Science News BS Heat Map, June 19, 2026

 

  

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Experts now think ageing can be reversed. Here's what convinced them."		Very bad clickbait from the BBC Science Focus site that is now one of the Internet's worst purveyors of clickbait bunk. The only discussion of biology is a discussion of jelllyfish, and it has no relevance to human aging.
"NASA Study Challenges Theories on Where the Ingredients for Life Came From."		The title and most of the story are not objectionable. But the beginning is way off. The writer says, "The question of how life began here on Earth... remains a bit of a mystery." To the contrary, the origin of life is the most gigantic mystery, which scientists have made no progress on solving. The writer then makes the untrue claim that scientists have confirmed that life began near hydrothermal vents. The claim that life began in such a way is a mere speculation, without any evidence to support it.
"Why 'reprogramming' is the buzziest approach in reversing aging right now"		This MIT Technology Review article starts out with a good description of how some previous excitement about reversing aging approaches failed to live up to the hype. The article then tries to raise excitement about a "cell reprogramming" approach, by claiming,  "It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory." The claim about improvements in memory and learning is groundless. When that claim is made, the article has a link to a very low-quality paper failing to show any such thing.  It's a junk paper guilty of the same old Questionable Research Practices so predominant in neuroscience memory research, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, the lack of any blinding protocol, and the use of the utterly unreliable "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge how well a rodent remembered (a worthless method for reasons discussed at length here). The paper also uses the Morris Water Maze test to try to measure memory in mice. While that test is fairly reliable when used on rats, it is not a reliable test when used on mice, for reasons explained in the appendix at the end of my post here.
"Metal-driven chemical reaction in deep sea may explain origin of life"		The title of this article in the journal Science is an example of very bad misleading clickbait, which we often get these days in even the most prestigious science publications. The idea that life (something of enormously high complexity even in its simplest form) could be explained by a mere chemical reaction is nonsensical. All that is mentioned is speculation about the origin of phosphorus in living things, and even the simplest living thing is vastly more than mere phosphorus. The main problem in explaining the origin of life is explaining the origin of hundreds of types of proteins required for even the simplest cell. Such proteins do not even use phosphorus.
"Newfound ‘Switchboard’ Helps the Brain Form New Memories Without Forgetting Older Ones."		We have here another example of the tendency of university press offices to produce hugely misleading press releases boasting grandly about low-quality work done at their university. The paper being promoted is the very low-quality paper here, which used way-too-small study group sizes such as only 2 mice, 4 mice and 6 mice. No study like this should be taken seriously unless it used 15 or 20 animals per study group.  The boasts of the press release are utterly groundless. Given the switchboard-resembling structure of the brain and the continuous firing of neurons, anyone can monitor some brain cells during some animal's learning, and say he found a "memory switchboard," even if the cells monitored have no relation to memory.
"How the brain builds sentences, neuron by neuron."		The article in Nature is promoting another low-quality study involving reckless endangerment of epilepsy patients, one in which very sick epilepsy patients have microelectrodes unnecessarily implanted in their brains. While larger electrodes are often implanted to help determine where in the brain to do epilepsy surgery, a scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)." We read, "These micro-arrays (used for research) were placed within the cortex in tandem with the surface cortical grids (used for clinical monitoring)," which suggests the microarray or microelectrodes were not necessary for surgical evaluation. The implantation of microelectrodes into brains has health risks, and here very sick epilepsy patients were  unnecessarily endangered. Nothing of any real scientific value resulted from this experiment. All that is going on is pareidolia correlation-fishing noise-mining, in which scientists identify some neurons that fired more often before some word was spoken. Because neurons fire randomly between 1 and 200 times per second, you would always be able to identify such neurons, even if brains do nothing to produce speech, and even if you were tracking neurons that had no involvement in speech. The sample size was too low (only 8 humans) for any robust result to be claimed. Tragically such reckless endangerment of very sick epilepsy patients in poorly designed experiments is an ongoing scandal of neuroscience research.
"Benzene reaction may explain how DNA and RNA building blocks formed on early Earth."		The press release starts out badly, by making the very untrue claim that DNA and RNA are "the molecules that encode all of life's functions." That is not true. Neither DNA nor RNA tells how to make a cell or any of its organelles; and neither molecule tells how to make a human body or any of its organs; and neither molecule does anything to explain the mental functions of humans. The press release discusses some mere speculation about how we might have got precursors of the first RNA or DNA molecules. There is no discussion of a lab experiment substantiating this speculation, as shown by the statement, "The team next plans to demonstrate that these reactions can occur in the laboratory."
"Ancient fire record rewritten: Researchers push earliest evidence of human fire use back to over a million years"		The article discusses claimed evidence of "fire use" in a cave in South Africa, "fire use" supposedly occurring between 1 and 1.7 million years ago. The claim is extremely dubious, being based on some "new method" by which scientists claim to analyze fossil bones and find evidence that some burning occurred, involving evidence "subtle and difficult to detect."  We read that this is evidence not of man-built fires but of the use of "naturally occurring fires." The evidence is extremely weak and doubtful, and the use of the term "human fire use" is inappropriate. No species existing a million years ago should ever be called human. A hallmark characteristic of humans is the use of symbols. When you are discussing creatures existing very long before any symbols were created, such creatures should not be referred to as "human."
"Decoding the Genetic Blueprint Behind Our Three-Dimensional Body."		Another telling of the "genes as body blueprint" deceit that materialists have been telling for decades, because it's a lie they need to tell. Genes actually specify only low-level chemical information, and do not specify how to make any anatomical structures and do not even specify how to make cells or any of the organelles that make up cells. Contrary to the title mentioning our bodies, the study discussed involved only comb jellies (looking like jellyfish).

1. On page 26 of the recent book The Developing Genome, Professor David S. Moore states, "The common belief that there are things inside of us that constitute a set of instructions for building bodies and minds -- things that are analogous to 'blueprints' or 'recipes' -- is undoubtedly false."
2. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake says this "DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth," and "There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body."
3. Developmental biologist C/H. Waddington stated, "The DNA is not a program or sequentially accessed control over the behavior of the cell."
4.  Scientists Walker and Davies state this in a scientific paper: "DNA is not a blueprint for an organism; no information is actively processed by DNA alone...DNA is a passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins."
5. Geneticist Adam Rutherford states that "DNA is not a blueprint," a statement also made by biochemistry professor Keith Fox. 
6. "The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, noting "it doesn't encode some specific outcome."
7. "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, who says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  
8. Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." 
9. Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy," and after referring to a "deep puzzle" of how biological forms arise, he gives this example: "Scientists really don’t know what determines the intricate shape and structure of the flatworm’s head."