Recent content by KenJackson

I am confused about the date. From the article: Skull? The rest of the article is about one piece of jawbone. Where did the skull come from? And the date is for a "carbonate crust", not the bone. Could it be a crust formed from some other very old material? Just in the last few thousand...

Solved the problem. It was only on my PCs. Over the years, I've been annoyed by various online ads, some that even seem to get through adblock plus. So I find the offending URL and define it to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts. As it turned out, cdnjs.cloudflare.com must have hosted an annoying ad at...

The web pages at PF include this script, which won't load, so latex is not rendered: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.4/MathJax.js When I try to fetch it with curl, I get an error: "Failed to connect to cdnjs.cloudfare.com port 443: Connection refused" Am I the only one? Is...

Many years ago, Popular Science magazine had an article about a guy who powered his radio from the energy in a broad spectrum of ambient radio waves. Also, brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla poured himself into trying to make the wireless transmission of electrical power work, but ultimately failed.

The article quotes an evolutionary biologist as saying, "What this group of algae has taught us is some of the steps involved in the evolution of a multicellular organism." But all of these "steps" seem to involve fully formed genes. Those seem trivial compared to evolving the genes. Where are...

Grief. Interruptions delayed my post so long that another answer slipped in unnoticed. Let me take a quick look. Interesting. That deserves some thought. Sure, there are well publicized sources of CO2, but the question concerned an increase in gas causing an increase in temperature causing...

Yeah, I read that. I know there's a lot of emotion on this topic, but I have a real science question and I'm trying to pursue it delicately. There's an inconsistency between my understanding of science and what scientists say in the news. As a responsible citizen, I'm trying to make sense of it...

That seems like a very reasonable conclusion. But it implies either something in my four points is incorrect or greenhouse gasses are not the most significant influence in climate change. Am I missing something?

In the news, scientists present greenhouse gasses--especially CO2--as the only credible influence in climate change.

Please critique this logic. It's well known from chemistry that cooler water can hold more gasses in solution than warmer water. As ocean temperatures rise (slowly, for any reason, over centuries) dissolved greenhouse gasses will come out of solution and into the atmosphere. Conversely, as...

In each case, it looks like we're starting with many many complete proteins before a new one is whipped up. That's interesting, but it's still not what I'm asking about. Also interesting, but we're starting with complete organisms, presumably with fully functional proteins, in these cases...

Your first three points seem to only address changes to fully-formed complete proteins. That's not what I'm asking about. This sounds a little like "poof!" How? What mechanism? How did partial proteins maintain existence before they were complete? And John Conway's Game of Life seems to...

I ran across this for the first time just a few months ago. I appreciate the wisdom, but I'm a little concerned about lobbing the "stupid" label. People who have strong political positions which differ from my own carefully thought-out political positions sometimes call me "stupid." It's as...

This seems like a good argument for using Linux. I install all the python modules I need from my Linux distro's repository. So fake packages would have had to get by the vetting and testing of the repository's maintainer. That's an added level of security.

Our bodies are made up of tens of thousands of proteins, each of which is a long precise sequence of amino acid molecules ("residues"). Evolution requires them to be "formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications." Does this mean the code for one of the twenty residues was added...