They have started a new science section and Arianna Huffington says this of her hopes for it:

I'm particularly looking forward to HuffPost Science's coverage of one of my longtime passions: the intersection of science and religion, two fields often seen as contradictory -- or at least presented that way by those waging The War on Science. A key part of HuffPost Science's mission will be to cut through the divisions that have resulted from that false war. Rather than taking up arms in those misguided, outdated battles, HuffPost Science will work in the tradition of inquisitive minds that can accommodate both logic and mystery. It's a tradition exemplified by Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller, who, when I visited with him last year, told me that he sees Darwin not as an obstacle to faith but as "the key to understanding our relationship with God."

Ah, yes, the old "accommodate both logic and mystery" ploy, as Inspector Clousseau would say. Expect to see full-bore accommodationism that tells you that magical thinking is perfectly compatible with science, as long as you throw in sexy sciency words such as 'quantum' and 'indeterminancy' to mask the woo that lurks beneath. I don't know why they don't call it the 'Deepak Chopra section' and be done with it.

A new study says that people start losing their brain powers as early as 45 years of age.

The results of the tests show that cognitive scores declined in all categories except vocabulary - and there was a faster decline in older people. The study found a 9.6% decline in mental reasoning in men aged 65-70 and a 7.4% decline for women of the same age. For men and women aged 45-49, there was a 3.6% decline.

Since my work involves mainly words, the lack of decline in vocabulary skills may be masking my decrepitude. The study can be read here.

One of the common criticisms that one hears against us science-based atheists is that our search for naturalistic explanations of hitherto mysterious phenomena, coupled with a relentless assault on irrational and unscientific thinking, results in all the wonder being drained from life. We are told, for example, that to explain that the rainbow is the product of multiple scattering of light by water droplets in the air is to somehow detract from its beauty or that when gazing at the billions of twinkling stars on a beautifully clear cloudless night, to be aware that they are the products of nuclear fusion reactions that took place billions of years ago is to reduce their grandeur. I must say that I don't understand the criticism. For me at least, understanding how these things come about actually enhances my sense of wonder about the universe. The more I learn about how the universe works and how the impersonal forces of nature created everything around us, the more I am impressed. To illustrate my point, I am now going to show you something that I think is incredibly beautiful. It is the equation: T = 2tanh ^-1(√Ω _Λ)/(3H ₀√Ω _Λ) So what is so great about this equation? It is the equation that tells us the age of the universe. Note that the age T depends on just two quantities H ₀ and the square root of Ω _Λ, both of which are measured quantities. H ₀ is the value of the Hubble constant at the present time and is given by the slope of the straight line obtained when one plots the speed of distant galaxies (on the y-axis) versus the distance to those galaxies (on the x-axis). Ω _Λ is the ratio of the density of dark energy in the universe to the total energy density of the universe. As with all scientific results, there are some basic theoretical assumptions that go into obtaining them. This particular one requires that the universe be governed by Einstein's equations of general relativity and that its current state is 'matter dominated' (i.e., the energy contribution of pure radiation is negligible) and 'flat' (i.e., the total density of the universe is at its critical value so that the curvature of space is neither convex nor concave). These 'assumptions' are supported by other measurements, so they are not arbitrary. The values of H ₀ and Ω _Λ are obtained using satellite probes that collect a vast body of data from stars and galaxies and scientists then do a best fit to those data for multiple parameters, of which these are just two. The current values were obtained in 2009 by the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Satellite Probe) satellite launched in 2001, and are given by H ₀=70.5 km/s/Mpc and Ω _Λ=0.726. Insert these values into the above equation (with the appropriate units) and you get that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. Why do I think this equation is a thing of extraordinary beauty? Just think about the implications of that equation for a moment. We humans have been around for just an infinitesimally small period of time in history and occupy an infinitesimally small part of the universe. And yet we have been able, using pure ingenuity and by steadily building upon the scientific achievements of our predecessors, to not only figure out the large-scale structure of the vast universe we happen to occupy but to determine, in a simple equation, its actual age! That is truly incredible. If that does not strike you with wonder, then I don't know what will. Furthermore, note how simple the equation is. The tanh ^-1 function (which represents the inverse of the hyperbolic tangent) may be intimidating for some but it is such a standard mathematical function that it can be found on any scientific hand calculator. If a news report states that new satellite data have given revised best fit values for by H ₀ and Ω _Λ, anyone can calculate the revised age of the universe themselves in a few minutes. But as this xkcd cartoon captures accurately, it is not that scientists lose their sense of wonder but that they find wonder in learning about the universe, and do not need to invoke mystery to sense it.

While a lot of the science media attention has focused on the search for the Higgs boson, we should not forget that that is not sole purpose of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Its high energies allow it to do more conventional work and there is now a report of the discovery of an excited state of the bottom quark-antiquark, a consequence of the standard model of particle physics. The preprint of the paper can be read here.

There was an old TV program called Candid Camera that used hidden cameras to capture what people did when confronted with awkward or unexpected situations. While the aim of the program was humorous, usually at the expense of the hapless person who happened to be caught on camera, some of the episodes serve as useful experiments on human behavior. One particularly revealing one involved the desire of people to conform to powerful norms of behavior that we all follow without even thinking about it. For example, when people get into an elevator, they space themselves as far as possible from others, immediately turn around and face the front, and not make eye contact or speak, apart from sometimes a quick nod of greeting upon entering. But in this episode, the camera noted what happens when the norms seem to suddenly change. Although the above experiment is amusing, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the person behind the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) , reflects on it and the Milgram obedience study, and says that the Candid Camera elevator experiment reveals how the strong desire to conform to the norms of the people around us can lead to behaviors that are evil, something he calls 'the Lucifer effect'. (Zimbardo has written a book titled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil that I have bought and plan to read and write about soon.) Zimbardo points an interesting feature in the Milgram obedience and the SPE studies about the role that religion plays in the willingness to obey authority and inflict pain on others even when one's own moral instincts are repulsed by the idea.

The large, diverse cast of ordinary characters in the obedience studies and the normal, healthy, intelligent cast in the prison study also serve to make vivid the tragic conclusion that we all hate to acknowledge: The goodness of Everyman and of Everywoman can be transformed and overwhelmed by the an accumulation of small forces of evil. The character transformation seen in many of the participants in both studies represents "The Lucifer Effect" in action. Both studies teach us lessons about authority; the obedience research teaches us to question authority when it is excessive and unjust, while the SPE teaches us the dangers of too little responsible authority when it is needed to perform oversight of the behavior of individuals within its agency. … Religious upbringing also comes to play in a complex way, leading both to unquestioning obedience to doctrinal beliefs as well as a profound caring for one's fellows. The first values should lead to greater obedience to authority in the Milgram paradigm, while the second should lead to less obedience to such authority. Support for the first prediction comes from a Milgram-like study that compared participants with various measured levels religious orientation in the extent to which they obeyed one of three authority figures: neutral, scientific, or religious. The results reveal that the shock scores elicited in this experiment were highest for the most religious participants, less for those moderately religious, and lowest for the least religious. Among those highly and moderately religious, the scientific and religious authorities were more effective than the neutral authority in eliciting the most obedience. Those who scored lowest on the religious measures, that centered around beliefs that one's life is under divine control, tended to reject any authority, be it religious or scientific. [My emphasis]

There is no question that scientific figures carry authority which is why scientific malpractice or fraud is taken so seriously. It is perhaps not hard to see why being religious or having a religious authority figure makes people more likely to be persuaded to go along with cruel acts. Religious people have usually been indoctrinated from childhood to believe that god is the ultimate authority figure and that unquestioning obedience to god's commands constitutes a virtue that will be rewarded. Their religious texts also have countless examples of the most appalling atrocities that their god has done or commanded people to do and which are supposed to serve a greater good. The appalling doctrine known as ' divine command theory' justifies such actions by saying that whatever god commands has to be good, even if it goes against every norm of humane behavior. Such beliefs can be a powerful force that can overcome the scruples that come with normal feelings of empathy towards other living things. As a side note, a few months ago, I wrote about people who get lost in Death Valley and have even died because they followed the instructions of their GPS system even when it erroneously instructed them to take roads that barely existed. I wonder if that is another symptom of this phenomenon. After all, an assured and confident disembodied voice telling them what to do is somewhat like what they imagine some god-like authority figure would do, and they follow blindly.

I like to sleep. I need a minimum of eight hours a night. But it is not just the good feeling that comes with resting that I find attractive. I really enjoy sleeping, the sensation of drowsing off, and usually have no difficulty doing so anywhere at any time, even on cramped airline seats on long flights. On weekends, I take a long nap after lunch and sometimes take a short nap seated up at my desk during the weekday. I used to worry that this was a sign that I was lazy but learned later that most people don't get enough sleep and that this can really be harmful. Here is a 60 Minutes report on the importance of getting enough sleep every day. Now comes a new study that suggests that the variations in sleep needs can be traced to the influence of a specific gene. I learned from the news report that Einstein needed 11 hours of sleep per night, which makes me a real slacker in the sleep department.

Via reader Norm, I learned about a new study using brains scans that suggest that people are aren't nearly as self-interested as some might think and that inequality makes people unhappy. "The scientists speculate that people have a natural dislike of inequality. In fact, our desire for equal outcomes is often more powerful (at least in the brain) than our desire for a little extra cash. It's not that money doesn't make us feel good — it's that sharing the wealth can make us feel even better."

The Mars explorer named Curiosity was launched successfully on Saturday and is expected to land on the planet on August 6, 2012. Because Curiosity is a much larger object than previous explorers, engineers needed to develop a new way of giving it a soft landing and this new technique is causing some anxiety to mission scientists about whether the rover can survive the landing. Some of them refer to the final stages of the landing as 'six minutes of terror'. You can see an animation (made back in 2005) of what the landing should look like. Here is a test run of the final stage done in the laboratory.

For reasons that are not clear to me, some religious people seem to think that the moral sense that we possess is evidence for god. In fact, some of them (such as Francis Collins in his book The Language of God ) go so far as to claim that this is a really powerful argument for god. They point to the fact that there are quite a few moral impulses that seem to be universal and claim that this must mean that they were implanted in us by god. This is a specious argument. In my series of posts on the biological basis for justice and altruism ( part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4), I discussed how our ideas of justice and our altruistic impulses can be traced to biological origins. What science is making abundantly clear is that the foundation of our moral senses also are evolutionary in origin and that culture builds on those basic biological impulses to create moral system of increasing generality. Paul Bloom has studied this question by looking at what we can learn about the moral thinking of babies and in his article The Moral Life of Babies in the New York Times issue on May 5, 2010 writes:

The notion at the core of any mature morality is that of impartiality. If you are asked to justify your actions, and you say, "Because I wanted to," this is just an expression of selfish desire. But explanations like "It was my turn" or "It's my fair share" are potentially moral, because they imply that anyone else in the same situation could have done the same. This is the sort of argument that could be convincing to a neutral observer and is at the foundation of standards of justice and law. The philosopher Peter Singer has pointed out that this notion of impartiality can be found in religious and philosophical systems of morality, from the golden rule in Christianity to the teachings of Confucius to the political philosopher John Rawls's landmark theory of justice. This is an insight that emerges within communities of intelligent, deliberating and negotiating beings, and it can override our parochial impulses. The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at — its generality and universality — is the product of culture, not of biology. There is no need to posit divine intervention. A fully developed morality is the product of cultural development, of the accumulation of rational insight and hard-earned innovations. The morality we start off with is primitive, not merely in the obvious sense that it's incomplete, but in the deeper sense that when individuals and societies aspire toward an enlightened morality — one in which all beings capable of reason and suffering are on an equal footing, where all people are equal — they are fighting with what children have from the get-go. … Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn't start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

There is a nice video of the experiments that Bloom has done with babies. This is why science and religion are at loggerheads. As science advances, religion simply has less room to exist. This is true in all areas of knowledge and, in particular, in the area of morality. We now realize that evolution has given us two great gifts: basic moral instincts and the capacity to reason. The latter has enabled us to build on the former and create the complex moral systems that currently exist. God is entirely superfluous.

In the case of the large-scale structure of the universe, the dominant paradigm is that the dynamics of the universe are governed by the theory of general relativity, augmented by the postulation of the existence of dark matter and dark energy. Classical Newtonian theory of gravity was not believed to hold, because it could not explain many features of galaxies. But in science, one can always come up with alternative theories to the dominant paradigm to explain any phenomenon and there have been efforts to develop what are known as MOND theories (standing for MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) to explain the properties of the universe that would dispense with general relativity and revert to Newtonian gravity with slight modifications. Via blog reader Hunter, I came across this article that says that they have tested one form of the MOND hypothesis and found that it cannot explain the measured gravitational redshift of galaxy clusters, while general relativity and dark matter can. This does not definitely rule out MOND theories since any theory can always be tweaked to accommodate any experimental result. But such negative results do make them less plausible to scientists.

He makes a good analogy for how scientists go about their work.

Creationists like to challenge the theory of evolution by asking how it can be that things can evolve incrementally since in its early stages the new feature seems to lack its final functionality. They pose questions like "What is the use of half an eye or half a wing?" Of course, scientists have long explained this. They have shown how the eye could have evolved by tiny changes and in fact even right now almost the full spectrum of differential eye development can be seen in existing species. They have also pointed out that it is a mistake to assume that the final functionality of a feature was the only functionality all along, and that features may have had other functions in the early stages and only later became adapted to its final use. Carl Zimmer had a nice article earlier this year in National Geographic about the evidence that feathers might have evolved for a different purpose long before flight occurred. More recently, he reports on new research results that add to our knowledge of what purpose those non-flying feathers in primitive wing forms might have served.

Global-warming deniers eagerly embrace anyone who supports their cause, however much of a crank that person may be. So any respectable scientist who expresses skepticism about global warming or who criticizes the work of those scientists who have warned us about it is makes them delirious with joy. They were particularly pleased when Richard Muller did so because he is a physicist at the University of California-Berkeley and thus comes with good credentials. Based on preliminary work he had done, Muller had said that he thought the previous studies that said global warming was happening were wrong. Republicans invited him to testify to Congress and in 2010 many right wing groups, including the Koch brothers, were willing to fund his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, which aimed to do a new and independent study as a check on all the other global warming studies, no doubt expecting him to contradict them. But things didn't go quite according to plan. In a press release announcing the first set of four papers that they have submitted to journals, Muller says, "Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism: There were good reasons for doubt, until now, Muller reinforced that message, adding:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

One has to be a bit concerned that Muller announced his results in a press release and in a newspaper op-ed and not after the papers had undergone peer review. Bypassing the normal processes of science and going straight to the public tends not to have good results. The problem for climate change skeptics when they try to co-opt real scientists to their cause is that real scientists deal with the data they have and not the data they wish they had. Whatever the private beliefs of scientists, they cannot go outside the bounds allowed them by the data, unless they are dishonest and suppress or fabricate them. As Kevin Drum comments:

The BEST report is purely an estimate of planetary warming, and it makes no estimate of how much this warming is due to human activity. So in one sense, its impact is limited since the smarter skeptics have already abandoned the idea that warming is a hoax and now focus their fire solely on the contention that it's man-made. (And the even smarter ones have given up on that, too, and now merely argue that it's economically pointless to try to stop it.) Still, the fact that climate scientists turned out to be careful and thorough in their basic estimates of temperature rise surely enhances their credibility in general. Climategate was always a ridiculous sideshow, and this is just one more nail in its coffin. Climate scientists got the basic data right, and they've almost certainly gotten the human causes right too.

Those deniers, like James M. Taylor of the Heartland Institute who had earlier embraced Muller as one of them are now disowning him, calling these new results "meaningless" and attacking his credibility, saying that he might be having the "intent of deceiving casual observers about the true nature of the global warming debate." Other deniers are also edging away from their earlier embrace of Muller. Global warming deniers will probably still give a platform to people like the Briton Lord Monckton, who has made quite a name for himself talking about this subject even though he has no expertise whatsoever in this area and makes outrageous statements such as calling an Australian government climate adviser a Nazi. The Australian comedy show The Chasers interviews Monckton and he clearly has no suspicions until the very end that his leg is being pulled and that he is being made to look a fool.

I don't have an iPhone of any kind but was intrigued by the reports of the latest one that had the voice recognition software known as Siri that seems to have a conversational ability reminiscent of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as can be seen from this compilation of a conversation. I am not sure if this is a hoax but the person who put up the video assures skeptics that this is real and says that anyone can test it by getting hold of a Siri-enabled iPhone. I am curious if any blog reader who has it can confirm. As an aside, I am a bit bothered by Siri referring to the user as 'Master'. I know it is not a real person but the feudal overtone is jarring. Taking his claims at face, it seems as if Siri is able to pass at least a low-level Turing test.

It used to be thought that they came 13,000 years ago across the then-existing land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, during what is known as the 'Clovis' period. A paper published today in the journal Science has measured with high precision (with new techniques) the age of a mastodon fossil bone with a weapon point embedded in it that was found in 1970. It found that it is 13,800 years ago, with an uncertainty of only 20 years, suggesting that humans were here earlier than thought, supporting other evidence that there was human hunter activity here as early as 15,000-16,000 years ago. A large number of mammals (mastodons, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, camels) disappeared rapidly around 12,700 years ago and it was thought that this must have been due to rapid climate change as the Ice Age ended, since Clovis hunters were not thought to have been around for that long. But the new earlier date for humans in the Americas suggests that mammal extinction may have been accelerated by humans hunting them with weapons.

Science has a unique role in the growing recognition that it is the source of authoritative and reliable knowledge. But that carries with it a great burden to make sure that the public's trust is not abused. Via Machines Like Us, I learned about the General Assembly of the International Council for Science (ICSU) issuing a statement last month on "The Principle of Universality (freedom and responsibility) of Science" that spelled out what the responsibilities of scientists are.

The free and responsible practice of science is fundamental to scientific advancement and human and environmental well-being. Such practice, in all its aspects, requires freedom of movement, association, expression and communication for scientists, as well as equitable access to data, information, and other resources for research. It requires responsibility at all levels to carry out and communicate scientific work with integrity, respect, fairness, trustworthiness, and transparency, recognising its benefits and possible harms.

This followed up on the second World Conference on Research Integrity held in Singapore in July 2010 that issued a statement that "emphasizes the need for honesty in all aspects of research, accountability in the conduct of scientific research, professional courtesy and fairness in working with others, and good stewardship of research on behalf of others." Scientists have to be vigilant in maintaining these standards.

I never met Carl Sagan but in addition to being a good scientist, prolific writer, great popularizer and advocate for science, he had the reputation of being a really nice person, which is probably why so many of us mean and nasty new atheists are urged to be more like him. Neil deGrasse Tyson relates an anecdote that reinforces that last characteristic. The true character of a person is revealed in the way they treat people who, by the usual standards of society, are of no importance to them whatsoever.

I am a sucker for animal stories that have happy endings. Another example of altruism in the animal kingdom.

A new study reports that fMRI machines can roughly reconstruct the images of film clips that test subjects have been viewing. What I found interesting was that the reconstructed images, while retaining the general shape of the original, seemed to replace the details with what to me seemed like the details of another image.