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Ice Volcano Seen on Titan
June 9, 2005
Planetary scientists are reporting the possible discovery of an ice volcano on Saturn’s large moon Titan.  A large circular feature, 18 miles across, appears to have a caldera at the top, is surrounded by stress fractures, and appears warmer than the surroundings (warmer, relatively speaking: the mean surface temperature is -290° F).  The infrared pictures […]
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Botany

Roses Are Red, Darwinists Are Blue
June 9, 2005
Roses have a special pigment molecule, a particular form of anthocyanin, responsible for all the rich red-to-blue shades in the petals that delight gardeners and attract pollinating insects.  This molecule is different from the pigments in every other flowering plant; it is glycosylated at two positions instead of one.2  A single enzyme does the job […]
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Cosmology

The Cause of a Teapot: Can Physics Explain Design?
June 8, 2005
George F. R. Ellis (U. of Cape Town) wrote a Concepts piece in Nature1 this week that asks fundamental questions about ordinary things, particularly, can we get from fundamental physics to complex hierarchical structures through a chain of cause and effect? A simple statement of fact: there is no physics theory that explains the nature […]
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Uncategorized

Historian Predicts Downfall of Darwinian Fundamentalism
June 8, 2005
In the upcoming June 20 issue of Forbes magazine, British historian Paul Johnson attacks the fundamentalism of Darwinists, and predicts its demise: Of all the fundamentalist groups at large in the world today, the Darwinians seem to me the most objectionable.  They are just as strident and closed to argument as Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, […]
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Uncategorized

Another Darwinian Assumption Overturned: Results “Too Radical”
June 7, 2005
Evolutionists are stunned at a study in comparative genomics performed by University of Chicago researchers that overturns a common belief about natural selection.  EurekAlert summarizes the finding: “The new data show that if more mutations show up at a gene, that gene tends to accept a higher percentage of those mutations.”  This means that mutations […]
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Solar System

Understanding the Sun – Not
June 7, 2005
Exclusive  The star we understand best should be the closest – our own – right?  Despite a revolution in solar observations, there is much we don’t know about Ol’ Sol.  That was the flavor of a talk by Dr. Alan Title (Stanford) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday.  At one point, he showed a […]
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Botany

Darwin Is Alive and Well at Down House
June 7, 2005
Chris Darwin, that is – the great, great grandson of Charles, and his fellow descendants Erasmus, Sarah, Allegra, Randal Keynes, and Leo Darwin Vogel.  The family members are retracing his footsteps in the fields around his old house by inventorying the plants, reports the BBC News.  The survey will help show if the flowering plants […]
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Darwin and Evolution

He’s Ba-a-a-ck: Lamarck Puts Pressure on Darwin – and ID, Too?
June 3, 2005
To historians of evolutionary theory, Lamarck is a 19th-century loser.  His hypothesis of “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” according to high school textbooks and common knowledge, was debunked by experiment, and overturned when Darwin proposed natural selection as a mechanism for evolution.  Why, then, does Massimo Pugliucci (Dept. of Ecology and Evolution, State University of New […]
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Education

Who Wins and Loses in the Darwin Wars?
June 3, 2005
Sandra Lilley, writing in MSNBC News, pictures sad-faced students, whose scientific inquisitiveness has been stifled by the controversy over evolution.  The article starts with a touching photo of a young girl, a look of wonder in her eyes, examining a toy human skeleton.  “Science is becoming a political ‘hot potato’ for some students,” she describes, […]
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Uncategorized

Evangelical Christians Split on How to Handle Evolution
June 3, 2005
A dismal picture of controversy dividing Christian brother against brother, with no resolution in sight, is painted by Paul Nussbaum in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  He says evangelical Christians are not monolithic in their opposition to evolution, but as divided as much of the rest of the nation.  He quotes a spokesperson for the American Scientific […]
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Birds

Soft T-Rex Tissue Claimed Bird-Like; Age Ignored
June 3, 2005
More details about the soft tissue found in a T. rex thigh bone (see 03/24/2005 story) were published in Science this week.1  Mary Schweitzer’s team claims to have found evidence of medullary bone [MB], a type of mineralized and vascularized bony tissue found only in certain birds during ovulation as a buffer against calcium loss.  […]
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Education

Kansas Debate Over ID Reverberates in Holland
June 3, 2005
“Is Holland becoming the Kansas of Europe?” asked Martin Enserink in Science this week.1  All that education minister Maria van der Hoeven wants to do is have some public debate about intelligent design, but the suggestion has caused an uproar among scientists who claim she wants to take Holland back to the Dark Ages.  On […]
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Dumb Ideas

Something from Nothing Dept.
June 2, 2005
How do you get optimization by chance?  In a Concepts piece in Nature this week,1 William J. Sutherland (U. of East Anglia, UK) suggested that the constraints of the environment will drive living systems toward optimal solutions.  He thinks that’s how “selective forces” shaped your teeth and jaw, for instance.  Economists and engineers use optimization […]
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Uncategorized

Mars Dry Areas More Extensive than Thought
June 1, 2005
If Mars had oceans or lakes, it wasn’t for long, at least in the Syrtis Major region.  Results of observations of the thermal emission imaging system (THEMIS) aboard the 2001 Mars Odyssey reveal about four times as much olivine as previously recognized in the Nili Fossae adjacent to the Syrtis volcanic shield.  Olivine quickly degrades […]
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Solar System

Jupiter Moon Throws Curve Ball
June 1, 2005
The little inner moon of Jupiter, Amalthea, isn’t dense enough.  A press release from Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that data from the Galileo spacecraft “shakes up long-held theories of how moons form around giant planets.”  Density of moons is supposed to decrease with radius around Jupiter, meaning that Amalthea should be the most solid.  Instead, […]
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