Category: Modern Science

Clouds that “Glow” in Twilight are Becoming More Common

Noctilucent clouds over Uppsala, Sweden (click for credit)

The picture above shows a phenomenon that can be seen during the summer by people who live at latitudes of 50-65 degrees. They are called noctilucent (“night shining”) clouds, and they appear to glow in the twilight sky. They aren’t actually glowing, and they aren’t really clouds, either. Instead, they are bands of ice crystals that are way above the clouds, in an upper part of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. There is very little water in the mesosphere, and it is extremely cold there. When conditions are right, however, what little water that exists there can freeze into tiny ice crystals, forming short-lived “clouds.”

Why do they appear to glow? Well, at twilight, the sun is below the curve of the earth, so you can’t see it directly. However, if you were up higher, you could still see it. Indeed, this video shows a drone observing the sunset at a height of 80 feet and then rising to 400 feet to see the sun set again. So even though you can’t see the sun once it sets, higher altitudes still “see” it. That means the sun’s light is still shining brightly on things that are high in the sky, including the ice crystals. Some of that light scatters off the crystals and heads to the earth. If you are at the right place on the earth and it is dark enough, you can see that light, and it looks like the light is coming from the “clouds” themselves. Here is an excellent time-lapse series that shows both noctilucent clouds and an aurora.

Why am I blogging about this phenomenon? Because this year has been an unusually good year for seeing it. Indeed, reports of these “glowing clouds” have tripled this year compared to last year. What’s causing it? According to Dr. Lynn Harvey of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, it’s because there is an unusual amount of water in the mesosphere this year. It is also a bit colder than normal. Combine those two effects and you have more ice crystals and therefore more noctilucent clouds.

Why is it wetter and colder this year in the mesosphere? We don’t really know. In fact, noctilucent clouds are a bit of a mystery in general, since they were first reported in the summer of 1885. Whether that means they just started forming then or just happened to be noticed then, we don’t know. However, most other striking atmospheric phenomena had been observed much earlier. Auroras, for example, were reported in ancient china and were named by Galileo in 1619. It’s hard to believe that a similar atmospheric phenomenon that can be seen at the same latitudes existed but remained unnoticed until 1885.

Of course, unlike auroras, noctilucent clouds are rare and short-lived. After all, they occur only in the summer and, in order to see them, it needs to be pretty dark, since sunlight overwhelms the small amount of light coming from the ice crystals. Thus, the sun has to be below the curve of the earth for the observer. However, once the sun is well below the curve of the earth, it no longer shines on the ice crystals in the mesosphere above the observer. This fact might have made them less likely to be observed and, even when they were observed, less likely to be believed, since they would “disappear” after a while.

So it may be that noctilucent clouds clouds are a fairly recent phenomenon caused by human activity, and it may be that whatever human activity is causing them is increasing their frequency. Of course, it may also be a natural phenomenon that ebbs and flows over time. We just don’t know. That’s the great thing about science. There always seem to be more questions than answers!

LED Lights Might Pose A Hazard for Vision

Wavelengths coming from various light sources (image modified from the Tosini 2016 article linked below)
A very good friend showed me an article from the University of Toledo. It reports on a study that demonstrates how blue light might be damaging to the light-sensing cells found in your eye. I didn’t know anything about this, so I decided to look into the research that has been done on the effects of blue light on vision. I found this excellent review article, which discusses what has been figured out so far. The short answer is that we don’t know anything for certain, but there is some evidence that long-term, chronic exposure to significant amounts of blue light could be damaging to your eyes.

Several animal studies have shown that exposure to blue light can increase the animal’s risk of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and other eye problems. However, studies on people haven’t been clear. Some studies have shown a relationship between long-term exposure to the sun’s light and AMD, and it is assumed that the blue light given out by the sun is the culprit. However, a case-controlled study in Australia indicated that it might not be exposure to the sun’s light that is causing the relationship. It indicates that sensitivity to glare and difficulty developing a tan are the actual indicators of higher AMD risk, and studies that show a relationship between the sun’s light and AMD might not be controlling properly for those variables.

The study that was discussed in the University of Toledo article linked above didn’t assess the damage blue light causes to human eyes. Instead, the authors assessed the damage on human cells. However, they didn’t use actual light-sensing cells from a human eye, because that’s not possible. They used HeLa cells, which are a line of cells that came from cancerous tissue taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks more than 65 years ago. The cells continue to reproduce to this day, so this line of cells is often referred to as “immortal.” The story behind the acquisition of the cells is the topic of a very sad and interesting book as well as a pretty lousy movie.

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The Scourge of Postmodernism in Universities

The clock tower at a “college” where two biologists were the victims of postmodernism run amok. (click for credit)

I recently read an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “First, They Came for the Biologists.” If you didn’t catch it, the title is an homage to the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who opposed the Nazis in Germany. He spent seven years in a concentration camp as a result. Essentially, he is saying that we must fight injustice even if we don’t think it will affect us, because ultimately, it will. The author of the article, Dr. Heather Heying, says that postmodernism is taking aim at science, and if we don’t stop it, we will all suffer.

Dr. Heying is a former professor of biology at The Evergreen State College, which doesn’t seem to be much of a college. Instead, it seems to be a place where views that go counter to a loud group of students will result in harassment and intimidation. If you don’t know Dr. Heying’s story (which actually begins with her husband, Dr. Bret Weinstein), you can read it from their perspective here.

Essentially, Dr. Weinstein opposed a campus-wide activity that he considered to be racist, and as a result, he was branded a racist. The situation quickly turned toxic, and the couple feared for their safety. They sued the university, which settled for $450,000 plus $50,000 in legal fees. The couple resigned from the university when the settlement was reached. You can read more from Dr. Heying’s perspective here and Dr. Weinstein’s perspective here.

The story is truly sad and makes me worry about the future of higher education in these United States. When students can make utterly false allegations that end up being believed, no university professor is safe, period. However, Dr. Heying takes it further than that, and honestly, I have to agree with her. In her Wall Street Journal article, she makes this profound point:

Postmodernism, and specifically its offspring, critical race theory, have abandoned rigor and replaced it with “lived experience” as the primary source of knowledge. Little credence is given to the idea of objective reality. Science has long understood that observation can never be perfectly objective, but it also provides the ultimate tool kit with which to distinguish signal from noise – and bias.

I have discussed the nonsensical nature of postmodernism before, but I don’t think I fully appreciated its danger until reading Dr. Heying’s article and learning about her and her husband’s experience at The Evergreen State non-College. If the disciples of postmodernism have their way, many more institutions of higher learning will become hotbeds of irrationality like that sad little campus. If you don’t believe me, read this chilling quote from her article. The man she is quoting is the president of The Evergreen State non-College:

[What] we are working towards is, bring ’em in, train ’em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.

When someone who runs a supposed college is willing to say something like that, there is something terribly wrong with the state of higher education in these United States.

If I sat down and had a conversation with Drs. Heying and Weinstein, we would probably disagree on a great many things. However, we would be in full agreement when it comes to the real danger that postmodernism poses to higher education.

Mathematics Leads Biologists to Discover a New Cell Shape!

In 1619, Orazio Grassi (a mathematician, astronomer and architect) wrote about three comets that had recently appeared in the sky. He gave evidence that they must have been far from the earth, even beyond the moon. Galileo wrongly believed that comets were in earth’s atmosphere, and so he wrote Il Saggiatore (The Assayer) in reply. Although Galileo’s overall argument was wrong, the piece does contain a statement that is quite profound:

Philosophy [he is referring to what we call “science” today] is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.

While most scientists who use this quote are talking about physics and perhaps chemistry, the fact is that mathematics seems to be the language in which God wrote His creation. As a result, all areas of science (even biology) require the use of mathematics to unlock the true secrets of creation. I recently ran across a paper that illustrates this point rather well.

The authors were using a mathematical technique called Voronoi Diagramming to model how certain cells in an embryo pack together to form the shapes of the organs that are developing. Generally speaking, most biologists assume that the cells become column- or bottle-like in shape so that they can squeeze together and form the smooth curves that characterize the shapes of the organs. However, their mathematical model predicted that another set of shapes would develop – shapes that are so unique they don’t even have a name. As a result, the authors call the shapes scutoids, which refers to the scutum and scutellum, features found on certain insects, like beetles.

A rose chaffer beetle (click for credit)

Drawings of two scutoid-shaped cells are shown on the left side of the illustration below, and the way those two shapes fit together are shown on the right side of the illustration.

The two drawings on the left represent scutoid-shaped cells. The colored drawing on the right shows how they fit together. (images from the paper being discussed)

Now, of course, the authors didn’t just believe the results of their mathematical model. After all, the mathematical model contains assumptions, and those assumptions could be flawed. However, armed with the knowledge of those shapes, they examined specific tissues in developing fruit fly larvae. Sure enough, they found tissue structures that are composed of scutoid-shaped cells.

Why do cells form these shapes in developing fruit fly embryos (and presumably other embryos)? The authors state:

Using biophysical arguments, we propose that scutoids make possible the minimization of the tissue energy and stabilize three-dimensional packing. Hence, we conclude that scutoids are one of nature’s solutions to achieve epithelial bending.

In other words, they produce the most stable tissue at the lowest energy.

Now remember, the reason the authors found this brand-new cell shape is because they started with mathematics, just as Galileo instructed. Writing more than 300 years after Galileo, Sir James Hopwood Jeans (English physicist, astronomer and mathematician) tells us why he thinks Galileo was right:

Lapsing back again into the crudely anthropomorphic language we have already used, we may say that we have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician. [The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press 1931, p. 122]

This Could Be One of the Most Important Scientific Papers of the Decade

What best explains the common features shared by animals? According to this study, it’s the fact that they are designed.

More than eight years ago (have I really been blogging that long?), I was excited to see the appearance of a new peer-reviewed journal, BIO-Complexity. I thought it was going to have a lot of impact on the science of biology, but so far, its impact has been minimal. A few good studies (like this one and this one) have been published in it, but overall, it has not published the ground-breaking research I had hoped it would.

That might have changed. I just devoured the most recent study published in the journal, and I have to say, it is both innovative and impressive. It represents truly original thinking in the field of biology, and if further research confirms the results of the paper, we might very well be on the precipice of an important advancement in the field of biological taxonomy (the science of classifying living organisms).

The paper starts by detailing the fact that while evolutionists have always hoped that living organisms can be organized into a tree of life (starting with one universal common ancestor and branching into all known organisms), that hope has never been realized. In particular, when we look at organisms on the genetic level, no consistent tree can be produced. Instead, a “tree-like” arrangement can be made, but it needs all sorts of rescuing devices to explain the many inconsistencies that crop up.

Nevertheless, the fact that the structure somewhat resembles a tree tells us something. It tells us that the organisms we see today contain a lot of commonalities. However, since no consistent tree can be constructed, it is doubtful that those commonalities are the result of evolution. How, then, can scientists understand the “tree-like” structure of biological relationships?

The author of this new paper, Dr. Winston Ewert, makes a suggestion that is both innovative and, at the same time, so obvious it makes me wonder why I haven’t heard it before.

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No, We Won’t Have Dinosaurs in Two Years!

Even with a LOT of tinkering during embryonic development, only minor changes could be made in a chick’s skull.
(image from Bhullar et. al. article linked below)

A little while ago, I wrote an article about how silly “science journalism” can get. The article was about the popular media’s claim that scientists were about to bring mammoths back from extinction. I explained how the idea was based on real research, but the goal of the research was not to bring mammoths back from extinction. In addition, if anything concrete comes from the work, it will probably be decades from now. In response to that, a student sent me an even sillier article, which comes from that bastion of journalistic integrity, People. It states the following:

Famed paleontologist Dr. Jack Horner, who’s been a consultant on all four films and is the real-life inspiration for Jurassic Park’s dinosaur expert Dr. Alan Grant, believes we’re (optimistically) just five years away from genetically engineering a dinosaur.

This article was written back in 2015, so based on Dr. Horner’s optimistic projection, we should be just two years away from having dinosaurs roaming around in some laboratory.

So what is the source of Dr. Horner’s optimism? He thinks that birds evolved from dinosaurs, so he thinks that we could genetically “turn back the clock” and transform a bird into a dinosaur. He claims that this has already been done to some extent:

In what Horner calls a definitive “proof of concept,” a group at Harvard and Yale “just recently, within the last few weeks, were able to transform the head of a bird back to actually reverse-engineer the bird’s snout back into a dinosaur-like snout.”

There are so many things wrong with that statement, it is hard to know where to start. However, I will give it a try.

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Print Reading versus Digital Reading: Which Produces Better Comprehension?

I saw this Science Alert article come across my Facebook feed a few days ago, and I read it with interest. Written by two researchers from the University of Maryland, it makes some pretty strong statements about the effectiveness of reading a digital article compared to a print article. Essentially, the researchers say that for specific kinds of articles, students’ comprehension is better if the article is read in print form as opposed to digital form. They make this statement based on a review of the studies that already exist as well a study they published two years ago. While I think they are probably correct in their assessment, I am struck by how small the difference really is.

For the purpose of this article, I will concentrate on their new study. In their Science Alert article, they refer to it as three studies, but it is published as a single paper. In the study, they had 90 undergraduate students who were enrolled in human development and educational psychology courses read a total of four articles: two digital and two in print. Two of them were newspaper articles and two were excerpts from books. They were all roughly the same length (about 450 words). They dealt with childhood Autsim, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies. Presumably, all of those topics would be of interest to the students, given the classes in which they were enrolled.

Before they did any reading, the students were asked to assess themselves on their knowledge of the four topics about which they would be reading. They were also asked which medium they preferred to read: digital or print. They were also asked about how frequently they used each medium. They were then asked to read the articles, but the order in which the articles were read changed from student to student. Some would switch between digital and print, while others would read the first two in one medium and then the second two in the other medium. That way, any effect from switching between the media would not be very strong.

After each reading, students were asked to identify three things: the main idea of the article, its key points, and any other relevant information that they remembered from the article. The researchers had asked the authors of the articles these same questions as well as two independent readers. Those were considered the correct answers. Two trained graders independently compared the students’ answers to the correct answers, and the grades they assigned were in agreement 98.5% of the time. For the 1.5% of the time they didn’t agree, they then discussed the grading and came to a mutual agreement.

After all four readings and tests, the students were then asked in which medium they think they performed best. As you will see, that’s probably the most interesting aspect of the study.

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Will Scientists Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth?

Model of a woolly mammoth at the Royal BC Museum in Canada. (click for credit)

One of my former students sent me an article from The Telegraph, a news outlet in the UK. The headline reads:

Woolly mammoth will be back from extinction within two years, say Harvard scientists

The article was written in February of 2017, so the student wanted to know if there would really be living woolly mammoths next year. The answer, of course, is absolutely not. This article is just another example of how many “science journalists” understand neither science nor journalism. Nevertheless, the actual scientific story is interesting, even though it isn’t nearly as sensational as what is indicated in The Telegraph‘s article, or articles found on other sites, such as here and here.

These articles are attempting to report on the Woolly Mammoth Revival Project, which is headed by Harvard professor Dr. George Church. As its website indicates, the goal is not to bring back the identical mammoth species again. Instead, its goal is to create some kind of elephant/mammoth hybrid that can live in colder climates. Why would it want to do that? For ecological engineering.

At some time in the past, woolly mammoth herds (and herds of other cold-adapted animals) roamed what are now the evergreen forests in the northern latitudes. This kept the growth of evergreens in check, making those areas more like grasslands. In addition, the mammoth herds would pack down and scrape away snow. Without this “land reshaping,” snow insulates the soil below, reducing the depth to which it freezes. As the deeper soil thaws, it releases greenhouse gases, and the worry is that those released greenhouse gases will accelerate global warming, aka “climate change.” Now please note that actual data indicate thawing soil will reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but most “climate change” alarmists aren’t interested in the data.

In the end, then, the Woolly Mammoth Revival Project hopes to populate the north with cold-adapted, elephant-like animals that will once again turn the northern evergreen forests into grasslands, packing down and scraping away the snow as they roam.

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Study of Mice Highlights the “Junk DNA” Myth

Junk DNA is a crucial to evolutionary theory, despite the fact that it most likely doesn’t exist to any significant extent.
The concept of “junk DNA” is crucial to evolutionary theory. For example, the “gold standard” of evolutionary simulations doesn’t produce any evolution unless at least 85% of the simulated DNA is junk. This is why so many evolutionists are fighting against the straightforward conclusions of the ENCODE series of studies, which indicate that at least 80% of the human genome is functional. Dr. Dan Graur, for example, has famously said that if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong.

As is the case with most evolution-inspired ideas, the more we learn about the natural world, the more it becomes obvious that there is very little “junk DNA” in nature. A recently-published study of gender in mice highlights this fact. In the study, an international collaboration of scientists examined the development of sexual characteristics in mice. As you probably already know, in mammals there is a pair of chromosomes referred to as sex chromosomes. If an individual has an X chromosome and a Y chromosome in that pair, he is a male. If the individual has two X chromosomes, she is a female.

But the development of the proper characteristics associated with each sex depends on what happens during embryonic development. For example, as a mammal embryo develops, it starts out producing ovaries. However, there is a gene on the Y chromosome called Sry. It produces a protein that controls the production of another protein, called SOX9. The SOX9 protein turns developing ovaries into testes. A male develops testes, then, because of the action of a gene on the Y chromosome. But as this latest study shows, there is more to it than that.

The scientists removed a small section of DNA from genetically-male mice. This section is found in what the authors refer to as a “gene desert,” a section of DNA that is devoid of genes. Nevertheless, when that small section of DNA was deleted, the genetically-male mice developed ovaries and female genitalia. Now please understand that the genes involved in the production and regulation of the SOX9 protein were not removed; only a small portion of what many would call “junk DNA” was removed. Nevertheless, without that section of DNA, the genetically-male mice did not produce enough SOX9 protein, so the ovaries continued to develop into ovaries, which then caused the production of female genitalia. As a result, the authors refer to this small section of DNA as a SOX9 “enhancer.” It enhances the production of SOX9 at just the right time, so the males develop the correct gender characteristics.

While the results of this study are fascinating, they are not surprising. After all, it has become more and more clear that the concept of “junk DNA” is a myth. As a result, it makes sense that even small sections of DNA have important functions, at least in certain stages of development or under certain conditions. The reason I am blogging about the study is because of something the lead author said in an article that was published on his institution’s website:

Our study also highlights the important role of what some still refer to as ‘junk’ DNA, which makes up 98% of our genome. If a single enhancer can have this impact on sex determination, other non-coding regions might have similarly drastic effects. For decades, researchers have looked for genes that cause disorders of sex development but we haven’t been able to find the genetic cause for over half of them. Our latest study suggests that many answers could lie in the non-coding regions, which we will now investigate further.

Indeed. As Dr. John Mattick so aptly put it more than a decade ago:

…the failure to recognise the implications of the non-coding DNA will go down as the biggest mistake in the history of molecular biology.

Another Unsuccessful Attempt to Detect Dark Matter

This NASA image illustrates the fact that most astrophysicists think there is about four times as much dark matter as visible matter in the universe.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about a galaxy that has no “need” for dark matter. This is interesting, because most galaxies “need” dark matter to explain the motion of their stars. Based on the mass that is actually observed in most galaxies, the stars should not be moving the way that they do. Thus, scientists think there must be a lot of mass in those galaxies that cannot be seen (dark matter). To make their current theories work, scientists estimate that about 80-85% of the mass in the universe comes from dark matter. Since dark matter is thought to be so prevalent in the universe, scientists have tried to detect it directly, without any luck.

How do you detect something you can’t see? First, you have to have some idea of what you are looking for. Then, you design an experiment to see if what you think you might be looking for really exists. The most “promising” candidate for dark matter is a class of hypothetical particles called “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs). These are particles that don’t interact with matter using the electromagnetic force. Since the electromagnetic force works via the exchange of photons, if a particle doesn’t use the electromagnetic force, it produces no light. Instead, WIMPs are thought to use only the gravitational force and the weak force, which works only at the subatomic level and is responsible for most of the natural radioactivity on planet earth.

Since all the matter we know of uses the electromagnetic force, WIMPs are obviously strange particles. However, they are allowed by the mathematics of the standard model of physics, which is why they are considered the most “promising” of the candidates for dark matter. How do scientist try to detect WIMPs? The most sensitive WIMP detector is called XENON1T, which is filled with liquid and gaseous xenon. The design of the detector allows scientists to identify electromagnetic interactions that occur between particles hitting the detector and the liquid xenon inside. They discard those interactions, and what’s left should be any interactions that use only the weak force. Those, of course, would be caused by the WIMPs.

The team of scientists using XENON1T reported their latest results at a seminar on May 28th, and so far, they have not seen a signal that is consistent with what is expected for WIMPs. I think their results argue strongly that WIMPs don’t exist, but that’s not the only explanation. The results could also mean that physicists don’t understand WIMPs as well as they thought, and these particles actually interact more weakly with matter than what the theories tell us.

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