming for an all-electric, all renewable future based upon an entirely circular economy rather than a linear extraction-burn economy. But we also need to consider how much carbon will be emitted between here and there, and if we want to minimize that carbon, we also should be building out our nuclear infrastructure, maintaining our hydroelectric inventory, and continuing to develop geothermal. These energy sources also have the advantage of providing baseload and even dispatchable energy, which significantly reduces the need for energy storage and will buy us time there as well.

The post A Fully Renewable Grid? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

MACE is a next-generation experiment designed to catch muonium transforming into its antimatter twin, a process that would rewrite the rules of particle physics. The last search for this effect ended more than two decades ago, and MACE plans to leap far beyond it using cutting-edge beams, targets, and detectors. A discovery would point to entirely new forces or particles operating at extreme energy scales.

We are getting a clearer sense of where and how often Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, and it turns out the behaviour was much more common than we first thought

To eliminate bedtime struggles, a growing number of parents have turned to melatonin gummies, but these hormone supplements are largely unregulated. Columnist Alice Klein digs into the evidence on the risks of regularly using melatonin as a sleep aid for children

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 team has entered a carefully controlled two-week quarantine as the countdown begins for their journey to the International Space Station. The four astronauts—representing NASA, the European Space Agency, and Roscosmos—are isolating at Johnson Space Center before heading to Florida for final launch preparations. The mission could lift off as early as February 11, with multiple backup launch windows lined up.

Hidden lava tunnels on the Moon and Mars could one day shelter human explorers, offering natural protection from radiation and space debris. A European research team has unveiled a bold new mission concept that uses three different robots working together to explore these extreme underground environments autonomously. Recently tested in the volcanic caves of Lanzarote, the system maps cave entrances, deploys sensors, lowers a scout rover, and creates detailed 3D maps of the interior.

Gene-editing citrus fruits to make them less bitter could not only encourage more people to eat them, it might also help save the industry from a devastating plague  

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has recently said that he wants to transform the NIH into the "research arm of MAHA" and a "central driver of the MAHA agenda." Lysenkoism 2.0 continues apace at NIH.

The post Lysenkoism 2.0 continues: Podcast Jay wants to turn NIH into the “research arm” of MAHA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already demonstrated working arrays with dozens and even hundreds of cavities. The approach could eventually support massive quantum networks with millions of qubits.

A new light-based breakthrough could help quantum computers finally scale up. Stanford researchers created miniature optical cavities that efficiently collect light from individual atoms, allowing many qubits to be read at once. The team has already demonstrated working arrays with dozens and even hundreds of cavities. The approach could eventually support massive quantum networks with millions of qubits.

A newly detected gravitational wave, GW250114, is giving scientists their clearest look yet at a black hole collision—and a powerful way to test Einstein’s theory of gravity. Its clarity allowed scientists to measure multiple “tones” from the collision, all matching Einstein’s predictions. That confirmation is exciting—but so is the possibility that future signals won’t behave so neatly. Any deviation could point to new physics beyond our current understanding of gravity.