Media

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Engineers Envy Diatoms Glass-Sculpturing Prowess

July 21, 2004

What is it? An ornate crown? A crystal serving dish cover? A work of art? The photo on the cover of the July 17 Science News, labeled “silicon jewels,” is a microphotograph of a diatom, a one-celled organism that lives in the sea and builds itself a glass house too small to see with the […]

Amazing Facts

Spiderman No Match for Real Spider

June 24, 2004

National Geographic News took the occasion of the upcoming Spiderman sequel to investigate the superpowers of real spiders. If you were spidy, you could: Jump 50 times your body length. That would be like a man jumping 300 feet (the world record is 29 feet, 4.5 inches). Walk upside down on smooth surfaces, with 170 […]

Bible and Theology

Movie Jesus: Fact or Fiction?

June 2, 2004

At a large rally at Biola University June 1, the Jesus Film Project, in collaboration with the university, announced a new DVD entitled Jesus: Fact or Fiction?. Each household at the rally received a free copy. Half of the DVD contains the full length Jesus film, a project that has been translated into more languages […]

Politics and Ethics

Eugenics Documentary Opens at Holocaust Museum

April 22, 2004

Michael Ollove at the Baltimore Sun reports on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Museum entitled Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibit shows a 1937 Nazi propaganda film that invokes the law of natural selection as support for weeding out the unfit. Ollove writes, The narrator declares that “we humans have sinned […]

Cosmology

Privileged Planet Website Opens

March 16, 2004

A website featuring a new book by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet, has opened. The subtitle of the book is How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery. The authors take issue with pessimistic views, such as those of Steven Weinberg and Carl Sagan, that our planet is “pointless” or […]

Geology

Rethinking the Geological Layers

March 5, 2004

One of the most formative ideas in Darwin’s intellectual journey was the concept of gradualism, the principle of “small agencies and their cumulative effects.” This idea became a dominant motif in his philosophy of life. Describing how the assumption of gradualism permeated his last book (on earthworms) shortly before his death, Janet Browne, in her […]

Dumb Ideas

Evolution Is Like the Matrix Revolutions

February 27, 2004

Matthew L. Albert enjoyed the Matrix movies. In his review in the Feb. 20 issue of Science,1 he thought the movies were parallels of evolutionary biology. The machines keeping the rebels alive are like retroviruses, he thinks: “These retroviruses are responsible in part for our evolution, while other retroviruses are attacking us. So, who is […]