Science News BS Heat Map, July 4, 2026

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Perseverance rover finds even more signs of extinct life on Mars"		A very bad example of false clickbait from the British paper The Register.  The subtitle immediately recants, saying "Scientists remain skeptical." All that was found was some carbon compounds that can be formed through lifeless processes.
"Bacteria Can Learn and Form Memories Without a Brain"		What is going on is here mainly the kind of word trickery that would be going on if you claimed that snow can learn and form memories, on the grounds that snow forms a footprint memory of your feet passing over it.
"Mars Rover Spots Complex Carbon on the Red Planet, Marking Yet Another Detection of a Building Block of Life"		It has always been bunk to suggest that life is built from things so simple they can be called "building blocks." Even the simplest living thing is built from very complex components -- hundreds of types of protein molecules, each requiring a very special arrangement of hundreds of parts. The building components of such building components are amino acids. Neither protein molecules nor amino acids have ever been discovered on Mars. The discovery mentioned involved vaguely described carbon compounds that were not any of the known building components or chemical constituents of life.
"An 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s regained speech and mobility after taking psilocybin."		This is an important case report that may cast doubt on claims that Alzheimer's patients suffer from a loss of physically stored memories, and may bolster a "haze" or "fog" model of dementia in which poor cognitive performance in such people is mainly the result of something rather like a state of drowsiness or stupor that can go away, with restoration of memory performance. Reports of terminal lucidity in those with severe dementia suggest the same thing.
"She Was Half Ape, Half Human—and She May Hold the Secret to What Makes Us Who We Are"		In this Popular Mechanics article, we read of a 4.4 million-year old skeleton called Ardi. No justification is given that this corresponded to any creature that was "half-ape, half-human." Such a phrase might be justified in describing a creature that had an ape as one parent, and a human as another parent; but no such creature has ever existed.  See the appendix for why the alleged "skeleton" is probably no such thing, but instead a set of bones gathered up from a wide area of about 20 square meters, and arranged to look like half a skeleton. The article has a fake large visual, which is not identified as the fake that it is. See the appendix for details. The visual is a work of "vector art" attributed to a Getty Images source of "Alexander Joe." A look at that artist's pages on Getty Images fails to show the image.
"Consciousness: how ‘working memory’ may mysteriously give rise to it"		The article suggests an idea that makes no sense  Working memory is one of the innumerable capabilities of conscious minds, and does nothing to explain consciousness itself.  Similarly, walking is one of the many capabilities of human bodies, but walking does nothing to explain the origin of human bodies.
"Your Brain Doesn’t Just Turn Off When You Die. What Really Happens Defies Our Understanding of Reality."		The headline is false -- your brain does  just turn off when you die, and does so very quickly (although conscious experience often continues in episodes recalled as near-death experiences, contrary to the dogma that minds are produced by brains). Within 10 to 30 seconds after the heart stops, the human brain turns off electrically, resulting in the flatlining state  called asystole, in which brain waves die off to become flat lines.  The Popular Mechanics article discusses a 2023 study simultaneously tracking brain waves and heart activity. Contrary to the very misleading statements that have been made about the patients in that study, statements debunked in my post here,  that study shows brain waves very quickly flatlining in the patients it tracked when they died.
"For The First Time, Scientists Say They've Built a Synthetic Cell From Scratch"		In a ScienceAlert press release, we have a scientist named Kate Adamala making grandiose boasts that are unfounded. There's no published paper backing up her boasts. There's merely an article at her company's site,  and a preprint. Far from being anything that was created chemically "from scratch" (a phrase wrongly used in press accounts of this research), what went on was cannibalization of components from E. coli cells. The article states, "SpudCell currently uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria." So ribosomes (organelles much more complex than proteins) were stolen from an existing one-celled life form (E. coli), and then put in some sphere-like fatty unit, wrongly called a cell. That so-called cell was not actually capable of sustained natural reproduction, although some artificially-induced "division" is being sold to look like cell reproduction (many a lifeless blob may undergo division).  The ScienceAlert press release says, "According to Science magazine, SpudCell has met some hurdles in publication: apparently one reviewer at Cell, a prestigious science journal, said the project was not real biology."  An article in Science calls this SpudCell object "far from alive," while noting, "Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology." In another article, a scientist says of this research, "I don’t think it means we’re close to creating a fully synthetic cell.”
"Experts no longer think life began on Earth. Here's what convinced them."		There is no truth in the claim of the article that there has been some change in the opinion of scientists about whether life originated on Earth. No such change has occurred. The "what convinced them" part is nothing that should not justify any opinion change -- the mere reported discovery (in miniscule trace amounts such as 1 part in 100 million) of nucleobases on an asteroid. As discussed here, the claimed result is not a reliable one, because the reported amounts were so tiny that the most likely result is that they resulted from earthly contamination. And even if nucleobases had been found on an asteroid, in the reported amounts, that would do nothing to make if more likely that the first life (or any of its components) had first existed in space (as the reported amounts are so small, we would still have Earth as the most likely place for the origination of such things). The BBC Science Focus article erroneously refers to "the discovery of nucleotides on an asteroid." The reported discovery was something much less: mere nucleobases. A nucleobase is a mere fraction of a nucleotide.
"Modern neuroscience is rediscovering an idea Freud had 130 years ago"		This press-release is the clumsiest attempt to sell a groundless theory of neuroscience trying to describe the brain as a "prediction engine." The theory has no warrant in physical realities of the brain. The press release tries an approach of "Freud thought of it first," which is silly, because the once-highly-regarded Freud is now generally regarded as an erring salesman of pseudoscientific nonsense.
"The Circuit that Lets Your Brain Think and See"		No actual explanation is given as to how a brain could think, and neuroscientists lack any credible explanation for human thinking. Appealing to "a circuit" is the laziest last resort when people lack an explanation of how a brain could do something. We have a discussion mainly of not what was observed in the brain, but in the behavior of some computer model. At least we get this neuroscientist confession contradicting a common tall tale of neuroscientists: "Back in 2015, I began working with patients who are missing the hippocampus, the region that lets us form and hold onto memories. If the brain were truly modular, losing that middle piece should leave you unable to do a great many things. But it doesn't. These patients can still do all sorts of tasks."  So why do neuroscientists keep groundlessly claiming that the hippocampus is "the region that lets us form and hold onto memories"?

Appendix:  The original source of the claim about the Ardi skeleton is the edition of Science you can read here. On page 77 we have the images below:

At right is the "skeleton"  corresponding to this so-called skeleton called  Ardi. It is some bones gathered from a rather wide area of maybe 20 square meters. Someone has arranged the bones into something looking like a third of a skeleton. But that could be a misleading act of social construction. We don't know whether there ever existed a single individual having the bones shown in the right part of the visual above. The bones could be fragments from different individuals of different species. So it is very dubious to claim that a skeleton was ever found. 

The Popular Mechanics article mentioned above has a large visual showing a fairly complete skull. The article does not match the so-called skeleton named Ardi, which (as you can see in the top right of the image above) merely has some fragments of a skull. So where does the skull image in the Popular Mechanics article come from? It is apparently just a fake image. A reverse image search shows the image has been used about 30 times since 2014, to adorn various stories about evolution. The use of fake images in articles about human evolution is  an ongoing scandal discussed in my post

"Visual Fakery Is a Pillar of Darwinist Propaganda," which you can read here.  Nowadays online articles about human evolution are massively making use of fake images.