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Origin of Life

Early Oxygen Fuels Fire in OOL Camp
August 25, 2006
Live Science reported a new claim about oxygen on the early earth appearing far earlier than usually assumed.  A Penn State astrobiologist is claiming that uniformly high oxygen levels existed on earth 3.8 billion years ago, a billion years before previous estimates.     Oxygen’s presence on Earth has been typically inferred from sulfur isotope […]
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Health

Embryonic Stem Cells No Longer Needed?
August 25, 2006
Two announcements this week may make harvesting embryonic stem cells obsolete.  First, it’s not necessary to kill an embryo to get a stem cell, reported Associated Press (see Fox News) and Live Science.  While this does not solve all the ethical problems, a White House spokeswoman called it “encouraging to see scientists at least making […]
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Origin of Life

Origin of Left-Handed Proteins Solved?
August 24, 2006
As noted in prior entries here (09/06/2003, 11/19/2004) and in our online book, the origin of left-hand proteins is recognized as one of the most formidable challenges to naturalistic origin-of-life research.  Occasionally researchers develop lab techniques for getting slight excesses of one hand over the other.  Astrobiologists agree, however, that 100% purity in a protein […]
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Media

Film Under Fire That Links Darwin to Hitler
August 23, 2006
Even before being aired, the documentary Darwin’s Deadly Legacy from Coral Ridge Ministries is taking heat, reported World Net Daily.  The criticisms, coming from Darwinists on Pharyngula and from the Anti-Defamation League, are two-fold: (1) that it trivializes the Holocaust, because “Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish […]
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Early Man

Chimp-Human Genes Evolved Much Faster Than Expected
August 22, 2006
It’s been all over the news lately – human DNA shows surprisingly divergent regions from chimpanzee counterparts.  The Houston Chronicle, for instance, summarizes the find: Searching across the four genomes, the team looked for regions of DNA about 100 letters long that had made the biggest leaps. One, they found, had changed nearly twice as […]
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Education

Darwinists Whack I.D. with Reckless Abandon
August 21, 2006
For professionals assumed to be logical, factual, and devoted to reason, scientists and journalists can get pretty emotional, depending on the subject.  One such subject that really rankles some of them is intelligent design.  Here are some recent salvos from the war of the words: Hotz shots:  From the LA Times, Robert Lee Hotz wrote, […]
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Intelligent Design

Review:  Lehigh Prof Critiques ID Colleague in Science Wars
August 21, 2006
Dr. Steven Goldman (Lehigh University) has produced a series of lectures for The Teaching Company entitled Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It.  CEH highly recommends this series for its wealth of historical background applied to an intriguing question: what is the nature of truth claims in science?  To what extent do […]
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Early Man

Team Claims “Hobbit Man” Is Fully Human
August 21, 2006
The bones of Homo floresiensis that caused such a stir two years ago (10/27/2004) are human ancestors of the current population of pygmies living on the island today, not a new species, according to a press release from Penn State.  The individual with the small skull (LB1) suffered from microcephaly and the rest of the […]
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Astronomy

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way
August 18, 2006
Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described […]
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Solar System

Mars Annually Pops Its Polar Cork
August 17, 2006
A unique geological phenomenon has been found on Mars.  Every year, when the southern polar cap heats up, carbon dioxide gas forms underneath a layer of translucent ice.  This gas levitates large portions of the ice cap until it finds weaknesses, and bursts out at over a hundred miles an hour in spectacular fumaroles (see […]
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Politics and Ethics

Nature Praises Iran President, Criticizes Religious West
August 16, 2006
The lead Editorial in Nature this week,1 “Revival in Iran,” had mostly praise for the repressive regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran for his alleged support of “science”: Perhaps the rise of science relates to the importance that Iran’s government attaches to the development of nuclear technology.  Many regard Iran’s interest in these technologies with […]
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Astronomy

Stellar Habitable Zones: Don’t Forget the Sunscreen
August 15, 2006
Astronomers concerned with the origin of life on earth have long thought about the “habitable zone” (sometimes called continuously habitable zone, or CHZ) of our solar system.  They’ve discussed this aerobee-shaped zone around our sun – or any star – mainly in terms of locations where the temperature would permit water to exist as a […]
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Uncategorized

Evolution Is Slow, Except When It Is Super-Fast
August 14, 2006
Evolutionary biologists seem comfortable with rates of evolution that vary by eight orders of magnitude or more.  While some animals found at the alleged dawn of multicellular life at the beginning of the Cambrian have changed little in 500 million years, other organisms seem to evolve right before our eyes.  Sara Goudarzi on LiveScience described […]
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Bible and Theology

Crossing the Line for Looks That Could Kill
August 13, 2006
President Bush may have vetoed one stem-cell bill for moral reasons (see Brad Harrub’s report on Apologetics Press), but in other countries where Judeo-Christian values are less prevalent, morality seems a low hurdle in the race to exploit biological resources that promise health, youth, beauty – and money.     With embryonic stem cell research […]
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Cosmology

Cosmologists Dragged Kicking and Screaming to the Anthropic Principle
August 11, 2006
Those who view science as a dispassionate, logical pursuit of the truth should savor the emotions in two articles by Tom Siegfried about cosmology in Science this week.1,2  He reported on the passionate rivalry between theoretical physicists who embrace superstring theory as the eventual “theory of everything” and those who oppose it because of its […]
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