Science News BS Heat Map, July 16, 2026

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?"		We have an interview in which one neuroscientist interviews another brain scholar who is promoting a book. The interview wanders all over the place, with no decent argument ever being formulated; and neither person sounds  like anyone who has a credible explanation of how human cognition arises. There's mention of a "constraint closure" explanation which sounds hopelessly inadequate as an explanation for the wonders of human minds.  The hierarchical organization of human bodies is one of the grandest marvels ever discovered, but it does not explain human minds or human memory. The author's book can be read online.  On page 10 she strangely states, "What makes organisms special, as I describe in chapter 10, is that the apparently invariant structures that constrain and enable these precarious flows of energy (processes) are also themselves reciprocally dependent on those flows of energy in turn."  There are 100 reasons why organisms such as you are special, many of which are a billion times deeper than that.
"The secret of human intelligence may lie in the power of a single brain cell"		We have the false claim that "researchers found that neurons in the human cortex are significantly more complex information-processing units ('microchips') than those of other mammals." Neurons are not anything like microchips. A scientist makes the false boast that his team discovered that "a single human neuron is itself an extraordinarily sophisticated computing device." The chain of reasoning used to try to justify this claim is a tortured mess. Brains are not computers, and (as discussed here) brains lack almost all of the characteristics of computers;  and individual neurons are not computing devices. See my post "11 Authorities Seem to Realize That 'Your Brain Is a Computer'  Is a Junk Metaphor."
"Dark matter's secret address revealed? Scientists say it may be hiding in fifth dimension."		Another "epicycle" to try and patch up the floundering theory of dark matter. When you have to imagine that something you fail to see is hiding in the fifth dimension, you are not in the realm of hard science.
"From friend to foe: How the brain updates feelings toward others"		We have a bad example of clickbait from the neuroscience magazine The Transmitter. In the article a neuroscientist makes the groundless boast "We found the neural mechanisms that underlie emotion toward others." The article quotes someone else saying, "“It’s truly unbelievable how much they did in this paper." A look at the paper being promoted shows exactly the type of schlock science work that predominates in today's experimental neuroscience research. The paper is behind a paywall but you can look at the Supplementary Information document, which shows the usual severe sins such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes such as only 5 rodents or only 9 rodents, and the use of the utterly unreliable technique of trying to judge "freezing behavior."  No neuroscientist has any credible tale to tell of how your feeling about something (such as your love or hate for someone or something)  could exist as a brain state.
"Detection of a four-carbon sugar in interstellar space"		The reported detection is not a very reliable one, for three reasons: (1) it is "bleeding edge" work using some new technology ("limitation has recently been overcome using ultrafast laser vaporization"); (2) the claimed detection is so far away (in the galactic center) that detection claims are relatively unreliable; (3) the reported amount is some tiniest trace amount that could easily be a false alarm.
"Scientists Say Gravity Has Been Holding Your Consciousness Together"		This is a bogus clickbait headline, provided by the Popular Mechanics site which so often publishes such headlines. As we know from astronauts living for many days in zero gravity, it is not true that gravity is necessary for either your consciousness or the continuation of your life (although the human race could not have arisen without gravity). Conversely, two of the other four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force) are forces that you need for every hour of your bodily existence.
"Learning to identify new objects reshapes parts of the brain, research finds"		The press release from York University makes a false claim. Learning to identify new objects does not at all reshape any part of the brain. The research being promoted is a typical product from today's wasteland of cognitive neuroscience research: a study using a study group size of only 3 monkeys per study group (500% too small for any reliable result to be claimed).  The study has produced no evidence that any part of the brains of the monkeys it studied were reshaped in any substantial way.
"The 'Nuclear Nightmare' That Was Manufactured by the Media"		Yahoo.com has strangely offered this story today, under a label of "Science." The article is a nuclear power industry sales pitch, by a writer who writes like he never heard of the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl which poisoned so many square miles. He tells the false tale that concerns about nuclear power plants were "manufactured by the media" without warrant. We have here another reminder that much of what you read labeled as "Science" is not science, but dubious or misleading corporate propaganda.
"Birds are not descended from dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs."		Silly Darwinist slop cluttering up Google News' science news page.
"Scientists Say They’ve Identified an Earth-Like Planet Right Next Door"		The term "Earth-like planet" should never be used unless some planet was discovered with life on it; and no such thing occurred in this case. The planet is twice the mass of Earth, and does not even revolve around a star like the sun. It instead revolves around a very different type of star called a red dwarf. Many think the chance of advanced life on planets revolving around red dwarf stars is slim.
"The hidden brain trait that makes some people fall for extremism"		There is no brain trait that makes some people fall for extremism. We have an interview with a neuroscientist and psychologist who fails to mention any such trait. He's promoting a book. The neuroscientist claims to have "run experiments with thousands of participants," but those were not experiments yielding brain data. We have no link to any papers or any mention of a paper, and the experiments are described as "neuropyschological games."  They were presumably just people playing online games, which don't tell us anything about brains, and which should never have been called "neuropsychological."

Below is an idea for a movie comedy, based on real-life bungling and lazy efforts in the world of science research and science literature, such as the efforts of slacker neuroscientists who keep using fumbling, lazy methods and sleazy shortcuts such as way-too-small study group sizes,  and who lazily fail to adequately study minds, anomalous mental phenomena,  brain physical shortfalls and medical case histories defying their dogmas. 

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 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. 

Science News BS Heat Map, June 25, 2026

 

                         

Recent Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
"Did two physicists just upend decades of cosmology research?"		A long-standing dogma of cosmology is a "cosmological principle," the idea that the universe looks the same on a large scale, no matter which direction you look in. But in the article we read, "A new paper published Wednesday in Nature by two physicists calls the cosmological principle into question. They argue that the universe’s structures do look significantly different depending on the direction you look. 'In this survey, we find there are large-scale structures which define special directions,' says Francesco Sylos Labini, a physicist at the Enrico Fermi Research Center in Rome, Italy and one of the study’s authors." The paper's finding will be resisted because it conflicts with a long-held but groundless dogma of cosmology, the idea that there was an instant of "primordial cosmic inflation" during a fraction of the universe's first second. Uncertainty here causes me to give a rating suggesting a result something less than rock-solid.
"Mars life search gets boost as rover test distinguishes mirrored biosignature molecules"		That headline sure sounds like something encouraging came up in the search for life on Mars, does it not? But the article is reporting nothing of the sort. It's just a Mars rover doing some analysis of biologically irrelevant molecules.
"Nasa rover detects potential signatures of ancient microbial life on Mars."		The headline is not justified, because all that is being reported on is the lackluster paper here. That paper does not mention a discovery of any building component of life, and does not mention a detection of amino acids or nucleobases (which have never been found on Mars). All that's going on is that scientists are speculating that what they observed might have been "macromolecular carbon" or MMC. There are 1001 ways to get such carbon without life ever arising. The authors state, "We explored the possibility of instrument background, inorganic Raman peak contributions from minerals and hydration, and terrestrial organic contamination. Ultimately...We conclude that MMC is the most parsimonious explanation for this feature." So it's no actual detection of such "macromolecular carbon," but just a guess about such a thing. Later (in a section very misleadingly entitled "Astrobiologically compelling sample") the authors confess, "The presence of MMC reported in this work cannot be ascribed at this time to any specific formation mechanism; biological, geological, and meteoritic sources of the organics observed are all possible."
"Great apes (including us) have been giggling for 15 million years."		We have the false claim that humans are apes. We also have a repetition of this long-taught falsehood:  "We share 98.9 percent percent of our DNA with many of our primate cousins." The difference between human genomes and that of the animals with the closest similarity (chimpanzees) is actually more like 14% rather than just 1.1%. Of course, we cannot tell whether animals ever laughed millions of years ago.
"It’s very exciting." An astronomer has seen light from just after the birth of the Universe. Now he's sharing it with the world."		Wow, that sure sounds exciting, does it not? But nothing new has occurred. The "light" mentioned is not actually light, but microwave radiation. And it's not from "just after the birth of the universe" but from 380,000 years after the birth of the universe.  This radiation (called the cosmic background radiation) was discovered in the 1960's. So the "new discovery" sound of the title is very misleading.
"A Physicist Made a 'Mini Universe' in The Lab to Check Time Really Exists"		No, the scientist sure as hell did not do any such thing. All he did was concentrate a little matter in a lab. We have not just an article writer falsely mentioning a "mini-universe," but also a physicist groundlessly using that term.
"We've just found the Universe's darkest galaxy – and it could solve one of the last, great mysteries in science."		A claim is made that some galaxy was found with "99.9 percent dark matter." The claim is groundless. Dark matter has never been observed, and all claims about the abundance of this supposedly invisible substance in particular galaxies are very dubious examples of guesswork. The claimed "galaxy" is not even a galaxy, but a mere group of four globular clusters, objects about a thousandth as massive as a galaxy.  The claim of the article that some mystery involving dark matter is one of the "last great mysteries in science" could not be be more false. Almost everywhere nature and reality present the most gigantic mysteries which science has failed to solve. Scientists and science journalists who fail to perceive this are those who have deluded themselves that they understand great mysteries that are a thousand miles over their heads.
"Research Suggests the Older You Get, the More Weed You Should Smoke"		In this article at Futurism.com, we get no research results backing up this claim. We merely hear of a paper that involved only cells, one claiming some benefits to cells, without showing any relation between marijuana use and brain decline. Another paper reviewing 26 studies states, "Although variability in the cannabis products used, outcomes assessed, and study quality limits the conclusions that can be made, modest reductions in cognitive performance were generally detected with higher doses and heavier lifetime use." It's a conclusion the opposite of what is reported in the Futurism article.

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 [i.e. medical justification] 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. Typically in the "informed consent" documents of such studies, epilepsy patients are not even informed (in any language a suffering epileptic patient would be likely to understand) of the most basic fact of what will occur, that tiny wires will be planted deep in their brains. This study fails to publish any informed consent document the subjects agreed to. Why was that?
"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."

Science News BS Heat Map, June 12, 2026

         

Science News Article	BS Rating	Comment
Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex		---
"Dark triad personality traits carry distinct physical signatures in the brain"		This low-quality study follows a defective plan followed by many brain scan studies: (1) you identify about 24 people with some particular mental characteristics; (2) you then brain scan them and brain scan about 24 control subjects; (3) you then look for brain differences (being free to look anywhere in the brain), and claim these differences as "brain signatures" of the mental characteristic.  The fallacy is that any two randomly selected groups of people will always have some differences in their brains, no matter how identically they think and behave. A convincing study of this type would require a pre-registered hypothesis, with a comparison made of only some specific area or type of brain difference that previous research had suggested, along with a much larger study group size; and no claim of discovering anything would be justified until there were repeated replications of the reported brain differences, replications in pre-registered studies.**
"The first complex cells had genes from a complex mix of species"		The article refers to eukaryotic cells far more complex than much simpler prokaryotic cells, believed to have existed first. But even the simplest self-reproducing prokaryotic cells are enormously complex units, requiring hundreds of specialized proteins. Article titles like this mislead us by describing eukaryotic cells as "the first complex cells." All cells are enormously complex.
"An Early Step on the Long Strange Road to Photosynthesis"		Quote: "However, the set of chemical reactions we call photosynthesis has bewitched and befuddled scientists for generations. It requires the coordination of dozens of proteins and hundreds of pigments that harvest photons, all embedded in a cellular structure less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Electrons pinball across membranes and between compounds to drive molecular turbines that rebuild air and water into sugars to provide the energy and raw materials that cells need to grow." The article  tries to suggest the beginnings of an evolutionary account for this mechanism with a very high functional threshold, but fails to tell any credible tale of how it could have arisen through any gradual process. But at least there's a good explanation of the vast complexity of photosynthesis.
Bumblebees can solve complex puzzles like chimpanzees and elephants, study finds		When wonders of cognition like this occur in insects with almost no brain cells, it is more evidence against the "brains make minds" dogma that neuroscientists keep senselessly parroting.
"A study by IRB Barcelona and the BSC rethinks the origin of our cells as a story of microbial alliances"		"The study challenges the idea that cellular complexity emerged from a single evolutionary encounter, pointing instead to a gradual process of interactions among different microorganisms that lasted for millions of years." The ridiculous "standard story" tall tale of eukaryogenesis is rightly challenged, but the suggested replacement is equally unbelievable.
"How the brain regulates learning on a cellular level: 3D maps reveal synapses reorganizing in real time "		The press release is promoting a study that  electrically zapped dead brain tissue from rats, something that does nothing to explain how learning occurs in living humans who are not electrically zapped. For more on the press release and its study, read here.
"Ancient genome duplications laid the foundations of complex brains"		We have an attempt to explain a huge number of new genes required for the appearance of the first brains, an attempt that very implausibly appeals to "genome duplications." Innovative new types of genes cannot credibly be explained by appealing to duplications. We read, "The data analyses were mind-bogglingly complicated." That should cause us to suspect shaky, dubious analysis.
A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins		We have the confession, "How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered." But if you don't understand that, what confidence can you have that any descent or ancestry from unicellular life ever occurred? The suggested solution is the same old "clumping" aggregation explanation that utterly fails to explain how we got the very complex anatomical innovations used by visible life forms. *

*"Big picture, we want to understand how initially dumb clumps of cells, cells that are one or two mutations away from being single-celled, don’t really know that they’re organisms — they don’t have any adaptations to being multicellular, they’re just a dumb clump — how those dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms, with new morphologies, with cell-level integration, division of labor, and differentiation amongst the cells. Just like, we want to watch that process of how do these simple groups become complex. And this is, like, one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology. I mean, in my opinion.....We don’t really know the process through which simple groups evolve into increasingly complex organisms."-- Biologist Will Ratcliff (link). 

** The paper authors basically confess the low value of what they have produced, by saying, "Our exploratory whole brain analysis revealed significant results in hypothesized regions, that did not survive correction for multiple comparison and therefore did not reach significance in the regions-of-interest analysis." Those very familiar with neuroscience and statistics will recognize this as basically a confession of having produced nothing convincing.